Random stories and stuff

[sgt.null]

Did you write that story, Sarge, or pull it off the internet somewhere?
.

both... the last was a pull.

[deer of the dawn]

....*sigh*.... I am figuring out that for Sarge, the word "random" is like Scooby Snacks. There's supposed to be story, dear Null, not just random.

When my daughter was about 3, she was wandering in and out the front door of a summer morning. She stopped, nonplussed, at the dark shape stretching across the living room rug. I explained to her about it being her shadow and watched as she made wondrous discoveries about how it moved with her.

About 2 hours later, the sun was higher overhead but still shining in the front door. She came toddling in and stopped at the threshold, looking at her now much-shorter shadow. "Aagh!" she cried. "I shrunk!"

[sgt.null]

You will figure out that for Sarge, the word "random" is like water falling into the sky. There was never supposed to be just one story, but dear Null will post another story, not just his usual, complex random stuff.

When Null was about a child, he would wander in and out the front door of a summer morning. He would stop, non-minus, at the dark shape stretching across the living room ceiling. It was explained to him about it being his shadow and then the village watched as he made wondrous discoveries about how it moved without and about him.

About a year before or later, the sun was higher overhead but still shining in the front door. He came trumbling in and stopped at the threshold, looking at his now much-shorter shadow. "Ut!" he cried. "Another dimension!"

[deer of the dawn]

When I was 20 years old I worked in a health food store. There was an older woman who would come in regularly. One day she came in and got all up in my face because she didn't like the short expiration date on the goat's milk. As the very short, grey-haired woman scolded me, finger waving and all, I remember having a revelation-- her anger was completely out of proportion because she wasn't really mad at me at all, but I was a safe place for her to vent frustrations. I felt compassion and apologized profusely. She backed right down and left feeling satisfied by my promise to speak to the store owner when he came in.

[lorin]

My parents moved us to Switzerland via the S.S. France to Paris. One day during the voyage we were at the ships pool. My father and mother were swimming, I was sitting on the edge because it was over my head. My 2 year old brother was sleeping on a lounge chair near the pool. After a few minutes my brother got up from his nap. He was sucking his thumb and wrapped the blanket. He walked up to the edge of the pool, still sucking his thumb and rubbing the blanket against his cheek. He stood there a few minutes looking at the water and, still holding the blanket and his thumb in his mouth, jumped straight into the water. He went straight down. My father and mother had a momentary freeze in amazement then my father yanked him out of the deep end, still holding the blanket. He came out whaling and choking salt water but was ok. He has no memory of the incident, apparently he was sleepwalking. But it was a long time before anyone could coax him back into the water.

[sgt.null]

I don't know.

I was bored, and was thinking of Clowns (yet I'm no writer really) but I decided to post something that I was thinking. My non-Clown loving friend thought it was disturbing and two other strangers said it was like a Frankenstein Clown. (Literally I am no writer) but this is what I came up with. Also the title I gave for it? It is called "Doomed Cotton Candy Clown"

The poor Clown sniffled as he sat in his cold dim room, as the sun shone through a single handmade stained glass window lighting a portion of his dank cell. He was painted in a mix of different colors, gaudy even for a Clown and even his wig was of different variety. Yet the poor thing was alone as he waited for his so called "Ringmaster" to come home.

He was always trapped there in that single room, "played" with once a day with his so called "Ringmaster" who claimed to love him. Though, through that small unopened space stained glass window, he heard of giggles and laughter of unknown Clowns who seemed to have a lot of fun.

Until an unknown voice of doom shouted them away, that's when he knew his "Ringmaster" was back. There was the slamming of a heavy oak door, as the creaking of wood and footsteps came closer to his room.

The sound of multiple locks becoming unlocked as the door slowly swung open. A lone unicorn stood there, her mane was tidy compared to the Clown's unkempt wig. And she only had one colored coat.

At first her mood seem dark, but quickly changed as she entered the room and she morphed into a happy, happy hyper pony. As the unicorn came closer,the Clown tried moving away, and as she approached him the Clown broke and spoke in a giggly voice. "Hey there, you ready to have some more fun?"

So the "Fun" begins..


(I am a very oblivious pony.., but any other pony can give me a opinion on this?)

[deer of the dawn]

Nice one, Sarge.

