Day O' Work

I'll tell you what occurred.  I walked out the damn hotel into the balmy morning parking lot and seven or eight of those orphaned cats jumped me out of pure malice, scuffed my shoes, and shredded my damn sweater. I started the car and drove down and around the block to the Starbucks that's still novel enough in this town to always have a line. It takes those youngsters about 15 minutes to make a drink. Three of us came to the crossroads at the same time. I was fixing to turn left into the parking lot. Someone else wanted to pull out and turn right. And the transgressing third pickup preventing us both from rightfully doing exactly as we intended was stopped cold, not signaling any intentions whatsoever, when it was supposed to be going straight forward. The passenger in that particularly honry vehicle saw fit to point at me just then. Of course, I immediately shot the tip of his index finger off right through the dang windshield of my rental car leaving him with a startled O for a mouth. Sure the windshield's covered by the insurance policy, I'm in Texas. That freed things up a little, and the offending vehicle moved ahead and out of the dang path of progress.

The purple-haired girl at the counter inside said, "Good mornin', Greg".

I said good morning back, knowing all the while my name wasn't Greg, fingering the pistol in my pocket.

"Do you know, Freya, that mariachi music fills me with a dizzy sense of surreality and alcoholic dread ?"

"No, sir. I did not know that."

"Let's go ahead and keep it that way."

"Yes, sir. You have a blessed mornin', sir. "

Outside, I notice again that there are no crows here. There's no consolation for me in that fact. I'm thinking it's the freaking fracking and that sickly smell of burning natural gas all the damn time. The grackles that survive here move like post apocalyptic marauders. They'll probably be waiting for me tomorrow morning.