"THERE WAS NOTHING, NO ONE, NOTHING AROUND FOR MILES"

Last night, I drove over an hour to the home of a dear old friend. Today is his birthday. He's the friend who has everything, including an endearingly childish love of pranks and stunts. I drove out of the city's comfortable glow, past the uncomfortable and uniformed hum of the suburbs and into the freaky blackness of the middle-of-fucking-nowhere. The safest and most-comfortable way I can position my life is to live in a serene and immaculately clean apartment in the center of urban chaos. All else makes me wiggle and fret. My friend, you see, lives in the solitude of a little house off a county road in a town that makes me fidgety with its Americana quaintness.

My backseat held the tools of my work: a donkey pinata, a garbage bag filled with carefully-selected thrift store bras and panties in various sizes, a crinkled brown paper bag of cowgirl confetti, a filthily-edited game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, a roll of packing tape, a Sharpie (I'm rarely without one and I have no idea why), and a slew of "acquired" local far-right Republican-party campaign signs. The panties and bras are to inspire his nosy neighbors into thinking he's more socially active than he actually is, the donkey themes are to pay homage to a long-running habit he and I have of adding "jackass" to the ends of serious sentences, and the Republican goodies are just to piss him off. I attached the pin-the-tail poster across his front door, adding "You owe me for the tape" in Sharpie and proceeded to over-tape the poor donkey poster to death. The panties, bras and confetti were all scattered around his yard, as were the political signs, and, lastly, the pinata was positioned like a sadly forgotten puppy, staring at the front door.

He phoned shortly after daybreak today in hysterics that gave way to genuine gratitude for effort. It was odd. I expected his laughter, I expected his promise of revenge (my birthday is, after all, only a few weeks away), but, as my hijinx were to entertain myself just as much as they were for him, I never counted on him being touched that I had bothered.

Jackass.