What is and What Should Never Be

I had free food from Taco Bell earlier.  You might ask, "But The Mighty, how on Ear(t/h) did you do something like that?"  Well, here’s what happened.  I made my order, a mere $3.50 or so worth of grilled chicken burritos (I’m in love with those things) and beverage, and was told to pull to the first window.  Well, the people at the first window, where ever since the remodel at our Taco Bell you would normally pay and receive a bag of napkins, sauce, and straws, pointed toward the next window with their thumbs.  Bewildered, I nodded and pulled forward.  I was handed my drink (I had no straw since I didn’t stop at the first window) and waited for my bag of burritos.  I had a few minutes to think about the whole thing, and decided I wasn’t going to say anything if nobody asked me for money.  On most days I’m a real goody-goody, saying things like "I didn’t pay you," or "I don’t think you charged me enough," but not today.  I was prepared for the girl at window #2 to ask for the money– indeed they still take money at that window sometimes.  Maybe they do it when they’re slow or something, but sometimes nobody’s at the first window.  But yeah, she handed me burritos and said, "Have a nice day," so I happily drove away with free food.  Sure I had no straw, but if you’re worried about a penny’s worth of plastic tube when you’ve been given a meal you’ve got bigger problems than a growling stomach.

On the way home tonight I remembered another tale of my youth with which I thought I would regale (regail?) whomever happens to read it. 

Todd, whom I’ve talked about a time or two, was at the house one night.  Seems it was in the summer, and it also seems neither of us had a driver’s license yet, so we were probably around 15.  For whatever reason, we decided at dusk to walk down the road.  In the damn dark.  We also, for whatever reason, brought a BB gun.  This was actually common practice anytime a friend and I walked along the road, because it’s fun to shoot discarded beer bottles.  Anyway, cutting to the chase, we got to the end of the road, and heard a strange noise.  We could never settle on an accurate description of this noise, and it’s still one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard.  I said it sounded like somebody strumming one of those homemade contraptions that stereotypical cartoon hillbillies often play, the thing made from a broom handle, a washtub, and some sort of string that makes a sound like a rudimentary guitar, which I guess is what I should have called the thing to begin with.  Todd said it sounded like an old man with a weird cough.  To try and spell it out, it was like, "Glhung, glhung," or something similar.  I immediately wanted to go back the way we came, but Todd said something like, "It’s cool man, we’ve got this," as he held up the BB gun like it was friggin’ Excalibur or something, and walked over to the edge of the road to investigate. 

I feel as though I should describe the location at this point.  Besides being pitch black, we were at the end of the road my house is on, where it meets another road, forming a "T" shape.  Across from the mouth of our road, past the edge of perpendicular road, is a wide stretch of grass at the foot of a hill.  There used to be a house up on that hill, but that’s a story for another time.  It was toward this grass that Todd so confidently strode, with me a hesitant step behind.  He began to speak to whatever was making this noise, asking things like, "What are you?"  Eerily, the sound did seem to come in response to his questions, as if whatever creature was making it was actually waiting for him to finish his questions.  Eventually he said, "Okay, we don’t understand you.  Make one sound for ‘yes,’ and two for ‘no.’"  I don’t remember the exact line of questioning he took, but amazingly the "one sound, two sounds" thing seemed to be working.  The answers were making sense!  That’s when all hell broke loose.  For whatever reason, he asked, "Are you planning to skin us and eat our bodies?"  The response was neither yes nor no.  I can’t accurately describe the sound, but to my already sort of frightened mind, it was like some horrible, alien laughter.  Imagine the original "glhung" sound, but strung more closely together in an undulating sort of way, like laughter.  Todd said something like, "Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen, you do realize we’re armed, right?"  And then, to my surprise, he said, "Okay, I’m going to come down there and have a look at you."  The very second he stepped into the tall grass at the edge of the road, something on the ground moved, lightning quick, and Todd, startled, jumped back.  At this I completely freaked, turned on my heel, and ran as fast as my couch potato legs would carry me.  That’s right, in a moment of perceived crisis, I totally ditched my companion.  And he was the one holding my BB gun. 

I finally stopped when I realized Todd was unharmed, lumbering a few steps behind me.  He said, "Dude, you hauled more ass than a Mack truck!  It’s cool, it was like a big grasshopper or something."  I don’t know if all of you know of what we call "Texas grasshoppers."  They’re large, black grasshoppers, about 4 times the mass of the common grasshopper, with red markings at the joints of the legs.  I’m not sure how, but at this point I convinced Todd that we should be on our way, and quickly. 

I found out later the very thing that made the sound.  Can you guess?  It was the damn grasshopper, or, if not the very one that jumped at Todd’s leg in the grass, another somewhere further back.  I heard the sound again months later, when I was outside with my friend Michael, who had always loved spending time outside as a child.  When I freaked and said, "That’s the sound I told you about, holy shit!" he just laughed at me.  "That’s not an alien," he said (yeah, Todd had me totally convinced that we’d had a close encounter).  "That’s one of those big grasshoppers!"  I couldn’t believe it.  That’s the sort of thing I wish I had known to begin with.  I might not have lost those two or three years of growth that night.

Well, that got a little more long-winded than I intended.  I wanted to talk a bit about some other things, but hopefully I’ll remember them until tomorrow evening.  Good night friends.

Die Machtig