The lady at the counter calls me sweetie and rings up my two red bulls and a bag of utz salt and pepper potato chips. 4.93. I ask her how much the bay bridge costs, knowing it's 2.50. She asks me if I need ones and quarters. No, ma'am, I've got it, thanks. I take my change (a ten, five ones, one nickel, two pennies) and head to the car.

The red bull helps and I give one to Marcus. He's driving. My job is to work the radio help keep an eye on the Budget rental truck fifty feet in front of us, and open stuff. Over the course of the trip I opened, unwrapped, or unscrewed one pepsi, two trail mix bars, a nalgene water bottle, a cranberry juice, two red bulls, the bag of chips, and two club sandwiches we got at our local Harris Teeter before setting out. I also peeled an orange and alternately removed and inserted cds from their cases, the player, and back.

It was Marcus' first time with a red bull. I told him my regular energy drink stories of coasting up and down near the croatian border drinking Dark Dog and Flying Horse, the latter being the prefered beverage of my friend Rick who laments the difficulty in finding it in stores outside of austria. I think it tastes like shit.

By the time we make it to Hardy's house, six hours after leaving Greensboro, NC, I wish moving trucks put graphics on the back of the truck instead of the sides. I have homestore.com rambling around in my head for hours, the budget logo and its two orange triangles that form a road make space recognition and figure-ground relationships iffy for awhile. We unpack the truck and look at toads, which are everywhere.

There is also ball and stick throwing for Tinsley, a chocolate lab. He is Chris' dog. We send him swimming into the bay to do some retrieving. Eventually the ball sinks and is unrecoverable. We are all sad and go inside, glad to stop talking about the war and online beheadings.

We watch game six of the fliers/lightning series. Philly wins 4-3 in overtime by Gange's bookend shot. We finish off a bottle of Sauza Gold, two budweisers, and a whole bottle of Pernod, all the liquor in the house. We watch tv and talk about frequency of sex amongst our married friends and neighbors. Turns out they are fifty percent more likely to have engaged in threesomes than the two unmarried boys.

I wake up early with signs that indicate that once again I have fallen over in the night. This happens often when I am drunk and talking with friends. I fell in the kitchen while making corrections to our shopping list. I crossed out donkey dick so Hardy crossed out hamburgers. We underlined scrapple. I put in "cock-mags", but crossed it out because we already have the latest Playboy.

It took me a long time to find the magazine this morning. I was hiding all the porn from the cleaning lady who showed up as I was whizzing. The bathroom door was open and I saw her coming up the path. I stashed the magazine under the ottoman and made some scrambled eggs.

When the cleaning lady and her daughter leave I go back to looking at Charisma Carpenter from Angel. She has tattoos on both her wrists, but the spread doesn't have but one good shot of the one on her left arm. The one on her right has a circle and the number two, but that's all I can make out. I think I will bring it home for Gerry who will refuse to read it. Not even the article detailing the abc's of rfid's will intice him.
Nor the misinformation from Marcus that the first hamburger invented at the St. Louis world's fair was originally called the beef bomb.

I can worry about that later, though. Now I'm going out to get some cheef bombs of my own.