The 2am Xmas Tree

So after being really tired all day (you haven’t read about the weekend thus far? Do that.) I went up to the Mill to work on my Secret Santa present and to watch Tron with Dub-A. Yes, Tron. Trust me, go watch it again. You’ll be surprised.

So we watched it and it was fun and then we chatted for a while and then we realized it was after 1am. I pulled the cord and we headed out, having decided to return the video on the way… which was actually the opposite direction from home but it was a nice night for a walk.

So a couple of drunk older guys stagger by and ask us the time, and Aaron lets them know it’s about 1:20. Then he checked the clock on his phone and saw that it was actually only 1:19, but let’s not split hairs. He was pretty close.

Cue scene change, start Surreality.

We hear this thunderous crashing of smashing glass over at the Jugo Juice across the street and see a belligerent youth picking himself up out of the picture window. He and his buddy continue down the street parallelling us and yelling profanity at the world. The idiot takes another huge kick at a store window and Aaron bellows at him to settle down. The two guys were a bit shocked to be noticed I think, which is odd on a Saturday night and a busy street, but you know how drunken idiots can be.

So Aaron and I yell at these guys to chill and they do- for about half a block. Then they start up again and we decide to bust them. We hail a paddy wagon and point the guys out, and they get picked up. Aaron’s impulse was to get thee hence so we wouldn’t have to fill out forms and make court appearances but I figured we were already in it and why exit the adventure now?

So we agreed to walk over to the cop shop, ten minutes walk farther from home. The femmecop inside was friendly and gave us the witness forms and we went through the rigmarole. Our statements corroborated surprisingly closely. And we chatted her up for a while and ran our sheets to see if we had records (another story for another time, ha ha).

So at about 2am we set off again, this time in a homeward direction. We almost took Blanshard. Almost. But then we’d have to go back up a block to the video store, so we went down Quadra so we could hit the video store in a relatively on-the-way-home fashion.

And we’re walking past 7-11 talking about how much of a pain it was going to be, going to court and such, and how we should reinvent a bunch of cop gear so they didn’t have to carry twenty extra pounds of gear all the time. Yep, twenty pounds. We asked.

And there, in the parking lot, was the Christmas Tree. For once, at two in the morning on a Saturday night the lot was empty (a momentary thing I’m sure) except for a tree lying like it had been tossed there, with a red ribbon around the top.

I looked at him, he looked at me. Clearly, I said, that tree is ours. Out of the fleeting sense of moral obligation that led us to bust those miscreants in the first place, Aaron stuck his head inside the door to ask the guy behind the counter if he knew anything about the tree. Nada.

So off we went. With tree in hand (he took the trunk and I got the bushy bits) we finally made it to the video store. No late charges for us.

And now the Mill has a Christmas tree, courtesy of a Jew and an Agnostic who moonlight as crime fighters in the seamy streets of Victoria.