how a cab driver stole my weed,
how my brand new car got hit by a flying trash can
on the same day that I bought it,
and why I’m still smiling
an overly long short story
by Brooke / KindaGamey
My lovely partner in heterosexual bliss got me Coldplay tickets for a show that was in Virginia Beach. She also scheduled us at a Bed and Breakfast called Beach Spa Bed and Breakfast. I think that’s what it was called. It could have been Spa Breakfast Beach and Bed.
(Kind of like a Mexican restaurant, you can just rearrange the order of the ingredients and you’ve got a whole new menu item.)
Well we were supposed to leave around 2pm on Thursday, but Miss M was running late and so was I, mainly because I was feverishly typing up the previous blog entry. I didn’t want to leave you guys hanging whilst I was gone. (So thoughtful!) Inevitably, due to our leaving late, we hit traffic coming into the va. beach tunnel.
There was a free shuttle that could have taken us to the Coldplay show but it left at 6:15 and we weren’t going to make it. So we got to the B&B and told the owner lady our plight and she said she’d call a local cab company she always uses, Andy’s Cab. OK! We’d have just enough time to check-in, see our room, drop off our stuff, and then run outside to hop in the cab. We did just that. And that’s when I met Kelly the cabdriver.
Now, when M had been faffing in the bathroom, I had a chance to step out on the balcony and partake of my little one-hitter tinderbox in the warm, thick, tar-filled air, so I was slightly buzzed already when I stepped into the cab.
Note: See, they were pouring tar on the street right outside. This B&B was on a corner and every street around it was getting repaved one by one. Everyone in the area seemed to have an opinion on this business, which consisted of how long it was taking the city, and that it seemed like they would never finish. The city promised it would be done by Memorial Day, but nobody was buying it.
M had to go and repark her car because it displeased the tar people so I went to go meet our cab driver. Kelly was salt of the earth. His blondish white hair was rubber banded into a pony tail that garnished the bald mountaintop in the middle. It strained through like the end of a pinkish egg being birthed from a hair vagina. He asked how much the B&B cost us, “How much a place like that run you?” and I didn’t know. He asked where I was from and after I said, “Richmond” he told me how he had done the roofing for Sixth Street Marketplace and then he commented on the B&B roofing.
To this man, the world was a series of roofs, he had roof vision, he saw roofs in a way that you and I could not imagine; like Neo’s codesight in the Matrix, this man saw dollar signs making up the fiddler perches of our world, the often unseen tops of our man-made habitation. I wondered if he would give up his cabbie life to get back to shingling in the breeze, high above the common man. How unfitting that his own dome was so unprotected. It sat quietly trying to cover itself with beads of sweat for protection from the harsh bombardment of solar radiation through the sunroof.
When M got in the car he asked her how much the B&B ran her. Unfortunately, she answered honestly. Even I was a bit shocked at the price. I think this is the point where Kelly just assumed we were rich douchebags who deserved to be taken advantage of. We were rolling along, discussing everything from the time Kelly made a killing selling grilled cheeses at a dead show, to the time Kelly watched a man directing a crane get squished into fruit roll-up by concrete pipes during the roofing of the Sixth Street Marketplace, “which was a disaster, you understand. everything about that job was a disaster.” We talked about the Navy’s new jets which flew over almost every five minutes and created deafening moments of silence for any sound that tried to compete with them. Later we would be shocked at how often they interrupted the Coldplay show, flying right over head and drowning out everything.
We’ve got a thing about weird cab drivers. Either the hiring practices for the entire vocation highly recommends weird as a personal asset or M and I have an unnatural knack for summoning the special ones.
Or perhaps the cabbies are just the luck of the draw, but the combined strength of the presence of M and my thoughtform topographies brings out a special side of people that they would otherwise keep hidden. (Because it isn’t like we ever say anything to invite the weirdness, we just have to show up.) In the Dominican that guy didn’t speak english but he drove like a bull out of chinashop hell and when we first left the airport he pushed that shitty van through parked cars within an inch of tearing into them. (It was tearifying.) And in San Antonio that Persian cab-driver who said to us as we were passing by it, “Have you seen the Alamo? Oh, no? It’s crap! It’s nothing! Just a tourist trap! Bah!” (well, his culture is a little bit older than ours, me thinks…) and then proceeded to talk to us about the nature of God, whether or not he was going to hell (we said no), and whether aliens and UFOs were real. He also made a reference to not wanting to work anymore, which for me was a strong Zeitgeist: Addendum ping, though he has most likely never seen that film. You have to understand that despite having a deep love for these subject matters, I am not provoking these conversational detours. They just happen around me.
