SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - The lance resurfaces!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve (Post 1177415)

Glad you're back, my friend. It's been awhile since our last phone conversation, and that mostly involved the roommate's fight and jail thing.

You too? I'm curious.

Yeah, I got in trouble a couple days after I talked to you. :oops:

And thanks to everyone for your condolences, but by grandmother's passing wasn't so bad. That sounds awful, I know, but she was never the same after my granfather died back in '01. She always seemed to be just..."lingering", and she seemed happy to go with all her family around her.

Part 2

My dad and I arrived in Glendive, an experience not altogether unlike visiting a familiar dentist for a root canal. I was imaptient to get back to Texas and the wholly undesireable delay in such a wholly undesireable place was rather unwelcome.
"No problem though", I told myself, "tommorrow morning I'll be out of this place for good".
We spent the night at my brother's house. When the morning finally rolled around, my Dad told me he had to visit the diesel shop before we could leave. He left with two of my three suitcases, my wallet, and my cellphone charger in his truck, and never came back.
It took me a few hours to realize what had happened, but when I did I was pissed. Don't even ask me why a father would do something like that, because I have no idea.
Whatever his intentions, my first task was escaping from Glendive again without any money or I.D. The first problem proved easy enough to tackle; my roommates were willing to spring for another bus ticket. All I had to do was pick it up.
The second was a bit more complicated, and didn't make itself apparent until I got to the bus station. Quick tip for bus travellers; If you have a ticket reserved, the bus company wants to see some identification before they give it to you. I guess bus ticket theft is a major concern. Whatever.
Luckily the ticket lady was either very nice or didn't care much about her job, because she accepted my brother's I.D. and our striking similarity of appearance as identification.

Soooo.... we're on the bus again. I have to say,even though I wouldn't recommend the bus as a form of cross-country travel, it has its' perks. You meet a lot of nice people (and a few a-holes), and you really get to take in the sights since you're not concentrating on the road or staring down at the clouds. Pike's Peak doesn't look very impressive from an airplane. Also, unlike the train, you'll arrive at your destination eventually.

And arrive eventually I did, at Fort Worth's beautiful, recently refurbished train/bus station, late at night, after an interesting discussion with a young man named Jerome who recently immigrated here from Jamaica. Apparently, Jamaica has some spicy cuisine that is utterly unique in the culinary world.

My roomies, Karen and Amanda, were, I'm sad to say, quite inebriated when they picked me up in Karen's miraculously undamaged car. It was Karen's birthday, and the two had been out celebrating all night. Naturally, I drove us home, and they seemed to be getting along famously, furiously texting guys they met that night and punctuating every sentence with a giggle. I digress, but I find it utterly fascinating how only the female of the species seems to be able to punctuate sentences with giggles. They also seem to be the only ones who can punctuate every sentence with a question mark. Oh well, fascinating as that is, giggling women make me extremely nervous. In my experience, giggling women tend to be emotionally volatile. Of course, my experience does not a study make, but if I'd had a spider-sense , it would have been tingling.

It took the entirety of the trip home plus a few minutes for the aforementioned volatility to manifest itself. I still don't know exactly what happened because I was unable to discern much of their prior conversation through the slurring and giggling, but I gathered that they were having a disagreement over some guy they met, and Karen had become convinced that Amanda was somehow attempting to sabatoge her advances towards him.
Again, I digress, but I also find this to be an extremely interesting characteristic of many females; the perception or practice of some kind of treachery is always afoot. For all the stupid things that men fight for and over, there is usually an almost noble savagery about it, or so I think. Occassionally it even approaches "good-natured" violence, if there is such a thing. Most women I have known, however, are absolutely, mecilessly, vicious, and I witnessed a sterling demonstration of that tendency that night. I tried to calm them down, but retreated to the relative safety of the living room once the decibel level capped 140. Even from there, I could hear insults and accusations being tossed about that I would never even think of levelling at another person. I won't go into detail, but the nature of many of the insults was the verbal equivalent of nuclear warfare. It was like making fun of somebody for the death of their child, or for having a debilitating disease. At some point, Karen threw a jewelry box at Amanda which struck her in the head. Amanda came into the living room and called 911, despite my pleas for a return to sanity.

Well, you can guess what happened next in a state with a very serious stance on domestic violence. The police arrived, looking like they were ready to beat me to a pulp. I thank God that I'd had the foresight to not lay a hand on either of my roommates during the whole thing, even to restrain them, because I would have been in a world of s*** if I had angered them or left any kind of marks. It's a funny thing to be the strongest and yet the most powerless person in a given venue. I don't think I ever felt so helpless in my entire life.

Explanations were given, and Karen was taken into custody, and put on bond for $5000(which personally cost me about $2000 as I paid the amount in full(screw bail bondsmen, I wasn't about to hand over $500 for no reason. Money was tight). The bond amount was extremely unusual, almost impossible for assault with bodily injury, which is a class-B misdemeanor here. I learned much later that Karen had told the judge to go ******* himself, after he explained to her that chasing a fleeing person who allegedly threw a cellphone at you and missed, and then throwing a jewelry box at them, did not constitute self-defense.

Karen was stuck in jail for a few hours while I gathered the money to bail her out. Amanda, upon realizing what she had just done, became extremely remorseful. I'm not sure what she thought was going to happen when she called the police, but it evidently had no basis in reality. She moved out immediately, and I was left with what promised to be a very expensive criminal defense case. Circumstances and finances being as they were, I decided to do the only logical thing: Prepare a pro se defense for Karen and try to get the case dropped. How hard could it be?

to be continued.......