I gave my son a haircut in the kitchen a few years ago. He had very thick, very red hair and it made a considerable pile on the floor. None of us noticed our friend's son, about 6 at the time, picking up my son's hair off the floor and applying it to his own head, where it stuck to his own short, nappy hair, until it was completely covered. His very dark skin contrasted with the orange hair. We laughed till we cried, we still laugh about that one.

[sgt.null]

ty deer.... not mine next...


A DA-7 hardship discharge brought Radar right back to where he started in life: Ottumwa, Iowa. In less than a month he knew he had made a terrible mistake. Radar had neither the inclination nor the tenacity necessary to run a working farm, and soon he and his mother were even closer to bankruptcy than ever before. After a long talk, Radar finally persuaded his ailing mother to go live with her sister in a neighboring town.


The night before the wedding: Mulcahy, Potter, and Klinger
Somehow during this difficult period of transition, Radar became engaged to be married. But after announcing his intention to sell the farm and all the livestock, Radar's bride-to-be began acting strangely--or so it seemed to Radar. The night before the wedding, a panicked O'Reilly arrived unannounced on the doorstep of his surrogate father, Colonel Sherman T. Potter (who had taken a position shortly after the Armistice supervising the V.A. hospital in River Bend, Missouri, just a few hours south of Ottumwa). As it so happened, Radar burst into the house just as Potter was about to head north with Max Klinger and Father Mulcahy to attend the O'Reilly wedding. Radar was hysterical, convinced that his fiancee was already cheating on him. Potter and Klinger dismissed Radar's concerns as nothing more than pre-wedding "jitters," and calmed him down enough so that the wedding could proceed as scheduled the following morning. But in the end, Radar was right to be suspicious. After only 18 hours of holy matrimony, Radar's bride abandoned him during their honeymoon in St. Louis, running off with a traveling salesman she met at 3 in the morning in the hotel bar. She didn't even bother to pack.

The next day, a despondent O'Reilly wandered into a nearby pharmacy determined to purchase the items necessary to commit suicide that night in his now abandoned honeymoon suite. He would later say his life was saved that day by an ebullient cashier who, suspicious of O'Reilly's purchases, got the troubled young man to confess his worries and to promise that he wouldn't do anything "foolish."

O'Reilly ended up staying in St. Louis for just over a year, moving in with his cousin Wendell Micklejohn and taking a job, somewhat unexpectedly, as a beat cop for the St. Louis police. While O'Reilly's soft-spoken manner proved valuable in defusing some early domestic disputes, it soon became clear that Radar--who now preferred to be called by his given name, Walter--was simply not up to the task of patrolling the more rough and tumble working-class neighborhoods of the River City. When a drunk dockworker broke Walter's hand for issuing him a littering violation, O'Reilly and his sergeant agreed it would be best for the young man to find another line of work.

An encouraging phone call from Potter inspired O'Reilly, a former high school drop out, to continue his education through the G.I. Bill. Potter challenged O'Reilly to determine what he was good at, what he loved doing the most, and to then follow that passion come hell or high water. Pondering these questions, Radar remembered how as a kid in Ottumwa he had once designed and built a doghouse for the widow Hanley. It was one of his fondest childhood memories, and he remembered also that he had enjoyed drawing up the plans for the doghouse even more than the actual construction. Maybe that was his "aptitude," he thought. And so it was that Walter O'Reilly enrolled for two courses in technical drawing set to begin in the fall of 1956.

The Sunday before classes were to start, Walter walked over to a large "five and dime" store near the Illinois border. There he bought all the supplies he thought he would need to be a good student of "technical drawing"--compass, protractor, ruler, and a beautiful set of hard and soft-leaded pencils coated in dark-green enamel. He carried his kit back to the apartment and laid all the items out on the kitchen table, imagining the various projects they might one day bring to life. For a moment he thought he might even sharpen one of the pencils and start practicing by drawing something--another doghouse, perhaps. But in the end he thought it best to wait for official instructions in the morning's first class.

That's when he got the phone call. Sherman T. Potter was dead. There had been an accident of some kind at the Kiwanis Labor Day picnic. His old friend Klinger had all the details. Some kids were horsing around with some lighter fluid. There was an explosion and fire. Potter had apparently survived the blast itself, but suffered a heart attack while en route to the hospital. There would be a funeral in a couple of days. Klinger and Mulcahy hoped Radar might say a few words.