So when Kelly pulls down the sun visor and some burned DVD’s come flying out, it didn’t surprise me too bad when he turned to Mia and said, “Oh shit. That’s just some DVD’s. You know, here, you should keep these two. You need to know the truth of what’s going on in the world,” and handed her Alex Jones’ The Obama Deception, marked only with OD written in pen, and Endgame, marked only with E. Much later M would turn and ask me, “I wonder if he dropped all those DVDs on purpose, like, he does this whole routine so he gets a chance to hand them out?” That totally Watsoned me because I thought that was a brilliant deduction.
As he goes on about the Bilderberg group enslaving us and stealing our futures and the future war with Iran I wanted to assuage his fears by reminding him that the corporate giants that puppeteer our governments are all financially in bed together so it doesn’t really behoove anyone to attack anyone else (caviar: unless they both benefit, in which case we’re f*ed. and you know i meant caveat, i was just being silly. Otherwise I bore myself. Seriously me, get to the damn point already!) In a grander sense than that, we and everything around us are just vibrational states of consciousness, so really, we are ALL in bed with each other, with all the animals, with the bilderbergs, with the saints and sailors, with the earth and the kitchen sink together exploring dissonance from the source; translating the emotional energy through our perspective interpreters as ‘suffering’. Perhaps, being under a similar isolation from the totality, the muscles of our arms decry the tragedy of the strain they are put under when we work out, shout at the heavens “why are you doing this to us!? what have we done to deserve this?” as they cannot see the greater purpose, the growth that eventually comes of it.
M tells me she hopes I don’t have anything suspicious in my pockets because she read online that they pat you down and check your bags before you can enter the stadium grounds. “Oh shit,” thought I, as I had my little wooden one-hitter box in my pocket. Kelly chimes in, “What, you got somethin on you? What you got, weed? Coke?” and I told him what I had. “How much you got?” he asked and I told him I’d just filled up the box, obliviously not thinking it was a suspicious question at all, but still being uncomfortable about being verbally probed. He tells us about when he took an ounce of weed into the dead show back in the day to show us he was on our side. “But oh yeah,” he says. “They got cops outside and inside and they got drug dogs too, dogs inside the fence and out.”
Dogs! The damn dogs can sniff anything! Almost as good as drug-sniffing bees! Even if I could ditch the box they’d bark at me just for the leafy scent marinating my pocket and then I’d have to submit to cop aggression even if they had nothing on me. I was like, “Well, I’ll just have to hide it before I go in.
(I did that at a museum in DC once. They had metal detectors and as the cigarette-disguised pipette inside the wooden box was metal I didn’t want it setting them off. So I wandered off the main pathway and found a little cave of snow under a statue where I hid my flask and one hitter, not realizing that this action was totally visible from the inside of the museum and that my little footprints in the snow completely gave away my hiding spot. Nevertheless, it was still there when I got back and all was right with the world.)
“You can’t do that, man!” said Kelly. “I’m dropping you right outside, the cops’ll see you!” He then told us the wonderful plan that just occurred to him. “You can leave the box in my trunk and I’ll come back to pick you guys up after the show. Here’s my card with my cellphone on it.” Card with cellphone. Well that’s trustworthy. We’d have to spend another $40 on cab fare when we could have taken the free shuttle, but it would be worth it to get my tinderbox back, even if the box was a little lighter than when I left it. The fear of the pat-down was getting to me so I agreed to his offer. “Hey man, I said, I’m really generous with that thing so if you’d like to partake please do.” I knew he was going to anyway, but, ah, you know. “Not whilst I’m driving,” says Kelly. “Good man,” says me. Kelly invites us to smoke up in the car and hands us back the box for a bit. After that I hand over the little wooden box I’ve been carrying around, hiding in hidey holes, scraping, filling and slowly unfilling, for a long time. I’ve handed it to many, many people, but this was the last time I would hand that box to another human being. Mia tipped him like $13 to ensure his kindness through guilt.
