I'll See Your Athiest Tattoo And Raise You A Tiger

In my travels as a traveller's check dealer, I have run across more Stupid than I have witless skunks. I'm not sure which smells worse. Last week I had the misfortune of hitting both stupid and a skunk and the compounding stench took my breath away. But, since we're talking about Stupid, I won't bore you with the skunk.

I stopped off at a roadside hovel near a shit neighborhood. I needed smokes and they had them. I went inside where two lovely young black ladies were zipping back and forth trying to serve both the local derelicts and the globally divine (me).

As I was waiting for the ladies to find my highly exclusive brand, a terrible, unwashed hippie walked in. He was wearing cutoff cargo pants, a dirty tee and a scraggly beard. He also looked like he had rolled around in the dirt, as he was liberally coated with a dusting of earth and, I presume, incense ash and fairy dust. He began making small talk with the ladies and eventually he admitted to having the "party plates" on his car.


"Party Plates" are special yellow license plates given to "hardcore drunk drivers." Hardcore drunk drivers can be defined as those who drive with a blood alcohol concentration of .15 or above, who do so repeatedly, as demonstrated by having more than one drunk driving arrest, and who are highly resistant to changing their behavior despite previous sanctions, treatment or education."

As he made small talk with the ladies behind the counter, I remembered that I might not have a lighter in my Carmaster 6000, so I requested one.

"Would you like a mini bic, a maxi, or a tatto bic?" she asked as she pointed to the three shelves of lighters.

"I'll take a tattoo lighter; why don't you pick one out for me," I replied.

Rather than just DOING WHAT I ASKED HER TO DO, she brought the whole damn tray over. I grabbed the first tattoo lighter that came to hand; it had a tiger tattooed vertically up the side of it.

"Hey," said Unwashed Hippie, "I have that same tattoo!"

As I turned to look at him, he raised his shirt above his right nipple and let us all view a large tattoo of a tiger identical to the one on this lighter and decidedly fresh. This man got a $400 tattoo based on an image he saw on A LIGHTER.

I turned back to the cashier and said, "I'll have this other lighter instead." I returned the tiger to his perch and selected one with a sword cutting through a carnation.