But O'Reilly was no longer listening. He silently hung up the phone and then spent the rest of the night sitting in the kitchen alone, staring blankly at the neat rows of green pencils still fanned out on the table.


St Louis Greyhound Depot
The next morning, his cousin Wendall found that O'Reilly had packed up and left before dawn. There was no note, only a crumpled $50 bill left by the toaster to cover his last month's rent. O'Reilly had taken a cab to the Greyhound depot downtown and caught the first bus north to Iowa. By noon, he was in Davenport.

There he looked up his one remaining friend from high school, Johnny McDougall. McDougall's "flat feet" kept him out of Korea, and he had spent the war years opening three hamburger joints in the Quad Cities. O'Reilly had remembered that McDougall once extended an open invitation to come visit when he got back stateside, and now seemed as good a time as any.

Luckily for O'Reilly, a trucking company in Kansas City had just rerouted its Chicago shipments to cross the river at Davenport. With the extra traffic moving through town, McDougall thought he might keep the location by the bridge open 24-hours. To make it work, though, he would have to keep costs at a bare minimum. In short, McDougall needed a trustworthy jack-of-all-trades and O'Reilly needed a job. The timing couldn't have been better, and so on October 3rd, 1956, Walter O'Reilly became the lone waiter, cook, and janitor for the graveyard shift at "McDougall's Butter Burger #2." McDougall even bought a new wood-burning furnace for the two-room shack at the back of the property, and reconnected the water line so Radar could live rent-free only 50 yards from his new job.

It was during this period that O'Reilly's celebrated powers of ESP began to return, so much so that he once again allowed himself to go by his wartime moniker of "Radar." Much like in Korea, Radar developed an uncanny knack to anticipate when regular customers were just about ten to fifteen minutes away on the state highway. Truckers on the K.C./Chicago run often pulled into McDougall's only to find their specific order already waiting for them on the counter, cooked to order and piping hot. Jim McTallins, a flatbed driver working out of Sioux City, swore that on one trip Radar not only had his usual double cheeseburger waiting for him when he pulled into the lot at 2 am, but that Radar had even skipped his usual side-order of fried onions--somehow intuiting that McTallins' doctor had told him the week before to cut them out of his diet! "I just had a hunch," O'Reilly told the astonished rig jockey.

By all appearances, O'Reilly led a fairly stable life for the next five years. He pulled his six shifts at McDougall's each week, where the organizational skills he learned in Korean allowed him to introduce a number of cost-saving measures for his boss. McDougall was so impressed, in fact, that he offered to promote O'Reilly to the manager position at Butter Burger #1--the flagship "family style" location on Main Street. O'Reilly took the bump in pay, but he had no interest in returning to the day shift or in supervising the rowdy high school kids that typically staffed the downtown location. In truth, the local high-school crew scared him, reminding him of his life-long feelings of inferiority and isolation. So Radar kept his midnight to 8am routine, Monday thru Saturday. Sundays he could be seen at Johnson's drugs near the town square, reading the new comic books and eating a burger someone else had cooked for a change. Most everyone in town recognized Radar as the McDougall's guy, even if few actually ever spoke to him in person.


Radar in slightly happier times.
The first body was discovered in November of 1961. Mary Louise Kolpalski, a full-time carhop and part-time prostitute working in Dubuque, was found washed up on a sandbar just south of East Moline. In retrospect, it is somewhat remarkable authorities did not link O'Reilly to the killing immediately. Though the actual murder had occurred a good 100 miles up the river, Kolpalski's body ended up ashore only a few miles from Radar's shack. But the police would only put the case to rest after the Carlson double-homicide in 1965.

O'Reilly's involvement with Kolpalski had begun early in the summer of 1961. By then O'Reilly had for the most part given up on the idea of ever finding female companionship. Though he had lost his virginity in Korea, Radar remained painfully shy around women, an anxiety only made worse by the desertion of his first and only wife during the honeymoon in St. Louis. Moreover, his late shift at McDougall's made meeting women difficult, and his reputation as the "spooky" guy who could predict truck arrivals didn't help much either.

In May of '61, however, some of Radar's regular trucker pals began talking about a carhop in Dubuque who gave hand jobs behind the dumpster for ten bucks. "Just ask for the 'dirty bird" special," they told him. While the date of O'Reilly's first encounter with Kolpalski remains unknown, police later estimated that Radar had ordered the "dirty bird" at least ten times that summer.