There were no dogs. I’m not even sure there were cops. There were medical professionals wearing green lights on their chests. One guy in the middle line had stuff from his pockets in his hands and was getting a pat-down, but those of us in lines without pat-down staff were perfectly fine. Just don’t get into the middle line! Shit. I could have taken in an inflatable doll full of weed. I could have pushed a wheelbarrow full of planters. Where were the dogs prowling the fences? Where were the cops? I felt a good buzz, but it would creep away the rest of the night, and my pockets would feel sadly empty.
The show was surprisingly good. We had lawn seats; that’s cheap seats for rich douchebags like us, but you know how it is. We were disgusted with the $12 Blue Moon prices and when the dude handed me my bottled water he took the cap off and laid it on a paper towel. I thanked him (wow, what nice service) and started putting the cap back on. “Oh no,” he says, “sorry I should have taken that. Weird rule, I know.” It was more than a weird rule. It was a pain in the ass. Ever try to lay out a blanket on the lawn holding two giant beers and a bottled water with no cap? Shit! Why even make a rule like that?
Possible reasons why the Verizon Amphitheater takes your bottled water cap:
1. they want you to spill your overpriced water on the lawn and get another one
2. they want it to be infused with the sweet aromas and cigarette ashes of coldplay fans
3. because douchebags get drunk and choke on them
4. because you can’t recycle them and it is easier to put them on lockdown than putting signs saying, “please don’t recycle the bottle caps”
5. because they are a more pervasive form of litter than the 10 million butterflies that coldplay shot out of a compressed air cannon
Mia said next time she was going to bring a bunch of bottlecaps with her on the down low. I could line the inside of a flasher overcoat with them and sell them to people like a NY knock-off watch vendor.
We got ourselves nestled in and then some guy came and offered us tickets to actually sit under the amphitheater in real seats. Ooh la-la! It seemed daunting, but we were up to the challenge. We needed to regain our rich douchebag status and we spent no time kissing the lawn goodbye.
It turns out, that shortly after this event, when we were comfortably watching in our new seats, that Coldplay jumps off the stage and goes all the way to the back to play right from the lawn – right where we had been sitting and had unknowingly been voluntarily evicted from.
That wasn’t the only surprise of the show. They did some instrumental bits, they had these giant globes hanging over the stage that fascinated me: they had projectors on the inside that projected an image in reverse to the outside skin of the globes. They could make it spin hieroglyphics, look like an earth, fractally migrate patterns around the surface. It was cool. At the end of the night they gave everyone a free CD recording of one of their live shows in a black sleeve with a pink butterfly on one side and a green on the other. It was called LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT LEFT.
(I wondered if somehow they had impossibly recorded and already burned the show we had just watched, but had that been true we would have heard jet noises overlap every single track. I normally wouldn’t think such foolishness, but I was so in awe of the real-time editing of camera angles on the big screen that I thought it was taped footage at first. Only when a jet passed overhead and I saw that he reacted to it on the screen was I assured that I wasn’t watching some Milli Vanilli video lipsynch conjob. I mean, coldplay scrub-faced singer dude did learn to sing backwards for the video for The Scientist, right? Although, countering that, I doubt coldplay bald drummer guy probably could replicate his animated facial expressions if he wanted to. Sorry, I never was good with band member names. Or bands. Or historical facts about the rises and falls and member swappings of bands gone by.)
After the show I texted Kelly and he called me back. I could barely hear him but I told him the show was almost over. One obligatory encore to go. He said something about being parked behind a Jim Beam van, in front of a limousine, and the cab had Cab #4 on it. I said ok and hung up cause I couldn’t really hear anyway.
Wait a minute!
