Don’t Mess with Texas (Or Me When I Have Been Up for 23 Hours)

It’s 3:30 in the morning and I am en route to Alexandria, VA for the birthday party of the season. Nephew is turning 2 and niece has turned 9. I have officially been up for 23 hours. Currently, Dave is at the helm and I am riding shotgun. The passengers on this trip are peacefully resting in the back. I drove for the first 8.5 hours of the trip that really should have taken us all the way to the Wet Stone but instead, merely got us to a little town called Princeton Junction in the state we all know and hate, New Jersey. After wasting $40 in gas and unnecessary FastLane tolls, we finally got away from that cluster-ef.

It’s late. It’s early. I am exhausted and am trying to keep my eyes open so as to not abandon my pilot. I know, all to well, how awful it is to play the chauffeur to happily snoozing passengers. So instead, I am lending my support my quietly typing away on my computer. In a way, I suppose that is just as rude.

No, actually, what is rude is the excessively tattooed, black nail polish donning gentlemen in front of us on our most recent rest stop run. While patiently waiting for Dave’s Junior Whopper and Becky’s medium fry, I watched as these two slowly but surely made asses out of themselves. After incoherently muttering something about “too much vodka”, the alpha dog gracefully spilled his large fry on the already greased up BK counter. After paying the cashier with his dirty dollar bills and change, he then proceeded to scoop up all the fries that had escaped his pack and shoveled them in his mouth. GROTESQUE. His mouth was like a cesspool for all truck stop generated diseases.

We are now passing a Greyhound bus with Texas plates. I believe it is going in the wrong direction and I am considering letting the driver know of this by way of a note in my passenger-side window.