But on the evening of September 23rd, something went horribly wrong. Still essentially a naive farm boy from Ottumwa, Radar had apparently come to mistake Kolpalski's paid ministrations for a form of romantic courtship. On the evening in question, the lovestruck young man purchased a teddy bear at the Dubuque Woolworths and later presented it to Kolpalski as an "anniversary gift." When this gesture elicited peels of derisive laughter from Kolpalski, a humiliated O'Reilly fled in shame. Halfway back to Davenport, however, something snapped and O'Reilly turned the car around. He parked opposite the drive-in and waited for Kolpalski's shift to end at eight. The coroner's report would list the cause of the death as blunt-force trauma to the head, although for his part, O'Reilly would later claim not to remember the exact details of the fatal encounter.


Moline's "Hound Dog Lenny:" fired for a tasteless joke.
The next three victims were all young women from the Quad cities: Marjorie Williams, 24, a cashier abducted from a gas station on the outskirts of Moline; Velma Morgan, 29, perhaps Rock Island's most notorious drunk and a suspected prostitute; and Kathy Flavinson, 34, a secretary for a Moline seed dealer. All of them appeared to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Authorities did their best to conceal certain key details linking the three cases, but by the summer of 1962, it was common knowledge that each body had been fished out of the Mississippi with a child's teddy bear tied snugly to the abdomen with electrical wiring, positioned almost as if a fetus. Thus did the summer of '62 become, along the banks of the Central Mississippi anyway, the summer of the "teddy bear killer" (in an interesting historical side note, Moline's biggest rock 'n' roll deejay, Hound-dog Lenny, lost his job that summer after dedicating a spin of Elvis Presley's "(Just Wanna Be Your) Teddy Bear" to the killer-- a tasteless joke that ended up inspiring a night of full-on panic as rumors spread the killer had just been spotted in town).

Radar's killing spree might have gone on indefinitely if not for the night of October 3rd, 1962. At approximately three in the morning, Amy Carlson--a popular cheerleader and senior at Davenport High--came into McDougall's to use the payphone. She called her father and told him she'd be back home in about a half hour. It remains unclear what happened next, but soon after Carlson hung up the phone, O'Reilly bludgeoned her from behind with the kitchen's fire extinguisher.

Dragging the body back toward his shack, O'Reilly noticed another person in the back seat of Amy's sedan. It was her twin brother Wayne, passed out drunk from a kegger party held earlier that evening in Clinton. Mr. Carlson had in fact dispatched his daughter to pick up Wayne earlier in the evening, not wanting his son to drive home drunk along the winding river highway. In a panic, Radar decided he would also have to kill Wayne. Dropping Amy to the ground, he went to his shack to retrieve his .38 caliber hand-gun and then returned to execute Wayne with a single shot to the back of the head.


The Carlsons' '57 Chevy at the Davenport Police Impound
Only then did O'Reilly realize the magnitude of the situation. Both Carlsons were dead and Amy's car was still parked in the lot. Even worse, a phone call to Mr. Carlson had placed Amy at the Butter Burger within the last half hour. A desperate O'Reilly realized he needed to concoct a scenario that would allow him to fake his own death and skip town. First he siphoned the gas out of the Carlsons' Chevy and combined it with some kerosene stored in the shed. He then emptied the cash register to make it look like a violent robbery had taken place. Finally, he doused the kitchen with the gasoline. Radar was about to light a match and burn the place to the ground when, shortly after 4 am, a worried Mr. Carlson pulled up in his pick-up in search of Amy and Wayne. By 4:15 am, Walter "Radar" O'Reilly was in the Davenport jail.

Facing the gas chamber for the murder of the Carlson twins, O'Reilly pleaded down to life without parole in exchange for his confessions to the three "Teddy Bear" murders that summer. Later, he confessed also to the killing of Mary Louise Kolpalski.

On June 16th, 1963, Radar O'Reilly began his life term at the Iowa State Pen in Fort Madison. But he did not stay in prison long. He was shanked by a fellow murderer on August 19th, 1966 and died the next morning. Walter "Radar" O'Reilly was 33 years old.

[Linna Heartbooger]

When I had first moved to Vancouver BC, my first impression was, "Wow, this is such a hippie city."

