  Enough time has passed, that I can finally talk about it Something happened to me about 2 weeks ago. It affected me deeply, and may have changed my life forever. I had hoped to block it out, but since my girlfriend keeps asking me to tell the story, I might as well recant it here.
Perhaps this will finally clense me of the horror that wakes me from my sleep even now. We were driving up to her cottage, on a moonless spring night. It was about 11:00 and we'd been driving for 3 hours. We needed to stop and get a coffee. There's an intersection where two lonely Ontario highways cross, and at that intersection there is a "Coffee Time". Anyone living in Southwestern Ontario knows as true as the sun shines outside, that Coffee Time is the shittiest of the 3 regional coffee chains; this story only adds to its list of misdeeds. I noticed the empty parking space by the door first. It was late so I was supprised to see 3 other cars in the unpaved lot. As we pulled into the space, I turned to notice the car beside us had two people in it. A young couple like ourselves who had purchased their food and had chosen to eat it in the car, instead of in the brightly lit resturaunt. One could only wonder why they had made that decision. I looked at the window of the coffee shop.
Then I turned to my girlfriend. "I'm not going in there". Puzzled, she finally saw what what had caught my gaze, and frozen my body. It was a clown. It was 11:00 on a Saturday night. At a crossroads in the middle of absolutely nowhere. An hour to the nearest town in any direction. And there, in that Coffee Time, sat a man with a bright red wig, full face paint, urlLink colourful overalls, gigantic red shoes, and a red nose. He was urlLink overweight , and the sweat from his hard, urlLink clown , life had begun to run the black and white makup from his forehead.
He knew I was staring in horror, so he urlLink stared at me from his table under the unnatural flourescent lights. I hadn't just pulled off the road and into a parking lot, I had made a left turn out of reality and into the horrors of a childhood urlLink nightmare . We walked in. Naturally I let my girlfriend open the door and go in first, I followed her in, always keeping her between the clown and myself.
If he was going to jump up from the table and rip one of us apart with his greasy clown teeth, by god, it was going to be her. The only trace that I would leave would be a thin puddle of urine, and the faint sounds of my screams in the distance. As we stood at the counter and ordered I could feel his dark, makeup covered eyes boring through my spine and directly into my soul. I could hear his wiskey tainted voice in my head: "Hey kid. Try the Boston Cream. I made them myself..." The most terrifying part of the experience, was simply not knowing why he was there. Any kid's party that he would have been at, must have been over by at least 3 hours. There were no other clowns, so there was probably no convention, or circus in the area, and any man who would have had a clown at his bachelor party, probably shouldn't be getting married.
No. The only explaination was that we had stumbled upon the restaurant, where children's nightmares have their coffee before heading off to work for another night. If we had stayed longer a big hairy monster, a school of phiranas and Colonel Sanders would have shown up, ordered double doubles, and sat with the clown to "talk shop" before their shift started. But there was no way that I was sticking around to watch that. 
