All Write, Already!

I'm sitting alone at the table in the Perkins, trying to read a few more pages in the latest in the series of increasingly trashier novels I've been reading lately, when I hear them: the two middle-aged women three tables away from me who feel the need to talk at full-volume about how damn wonderful their lives are.

"We just got a new Ford Extravagance," the first one says, as her oh-so perfectly chunky jewelry rattles and clacks on the wrist bearing the fork to her mouth, "and it's sixteen inches longer than the next-largest SUV."

"Heather was going to buy one of those," snipes the second, and I swear to Bob I can see her mentally flexing her claws, "before Chris divorced her for screwing her assistant." Cue the bitchy little smirks and quiet chuckles.

I could have changed tables, or tried to ignore them, but I'd finished my meal, and I had to be getting back to work. So I blew out the pilot lights on two of the grills and cranked the gas main valve wide open. I figured that eventually the vapors would hit the smoking section, and the whump that shook my car as I drove off kind of proved my point anyway.