Alcohol is clearly the answer

I've been thinking: this whole 15-Minute Mission thing might be easier if I was drunk. I mean, all the great writers are alcoholics, right? You've got Hemingway... and some other guys...

Anyway, I know for a fact that journalists are a bunch of drunks. I never drank more than when I was a reporter and a copy editor (except for maybe now, as a customer service person). Deadlines and the fear of empty holes on the page if you don't get the story can easily drive one to drink. Maybe that's why my journalist friend Bill Toland calls me a "recovering journalist." I always thought he was referring to the fact that I no longer worked in newspapers. Huh.

I remember my copy editor days, working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. Tuesday was taco night at Hucklebucks. We'd go down there after the paper was put to bed, and we'd drink cheap beer and eat free tacos. My coworkers would sometimes say the taco meat was questionable, but I've never been picky when it comes to food.

I think it was probably a taco night when I hit that mail with my car on the highway. Yeah, I hit mail, as in U.S. Postal Service. It was a big old pallet of credit card offers, sitting right there in the middle of the highway, all nicely stacked in those little plastic-y mail bins. Until me and my rusty Honda came along.

It was raining and it had to be about 2 a.m., so it was deeply dark and suddenly there was something in the middle of the highway and I didn't have time to swerve around it. So I hit it. I thought I was going to hear this huge CRUNCH as my car crumpled before me. I braced for impact. Instead, these little white things went FLYING out in front me and my car just continued to roll over what felt like a huge bump in the road. I pulled over, completely confused by what had just happened. I went out in the rain to see what I'd hit, and realized the little white things were envelopes and the bump in the road was the wooden pallet they were stacked on. It must have been thousands of credit card offers, now scattered all over the wet highway. It must have fallen off a bulk mailing company's truck.

Damn mail damaged my radiator. I called the only person I could call at that hour - my sister - and my brother-in-law came and picked me up, God bless him.

I've never told anyone this, but the reason I never called the police is because I smelled like a bar that had just had a free taco night, and I didn't want to have to take a breathalyzer test. I would have passed, I think. I'd actually only had, like, two beers over the course of a few hours. But I did not want to go there. And it would have gone there. Because what sane and sober person hits mail?

Besides me, I mean.