Now I remember...

... why I never wake up in the mornings.

As most of you who pay close-ish attention to my posts, you'll notice that about ninety percent of them are written between one and three in the morning. I'm a dyed-in-wool night owl. Have been one for years. Especially now in these salad days of being in school and working a job that allows me to make my own hours, I hardly ever see this side of noon.

This morning, I offered my services to a friend to drive he and his wife to the airport. I thought this would allow me the chance to do two things: first, to finally try Burger King cheezy tots. As I mentioned earlier, if you don't wake up in the morning, it's hard to get to fast food breakfast. Secondly, I had a coupon for some free breakfast chicken sandwich biscuit thing from McDonald's I figured I could cash in.

So what went wrong?

Starting with the trip to the Airport, which in San Francisco is always a harrowing task in and of itself, my morning had already begun to sour. I waded my way through throngs of traffic to get to the United terminal. I see an opening at the curb, put on my blinker and *VOOM* some dipshit in a Navigator comes flying around my passenger side, determined on getting to the curb before me. I try to shake it off, remain calm. I pull my car to the curb, but with the front end angled in, since dumbass Mr. Navigator has given me no room to pull in. I hop out, open the hatch on my car, let the spare swing free, and..... "Sir, don't let that swing out into traffic, it'll get hit!" Up comes trotting the traffic cop/crossing guard who is more concerned with the fact that the edge of my spare tire is hanging some four inches towards traffic than she is with the fact that I almost lost my passenger side mirror to an idiot who left me in this position.

Unperturbed, I soldier on. The promise of cheezy tots gives me a glimmer of hope that all is not lost this morning. So I drive out to Burger King on my way back home. I park my car because I despise drive-thrus, walk up to the counter, place my order for two orders of cheezy tots, and..... "I'm sorry sir, we don't have any this morning." I keep composed, ask how it is that they have run out at seven forty in the a.m. and the woman muttered something about "the shipment showing up and sometimes they put it..." and starts gesturing with her hands about nothing at all. So from what I can gather is either the cheezy tots order wasn't in their shipment that morning, or it was just placed somewhere slightly out of reach from the squad of little old Filipino lady workers who were all under five foot five.

Fair enough, I say. I can just get some hash browns at McDonald's when I get my free sandwich thing.

I arrive at McDonald's, and I'm already slightly cheesed. I hop out of the car, hit the ground running, walk in the front door, look at the menu, and..... "hey, where is my coupon?" Sure enough, somewhere either at my friend's apartment building or the airport, the coupon fell out of my pocket. I even went back to the car to make sure it hadn't fallen out in there. All to no avail. Rather than accepting defeat, I just bought some food so that I wouldn't go home empty handed and empty stomached.

So I get home, sit down to eat my already-unsatisfactory food, flip on the TV, and..... "those of you who love a nice cold beer on a warm afternoon might have to pay a bit more the next time you go to the bar or the store." That's right. By some cruel twist of fate, I just so happen to return home, dejected and completely unfulfilled, in time to catch the "Good Morning America" special report segment on how the price of beer is set to sharply increase before the end of the summer, and how consumers could be paying up to a dollar a pint more for beer in no time. Talk about kicking a man when he's down.

So here I sit. It's ten minutes to nine, I've choked down a cup of the brown liquid that McDonald's tries to pass off as coffee, come to terms with the fact that my beloved Pabst Blue Ribbon might get all the way up to four dollars a pint at my local watering hole, and laid out for you fine folks exactly why I'm cranky. Now, having said all this, I'm doing what I should have done two hours ago: I'm going back to bed.