Kelly’s cab didn’t have Cab #4 on it, did it? I don’t think so. I get another call after the show. It’s Andy. He’s waiting in a cab for us. I got a sinking feeling. Kelly is gone. Did Kelly tell him about/hand him the box? When we get out there to the Jim Beam van we find a dreadlocked guy shouting through the open window at our new cab driver, “That’s no way to run a business, man! Fuck you, man! Fuck you!” and our new cab driver shouting back, but in a much nicer way. He had been kindly waiting for us and declining other customers and they weren’t too happy about it. That was nice of Kelly to make sure we had a cab, was he really a stand-up guy after all? I asked Andy about the box and he says, “What box?” When he dropped us off he would ask me about what was in the box, “Was it full of coldplay tickets?” “Yeah right,” I said sullenly as I slinked off. Andy asked Kelly on the CB Radio about the missing property and Kelly said he could drop it off at the B&B in about an hour or so.
Andy was kind and weird and told us stories with a lot of specifics and authority about the music industry, making rock and roll and selling out, making trance techno, and how much you can get paid if you are a successful comedy writer like his Dad was. He specifically told M not to give up the dream and we took that as a sign — the tarot card reader in Austin had told her she had a seed that she wasn’t tending to. We always figured writing was the seed, so Andy telling her to keep writing even after she had already tipped him and he could gain no benefit from the offering, that felt like it had significance, was something we should pay attention to.
Back at the ranch.
That night I fretted and waited for news from Kelly. Finally, I figured I should stop fretting and we should just get on with having a good night. I tried to put it behind me, but I kept my cellphone close just in case. We had wine to drink, doing it to do, we had a hot spa bath to take.
I called Kelly again. He said it would be another hour before he could come by the B&B. His answering message says he works from 5pm to 5am. I fell asleep in the arms of my baby and only woke up at around 5am when I jumped up to see if there was a message on my phone. Nothing. I’d been had. I texted Kelly a message: Please tell me I haven’t been had. Damn, was that a rich douchebag thing to say? I didn’t want to call him too early because he was most likely sleeping, but at 11am I had to call because we were leaving the B&B and needed to plan our next move.
No response. I was hosed.
It wasn’t the loss of the weed or the box that hurt me. It was that he took advantage. That he lied to me. That I gave him trust and he kept it. That I try and be so karmaically GOOD in the truest sense of the word I know and he would still do that to me, how dare he do that to me? That we were laid back, and supportive of his career choices, I was a fellow conspiracy theorist and fellow weed smoker, and he would turn his back on me like that. What the hell is Kelly so worried about the Bilderbergs for? They’re just doing what he just did; it’s just theft and manipulation on a larger scale. It’s all born of the moral corruption that is invited when we forget that everything else is also us. Is consciousness.
We went to the beach. Mia read If the Buddha Dated and I read If the Buddha got stuck.
If the Buddha got stuck
by charlotte kasl, ph.d
7. What Makes Change So Scary?
Explore the Payoffs That Keep You Stuck
(p. 25)
Why is change so hard? Because we adopted most of our behaviors to survive or comfort ourselves in some way. Sneakiness, lying (KG: Kelly), compulsive eating (KG: change that to smoking, and that’s me), shutting down (me), thrill seeking, burying feelings, being perfect (KG: ex-wife), or acting like a victim (KG: ex-gf’s) initially served a purpose. Namely they helped us get approval, attention, or sympathy, avoid being shamed, feel excitement, or escape feeling horrible about ourselves (KG: feeling horrible aka. separation anxiety from the whole of creation.) Unfortunately, many of these behaviors became the escape hatches that now keep us stuck (KG: the hatches that say Quarantine on them, à la the show LOST). They are the counterfeit comforts, the short-term forms of relief that block long-term happiness.
Payoff Inventory / Secondary Gains
(p. 26)
Bring up a habit or behavior that has you stuck and is hard to let go of (KG: uhh… weed?) and see if any of the following items fit. (Examples: not speaking up, berating yourself, overworking, isolating.)
1. I get to distract myself from underlying feelings of emptiness, loneliness, fear, and sadness with this behavior.
KG – *shrug*, sure…
2. This behavior is soothing and lowers my anxiety.
KG – damn straight it does
3. I get sympathy and attention.
KG – er, I don’t think so. attention maybe?
4. I get approval, admiration, status, rewards, money. People want to be with me.
KG – It depends.
5. I get a sense of intensity.
KG – Yup.
6. I get to avoid revealing myself.
KG – Quite the contrary! I reveal myself all the time! Moreso on weed I think.
