I didn’t really plan on writing anything anytime soon, because I really wasn’t expecting to do much of anything, but this little series of events had me thinking, and I felt like sharing it.

I decided to go to Hollywood video and rent a couple of movies (I ended up renting Old School, again, and buying SpaceBalls). Basically after the last two weeks I felt like I needed a weekend of doing nothing to recoup just a little. Anyway, I’m on the way to the video store, and I see a car sitting in the middle of my lane, not moving. I pull into the other lane, slow down, and roll the window, “Need some help?” It’s a kind of pudgy woman, and her kind of pudgy husband, in like a Toyota Tercel or something. “I think my battery died, I need a jump.” I came back with, “I don’t have any jumper cables, hold on though.” I was thinking that I could at least help them push the car over to the side of the road, and let them use my phone if they needed to call someone. I pulled into the parking lot of the mexican restaurant and walked back out to the car, which was no small feat in and of itself, since it’s been raining all day here and the ground was muddy and slick. So anyways, I get back to the car, and someone else has pulled over to help them. One closer inspection it’s a police officer, but not a black and white, rather a plain clothes or off-duty cop, in an unmarked cruiser. We decide to push the car of onto a side street, and so I get behind the car, and wait. At this point I guess I missed a bit that I need to back up and explain. When I first walked back to the car after pulling over, I noticed that while the car was dead in the middle of the street, the man sitting in the passenger seat had yet to move, and was currently concentrating on a stack of pancakes in a styrofoam container. Well, once behind the car I get into that pushing position, and wait for the passenger side door to open, and the man in the passenger seat to get out and commence to helping push his own car out of the road. Instead I see the outline of an arm and a spoon moving toward the man’s head and near his mouth. He is not getting out. He is STILL eating pancakes.

As it is pretty obvious to myself and the off duty/plain clothes cop that the man is not going to get his pudgy ass out of the passenger seat, we decide to commence pushing the car off the road, as both the car’s occupants sit inside the car, as if out on a sunday drive. Remember now, that it is dark, raining, slippery, and we’re pushing this car up a slight incline. We get this car off the road, and park it, and the cop goes to grab his car, and his jumper cables.

The car is jumped, cranked, and ready to go, and it’s apparent that I’m not longer needed. So I tell the other members of our little motley crew that I’m going. First to thank me, the cop. To which the the woman replies, “Oh yeah, thank you.” What does the man say. NOTHING. Wanna know why? It’s because he’s still in the passenger seat, eating his F’ING PANCAKES.

The problem that I have with this is not that this guy was a lazy, stupid bum. The problem that I had, as I thought about it, was that his behavior, while it did upset me, didn’t really shock or surprise me. And that has happened to me a lot more often than not, lately.

I’ve made it known, that I won’t live here in Alexandria forever. I want to move back to the south; Memphis, New Orleans, maybe Atlanta, someplace like that. I just hope that when I do move back, I can slip back into that southern charm just as easily as I seem to be slipping out of it by living here. Jaded and untrusting, and expecting the worst of people, is really no way to live.