Hey Guys.

The scene open on a rather peculiar sight. The viewer is greeted not by a locker room, or a hallway in the UCI building, or even a McDonalds, but instead by the rattling and quite frankly filthy inside of a vehicle. The cabin is both huge and yet terribly cramped at the same time, jangling like a can on a paint shaker as it rolls down a rocky desert highway, clearly visible through either window.

The car’s radio is the only sound, offering a bit of relief to the sunburned travelers contained within, packed like sardines, except pickled with sweat instead of olive oil. The driver, a man who is clearly a shaved grizzly bear passing as a human, keeps one hand on the wheel, keeping her steady, and the other arm leaned against the open window. The look across his eyes is one of the absolute and utter focus that can only come from the American trucker.

You know, the one like your fattest relative gets when they see two types of pudding at the golden corral?

Anyway, his eyes on the road and his foot on the pedal, he keeps a steady pace along the black asphalt as the music floats around the tiny cabin.

It’s the other traveler, however, that we are going to worry about. For next to our rotund Lawrence of Las Vegas sits probably the last person that you would expect.

In the passenger seat, absolutely coated in sand, like a chicken breast someone had prepared for deep frying, with closed eyes behind cracked red lenses, with bruises, cuts, and what could only be described as cheese grater marks lining the exposed skin beneath torn clothes, sits Teddy Sol.

I suppose you’re wondering exactly what’s going on.

…Okay, maybe not.

But give me a little credit here, I have a heck of a story to tell if you’re willing to hear me out. It’s got action, betrayal, true love, giant robots.

“That’s from Princess Bride”

There’s no giant robots in the princess bride

“There should have been. Woulda sold more tickets, I guarantee it.”

Mack…

…

…

…You’re alright

Now, where was I? Oh yes. Our story begins in the middle of a sun-bleached and god-forsaken spit of land somewhere around the vicinity of the American southwest.

Or maybe just the Westwest. Honestly at some point it just becomes sand and then becomes Vegas.

The main point I’m trying to get at is that our heroooo….protagonist is at the moment far from his typical settings. Indeed young Teddy Sol finds himself along for the ride with one of the greatest big men to ever haul wheat, Mr. Mack Johnson.

Yes, his name is Mack…and he drives a truck.

I can’t make this stuff up.

But I feel that even this is getting ahead of myself. Let me turn the clock back a little bit…

The scene shifts as the voiceover speaks, coming into focus in the middle of a sun-bleached desert floor, not unlike the bottom of the grand canyon.

Aside from the occasional lizard, very little happens in this type of environment. One can wile away the hours counting spines on a cactus perhaps, but overall the nightlife is not one that I would describe as exciting.

Obvious? Okay, maybe.

I mean, it’s not like one would expect to find a white-suited bartender sitting amongst the rocks, serving white Russians to vultures and vodka cranberries to coyotes.

I mean come on, that would just be silly.

It’s not like alcohol can really be found in the desert in any abundant proportion, right?

Which makes the scene that we have arrived upon all the more peculiar. For lying on the ground, in scattered quantities, are several medium sized liquor bottles. I would name brands of course, but you know as well as I do that the alcohol industry spends enough on advertising that I could probably get a new Ferrari out of the deal, so just take my word for it that scattered next to the footprints are several half-empty bottles of every imaginable imbibable substance.

Did I not mention the footprints? Oh where is my head at today?

Indeed, the bottles serve not only to provide a bit of decoration to the bowl of sand, but also a trail, lining a quickly fading set of footprints, a set which the camera follows slowly and purposefully as the voiceover continues speaking.

Now, they say that you don’t really know a man until you see him in some kind of crisis. I don’t know who “they” is exactly, but take my word for it, “they” is pretty smart. Now, Teddy Sol was not in the best place in the world at the time. I don’t want to skip too far ahead in our story, so you’re going to have to take my word on a few things. The first is that Teddy Sol, in an uncharacteristically boneheaded move, had wandered into the desert with a backpack full of liquid courage and the intention of killing as many brain cells as possible to kill the pounding headache.

The same headache that had followed him ever since he had first heard who had been elected mayor of Chicago.

Now, to those following our story extremely closely, it may come as a bit of a curiosity that Sol would just about break down into a million pieces upon such a discovery, given that Teddy Sol and David Sanchez had never seen one another, had never so much as been in the same building.

Thus it should not matter to Teddy Sol which corrupt politician had managed to buy the most votes on this particular year.

And to those who know our story well enough to be confused by that previous paragraph, stop jumping ahead.