Free...cheeseburger

I would like to caveat this story, which happened on my cross country trip from Baltimore to Denver, with two notes:

NOTE 1: I have occasionally been accused of "lacking common sense". While I think in general that characterization is false, when I am sleep deprived, which seems to be all the time now, I don't always do things that make sense. This includes driving 18 hours straight through, among other horrors, Kansas and a hail storm.
NOTE 2: This could all be the result of bad karma because I tried to eat a cow.

While driving through the midwest, and most specifically Kansas, you will find strange signs along the side of the highway. One sign will just have a slab of raw meat. Another will say "eat more beef". Then there will be the sign with a nicely laid out steak dinner the likes of which I couldn't cook if you held a gun to my head.

Considering I have not done a good job of eating the past couple of weeks, these signs started to make me hungry. Signs make me hungry anyway due to a peculiar habit from my childhood. For whatever reason I was under the delusion, as a young child, that highway signs were made of candy. I had a pretty good idea of what each one would taste like. For example, those yellow reflector signs with the black stripes were obviously butterscotch flavored, with a hint of root beer. Those blue service signs were blueberry. A stop sign was cherry flavored with a vanilla twist. As an adult, I am constantly trying to come up with new, unexpected flavors for highway signs while I'm driving, and due to my adult diet, which has expanded beyond coke and M&Ms, this keeps me entertained for hours. The green exit signs would obviously be lime. But what if they were green apple with white chocolate? Or maybe they would taste like sushi. Or maybe they would taste like that horrible Japanese gum we always get at Sushi King. In any case, I started wondering what flavor a sign would be if the aforementioned sign had food depicted on it. Would it actually be beef flavored with some meta-flavor underlying the beef, such as potato flavor? Or would it be like those Asian dishes where they make a food look like another food (e.g. a meatball that looks like an orchid, or a cucumber carved up to look like frog legs)? I pondered this philosophical question for miles, resulting in a craving for a cheeseburger, so I pulled off on an exit and procured one.

Now, I am a good multi-tasking driver (I can smoke, talk on my cell, shift gears and change a CD all at the same time because I have an innate ability to drive with my knees) so eating a cheeseburger should have been no problem while driving. It's all in the preparation. Before leaving the hamburger joint I got my napkins ready and fixed the paper around my cheeseburger so I could eat it and not spill it on myself. Then, for reasons that are even today inexplicable, I decided to put my cheeseburger on the dashboard. In my defense of this action, my cokes and crackers and food bars were on the passenger seat, along with maps, directions and CDs. In addition, I don't like to merge onto a highway while doing anything else because that is a fairly dangerous driving maneuver, especially since I tend to merge at great speeds so that I'm traveling with the flow of traffic. In any case, the only other thing I could have done was hold the stupid cheeseburger in my hand.

I should mention here that I had the two back windows cracked open, as well as having the driver's window completely open. I always open the driver's window all the way when I am merging onto a highway.

The cheeseburger seemed content to hang out on his little perch on my dashboard while I nailed the accelerator to the floor. But after I had gone about 100 yards on the entrance ramp something strange started happening. My cheeseburger was vibrating like a bobble head doll. In addition, a wind vortex seemed to be building in my car. That's strange, I thought to myself. Then, as I glanced away from the cheeseburger to my tachometer to see where my RPMs were, the cheeseburger made a graceful leap from the dashboard and out the window. I managed to catch the paper but the cheeseburger was gone. It reminded me of my cat Prickly Pete, who used to feign sleep on the vet's exam table, only to jump off it the second the vet turned her back. I looked in the rear view and saw one very satisfied cheeseburger sitting in the middle of the road, more or less intact except for some mustard and a pickle. You little bastard I thought to myself, now I'm going to have to eat another Clif bar. Moments later the cheeseburger was mushed by a RAV4. I will probably never order a cheeseburger again.

EPILOGUE: Yes, I have been under a lot of stress lately. Why else would I write a one page story about a cheeseburger blowing out my car window?

EPILOGUE, part 2: I would assume that I can still write my cheeseburger off on my taxes as a moving expense even though I didn't actually get to eat it. Can someone check with the IRS on this for me?