Last night we had some friends over for dinner. Said friends brought a large salad. My wife got some salad dressing out of the fridge and her instinct told her to give it a big shake. The lid betrayed her and the wild dressing attacked without warning.

Now this was funny...You know what they say - "I like my women like I like my salads...with Baja Ranch on them." That is what they say you know.

This dressing on my wife reminded me of other condiments being on other people. And that reminded me of a really bad day.

I was around 9 or 10 years old. A favorite past time of mine was throwing stuff off the bridge near my trailer house with my only friend, Mark Sawyer. We threw a variety of stuff off the bridge to explore the fascinating subject of how things explode. Water balloons, cans of pop, whiskey bottles, coins, light bulbs, bologna...bologna was always fun. We would see if we could get slices to stick to car windows as unsuspecting drivers passed under the overpass. It was a challenge, but oh so rewarding when accomplished.


Sooner or later we graduated to condiments. We would search through each others fridges to see what we could find and typically ended up sneaking out of the house with ketchup and mustard stuffed down our shorts. Our skill level grew quickly as any deviant child's will and we were soon able to create amazing racing stripes on any car, truck, or moped that had the misfortune of passing under "our bridge".

One day when we were feeling especially crap bag-ish, we thought it was funny to put mustard racing stripes on a Jeep that had the top down. At this time you'll need to picture a red Jeep Wrangler with two perfectly straight, continuous lines of mustard beginning at the front bumper and ending at the rear...not to mention the poor man who has a newly acquired ribbon of French's up and over his body.

Us boys immediately ducked down as all little girls would to assure mustard man didn't see us. The next thing I know we hear an ungodly engine roar and for some reason it sounded like it was coming up from the side of the highway. At this point Mark begins sprinting to his house without saying a word. I opted for the comfort of my own domicile and I can tell you...that was a mistake.
My suspicions were true...we had indeed "mustarded" the wrong dude that day. This man, scorn by a hot dog fixin', was determined to catch the little turds responsible for the stain on his shirt.

I ran my little guts out. Home was only about 300 yards away, but I'll be if that guy didn't come popping up out of the woods, engine screaming at me, gears jamming. I remember looking behind me as I ran only to see a scene out of some sort of Terminator movie. This guy comes flying through someone's yard and slides out onto the road with his tires immediately smoking. I kept running and he caught up to me right as I approached my door step. I looked back once more and he was already out of his Jeep heading towards me. I panicked and before I could get inside he had a hold of my shirt collar screaming, "WHERE IS YOUR MOM!?!?!" repeatedly.

Quick thinking thought I might be able to pull some sort of pity-card out of my butt and I told him with tears flowing that my mom was dead. This man, with the spicy-yellow, euro-stripe on his shirt didn't seem to be affected by my dead mom lies. He just continued to yell until my dad opened the door and asked what the hell was going on.

A few minutes later I was in my room, staring at the floor pondering what the heck I was going to do being grounded for 3 months. Overall though, I really didn't get into a crapload of trouble. Unfortunately my underwear didn't experience that same grace.