And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy

Man, I was at $4.50 and I needed to spend $5.00 to use my check card at the convenience store across the street so I bought some tic tacs to make up the difference. Tic tacs? As if. More like tic cracks. Like as in what your teeth do when you try to bite one because they are hard as tiny orange pellet-shaped pebbles. I mean I don't know what the shelf life is on tic tacs but these must be pretty close to senility.

Plus, while I was home for Mary's wedding this weekend, I cut my face on beef jerky. It's not a really impressive scratch, it's just the fact that I cut my face on beef jerky. How often do you get to say that? It's like the time I scraped my toe on the ceiling while I was trying to get out of bed. It's just one of those things you'll probably only do once in your life, if ever, and any time you try to think about it your head starts to spin because seriously, what the heck did I just do? On beef jerky??

And then while Mara and I were driving to Rochester on Saturday, we picked up a hitchhiker for the first time ever. We actually drove past him once, which is when I noticed there was a young, nerdy-looking guy at the side of the road right by the optimistic "welcome to Cannon Falls!" sign (the one that's like ten miles outside of Cannon Falls) with "ROCHESTER please" neatly written on a piece of cardboard. We debated going back for him as we went through the McDonald's drive-thru. After carefully weighing the pros and cons, we turned around and almost drove past him a second time when I said "Wait, look, he's got glasses!" and we stopped.

I am well aware that you can't tell a psycho at first glance, or even at second. We both knew it could potentially have been a bad idea. But he looked like nothing so much as a runaway techie with his longish dark hair and Skinny Puppy t-shirt standing at the side of a highway. With a dog. And glasses. And it's a well known scientific fact that if you're faced with a bespectacled opponent, all you have to do is break their glasses and they will be completely helpless.

I just made that up. That's not actually a scientific fact.

But all things considered, he seemed a safe bet. And as it turns out, it was. I guess his name is Edward, his dog's name is Corvis, he lives in Lacrosse, and he hitchhikes like this for fun, on the weekends. This time he hopped a midnight train from Lacrosse to Minneapolis and was hitching to Winona to get on another train bound back to Lacrosse. He seemed like a pretty interesting guy. We dropped him off at the intersection outside RCTC and headed to our respective homes, although I think mine and Mara's route was perhaps a little more direct than his. Probably a lot less interesting, too.