You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
Ya can't take a shower in a parakeet cage
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
All you gotta do is put your mind to it
Knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it
Well, you can't go a-swimmin' in a baseball pool
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
You can't change film with a kid on your back
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
You can't drive around with a tiger in your car
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
All you gotta do is put your mind to it
Knuckle down, buckle down do it, do it, do it
Well, you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
You can't go fishin' in a watermelon patch
But you can be happy if you've a mind to
You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd...
Hmm, that was weird. Er: blame it on the cold. So. Moving on.
The trip on Tuesday from the Flat to the home state. It can be summed up in a few words. However, I'll drag it out into way too many. Tee hee.
The first notable thing occurred on G Road, maybe ten miles north of Old State. I was jamming along: listening to the "You want..." mix (absolutely brand new, just burned the night before), rising and falling through the wavy humpy-bumpy-ness of G Road; sunglasses on; jacket stuffed into the foot-well of the passenger seat; phone charged, keypad locked and carefully arranged in the compartment beneath the parking brake; tea and Coke open in the holders before me; lunch on the seat to my right. The slow cars and dairy trucks that had been in front of me had turned near B-line Road. All was right with the world.
I crested a hill—one of the larger ones—and suddenly had a flash of something so amazing that I nearly pulled over to get the camera out, so I wouldn't forget it. There before me was a sky so perfectly turquoise, with stripey white clouds so perfectly formed, that I would have sworn that I'd just driven into The Simpsons! I could not have been more stunned if I'd been whacked in the head with a bat. It was one of those times where someone whose opinion matters to me a whole lot would have said, "You haven't done enough drugs to have that response." Or something like that.
Shortly thereafter, just north of state highway 72, I was maybe 5 car-lengths behind a gaggle of pickups and SUVs. I was going maybe 65 mph or so. (This is a 55 mph zone, gravel-on-asphalt. Slippery as hell when conditions are anything less than perfect.) The larger group in front of me was going probably 70-75 mph. Just after I got into "town" there—what's that place called? I can't remember, but I know that there's a street called Shangri-la, which often makes me laugh aloud—some pinhead in a diesel pickup with bumped-out wheel-wells pulled out in front of me, from a gravel side-road. I didn't exactly roll the car trying to avoid killing us both, but it wasn't the nicest thing ever, and I was pretty pissed. And I wasn't any happier when, once in front of me, he didn't accelerate beyond 40 mph between that point and C Valley Road. 40 mph, in a 55 mph zone. At 2:00 on a Tuesday, in an apparently-empty full-sized pickup, on dry pavement, in sunny weather. Jackass!
There was a fine explanation for it. See, Jack (that's Mr. Ass to you) was on the phone. So he couldn't be troubled to actually DRIVE. I was apoplectic. Every time we'd get into a passing zone, there would be a flood of cars from the opposite direction. And every time there would be no one oncoming, the No Passing Zone would start. Happily for my blood pressure, Jack turned onto another side-road (after slowing to about 5 mph--grrr!) maybe 3 miles onto C Valley Road.
`That, unfortunately, was followed very shortly by the oddest moment of the trip. I came upon a tiny minivan, stopped in my lane with its hazard lights on. There seemed to be 2 women in it. I'd briefly considered stopping to see if they needed to call for help and had already begun to slow down when I saw something that made me a little sick. An arm shot out of the passenger window...and dropped a garbage bag. They'd pulled to the side of the lane, and turned on their hazard lights, to illegally dump garbage on the side of the road. How idiotically non-incognito is that?! Shockingly stupid, on top of the rest of the problems with that behavior. Yargh.
The Flat was to provide no further excitement, however. I bought gas in R-ford for nearly $.10 less than it had been at home (and why do I care so much about saving $1.20 on my tank of gas? I don't know. I could lose $1.20 and never realize it, but when it comes to paying it for gasoline, I feel like I'm being robbed at knife-point! It's one of those odd mental issues, I guess.), at $1.749/g. B School Road is up and running again, although I'm hard-pressed to determine what sort of fix they might've done to it, since it's bumpier than ever even after having been under construction for about 4 months. I paid my toll in dimes because I was out of quarters. [I must remedy that before heading back on Sunday. Yeah, and like you care.]