7. I get to avoid taking responsibility for the state of my life.
KG – I guess I do get to avoid responsibility for my own failures. “Well sure I didn’t win poker, but I was stoned.” “Well sure I don’t win any of the board games I love to make people play, but I was on weed at the time, every time. I could have done much better sober.” “Well sure I took 5 or 6 years of college and didn’t graduate, but I was on weed at the time!”
8. I keep people from confronting me or being angry with me. (Examples: I’m in such pain and my life is so difficult; I’m so sweet, generous, and innocent; I’m so intimidating.)
KG – There’s something wrong with keeping people from being angry with you?
9. I get to be right, and make others wrong.
KG – I get to be high, and make others high.
I am the loosener of rigid thought structures.
10. I get to fit in and not threaten anyone. (Examples: rescuing others, being agreeable, not asking for anything, hiding my intelligence, opinions, and needs.)
KG – this has nothing to do with weed, but sure, I subscribe to those examples weekly
11. I get to have a sense of belonging.
KG – sure. with the universal consciousness.
12. I get to avoid looking at my part in a troubled situation by blaming and trying to get everyone else to change. I anayze others and tell stories about the crazy/mean things they do.
KG – How did you know I did that? What does this have to do with weed?
13. I get to be a martyr and make other people feel guilty.
KG – one of my specialties
14. I have an excuse for poor performance or not being responsible.
KG – I already discussed this in #7.
15. I get to avoid mistakes or feeling incompetent.
KG – There’s a way to DO THAT? I need to try harder I guess.
16. I get to feel sorry for myself, or they’ll feel sorry for what they did!
KG – Oh, that’s interesting. Especially considering the last telephone call to Kelly that I made. I haven’t told you that bit yet.
17. I get to convince myself I’m doing something useful.
KG – I do feel more spiritually connected through weed I guess. And I believe my eventual purpose will arise somehow.
18. I get to avoid the terror of emptiness.
KG – sure
19. I never have to reach out to others. I get to remain invulnerable and not risk rejection by never asking for help or support. (Examples: I isolate, avoid social situations, and keep distance from people.)
KG – It’s funny, I rarely call people and ask them to hang out. I wait for them to call me. I’ve always done that. Kind of rude in a way, but I don’t mean for it to be. I just figured if they wanted to hang they would have called already.
20. I get to remain in a fantasy world.
KG – *ding ding ding ding* You win a new caaaaaaaar!
Seriously though, can you blame me?
21. Other. Make up one of your own.
KG – I like the taste of weed? I like having something gently caressing my lungs since I gave up smoking cigarettes years ago? Weed has helped me destroy my left brain so that my right one can speak to me openly and I can act as translator for universal consciousness?
Left brain: “Freak. You are seriously nutty as a fruitbat. Honestly, you’re embarrassing yourself.”
Right brain: “Chill out, dude. Everything is going to be groovy, man! Peace and love, peace and love!”
I love saying peace and love. It’s referencing the Ringo Starr freakout video which was really odd. Peace and love, but quit sending me shit to sign you bastards! Anyway, NO to peace AND love, that assumes a division between the two: peace IS love, love IS peace. If we loved everyone and everything as ourselves, we’re guaranteed peace. Separation is suffering. Loneliness is not inherent, it is being manufactured by your environment just like acid rain and toxic smog. As we are only consciousness, the simile here isn’t just a literary method, they are both referencing the separation of man from everything else. They reference the destructive behavior that comes from separation.
EXERCISE
What would it take to Make a Change?
(p. 29)
1. Ask yourself, “How is this payof behavior causing me to suffer?”
2. Ask yourself, “How could I get what I want without using this payoff behavior,” e.g., “How could I calm myself, get comfort, easy my pain or connect with people without a harmful behavior?” Give a lot of attention to this question. We don’t usually let go of a soothing behavior without having a new one available to us.
—
*
After the beach and my Blackberry discovery of a google maps application (yay!), my first search yielded a nearby vegetarian joint attached to a gym. We ate, drank healthy beverages (unusual for us. they didn’t serve beer.) and then went to go play a Va. Beach disc golf course, which I also google mapped.
