Bringing in the new year.
So we were going to follow Mom to Lamar and Joanna's for a simple fun little get-together New Years Eve. (Don't get me wrong, it was nice, it just started out poorly for Don and me.) They live a good twenty minutes from here, so we're going down this winding road behind Mom's truck in the dark listening to the Dead Kennedy's going "Oh... er...how long is this trip?" Eventually Mom pulls us into a neighborhood and up a little street. But it appears to have a dead end, and she's starting to pull up a driveway to turn around so Don moves to pull up next to her to ask what's up and didn't see the ditch that he's driven us into. The front wheels partially off the ground, the nose is hitting dirt, and the rear wheels aren't pulling us out. DAMNIT. We're stuck. For some reason, I'm near hysterical with anger at... well I'm not sure. I'm just pissed. A combination of buttery dense PMS, and sheer lack of food all day has me off the deep end and Don commands me to STFU and eat some chips. So I sit and sneer and munch all hunched in the passenger seat as Mom informs us that she's made a wrong turn in the dark, Lamar lives the next street down, and she'll bring him over to pull us out with his truck. Lovely. So we're huddled in the dark and I'm just crunching away grumbling and pissy and Don's thinking this get-together was maybe not such a swell idea. As I'm glaring into the darkness I notice a porch deck thing constucted up off the ground with the light on and I can make out the silhouette of man checking out the car from above. I inform Don that there's a guy looking concerned about what a car is doing in his ditch but Don isn't too interested and though I fully expect the guy to come down and questing us, he doesn't he just looks around stands there for a minute and appears to go back inside his house. Again, I assume he's just going in to make his way down to us, but a moment later his shadowy form appears again up on the deck and I tell Don how odd I think it is, and "look, I think he has a flashlight, why doesn't he come down?" Don's sigh and general disinterest is my response. "Okay, he's looking, he's looking... hey he's got a stick or something. Is that a broomstick? What is he doing?" Don seems to have something to say to that but seems to think I'm better off describing this man than hearing his fears. "Okay uh, he's not coming down, he's just got that sti- Oh good, it's a shotgun." Finally it's held up high enough on the man's chest that I can make out that this shadowy redneck definitely has a rifle and he just stands there with it. Appearing to wait. I'm ranting and bitching and generally terrified and Don gets my phone and calls my mom begging her to hurry, and that we're at the mercy of good old Southern hospitality. I'm eating these tortillas like they're my last meal and we turn on the incar overhead light hoping that it will show this man that there is a small helpless girl in this car, not a drunken night prowler. The man seems unmoved. We're both pretty fucking scared, Don's trying to stay calm to keep me from going berserk and I'm already hearing the banjos of death playing and the man still lords over us with his shotgun. Don puts on the hazard lights and not soon after a truck pulls up to us and my Mom hops out and announces loudly how they should pull around to hook the car up better to pull it out. They drive all the way out to the street (to our dismay)and turn around to back up behind us. Mom tells me to go get in Lamar's truck. I run like a cornered fox and get in and everyone notices the scary ass silhouette of our neighbor holding a shotgun. All the while, he just stands there I guess guarding his precious stuffed bass or whatever and eventually, Don's Corolla is pulled out and we're taken to the safety of Lamar and Jo's. Having a gun pulled out in my direction is a first for me, and I was pretty sure I didn't want to die in the dark in a shoddy neighborhood by some gargantuan misunderstanding. Lucky though, I didn't. I just look back and think, that's a pretty heavy way to end 2006. And (forgive me) we came pretty close to going out with bang.