I'd gotten a BLT, no tomato and no mayo, on toasted white, while still toodling around town. I ate it while driving through the Mad-town area. It had begun flurrying around Milton. I'm generally not this cocky, but it really does take some confidence to drive a stick through a major city (and yeah, I know that Mad-town isn't a "major city" by most standards, but it's the most major city through which I drive on this trip, so I'm claiming it, and if you want to fight about it, do it in person) while eating a soggy BLT with shredded lettuce, noncrisp bacon and no mayo to hold it together. One-handed, of course. And the secondary goal being not spraying lettuce or toast crumbs all over the car, or losing ANY bacon AT ALL. I dropped a tiny bit of lettuce in my lap but had no other trouble. I was pretty proud of myself for that maneuver.
Made myself laugh pretty hard while singing along with Liz Phair's Why Can't I? I've liked the song for a while, but only recently put it on a mix and so only recently began learning the words so that I felt like I could sing along. And so I sang. Only, I clearly hadn't understood this part:
Gonna take a while for this egg to hatch
But wouldn't it be beautiful
Here we go, we're at the beginning
We haven't fucked yet, but my head's spinning
J.R. recently wrote a post on her feelings about Liz Phair's music and lyrics. Check it out.
Somewhere in the middle of the Cheese State. I realized that I'd brought along nearly $2000 worth of checks, made out to me, that I'd intended to deposit into my checking account before leaving the Flat, and that I couldn't deposit into my account while in the home state. Nor could I cash them while there. And I cannot get cash while there, because I haven't yet received my debit card. So I, essentially, had only the cash that was in my wallet (plus those essentially useless checks) to get me through nearly a week. Again, laughing out loud. The people driving near me must've thought I was nuts.
As you know, I arrived in the home town sort of early but came back to the parental home fairly soon thereafter due to the snow & crap on the roads. My parents' driveway is short but sort of steep. I park at the bottom on the left side, so that there's room for my dad to back out of the garage when he leaves for work at 6:30 in the morning. When I tried to drive in the first time, I didn't go fast enough. I got about 1/4 of the way in and...got stuck. Not "stuck," exactly, but...the car stopped moving forward. Because the driveway was slippery. So I couldn't do anything, in a forward direction. I was just spinning, and looking like an idiot. (My dad was watching through the window and clearly wondering if he'd spawned a fool.) So I calmly slipped the car into reverse, backed into the street, goosed it, and pulled smoothly into the driveway. Perfectly. Then I pulled up the parking brake and... promptly pulled my foot off the clutch without thinking about it, killing the engine with a tooth-rattling jerk. Dad was getting his jacket out of the closet and didn't see it—or he had the outstanding decency not to mention it when he came outside to help me lug all my crap indoors. I looked like the veriest of greenhorns, not someone who's been driving fully half my life. Sigh.
Mom wasn't home; she had a couple of obligations that she couldn't get out of, so Dad was left there to deal with me. We rustled up some grub (I had buttered toast and a glass of milk for supper) and did the usual "how was the trip?"/ "fine", "much semi- traffic?"/ "nope", "construction?"/ "nope" thing while I ate. Then we both just roamed around the house aimlessly until Mom came home.
The rest of the song...
Get a load of me, get a load of you
Walkin' down the street, and I hardly know you
It's just like we were meant to be
Holding hands with you when we're out at night
Got a girlfriend, you say it isn't right
And I've got someone waiting too
What if this is just the beginning?
We're already wet, and we're gonna go swimming
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
Why can't I speak
whenever I talk about you?
It's inevitable, it's a fact that we're gonna get down to it
So tell me
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
Isn't this the best part of breakin' up?
Finding someone else you can't get enough of?
Someone who wants to be with you too?
It's an itch we know we are gonna scratch
Gonna take a while for this egg to hatch
But wouldn't it be beautiful?
Here we go, we're at the beginning
We haven't fucked yet, but my head's spinning
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
Why can't I speak
whenever I talk about you?
It's inevitable, it's a fact that we're gonna get down to it
So tell me
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
High enough for you to make me wonder
Where it's goin'
High enough for you to pull me under
Somethin's growin'
out of this that we can control
Baby I am dyin'
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
Why can't I speak
whenever I talk about you?
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
Why can't I speak
whenever I talk about you?
It's inevitable, it's a fact that we're gonna get down to it
So tell me
Why can't I breathe
whenever I think about you?
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