The Prison Sissy of Cell Block 12E

What I've Done - Linkin Park (mp3)
The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon (mp3)

When it comes to my hair, I am a serial haircut monogamist. I find someone who cuts it well enough, who can carry on a conversation well enough, who charges a reasonable enough price, and I stay with her for a year or so. My current monogamous hair relationship is with a woman named Candace. Nice, uber-skinny blonde in her mid-40s who can fire off some seriously cynical quips. Almost as if cutting hair for two decades has made her bitter. Go figure.

Candace cuts hair in the mall. It's the only reason I go to the mall anymore. When I break up with Candace, I won't go back there for haircuts. Getting your hair cut in the mall isn't something to go bragging about.

So I park outside JC Penney and go in. I get my hair cut. I take a detour through Barnes & Noble on my way back to the car. Once in the parking lot, my car's not where I thought I left it. I look for a few minutes and start to worry that my precious Honda has been jacked. The Honda Accord is the most jacked car in the US, I recall hearing once. (It's actually the Civic, but still.)

What I do notice, however, is that someone in the next row has left their car out in the middle of the aisle. I chuckle. Did the moron park there accidentally, thinking they were in a spot? How can you not notice something like that?

I keep looking for my car.

Then, that horrible ominous sound goes off in my head. It's the sound of an evil light bulb. And I look back at the car in the aisle. It's blue. It's a Honda. It's got a baby seat in the back.

Yup. It's mine. I'm the moron.

I left the emergency brake off. It's a stick, and I left it out of gear. The lot apparently has a .01% grade to it, so as I walked across the lot to go in and get my haircut, my car was likely inching at a snail's pace back... back... across the aisle, until its ass bumped or nudged the car on the other side, a black Honda CRX from the early '90s, beat all to hell and with a paint job that looked like Mikhail Gorbachev's head would appear in a photo negative.

I grab a sheet of paper from my backpack, upon which I plan to write my name and number to stick under a wiper. As I'm placing said sheet in said wiper... up drives Paul Blart. Yes, the Mall Police were in hot pursuit of my pasty white ass.

After getting out to inspect the "damage," Officer Blart informs me that he has contacted the Police Department, and although he cannot keep me at the scene by any use of force, my choosing to leave the scene would be construed as leaving the scene of an accident. He also asks me to move my car back into a space for which parked cars were originally intended. So, I slump my Toonces ass back to my car, pull it into my original parking spot, and sit and wait 40 minutes for the po-po to arrive.

Because the descent into hell is a slow spiral staircase rather than a deep freefall, things get a little more pathetic when Tackleberry arrives.

It seems the insurance card in my glove box expired in March. My darling wife had applied for a change of address and was waiting for the new one to arrive before handing it to me. Not only that, but because this all happened on Memorial Day, the company's contact line was closed for the day, so I had absolutely no way to prove to this officer that I was presently covered.

The officer then engages in a lengthy diatribe about how he could technically arrest me for this. As he's talking, and as I'm saying "Yassuh" and "No'suh" and nodding a lot, I drift into an alternate LOST-esque universie where I've been sentenced to life in prison for expired insurance. I became the Prison Bitch of Cell Block 12E and had my ass traded around more than Pokemon cards in the '90s all because of a piece of very important paper.

Fortunately, at the end of his lecture, the officer did what he didn't have to do: he let me go. He left the accident report information in the dude's windshield wiper. He bid me adieu. He chuckled, I'm assuming at the thought of just how pitiful anyone with a penis must be to fail to put their car in gear or hit the brake. And the event was over.

I am not your run-of-the-mill moron. I hope your Memorial Day was less pathetically amusing than mine.

To conclude, here are my wife's words of comfort and love at the conclusion of my story: "It's still not as bad as driving away from the gas station with the pump still in your tank."

Thank you, honey, for always having the right words.