Rocky and I had been to see a play, part of our little tradition of subscribing to the Guthrie Theater every year. This performance had managed to sneak up on me. I had it on the wrong night in my calender, and everything had turned into a sort of train-wreck that day.

Rocky drove from the airport, directly from the play. I drove there from another location. We met, attended the play, and enountered a creepy older couple who desperatly wanted me to eat one of their throat lozenges. (see Play, Pie, and Crazy, Part 1)

Rocky and I decided to go to Perkins for pie and coffee. I normally would never eat pie, and certainly not that late at night, but decided to make an exception. We were going to meet at the Perkins on the way home.

But first, I had to stop for gas. I decided to go to a familiar gas station, first, rather than risk running out of gas on the freeway.

So I got through all the button-punching preliminaries, set the nozzle in my gas tank, and began the long wait. I did what I often do. I put one leg up on the concrete plinth that the gas pump sits on and proceeded to stretch out my hamstring muscles. I was already stretched from earlier that day, so I was able to nearly touch my nose to my knee.

Then, I switched legs, and as I did so, the car on the other side of the island rolled forward. There were a couple of skin-head-looking types glaring at me from the car. The window nearest me was rolled down slightly.

The guy in the passenger side glared at me and said "Bitch". They drove off.

Weird. Shrug.

Rocky got to the Prekins ahead of me, and was sitting at the table playing with his new laptop. It is a very special laptop from a very special source. Not everyone can get them, yet.

As he explained this to me, I thought about pointing out to him how unfair it was that he got to keep his special laptop that not many other people could get, which he got from a very special source...when I had to throw away a lozenge with similar credentials just minutes before.

But I was distracted by the conversation going on behind my back.

There was a young man explaining to another young man how current political powers were massing to bring about Armageddon.

"There are agents of the Beast who are right now working to make everyone in the world equal so that they can bring our country down to the level of other countries and bring about Armagheddon. Do you have any idea who that might be?"

I assume the other young man wrote some names down on a napkin or something, because I really didn't hear a reply, but the other young man seemed delighted with some sort of answer.

I couldn't help but overhear the conversation as the guy went through the _Left Behind_ series, and every single hair-brained conspiracy theory that I have ever even hear rumor of. It was masterful.

Rocky and I had a tremendous conversation about his trip, and some of the stuff he did and the people he talked to, and we talked about the play a little, and I told him about what had happened while he was gone...

Punctuated by dark intimations of the Jewish Monitary Conspiracy that was the Federal Reserve, and the heroics of certain politicians who were determined to preserve as much of the rightous church as possible for the final battle, and the implications of the gay agenda, and the importance os good spiritual hygiene and preperation for spiritual warfare in the conflict to come. They sounded really jazzed at the idea of rives of blood, death, and destruction. The identity of the horsement were discussed. The identity of the Beast was dicussed.

They covered everything.

Rocky and I would occasionally pause in our conversation just to gather our thoughts whenever a particularly noxious bit of craziness wafted over us.

What a weird night.