Mind you, I haven’t had much sleep lately. I was working late, and I refuse to shorten the time I spend at home, and so sleep is the obvious sacrifice to the slavering, unsatisfied maw of time. On my weekend, I was supposed to get some here and there, but did not. So, with justification mostly in hand, I detail the following anecdote.
At the Taco Bell drive-thru window, a crossing of ley-lines, a Hellmouth if you will, I waited patiently, Most-Honoured Girlfriend interjecting with occasional complaints about her job. The time passed slowly and my mind lept from subject to subject with abandon. I was in a cheery mood, excited about the night’s events. Absent-mindedly, I tapped at the open car window with the twenty I was to proffer as payment for vittles.
As sometimes they do, my ADD fingers began to slide the twenty back and forth in the precarious opening where the window normally resides. What part of my brain then had epiphany I cannot tell, for afterward I was in as much shock as any observer might have been.
“Clare,” I heard myself cheerily intone, a child-like need to impress evident in my voice, “check this out.” And immediately thereafter I dropped the twenty dollar bill into the void between the car door’s molded interior and metal frame.
Before Most-Honoured Girlfriend could even react, I stammered, “What the hell did I do that for?” For I truly did not know. Was it an untethered Buddhist instinct to unburden one’s self of such materialism? A mistaken premonition that I somehow would be able to retrieve the bill? Simple insanity? MHG simply stared, agape in disbelief. We hadn’t much time to analyze before we had to rapidly thrash the car’s insides about, searching for cash with which to pay.
Needless to say, my friends and MHG got at least twenty dollars worth of belly-laughs out of this, so I suppose I got a fair deal.
