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Just found this old scrap from when I was sitting in IHOPs in Phoenix a lot, waiting for my mother to die from cancer. I swear the moralistic ending was completely unintentional.

Last night I found myself drunk and trapped in a country house with a lot of really great cartoonists. We’d tried to leave earlier but by 2am the whole state had turned into an ice-skating rink. Three carloads of people slid off the road, four counting us. We had to slide-push our car back up a couple hills like it was a fallen chaperone at a kid’s ice-rink birthday party, our feet splaying about like fawns, while the owner of the car struggled to maintain his tenuous grip on his consciousness/dinner.

We got back intact and danced some more, with a new tinge of abandon, joyfully resigned to our fate. Then we collapsed on the living room floor and slept like a big pack of dogs.

By dawn the roads had more purchase, and we filed out in a stupor, still half-drunk. On our dreary drive back to civilization we passed a giant plume of flame shooting two stories above the quiet, snow-rimed housetops of Woodstock. I forgot my deer mask in the car.