I Am a Drug Addict Klepto

So I went down to Irvine today to have lunch with Miranda, her husband, Gilbert, and their two kids.

We went to a little sushi restaurant and as Miranda is giving me a harsh 3rd degree about when I'm going to get married and how I need to take my biological clock more seriously, her 7 year-old son Austin is going through my wallet. He keeps pulling out my money and my cards and I keep pulling it away and telling him to stop it. So Miranda and I are in a heated conversation and Austin keeps going through my wallet and I keep taking it away, until suddenly, he holds up a little baggie, waves it around high above his head and goes, "WHAT'S THIS????? WHAT IS THIS????"

*Rewind two months*

Reggie and I had just had a massive blowout screen-door-bangin'-in-a-storm fight and I came home from work to find his car parked outside my building. I went over and didn't see anyone in the car, so I went upstairs and there was no one home. Then I got into my usual paranoid frame of mind that maybe he was hiding somewhere ready to jump out and kill me a la Fatal Attraction and shit (yeah I know...I really need more faith in mankind). So then I search the house, scared out of my mind but there's no one there so I look out the balcony and see that his car is now gone. I'm thoroughly creeped out so I call him and ask why he had been parked outside my house. He says that he'd run up to grab his coat which he'd left at my place before the fight and I was relieved to know he wasn't stalking me. Then he asked me who I was taking to the game (meaning the Clippers game) which was starting in half an hour, and which I had completely forgotten about in my very angry state of mind. So I'm pretty blatant with my spite when I say that I was going to call around and see who was available to go, but then I realize that the game is in half an hour. Reggie says he'll go with me and I'm angry at him but I still say fine. So he picks me up and we ride halfway to the Staple Center in angry silence and then have a loud he said/she said fight that takes us to the parking lot and then some. Finally, we wear ourselves out and apologize, but as with all post-fight periods, it's ridiculously frosty and awkward.

So we're walking towards the Staples Center, not really knowing what to say to each other, tension still on level high, when Reggie stoops down and picks up a little baggie of weed. Now, I'm someone who gets excited finding a heads-up penny on the ground, and a found quarter can make my day. But a dime bag of weed had to be the best random thing to pick up on the street, second only to the unlabeled video tapes that my roommates at that summer of USC picked up which turned out to be porn. So the little baggie breaks the ice between us because 1. We think it's hilarious that we found drugs on the ground (albeit in downtown LA) and 2. It leads to a lighthearted discussion about who should carry it, with the obvious choice being me, since Reggie is a young black male and thus, would get 20 years or something ridiculous for carrying weed while I , being a non-young black male, would get off with a slap on the wrist. So for shits and giggles, I put the baggie in my wallet and completely forgot about it.

Actually, that's not true. I remember it's there from time to time and I keep thinking that I should really take it out because I have a nagging feeling that leaving it in there will lead to one of those situations that I'll later regret and wonder why I didn't take it out in the first place, but which doesn't deter me from wanting to tempt fate and let some hilarious, awful wackiness-ensues-and-you're-really-up-shit-creek situation happen. Like knowing I shouldn't carry a fake ID in my wallet day-to-day while I was in college, but being too lazy to take it out, then having my wallet stolen, then recovered by a campus cop who called me and had me come into the station to reclaim it, then told me that he noticed I had two IDs in there and thought it would be a nice warning for me if he just destroyed it since it was probably just a "bizarre mistake" this time, but next time I would get to spend some more time at the station...

Anyway, so I know it's in there and I always think I should take it out. But I never did. Maybe it was part lazy, maybe it was part masochism. Maybe it was a challenge to the universe to see what kind of hilarious but shitty situation it could put me in.

So fast forward to this afternoon, as Austin waves this baggie of weed around in a crowded restaurant as my conservative cousin and her husband gape at it, and I have to tackle him to get it back...then I have to go through the story of how it ended up in my wallet which of course, no one believes.

But you all believe me.....

And of course, the moral of this story is, don't pick up weed that you find on the street. Unless it's yours, in which case you gotta pick that shit up quick cuz you know that weed ain't cheap.