But people couldn't seem to figure out what pre-existing category to put me in. (I am somewhat of proud of this.)
Strangely enough, my outward appearance seemed to put me closest to "hippie" and one other category.

A year or so in, at lunch, one co-worker made this comment:
"You make your own bread? Between that and the way you dress, I would think you were Amish-- if I didn't know you worked here (at a call center)!"

[sgt.null]

Laundromat: Episode II


Guy: Im back

Laundry Lady: You cannot walk into my store wearing a paper bag over your head.

Guy: Yes I can.

Laundry Lady: No you cant

Guy: Are you sure?

[Guy tries to bribe lady with a mentos mint.]

Laundry Lady: Leave the Laundromat!

Guy: After you give me some loose change!

Laundry Lady: You really want those quarters, dont you?

Guy: Maybe, Maybe Not

Laundy Lady: Leave!

Guy: You shall not live to be older than two cycles of a mime's unicycle, for Ted Danson, the popcorn guy, is coming for you. Hahahahaha! All hail Orville..All Hail Sam Malone..

[Linna Heartbooger]

Me: "Now I have to get on the phone and bother my tutoring clients... well, really they want to hear from me, but I don't want to call them and it feels like bothering them, and I don't want to bother myself to get together the information I need..."
My son: (age 5, impishly proposing a preposterous - not childish - solution) "Just say silly things, to annoy them!"

[deer of the dawn]

My father-in-law can't hear very well on the phone. A few years ago, telemarketing was at its peak in NY State. He was especially annoyed because phone calls are so much work for him. His response was to either put the phone down on the table and walk away, or to keep the conversation going as long as he could about random stuff and finally say, "Actually, I'm not really supposed to talk on the phone" which was always very perplexing to the person on the other end.

[sgt.null]

Outside the door, about to scream.

Joe Superstar was a man of mild temperament, short stature, and had the goal to become the world's fastest guitarist. Though Superstar never knew even basic physics, he created a guitar capable breaking the sound barrier.

Joe Superstar quickly destroyed a large boulder and used the shattered remains to form eight small statues that strongly resembled his favorite guitarists.

He placed them in a circular pattern to form a sort of shrine and placed his guitar in the middle of it. He then channeled the power of the stones into the guitar to channel the power of the heavens. He was in a trance with the beauty of the mysterious dimension and didn't even notice the very large tornado heading toward him.

The shrine was quickly demolished and the immediate withdrawl of power sent Joe Superstar into a lair of pitch blackness found to be a parallel dimension. Joe was also introduced to Kevin Carpenter an eccentric mime with a strong Cockney accent.

"I have no idea," randomly said Joe. "I feel very uncomfortable."

A small beep was heard. "Oh, that's me," said the mime. He pulled out his cell phone.

"You're too late," said the one on the other side of the line.

"I know I am!" he said, as he quickly hung up. "Anyway, I've come to meet you," he said to Joe.

"I suspected that suspicious suspectial suspision," Joe said. "Why did you come to meet me?"

"Because," said the mime. "You are the slacker demi-god."

A million tiny fabrics twisted in the shape of a G clef opened the space around Joe and started marching toward him, slight chanting could be heard. "slacker demi-god, slacker demi-god, slacker demi-god..."

"Why am I the slacker demi-god?" asked Joe.

"Because," said the worm. He pointed to a letter hanging out of his side pocket. "The sign."

"The sign, the sign, the sign...!" chanted the voices.

"I'm afraid there has been a mistake," said Joe. "Please release me."

"You shall be released," stated the mime. "On one condition: you assist this cat in consuming the sacred catnip."

The voices gasped. Joe shoved the catnip in the cat's mouth. The cat suddenly morphed into a homeless street performer.

The mime scowled at Joe. He was not supposed to complete the task.

"You, still shall not be released," said the mime. "We are dependent upon the powers of the slacker demi-god. You shall remain with us!"

But just as he said this, Margaret Vinegar, the girl who lived inside of a cave on a desert island for fourteen months in 1672, appeared in the dimension.

She fainted as the mime used a condensing spell and compressed the subatomic particles in the morning dew until a black hole formed.

Joe and Margaret entered the black hole and vanished from the dimension, to enter a new one that resembleed the innards of a local teahouse.

"Why did you save me?" asked Joe?

"I marked the wrong one," said Margaret.

Then everything went grey and disappeared and Joe found himself alone, at his home on earth.