I was free of my addictive behavior. At least for that day. ;)
The cab driver Kelly had actually freed me by stealing from me! I had a really nice time sober! A great meal, a nice game of disc golf. I even learned a new straight-arm throw (I call it the coiled straight) which for an old dog, is a new trick indeed. It gets so much spin on it it actually flies lofty and straight. Love it!
Before we left Va. Beach to go home I called Kelly from the parking lot of the disc golf course. He didn’t answer so I left a message.
“Kelly, this is Brooke. Listen man, don’t worry about my tinderbox, dude. I just want to give it to you. Especially because you told me a story about how you were robbed once and I know you wouldn’t want to wish that on anybody else. So please accept my gift and I hope you have a nice life.”
*click*
how my brand new car got hit by a flying trash can on the same day that I bought it
I am so tired of typing. I’m not going to be able to give this next story the justice it deserves, but it does have a tie-in to the previous one so I feel like I have to do it here.
I got back from Va. Beach and the next day, Friday, I went to go buy my new car. It was already all worked out and ready for me. Gordon Winfield III at Colonial Honda had been incredibly patient and fair and understanding and hooked me up with a great deal on a brand new sparkly eggplanty-blue Honda Fit Sport with GPS Navigation because I have topographical memory disorder and waste more gas from getting lost than I do from poor car maintenance practices (which is probably a lot.)
As I might have mentioned in the last blog, part of my Delusions of Worthlessness stems from living with my parents and not having a car. Not just NOT having a car, but borrowing the big purple van (aka. pleasure wagon) from my ex-girlfriend for months and months on end. I had sent her checks on occasion and I’m helping my folks by paying a little rent there, but these are all things that needed to be fixed and I was damaging myself by not doing so. Getting a car was the first step and I wanted to return L’s van with style. I was going to get it fully gassed up and cleaned and get her a gift card to Friday’s, not because I’m a fan of that place that removed their only vegetarian item, the eggplant something, and are now completely worshiping at the altar of meat, but I gave her a Friday’s card because that is one of the few places in Mechanicsville that I know about that isn’t a rat hole.
So, with karma points in tow I got my folks (who were going to Mechanicsville’s BJs anyway, ugh I hate that name) to follow me to L’s so I could finally drop off the van. Borrowing the van was a big deviation for me in the first place; I seriously don’t even like to keep people’s DVD’s for too long and always try and get them back to their owners. This was a serious borrow. (But then again I paid for the wood blinds and the couch and she had said I could keep the van, but I was the one who said no.) I was very eager to give the van back, check something new off my mental checklist, and to stop this affront to my current girlfriend who must think this ex- intrusion into our relationship a strange deal, though she is so wonderfully understanding that she never has said so.
I drop the van off, say goodbye to my folks who leave to go shopping, and go in and say goodbye to L and thanks for the van. I turn on to Laburnum and head home so satisfied with myself and happy with my new purchase. The sound system sounded amazing, the day was bright and beautiful, and everything was as it should be, perfect.
Then I saw someone barreling down the street behind me. It was a big white truck and I thought, “oh, shit!” The dealer had asked me, “Have you ever bought a new car before?” and I had to think about it because most of my cars were donations or bought for me. Oh yeah, back in two thousand or something I had bought a Volkswagen Passat, stone grey. Beautiful. Stylish. Hours after I bought that car a man turned out of a gas station and did not look left. He came right out and crashed passenger side into my brand new car. I shouted, “NOOOOOOO!” with such anger, like I was trying to hit the Ctrl-Z of life, but of course it didn’t work. The guy got out and said, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I was so distracted!” and all I could say through my gritted teeth was, “This is the first car I ever bought. I just bought this car to-day.” Feel it, man. Feel it with my stare! I just bought it TODAY motherfucker! I stayed rational though I was shaking. He hadn’t meant it. My car got fixed, but it was never the same though. The frame was bent, one headlight was always a bit jittery. After a good life, it eventually got flooded in the hurricane that came through Richmond. The passenger seat floor got filled with water and I drove it one last time, sloshing like a bathtub, to Joy’s house and back before it died proper. The water had damaged the VW’s HAL 9000 computer. It was dead. Insurance just totalled the car and I spent the check on something frivolous I’m sure.
