Last night I drove over to Trader Joe's and I happened to park in front of a huge, dented, metallic-blue-and-primer-gray, two-and-a-half ton pickup truck with what looked like a cow catcher mounted on the grille -- the kind of vehicle that makes phrases like "dually with headers" pop into your (my) head. And that's fine, but then I noticed the Idaho license plate. Now, in these here parts some of our homosexual brethren call a truck like that with Idaho plates a fag killer. So I looked at the truck and thought, "Hmm, fag killer," and then I strolled into PetCo. and bought 16 lbs. of cat litter. I hauled the jug of litter back to the car before I went into the grocery store, and seeing the truck again gave me a little shock, the way it seemed to be patrolling the dim edge of dusk leading into the longest night of the year, hissing Looka me, lil' missy, I'm a Faaaag Killer. When I emerged from Trader Joe's fifteen minutes later with my two paper bags of organic, non-trans-fats, imported beer foods, I found the monster bearing down on the hood of my trembling, peacenik Volvo, drunk as a boiled owl and hollerin' "Ya seen enny fags 'round here ya little Norwegian piece of shit? Cause I'm one fag killin' motherfucker!"

God bless my subconscious, it drowned out the moron by raising the stubbly specter of Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot dressed as a woman, shrieking, "MEN! Rough hairy beasts with EIGHT HANDS!"