Joe then answered the telephone.

[deer of the dawn]

This was actually a pm to Linna a few weeks ago. She suggested I post it here.

I dropped my daughter off early for SATs, and when I got home since I had had an insomniac night I tried to sleep but people outside were yelling and the dogs were barking and I gave up. No electricity, of course. I went shopping, first to a "supermarket" (about the size of a hole-in-the-wall convenience store) and several of the things I needed were "finished" (they were out of them) and the radio station they were playing was being run by completely inept people and it was SO annoying and I was like, "what up, God??!? Are you trying to crazify me??" After that, the Abattoir, where I buy meat covered with flies off of wooden tables that never get washed seemed downright amusing. Actually, Africa at its most honest has a charm to it. It's when it tries to be modern that everything falls apart.

[lorin]

When we were younger my brother and I lived in Switzerland. One weekend my father took all of us up the Rigi. Much of it is cable car but there is a long winding drive along the edge up to the end of the tree line. We did ok going up. My mother was terrified of heights so she kept her eyes closed going up. Coming down was another matter. Half way down my mother had had enough. She made my father stop and she took my brother and I by the hand and walked all the way down the mountain with my father following behind in the car. By the time we got down my fingers were a bloodless white.

Fast forward 30 years. I am at the top of White Mountain in NH. I drove up the long road to the summit. On the way down I made a huge discovery. I had somewhere along the way become frightened of heights. Half way down the mountain I froze. I could not move my feet to move the car. I caused the backup from hell. 1/2 hour later they sent a ranger to drive the car down.

Like mother like daughter.

[sgt.null]

Armageddon, rainbow, "the bird with no name"
An autistic Kung Fu teacher,
Light-year, distance, time, gravity,
Four carpenters,
a divorce,
circus announcer, and nitrogen.
Shakespeare,

[Linna Heartbooger]

I love math notation some days, and I taught a middle school student of mine about a symbol which means "does it equal?"
You can use it in checking sometimes, to say you aren't sure if the two sides of the equation equal each-other and are trying to confirm it.
One day, I was like, "This is not correct. Change one thing about the equation on this line so that it shows a true statement, given the line before it."
She grinned and changed the equals sign to an equals sign with a question mark over it!
I loved seeing that spunk!

Another student was frustrated because she's trying to draw a diagram for a real-world geometry/trig problem where a man is looking up at the top of a building.
She faithfully drew a stick figure to represent the man, but he kept getting in the way of the other lines she needed to draw.
"Gahhh! He keeps getting in the way - why can't they make it a ghost or something!?"

My 2-year-old plays pretend: "I am a tall man named Saulp, and I am from South America, and I am a counter... 1, 2, 3..." (?)

[deer of the dawn]

Yesterday I was driving home and it was raining a little. There are young boys who wash windshields at any junction where traffic backs up. I stopped at a junction and a boy started washing my windshield, even though the wipers were going. I told him to stop but he thought it was funny to try to dodge the wiper-- till he broke the blade off.

Then he looked frightened, and tried to fix it back in place. Traffic was moving so I started driving. I was really angry because my car is old enough that they don't make the wipers anymore and my husband has to jerry-rig new blades on, which he tried to do this afternoon and couldn't because the new one cracked. Which means that it's rainy season and I still have no wipers.

I told a woman that works for us about it and she said "That boy better thank God you were not a Nigerian. Had you been a Nigerian, they would have seriously beat that boy."

I usually let them wash the windshield because they are kids trying to get some money probably for food and school fees, and they're at least trying. Few people pay them for washing, they just drive away.

[Linna Heartbooger]

My first job after relocating (to Canada) after college had nothing to do with what I'd studied!
I got a job at a call centre doing somewhat mindless customer service work.

One day, I was talking with an older lady at my church there about how I was ashamed that I just had this call centre job. She said, "My father always said, 'Any honest work is good work!'."

Not the way I'd been thinking at all... so encouraging.

[deer of the dawn]

A couple weeks ago I took my daughter and some of her friends shopping. When we left town to go home, we came around a corner that was clogged with moto-rickshaws, only to meet a half-dozen or more angry-looking riot police walking toward us.

Whatever had happened was over and people were just standing around talking about it. We drove home, no incident. But I thought about how resilient and awesome Fawn of the Dawn is, that we could actually make jokes and laugh about it.