I called up a friend on, I wanna say the second Sunday of my time away, and begged her for a ride to Best Buy. Reluctantly she complied, on the way taking me to the bank where I cleared out my savings from years and years of cutting grass and, well, various short lived entrepreneurial enterprises. From there we went to Best Buy where I scooped up an HP dv2615nr Notebook PC, the same one I have with me now. Well, technically I suppose it’s not quite the same one- about a week after I got it I borked the MBR and may or may not have deleted the boot.ini, but the Best Buy rent-a-techies, in all their glorious inadequacy, just assumed that the product was DOA, replacing it on the spot.
If my life was spiraling into nothingness before, the laptop only catalyzed this degradation. I penetrated deeper into the underground “warez” scene with each passing day, a community I was familiar with before, but never to the degree that I would become. The whole deal intrigued me, I felt so slick, so sly. Between grabbing pirated films and TV shows ripped to XviD and tossed onto Rapidshare’s behemoth server farm scattered all across the world, I’d peruse the message boards, determined to drive my post count through the roof, thus proving my manliness.
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I hung a right into a McDonalds parking lot to try and get it together before taking the leap of faith onto 290. You see that was the plan, I’d never been on the highway before, hell I’d only been comfortable on 9 for about week, so I figured I’d leave at 4, make it to 395 by quarter of, merge onto an empty highway without endangering the lives of myself and others, and then experiment with changing lanes and what not before the morning rush.
So after a few failed attempts I made it between the lines in a parking space, turned off the car, and tried to gather my composure. The radio in my particular kick ass minivan doesn’t shut off with the car, but once you open the door, and without the white noise from the engine Ben Kweller now blared out my slightly cracked windows. My eyelids proved to heavy to fight without chemical enhancement so I ran into McDonalds, ordered a cup of joe and brought it back to the van. The determination of my eyelids proved too much for even this mediocre stimulant as I passed out cold within minutes.
It was 9:30 before I woke up, head cocked to the side against the window, drool gathered out the side of my lip and down my beard. The sun had risen, cars racing up and down route 9, the song of horns ringing with their ill composed melody. My stomach churned, and with the morning rush upon me, I kind of wanted to prolong throwing my car like a hail mary onto the bowling flow of 395 traffic, so I did what any sensible person would and began making a days supply of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.