Ever have one of those nights when you wish you'd just gone home instead of going out?  You go somewhere that you usually go undisturbed, and are suddenly and inexplicably surrounded by friends you haven't seen in weeks who are all having a nervous breakdown of some sort?  But that's what happens when you let some girl photocopy her butt.  Not that I ever thought for even a moment that she actually would, but as I sat there at my computer screen I heard my friend ask a potential customer to please pull up her pants.  Next thing you know her boyfriend walks into the establishment, seeing his girlfriend trapped between the top cover of a copying machine with her pants around her ankles ankles.  Maybe what should have tipped me off that they shouldn't come into this store was when I saw this young woman urinate in front of me in the parking lot (strange how all the weird shit happens to me when chicks choose to pee in front of me).  Well, my friend and colleague quickly closed the shades that showed the entire parking lot  this pretty young girl's little white hiney.  After the shock had left us and our lives turned back to some semblance of normality, her boyfriend and his buddy returned to explain to us that he thought it was uncool that we let his girlfriend try to photocopy her butt.  We explained to him that we thought it was pretty uncool too, but that we didn't encourage her.  We didn't even think she was serious, and we thought it was pretty uncool that they would let such an obviously underage girl drink on a Saturday night when we know her parents are waiting up, worried sick out of their minds.  Her boyfriend then said, "oh yeah?" and they left.  But before they left, we asked them their names.  One said, "we're not going to tell you our names," and the other said, "yeah, don't tell them your name Jim."  You could smell the ozone in the room.  Such monumental examples of incredibly wet snot snotty snot are few and far between.  I like the nipples on the 'D' and the 'K' keys on this computer.  When I don't know what to write, I just sit here and stroke them.  I think that is what they were put there for.  Which reminds me.  Have you ever been camping out in the deep dark woods and forgotten to bring along the toilet paper?  That's when you have to make one of the biggest decisions of your life?  Animal or vegetable.  Do you try to wipe your ass with a raspy, scratchy, spiny leaf, hoping you strayed far enough away from that poison ivy bush, or do you hunt down a couple of nice, soft, warm bunnies?  The only problem with using rabbits to wipe your bum is, well, do you really want them that close to your carrot?  Okay kids, quiet down.  Old man Earl here is going to tell you a story before we turn in.
    There are times in a man's life when he has to do some things he ain't too proud of, but he'd gotta do it to get by.  I had this friend once (now mind you, this was quite a few years back).  We were neighbors back when our families still had that farmland.  Daddy left the farm to me and I tended it to the best of my abilities till the government came and took it away.  But that ain't a part of this story.  This here friend of mine, his name was Terrence.  Terrence Gramble.  Terrence earned the nickname Stinky when we was kids, can't remember how that came to be, but it stuck with 'em.  Now Stinky had his father's land, and he did a better job of tending it that anybody in his family ever had.  He didn't never settle with a woman, his heart belonged to that land.  There wasn't hardly a time you wouldn't see old Stinky out there runnin' the combine, tendin' to his animal, or fixin' fence.  Stinky had a little sister that he took care of up there too.  You see, Stinky's parents died pretty damned near the same time.  It was a cancer took Stinky's father, and his mother died a month later.  Some say of a broken heart, but maybe that's just romantic hogwash.  So Stinky had the land to tend and a sister to raise.  Her name was Mary Beth, just fresh turned 18 the day after her mother died.  It wasn't easy for Stinky, because Mary Beth was what they called at the time a 'touched' child.  They thought she was crazy, but there weren't nothin' crazy about that girl.  Now they call Mary Beth Autistic.  Mary Beth couldn't talk, or maybe she just didn't talk.  No one really knows but Stinky.  She was just the sweetest thing though, but every now and again she had the meanest temper.  I remember one time Stinky wouldn't let her out of the house to tend to her flower bed on account that it was rainin' somethin' fierce, and that Mary Beth just pitched a fit.  Throwin' dishes and screamin' like a banshee.  Ol' Stinky had his hands full that night, and how!  You see, Mary Beth didn't have much that she took a shine to but that flower bed.  Some people say (gossip bein' the only thing to keep people's minds off their own troubles out there in the country) that the flower bed that was Mary Beth's pride and joy was right over her mama and daddy's graves.  Stinky always denied that, though.  Probably 'cause of the rumor floatin' around that Mary Beth communicated with her dead parents through them flowers.  I don't blame him for denying the whole thing outright, but one time while me and Stinky were sittin' on my porch after a long day of seedin', catchin' a good ol' drunk, Stinky said that if it was true, he couldn't think of a better tombstone than those flowers.
    Anyway, them flowers were all Mary Beth did.  She didn't ever talk to no one but Stinky, and even then it was only in sign language.  She was an odd one all right, but she weren't no crazier than you nor me.  Every day I'd look across the field and see her there, lookin' after them flowers.  It was like she was cheated out of all of them other skills that humans need to survive, and instead God or Mother Nature or Somebody gave her a green thumb as big as her heart to make up for it.
