Act natural

( Tuesday, Mar. 26, 2002 8:35 pm )

>Danger's my middle name

I have to write a paper and an essay tonight, hence I must write an extremely long diary entry and then probably watch some TV. I actually have a reasonably exciting story to tell, so it's well worthwhile. OK, check it yo, check this out:

So I was in Florida for a few days, along with a lot of my family. After my Grandma's birthday dinner, my cousins, who are all around my age, decided to go out to Church Street to hang out for a while. Mind you, this is about 7 or 8 o'clock, not really peak goin-out time. We sat in a pretty much empty bar and talked for a while. Eleven o'clock rolled around and things started to pick up, though the oldest and youngest cousin headed back to the hotel, leaving the core group of me, my younger brother Adam, my cousin Raymond who is my age, and my cousin Derrick, who's a few years older. Derrick's nice enough though he is a Republican, but pretty quiet and a focused drinker. I haven't known what to say to him since Beavis and Butthead went off the air, destroying the last thing we had in common. Raymond and I used to be really close, but he's another one I'm not sure how to talk to. He's very friendly, though, and was really digging the club music, convulsing on the dance floor like he was at a church revival meeting. He's weird because he's quite the Super-Mack-Daddy, yet is kind of effeminate, in a Southern pretty boy way. And then there's Adam, who recently started drinking, and was knocking back Kamikazes. He did a very funny impression of the fish in the big tank near the dance floor (the fish say "ARghhh!!! AGAIN?!?" when they crank the music up). Back to the actual story, though, which is when we were leaving the club around 1:30 to get a cab back to the hotel. Across the way there was a cab with its lights off. Derrick enthusiastically waved for a cab with both arms, and another cab pulled up to us, and we piled in. But uh oh, apparently lights-off cabby had been waiting there for a while, because he suddenly woke up and pulled in front of our cab, blocking us in. He jumped out of his cab and opened our driver's door, very angry. "Come on, get away from the door man," pleaded our cabby, a peaceable man. But his cries went unheeded, so our cabby got out and engaged in a little scuffle with Insane Man, in an altercation described by Derrick the next morning as a "girly kick-fight." Finally able to get back in and close the door, our cabby started to pull away, and as he did Insane Man came back for round 2, which was to pound a glass bottle against the window of our car, while we watched as if it were a movie. He was pounding right by Adam's head too. Finally he chucked the bottle after us as we pulled away. For Round 3, he caught up to us at the next light, menacing us from the next lane over. "You know, I thought he was going to pull a gun on us," Derrick commented later. Hmm, oh yeah, we could have died. You can be pretty blase about death when you're drunk. Anyway, we finally escaped onto the highway and made it home without further incident. Ray kept piping up from the backseat to say to the driver, "If I ever see that guy again, I'll kick his fucking ass!" He was pretty drunk.

Whoa mama, so that's how I nearly died. I also cheated death last Spring, in an incident involving professional fireworks, a rain of fire, and a lucky wind.

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