I'm SO going to Hell...

So tonight I was over at my neighbors for a while. Other neighbors were also there--all guys of course--and the beer was flowing pretty free.

After a while, I came back here, hoping that some of the others would take the hint and go home too. But they didn't, and they kept drinking and laughing and generally screwing around.

Well I'd been drinking too. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to think up what at the time seemed like a mildly funny joke. I had an old car tire sitting in my yard, in a pile of stuff that I was getting ready to take to the dump. Suddenly the thought of rolling the tire through the bushes between my yard and the gathering struck me as being something worth doing. So, taking advantage of the total lack or street lights and yard lights in the vicinity, I quietly rolled the tire to the edge of my yard and gave it a shove through the trees towards the neighbor's driveway and the guys who were sitting there drinking.

Well they heard it come busting through the brush, but they couldn't make out what it was. I figured that the tire would just roll up to them and we'd all get a chuckle, but I neglected to factor in the steep incline of my neighbor's driveway. The tire bounded through the bushes, then cut a sharp turn and rolled/bounced down the driveway and into the woods across the street--and probably into the yard of the grumpy neighbor across the street that nobody likes.

Immediately the air was filled with exclamations.

"Oh my God, what was that?"
"Damn! I don't know, but it went down there!"
"Where'd it come from?"
"What was it?"
"I dunno, but it was BIG!"
"It was running to all get out, whatever it was!"

And the whole batch of them all went down the driveway to the road, trying to see what it was or where it went. While they were down there, I walked through the bushes, helped myself to a beer from the cooler, and sat down to watch them all searching for it.

After a few minutes, they started coming back up.

They asked me if I saw it, and I of course feigned ignorance. "What was it?" I asked.

Well the consensus was that it was either dark or light-colored, depending on who you asked. It was pretty much agreed that it stood at least three feet high and had four legs. It might have been a cougar or a bobcat, and maybe a bear. It probably wasn't a deer fawn, although that was debated almost exclusively for a couple of minutes. Whatever it was, it was agreed that it "ran" through my yard into theirs, saw them, then turned and ran down the driveway "really fast".

How fast do gravity-propelled tires really go?"

Of course the neighbor across the street--the one who hates everyone and constantly calls the police over the littlest stuff--could not have missed seeing that crowd of alcohol-inspired guys standing on the edge of his property with flashlights speculating on what they saw and where it went. And tomorrow when he looks into his yard he's almost certain to find a tire where there was no tire earlier today. This has all the makings of an escalation of an already-existing neighborhood feud which is already worthy of the Hatfields and McCoys.

I REALLY should have said something, but every time I thought about fessing up, someone started in again wondering about what they "mystery animal" was, and I just couldn't kill the fun.

Now I'm home, and when I left they were all still pontificating on the identity of the "creature".

Yeah, if God doesn't make an exemption for practical jokes, I'm going to Hell.

I'm just banking on the assumption that any God who would create something like the Platypus has GOT to have a sense of humor.