    Stinky worked harder than any three men together to make ends meet.  It was a strain on his body and mind, you could see it in the wrinkles on his face.  We'd tell him to sell the farm and move into the city.  That farm woulda fetched a pretty penny, and Stinky could have cared for Mary Beth more easily in the city.  Stinky wouldn't have any of that.
    "This farm's been in my family for five generations," he'd say, "there ain't no way in hell I'm givin' up on it now."  At least, that's what he told everyone else.  What he told me was that if the left that farm, and that flower garden, well that would just plain break Mary Beth's heart, and he didn't want what happened to his ma happenin' to her.  She was all the family he had left.  So he'd work the farm till his fingers bled, and then he'd work it some more, trying to keep their heads above water.
    Well the government caught up to Stinky long before they came for me.  They took his land on some technicality.  They said he'd failed to pay his back taxes or somethin'.  Stinky had to leave his family's farm because he couldn't get a loan to pay the government off.  That meant Mary Beth had to go too.  Only trouble was, Stinky didn't go peacefully.  When the government men came he met them at the gate with his Remington.  After he plugged two federal agents in the ass with rock salt the locked ol' Stinky away.  Of course, this left poor Mary Beth in a pretty pickle.  She couldn't take care of herself, and when the feds tried to drag her away from that flower bed of hers well, let's just say that by the time they finally got her down they were wishin' they'd gotten some of Stinky's rock salt enema instead.  So Mary Beth was tried, and because of her peculiar nature was thought to be insane.  They locked her up tighter than ol' Stinky.  Most times they kept her drugged up so she wouldn't cause no trouble.  That girl never caused anyone a fly's weight of trouble, long as she had her flower bed, but they never let her out of her cell.  I tried to visit her once but they wouldn't let me in to see her.  Well when Stinky got out, you're damned right the first thing he did was march right up to that lunatic asylum and demanded they let his sister go.  They wouldn't do it.  They wouldn't even let Stinky see her.  You better believe he made a stink about that, but they told him they couldn't let her roam free.  She'd been diagnosed as self abusive and unstable, and Stinky didn't have the facilities nor the means to take care of someone in that condition.  That's what they said, so Stinky did what any man would do in his situation.  He got a job in Alaska gutting fish for a season.  The hours were long, but the pay was good, and in the brief amount of spare time he had, he learned all he could about mental disorders, and how one went about treating someone who's got one.  That's how he found out for sure that his sister wasn't crazy.  It wasn't her fault she was the way she was.  So he sent every penny he'd made to a foundation that treated these sorts of disorders and got them to send Mary Beth there.  That Stinky took on some of the worse jobs any man's ever had to endure for the love of his sister, who at that point may have forgotten all about him for all he knew.  He shoveled manure for fertilizer, he worked the grill at some of the greasiest spoons you'll ever see, scraped barnacles off the side of ships, ran a garbage scow, cleaned sewers.  Anything at all he could find to pay Mary Beth's bills.  He would work thirteen hour days and some times lived in the streets when it was warm enough just to save every bit he could for Mary Beth.  He never stayed at the homeless shelter because he would say that that was a place where thieves would find out he had a little bit of cash.  Also, Stinky had this theory about how the government built shelters to get homeless people out of the way so they can forget about them, after all, homeless people are only good for statistics as far as Uncle Sam is concerned.  It was a very cold October night when Stinky walked by the shelter.  It was probably hungry men that followed him into that alley, hungry and cold and desperate, and when they told him to give them his money, he probably would have given them a bit to get by cause Stinky knew what it was like.  Those men that followed him into that alley were achin' too hard to ask any questions, though.  Now Stinky was a strong worker, but he wasn't much of a fighter.  Would they have left him be if they'd known what the money was for?  They found Stinky's body, stiff and cold the next morning.  They couldn't really tell what it was that had done him in, he was so messed up.  He had a splintered skull, cracked ribs, a punctured lung, and he lost most of his blood to boot.  It shouldn'ta happened to a dog.  Well, they told Mary Beth what happened.  She didn't bat an eyelid.  Maybe she didn't hear, or maybe she didn't remember, or care.  I doubt that though.  You see, after Stinky died, me and some other friends of Stinky took up a collection to keep her in that new hospital.  It's really good for her.  They let Mary Beth out every Sunday now, and I pick her up in my old Chevy and take her to church.  I didn't know why at first, it was her idea, and I thought maybe she wanted to pray or somethin'.  Funny thing was, I could never get her into the church.  Soon as my truck stopped in the parkin' lot, she'd be off like a shot around the back to where the cemetery is.  Every time she'd do that.  First time, I was worried she'd run off somewhere and get herself hit by a car or somethin', but she'd just sit there there in the grass, all through church.  Finally I went over to see what all the commotion was about.  That Mary Beth was sittin' right next to Stinky's grave, tendin' that flower bed of hers.  She looked up at me and she smiled so sweet, and I felt a tear in my eye as I whispered 'some tombstone, eh Stinky?'