It’s time for another trip into the DrakeGTA Archives.
When I posted the last DrakeGTA Archives article back in early June, my original plan was to turn this into a monthly feature.
Then I realized doing that might be overkill, considering we already have a monthly archive series in the form of the AJnet Archives. I also don’t like the idea of having too many monthly features, especially when there’s nine different writers submitting articles for publication. Having too many monthly features takes away valuable scheduling space for articles.
With that said, Drake was my boy and I don’t want to see his work die with him, so instead of reposting old DrakeGTA articles every month I’ll only be reposting them every two months.
If this is your first time reading a DrakeGTA Archives article, Drake was a very good friend and fellow writer who passed away in September of 2021. He was also the originator of Rantlister (which is a whole story in and of itself). His own website, DrakeGTA, may have disappeared from the internet, but using the Wayback Machine I’ve been salvaging some of his better articles and reposting them here. I also purchased his original domain, DrakeGTA.com, and will eventually get around to turning it into a proper archive.
This particular article I’m reposting today is commentary on a news story that happened in 2011 (I’m over here doing commentary on his commentary, go figure). Two brothers in Lawrence County, PA stole a bridge and sold it for scrap metal. Yes, you read that right. These guys dismantled, stole, and sold a damn bridge.
When Drake was a member of the AJnet Forums, we’d often talk about offbeat stories like this one. Drake was like me in the sense that he enjoyed when people upset the apple cart and did absurd stuff like this. I mean really, who steals a damn bridge?! We loved silly little shit like this, and he’d often share these kinds of stories on the forum.
This article, titled “The Bar Has Been Raised: Go Big, or Go Home”, was posted to his website on October 16, 2011. This was before me and Drake really became good friends, but I think it serves as a good illustration of the types of conversations we’d have. I can definitely see this as a post on the AJnet Forums, and we may have even talked about it at one point. Two of the things I miss most about Drake were these conversations, and his ability to always find and post a song relevant to whatever he was talking about at the time (as you’ll see in the article).
Anyway, before I start getting too sappy, here’s “The Bar Has Been Raised: Go Big, or Go Home”, originally posted to DrakeGTA.com on October 16, 2011.
So there is this supposedly ancient Chinese curse, it goes: “May you live in interesting times.” We’ve reached a point in this nation where parts of many major cities resemble Dresden Germany following a visit from allied bombers in 1945. I thought things were getting “interesting” when I heard of thieves breaking into people’s houses and stealing the copper pipes to sell for scrap, but now that they are stealing bricks, literally stealing the bricks that houses and buildings are made out of, you know that’s “interesting.” But fuck those small minded crooks, let me tell you about a couple of fellows who have raised the bar.
These two young brothers, Benjamin Arthur Jones and Alexander Williams Jones, have crossed the line between regular old villainy, and cartoonish super villainy. My daddy always taught me that if you’re going to do something, do it right, especially if it’s something you shouldn’t be doing. Further more, as I always say, you only live once, make it epic. Go big or go home.
So, I don’t know the exact situation that leads up to this, so I’m going to use inductive reasoning and speculate. You got two brothers in Pennsylvania, I don’t really know anything about them, so I’m going to assume they were just some good ol’ boys. Never meaning no harm. Beats all you never saw. Been in trouble with the law. Since the day they were born. They were driving around one day, in their orange 1969 Dodge Charger, presumably they had just done some epic car jump that caused them to evade the police in a highly dramatic fashion, and on their way back to the family farm/moonshine still, they cross a bridge.
Not just any bridge, but the historic Coverts Crossing Bridge in Hazard Country, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania. Bo Benjamin looks at his brother Luke Alexander and says: “You see that bridge? We should fucking steal it.”
Alex looks at him, and pulls out his wallet, says: “You see this wallet? It contains all the fucks I give right now.” The wallet was empty, and they stole a fucking bridge, a fucking bridge.
Let me give that a moment to sink in. You know how you have to have a truck to transport a modern Barbecue grill? They stole a fucking 20 foot by 50 foot bridge. That’s only one notch below stealing the Statue of Liberty and selling it to Putin for a lawn ornament. That’s like walking out the Musée du Louvre with the Mona Lisa in your trench coat, except it’s 20′ x 50′ so you have to use a semi.
Now of course they got caught. (Which violates one of the first rules of being a super-villain.) It turns out that the recycling center gets suspicious when you show up with A FUCKING BRIDGE. But can you imagine what it’s going to be like for these boys in prison? “What you in for?” “Me, oh, I stole a TV.” “A TV huh? Oh, that’s cute, I stole a bridge.”
All I’m saying, the bar has been raised. Until Carmen Sandiego lists The Gateway Arch on Ebay, these guys get to wear the Bad Mother Fucker wallet.