So there we stood, in the still of the night, a middle hot humid night on my friends’ third floor balcony...he rented a condo and personally I would of got one much higher up so that I’d be closer to the stars, and The Milky Way and all the other galaxies and farther away from all the traffic noise...we got together from work and we went to a no-name basketball game and sat in a luxury box that my friend had somehow won in a sweepstakes from one of those decaying brick and mortar stores that is going the way of the dodo...he invited a bunch of guys from work and we feasted on chicken tenders, and hamburgers and hot dogs and potatoes and all that good stuff...plus all we wanted to drink, and we wanted a lot...I don’t even remember who was playing or who won or who lost or who scored...I’m glad I wasn’t driving that night...it was about the experience...they treated us royally like these nobodies that we were were really somebodies...some of these somebodies somehow, someway made it to his place which wasn’t too far from the arena...where we sat around and cursed life and destiny and fate and anything else we could blame...I mean anybodies... and with each beer we drank, life seemed more unfair...one of us decided to get some air on the balcony and threw his empty beer bottle all the way across the busy road that passed in front...we could hear it crashing down below and well it wasn’t long until the rest of us joined him on the balcony and started throwing our empty bottles too...then somebody went to the kitchen and got the trash that must have had at least 36 empty bottles in it...we heaved empty bottles across the 4 lane road like drunken outfielders trying to hit a blurry cutoff man...one way pendulums flying in the night...angry young men taking out their frustration except we were neither angry or all that young...just drunk guys acting like drunk frat boys...we sure weren’t going to throw any full ones and wasting any beer...at first we made sure there was no traffic coming, but after a couple more, we didn’t care...some bottles made it, some didn’t but at least the lesser throws didn’t hit any cars or trucks going by...so the projectiles were sent out into the humid summer night illuminated with the yellow dirty glare of the street lights ...flying over cars and trucks and breaking on the sidewalk CRASH SMASH CRASH with pieces of glass scattering about...and a few people on the sidewalk did a dance to get out of the way and just looked up and over at us...they didn’t even have the guts to yell something at us or shake their heads in disgust...just some rich kids having some fun ha ha...what did they know?...it’s not like they were the kind of people to make trouble anyway, broken down old men wearing dirty baseball caps, shuffling along, carrying backpacks or walking stiffly on some old cane they got from the thrift store, middle aged women pushing their life’s possessions in a shopping cart...we laughed and laughed...eventually we ran out of empties and went back inside to the cool air conditioning to unload and reload...or we figured somebody would report us but nobody did...either nobody cared or wanted to get involved...after a while, we went back outside and threw some more...but by this time the traffic had died down and there weren’t any more people on the sidewalk...the homeless had found homes, on a park bench, behind some bushes, or maybe in a helter shelter...so we started yelling at no one person in particular...silly things, crazy things...whatever...it was getting real late and the party broke up like the bottles themselves...and most of us went back to the slice of suburbia where we lived with the nice grass and the trimmed bushes and the manicured garden...back to the wife and the kids and the mortgage and all that jazz...back to being fine outstanding respected church going members of our communities.
