The End of Justice

Interlude:

I just started to play Draw Some on my iPhone.

Apparently Draw Some is the new Words With Friends.

I was going to write a version of this story anyway, as the spoken-word version had Josh Ravitz about peeing in his pants on the way home from Baltimore *

The very first round of Draw Some I played was with Shark (an important character in the story), and this was the picture I guessed:

/ end interlude

So this is a story from my first year of marriage, about 10 Block Constructed PTQ seasons ago. Shark and I were (supposedly) both Q’d for the PT on rating (something that would never happen today) with me having beaten him in the finals of a big cash tournament at Neutral Ground.

No idea WTF we were doing in the car. Maybe Shark was going to trade; I guess I was just going to deny my newlywed 10 wife the company of my pleasure ** for the day.

BDM had just discovered his love of U/G Werebears (rather than Arrogant Wurms), and our chauffer for the day, Justin, was coming off back-to-back losses in PTQ finals (with BDM’s U/G deck if I recall).

Fast forward a million hours.

BDM loses the win-and-in round to a Circular Logic, apparently forgetting (and apparently like his opponent) that Werebears tap for mana.

Justin loses in the finals, again.

I lose literally all my [ADJECTIVE REDACTED] drafts, prompting then-GP superstar (and YMG scum) Danny “MonkeyPants” Mandell to puzzle over the swingy-ness of my brilliant-or-brainfart in-game play.

So basically we are all of us tired and tilted, except maybe Shark… Still no idea what he was doing there.

It’s getting late and we are some hours still from NYC.

Justin decides he is too tired to go on.

BDM and I call our wives; one is cooler than the other about it (not naming any names).

In a stark reversal, Shark is now the one who starts going on tilt. Shark, in those years, lived in Connecticut rather than Manhattan, and we were like one highway stop from his apartment.

“No…” stutters Justin. “… too tired to go on… ”

We take an immediate exit that has a hotel icon and venture into what can only be described as “the setting of every low budget horror movie, ever.”

The woods, the smell, the seemingly innumerable miles between the exit and the supposed hotel in the middle of the Connecticut night… All of us have the exact same reaction:

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WEREWOLVES HERE DON’T STOP THE CAR, JUSTIN.
(-all of us)

We eventually make it to some “hotel”, which is basically a series of barns. I spit you not, light-blue barns. At this point I am weighing the certainty of a regular-old Michael Myers-esque machete maniac [bumpkin] killing me versus my heretofore reasonable skepticism around the existence of men turning into slavering canine murderers under the light of the full moon. Justin is a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, and I am pretty sure Shark and BDM are atheists, but not one of us isn’t terrified of a spontaneous werewolf attack. WEREWOLVES, I tell you. You can shake your head all you want but if you were there you would definitely have been clamoring for silver I am not really interested in dissenting opinions.

So we park. In a barn. Again, literally “a barn” … As in “there is straw on the ground”.

Our hotel room is a converted barn also. I mean obviously it is a barn. It smells funny (I can only assume this is the scent of ammonia being used to cover up the entrails-ridden stench of previous werewolf massacres), and the air conditioning is weird we all agree… Stuffy even as it is supposed to be freshening us.

So we were all dying of exhaustion fifteen seconds earlier but you know how it goes: sharp enough to Drafto as soon as we found carpet to lay cardboard to (I am sure Shark was overjoyed at this) . We gamble on Beds v. Floor (and possibly more? … it’s been ten years). I assume I was on Shark’s team on account of I remember winning.

So BDM grabbed a biology class-stained comforter and burrowed himself a little rat’s nest in the corner. Justin, having gimped had no warmth to look forward to except maybe cozying into the blood-soaked fur of his yellow-eyed soon-to-be killer.

Yawn.

If only for a moment in this victorious draft I can forget my troubles and the impending doom by lycanthrope lips.

Zzzzz…

I wake up first to find Justin (expectedly) lying on the floor by the door.

And unexpectedly…

… WITH HIS HEAD OUTSIDE THE DOOR!

Or what should be his head!

Justin is such a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy fathead that his big nogs was enough to sate any murderous werewolf attackers… with brains enough to sate the inevitable wandering Zombie Apocalypse.

… Or that’s what I would have seen… You know, if there was such a thing as justice in the world. But because there is no justice, Justin was still alive, just with his head halfway out the door, out into barn-land. The dumb motherfucker literally spent the night half-in and half-out of our room!

I go from being restfully sedate to (I think, understandably) monkey tilted in one nanosecond.

“Justin WTF!?! We are in the middle of werewolf country!”

Everyone wakes.

I mean forget about the safety concern of LEAVING YOUR RURAL HOTEL ROOM DOOR OPEN ALL NIGHT… Justin did so, dangling himself out deliciously… IN THR MIDDLE OF AN IMPENDING WEREWOLF ATTACK.

“Sorry Michaelj,” said my sometimes writing partner. “The air conditioning was kind of weird and I had trouble breathing.”

LOVE
MIKE

Aftermath:
I guess on the bright side, we were not torn to shreds by werewolves (or even just robbed or whatever).

But…

Because this is The End of Justice, the cash tournament Shark and I split was downgraded from 36K to 24K based on attendance after the fact, and I lost my ratings Q with just one PTQ weekend and one PT (which I was thankfully qualified for) left.

I didn’t get there.

* In case you missed it, Josh and I podcasted on that trip. You can check that at MTGCast and the follow-up with BDM here

** Katherine and I both caught the reversal in diction; we decided to let it stand 🙂