Thursday, September 23, 2010

Well, if it's good enough to get broke off a proper chunk, I'll take a small piece of some of that funky stuff.

It's 1983, it's 12:30 a.m., it's raining, and you're taking a shortcut home through some alley outside a new wave dance club where you can hear the bassline from Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" emanating from out of the broken men's bathroom window.

Aside from the rain and the fact that you hate that song, you feel good. You feel like you could fly and like nothing bad can happen. You just saw "Trading Places" as a second date with a woman you met a few weeks ago. You feel comfortable in this city; you've been living here for three years after traveling back here from the present day version of the same city.

Apparently you have some sort of time machine. That's cool, I guess, but I wish I would've known so I could've convinced you to let me travel back to the 1960s and remove the laugh track from The Flintstones. C'mon: it was a cartoon. I mean seriously — a laugh track on a cartoon?

Anyway, you're on your way home from your date in this dark alley with crappy music being thrown your way, so you bust out the iPod you brought back with you and fire up some old school Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg.

Well, it was still like nine years from being released, but it was old school to you. You gotta have your jams. And you hate '80s music. For that reason alone, I still never understood why you chose to go back there.

Oh, yeah, so you're going about your business, being all, "...like this, that, and this and uh, it's like that, this, and that and uh, it's like this!" when — BOOM! — a crew of bikers pulls up from both sides of the alley. You stop and survey the bikers as they step off their motorcycles and form a circle around you.

One biker approaches you, insisting that you have something they want.

Despite assuming he was referring to something modern you brought back with you, like, probably the George Foreman grill you'd been bragging about to all of the 1983 people, you tell him you don't know what he's talking about.

He repeats that you do, and tells you that you will turn it over to them or face the consequences.

"Oh, really?" you ask. "The consequences?"

"Really," the biker retorts, mimicking your tone, like one of those punk little elementary school bully kids would do. "Steep consequences."

So you mean mug him, taking one those quick steps toward him like you're going to punch him, but don't raise anything more than your shoulders.

Dude flinches and you start laughing, so he takes a swing at you.

Apparently you were prepared, though, because you side-stepped it. You proved to be prepared for his next two punches as well, as you side-stepped those, too.

You grab him by the throat and make a point of looking him in the eyes: “That’s three strikes.”

Barely able to breathe, let alone talk, the biker lets out a wispy “I hate baseball,” before mustering the strength to pull a knife out of his belt and take one of those improbable swings at your stomach that bad guys always seem to be able to do when it looks like the good guy's in control.

You let go of his neck and jump back, causing him to miss yet again. You back up and ready yourself in some sort of martial art stance.

“That wasn’t a baseball reference,” you inform him in one of those Jack Bauer angry whispers. “I was talking about the three-strikes justice philosophy.”

Dude, also: why didn’t you ever tell me you knew karate or jiu-jitsu or whatever? Because I’d totally have asked you for some lessons and tips or something.

Anyway, so then this biker guy rushes at you with the knife over his head, except not really.

And by “not really,” I mean you just sweep his legs out from under him before he can get close. Dude gets knocked out when his head hits the ground during the fall.

The second you go to grab his knife, the rest of the bikers charge in at you.

At that point, you just go on some sort of crazy, parkour-fueled Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon display of beatdownsmanship, jumping off the alley walls and knocking out multiple bikers with single spin kicks, and all sorts of other cool stuntman tricks/martial artistry.

With the whole biker posse laid out in the alley, one last bike pulls up and some big tall menacing looking dude gets off. He pulls out a gun and shoots you before walking up to you, standing over you, and telling you "...so just chill 'til the next episode."

Yeah, I still haven’t figured out how he knew the words to “Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang.”

And now you’re just waking up from your coma, 27 years older.

Oh, and that chick you were dating, strangely enough, ended up marrying the biker dude who shot you. She never heard from you again and figured you weren’t into her, so one night she was drowning her sorrows over you at a bar that the big biker dude frequented.

So, yeah, they’ve got, like, grandkids together now or something.

1 comment:

  1. This post solidifies how deserving you are of the Omar Little Award for Excellence in Blogging.

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