Thursday was back to work. I woke up and felt normal for the most part - no hangover yet.

After work I met up with Alex, Gary, and Tony at Alex’s house for movie night. We watched the 1970s classics The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.

Alex, Gary, and Tony try to meet up once a week to watch a movie that one of them recommends that they feel the others should see. It’s a pretty cool idea and I was happy to take part. I hadn’t seen either movie yet and they were both very entertaining. Sort of a look at what a mindless action flick would look like 30 years ago, with a little bit of culture added. The fight scenes were hilarious and surprisingly realistic.

When the movies were done someone announced that we should go to Sonic for cheeseburgers and tater tots at 11:30PM. There was some waffling within the group but it eventually became a game of “I’ll go if you go” and so off we went.

Sitting on the metal bench eating tater tots and sipping my vanilla milkshake at midnight and watching the long line of cars wait for burgers and fries and waitresses zipping by on rollerskates was a little surreal. It was an entertaining end to an already great night.

I ended up not drinking anything, which was good because I hit a sobriety checkpoint a few miles from my house.

I rolled up to the checkpoint with slight unease. Normally I would roll my window down and greet the officer and calmly explain that I haven’t been drinking because I don’t drink and they would wave me through and I wouldn’t give it a second thought. A minor inconvenience.

Tonight, I got a little nervous, which was very odd since I hadn’t had anything to drink in over 24 hours. Sort of like seeing a speed trap on the side of the road and you cringe even though you aren’t speeding. Was I relegated to the “People sometimes doing things they weren’t supposed to” portion in my mind from now on?

I managed to keep my cool and greeted the officer who quickly realized I wasn’t drunk and big me goodnight. Before going I asked him because I was curious:

“Have you had a lot of drunk drivers so far?”

“It’s still pretty early”, he replied. “But by the end of the night we’ll have that bus filled up.”

I let me eyes follow where he was pointing and expected a much, much smaller “bus”. This was a Greyhound style cross-country bus that clearly held a very large number of people. For a Thursday night this seemed like a lot.

I wanted to go back and talk to the checkpoint officers more but it seemed like a bad idea and it was late.

As I closed my eyes to go to sleep I had a brief vision of getting pulled over and spending time in that bus with the other drunkards before being whisked off to spend a night in jail.

Driving drunk seems reckless and stupid. Why not just take a nap in your car for a few hours? I don’t get it.