Pepsi the mad-nut mutt was totally right about everything, one hundred percent of the time.

“No shit, man, especially about this kind of class-A weirdness. She’s spent her whole damn life instigating it." My mate Blue replied with an air of disbelief at my apparent foolishness.

“Did I say that shit or just think it?” This is highly out of control. We really can’t be dealing with this right now. I allowed my brain one staccato moment for the situation to gel. All her life? I postulated. And that’s a fucking long time in dog years.

Meat-head Bruce had broken out of his fear-coma, way over on the other side of Willcrop street where Pepsi had momentarily pinned him with her fearsome pronouncement. But that jazz was all over now. When an animal works on instincts like fear, egomania and the godless need to be muscle-bound well past the age of 50, you know you can’t keep things predictable for long.

I cautiously turned towards my mate Blue, to see if he was having a similar reaction to the here and now. I couldn’t keep my focus on him. The combination of his ridiculous Jesus-beard highlighted against his favourite Vegas-gold t-shirt was enough to keep me from seeing straight what was really going on with his face. My eyes glazed over like a salty Christmas ham, and all I could focus on was the empty car parks sprawling across the asphalt valley behind him, another neon fortress of capitalism thrusting out of the ocean of flaming bitumen like something out of a Stanley Kubrick film.

We can’t stop here, this is fuckin’ bat country. I repeated the words from his t-shirt over and over in my head.

“Shit man, the t-shirt is right, this is out of control.”

“Uh, yeah, man, whatever you say. Are you alright man?” Blue replied hesitantly.

“What are you talking about you goddamn Rasta-pants?”, I screeched with a heady mix of horror and confusion while clutching at his t-shirt trying to make more sense from the faux-blood prophecies printed across his chest.

“Right. Okay, I think we need to get you off the streets. Fuck, Sergio, you are lucky this isn’t California right here or you could go away till the next ice age for letting yourself get like this in public.”

“Well, Blue, if we keep raping Mother Nature like this”, I spat, while waving furiously towards the car park and the Meat-head’s car simultaneously. “She’s gonna FREEZE our arses to DEATH in about 15 minutes.”

However this was the least of our concerns. While Blue was oblivious to the fact, Pepsi and I knew that Meat-head Bruce was stoking his car up for a gory U-turn across Willcrop street and directly into the car park beyond us. And here we were, Blue, Pespi, My own dog Jarhead and I, standing right in his path. This society is fucked. I thought to myself. If this Meat-head fucker runs us all down, is he even going to get in trouble? Do pedestrians even have right of way anymore? But there was no time to query the government on this nonsense.

I looked onto the empty car park below in search for recognition of this mad truth I had just uncovered, but none was to be found. Plastic shopping bags growled silently across the searing black tar like fake tumbleweeds from a low-budget Western film.

“Did you totally not listen to what my dog said, Sergio? We need to get out NOW if we want to LIVE!”. So now Blue understood the gravity of it all. I wasn’t crazy. The Meat-head was going to kill us. We needed to flee like wombats before the sweeping flames of destruction.

I gestured for Blue to help me lift my own dog into the trolley along with Pespi. She was in only moments before the Bruce the Meat King ramped up over the kerb towards us. With a mewling squeak of urgency, Blue and I scrambled onto the back of the trolley and slammed the aluminium death-mobile down onto the in-ramp, sending us careening across the field of smoldering black tar. 60 kilometres an hour seems a hell of a lot safer in a car. It was almost an afterthought.

Meat-head Bruce was hot on our tail in his purple hatchback, and I looked at Pepsi for reassurance that this wasn’t going to end violently, but all I got from that canine devil was a look of wolfish arrogance. You filthy man-scum, you think I don’t deal with this shit every day? It’s under control! This time she was barking directly into my head and I was stunned again momentarily by that same burning-furniture gaze that had instigated all this insanity.

Blue and I slammed the trolley into a screeching halt in front of the main entrance to the shopping centre. As the wheels bubbled and slurped their way deeper into the bitumen, we all disembarked haphazardly onto the concrete, Bruce bearing down on us in his purple car, the whole damn time.

‘No dogs allowed’, the sign read in black and red text.

“Blow you man, this is a matter of the highest urgency!?!” I shrieked at the sign as if it were calling me out for my actions. We burst through the automatic doors like something out of ‘The Last Action Hero’. We were confronted with a cardboard cutout advertisement for ‘that television show with the fat clowns’, and I fly-kicked it across the hallway just to prove my point.

We were safe. For all his Schwarzenegger-style bravado, that fat bastard would never fit through the doors. Even if he did, he doesn’t want to mess with Pepsi.

[24 minutes...]

[Image by CLG]