So back to the big white truck coming towards me fast in my rearview mirror. You see, the whole day until the moment of the crash with my VW I had felt worried that someone was going to scratch my car. I was terrified something was going to happen. And after it did, I didn’t have to worry anymore. The pristine stage was over. I had to let it go. I was about to learn the same lesson with my new car.
The truck was loaded with trash cans in the back, and filled with shit in the front seat, and the woman driving it was wearing ripped pink sweats and a shower cap. She was really picking up speed and there was nowhere for me to go as there was a car ahead of me in the right lane. She didn’t seem like she was stopping though so I slowed a bit and then she made a mad dash cutting to the right lane around me and then cutting back to the left lane in front of me. As she did this a bungee cord on the back snapped and a big gray trash can flew out and smashed into my passenger side door. My brand new, perfectly pristine with shiny bits, eggplanty-blue passenger side door.
What’s with all the passenger side door damage? A literal demonstration of god is my co-pilot? A repudiation of my regression into materialism and self-worth? (edit: Mia just suggested it means I need to pay attention when I’m a passenger to my own journey. Didn’t the tarot guy say something about that? Hanged man in the present position. Stuck but aware of it.)
I pulled into the next driveway and went to help her with her escaped trash cans. I told her I just bought the car that day, “Oh shit! You kidding me?” she shrieked. “Don’t worry! I got Progressive! We gonna get that fixed up!” She talked a million miles a minute. I told her she was driving crazy and she said she had to pee for miles and that she had a kidney problem. She could have driven off, but despite my still being sore from Kelly the Cab Driver’s deception, I dared to trust again and went back to my car, hoping that she would pull her truck off the road and pull into the driveway as she promised. She did.
She said, “I’m a Christian and I wouldn’t do you like that. Someone hit me [my car] in a parking lot once and then drove off! That was just terrible! No, I wouldn’t wish that on nobody else.”
Oh, universe! What a long, drawn-out, funny joke you just made with me as the butt of it. Ha Ha! What fun! What a chuckle I’m having. But damn if it did release me from my fear of getting my car scratched. It didn’t matter anymore. I was free.
Aside:
Speaking of Christianity, when it comes to religion, I don’t do the hard stuff, you know, I’ll stick with consciousness, weed and beer, but M’s mom always sends her this little booklet, The Daily Word. M doesn’t invest at the bank of Jesus either, but she reads it to please her mom and tries to get out of it what she can. Yesterday, she showed me a passage from the daily word that was the most New Age Christian mashup I’d ever heard. Christian stuff usually gives me hives, but I actually liked this a lot.
The woman and I talked about all sorts of things even though she was bursting for a pee and almost went behind a truck. “Oh you think I’m joking!” Thankfully, the horrified people in the closest building let her go there after a few protestations. Oh, you know where she was driving back from? Virginia Beach. (what a clever writer the universe is! and, as he is me, he has my sense of humor.) Oh, and it turns out she does martial arts as well. (I’ve been taking Ving Tsun Kung Fu for over 6 months.) She is like, the only black female kickboxing champion in virginia or something? I can’t remember the details. She used to train 7 days a week. She runs/works for(?) a cleaning service now. She’s getting divorced.
“You kinda cute for a white boy. You gonna be my boyfriend!”
“You wait till you see me dressed up!”
“Oh, can I sit in your car? Let’s sit in your car and play white.”
“I try to get a man, but man come round my house and say,
- “Who’s nunchucks is this?”
“That’s mine,” I say!
- “Who’s throwing stars is this?”
“That’s mine too.”
- “Who’s sword is this?”
“That’s mine, baby!”
- “I ain’t comin in this house!”
Hilarious. I never would have heard any of this had I been angry and aggressive. Had I valued the impermanence of a passing moment; had I valued the steel and paint on my car more than the other part of me in front of me; more than the lesson the universe was trying to teach; the lesson I, the universe, was trying to teach myself.
Sorry about all the words.
I could have just told you that.
- statue comemerating the first air force segway brigade
(unfortunately, they didn’t do very well in iraq)
have a nice memorial day weekend.
don’t sweat the small stuff!
sweat that huge shit!
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- Chris
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- Max
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- Max
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- Mia
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- Sarah
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- Sarah
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- Sarah
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