Nick For A Day

One time, I got really drunk and woke up the next morning in a RV with a family of Eastern European background, and I couldn't understand a word they said. At one point, after splitting half a warm beer for breakfast we found discarded behind a rest area on I-40 outside of Nashville, the patriarch of the family - a man who I later determined to be named Uldem - placed a hand on my shoulder. Through a heavily furrowed brow thickened by years of exposure to the relentless sun, I perceived an unmistakable twinkle in his eye. He leaned in for what I was sure to be a dangerously homosexual exchange, and driven by that desperate animalistic fear that grips men in times of uncertainty and ambiguous sexual situations, I kneed him square in the crotch. He doubled over, crying out "Hurfali! Hurfali!" and as his family's attention was focused on their fallen comrade, I escaped across 4 lanes of interstate traffic. I couldn't be sure, but I thought that I caused a young family of four - guilty simply of the crime of driving under the influence of infectious joy so characteristic of people blind to the morose realities of potential never-to-be-realized - to careen into a propane tanker. Their sing-song happy chatter quickly turned into screams of panicked horror as they witnessed all their dreams, along with their flesh, consumed by that harsh glutton: fire. Then again, I couldn't be sure. The young daughter of the Eastern European family caught up with me on the other side of the interstate and threw a rock at the back of my head. I fell, more out of surprise than the velocity her small arm was incapable of, and she knelt by my prostrate form. She placed her delicate hand on my forehead, and with tenderness born of a child's necessity for purity, she whispered what I could only believe to be an Orthodox prayer. I closed my eyes momentarily, and when I reopened them, she had disappeared. Had she ever been there? Had I died in my wild escape through raging traffic? The unfamiliar peace blossoming in the center of my being, taking root in the shadows cast by my own existentialism, told me that a new chapter had been opened. Warmed by the idea of my own, involuntary smile leading my feet on paths untread, I prepared to put my other foot forward over the cliff, and plunge into some wonderfully ethereal existence predicated by no rationality entangled in the overbearing macabre. I got up, brushed myself off and gazed hopefully into a brave new world, and one thought snaked its way through my mind repeatedly, "Does Arby's open at 11am or noon?"I think that about does it. Also, I have blue eyes and dislike communists. Vehemently. I'm kidding of course. Give me a hug, comrade!