How I Almost Killed the Mexican Shang Tsung........

I fully planned on coming back from lunch today and updating the blog with just some random youtube clips of blaxploitation flick trailers, that are all just as good (and sometimes better) than the actual movies. But something happened to me on the way back from lunch that is seriously making me reconsider whether there's such a thing as divine intervention. Strap yourselves in because this one is a real nail-biter.

It all started with me driving down Riverside, a.k.a. the taco truck mating fields, just minding my own business (listening to Lionel Richie "Dancing on the Ceiling" on Jammin 105.9 which as I said is MY OWN PERSONAL BUSINESS), when out of the corner of my eye I see this older mexican cat walkin' up a hill from this chicken joint. He gets up to the sidewalk, where logic would follow that he would stop and wait for the extremely heavy traffic flow to teeter off before he crosses the major street............but logic did not follow, dear reader. On this day, logic was blind and it's seeing eye dog was shot with a nailgun by Macaulay Culkin. This guy just keeps walking as if he found a new secret crosswalk nobody knows about yet. Apparently if you drink enough cases of Bud Light, the standard pink elephants turn into crossing guards. He just keeps on goin'.

Fine, I think to myself, I can deal with this. Everyone who knows Sandman can tell you I have the reflexes of a cat (and if any frozen burritos are being microwaved in the general area, the sense of smell of one, too). So I slam on my brakes, thus beginning the time-honored tradition of the near-pedestrian-murder experience we've all been through a million times, on both sides of the coin. We all know the drill. It's a 5-step process:

1. The pedestrian almost gets hit.
2. There's a moment of confusion, like both of you just woke up in bed with St Louis style pizza in your underwear.
3. Blame is assigned to the guilty party through facial expressions and telepathy.
4. The pedestrian moves back to the sidewalk (not so subtle foreshadowing here)
5. Both parties go on their way cussin' like sailors*

It's tradition!

But no.........this guy ain't having it. He's a rebel. A desperado, if you will. He says "chinga tu madre" to tradition and sticks his pinky in it's stinky. Basically what that boils down to is that instead of moving back on the sidewalk like a normal person, he stood in front of my car for what felt like infinity plus uno, just staring into my eyes with a confused look. He never got past the second stage of the process. After a while I'm yellin', honking the horn, whatever to get him to snap out of his stupor and move so I can get back to my very important job, so important that I have plenty of time to relate inane, rambling stories on a blog.

Finally he does move and I do drive off. But is that where the story ends? You'd think so, friend..........but you'd be dead wrong. Prepare for the shock of your young life. The horrible twist to this tale.

See, if this had all been happening in someone else's lane and I was just a spectator, I would still probably be writing about it here right now, because it would have been fucking hilarious regardless. So that this happened to me and not someone else is besides the fact. Also besides the fact is that this exact same refusal-to-move-after-near-accident situation happened to my wife on the same street literally less than a month ago, which in and of itself brings up disturbing trends in traffic laws south of the border. All of that is besides the fact, though. All of it takes a backseat to this new revelation that hit me somewhere around the 340th second of this guy staring into my soul with his unsteady drunken brow waving like a scuba buoy............the revelation was, "Hey, I recognize this guy."

But from where?

It wasn't until I got back here to the safety of my half-cubicle-half-toolbox thing that I'm sittin' at right now that I realized where I recognized him from.

Yes, that means another story, but I'll make it quick.

About 3 years ago, I'm driving past a 7-11 on my way home (yeah, to another apartment complex on Riverside. Who the fuck are you to judge the rate of my progress in life? HUH??!), when I see a circle of people, mostly high school kids, standing around jumpin' and screaming. Which we all know can only mean one thing. One beautiful thing.

FIGHT!!!!

Needless to say, I immediately pull into the 7-11 parking lot and get out to watch. And it's a good ass fight, too, it's two black kids maybe 16 years old, and they both had hands like a good metaphor for something with a lot of hands. But I could barely concentrate on the fight cuz on the other side of the circle, there's this guy........this old mexican guy.........and he's yelling over and over "FINISH HIM!!!! FINISH HIM!!" It was just weird and uncomfortable. He was completely ruining the mood of what otherwise is supposed to be a clean family event. And he wasn't even directing it at a specific fighter. Dude just wanted to see somebody get finished, didn't matter who. Eventually the cops came and everybody ran away. In the words of the great philosopher Cam'ron, "All you hear woop woop, want want, beep beep". But I never forgot that old man sincerely screamin' a Mortal Kombat catchphrase in the middle of a high school fight.

Fast forward to 3 years later, and I swear to zombie christ it's the same guy that I almost "finished" with my front bumper earlier today. With Lionel Richie almost providing the soundtrack to the final twilight of his life, which apparently not unlike mine, was mostly spent on and around East Riverside Lane. Proof that there's a God somewhere up there, who smokes a lot of angel dust. And I don't mean the dust of angels either, we're talkin' huge amounts of PCP, in all likelihood purchased from behind the 7-11 on Riverside.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Now that I think about it.........whoever made up that phrase was a dummy, cuz I coulda fictionalized the fuck outta that story and made it a million times stranger. Like I could've gave the old mexican guy a duck beak and my car could've been the pope-mobile.

Truth is still pretty strange though, you gotta admit.



Footnotes:

*Or any other profession that's filled with enough morally bankrupt people as to be singled out and stereotyped with an activity that everyone on earth does on a daily basis.