| The Enema Museum A couple of things ran through my mind on the way to the enema museum. The same things that would run through anyone's mind I guess—one: why is there an enema museum, and two, why was I going out of my way to go to there? I drove from Mt. Pleasant down to the property in North Carolina to see with my own eyes that which the property manager could not see, or for the measly fee I pay her, did not bother to see, that being the adjustment of my neighbor's border road which previously meandered onto my land but now runs straight and true according to the newly surveyed line. Job well done. Idling down the gravel road waving bye-bye to the toddler on my front porch the heat beating down on my wheeled metal box helped me decide not to drive the four hours back to Virginia during the heat of the day (without AC), but to splurge for a motel. I drove about twenty-five miles and checked into a Danville, VA. Sleep-Inn at three in the afternoon. The room was frigid. I checked the AC unit but inexplicably it was turned all the way off. I got under the covers and signed into the motel's wifi service on my miniature device by touching the glass screen with thumb and forefinger together and then swiping them outward to enlarge the print so I could see a virtual button that said—accept. I sent out a couple of emails and glanced at a news reader long enough to see that celebrities continue to goof up and grab headlines while black goo gushes still from a mile beneath the surface, spreading farther and wider and causing some to speculate in all apparent seriousness that the earth is about to become a fireball and we, all the many billions of us balanced precariously on its surface are surely to perish under a black cloud that blots out the sun. So that last bit I think effectively answers why the next morning I set my GPS to lead me to the enema museum in Lynchburg, VA. The end will have to come eventually, whether to each of us individually or to all as one I can't see that it makes much difference. Whether it is a result of our hubris and greed and aggressive disregard for the mother planet or just some stray meteor as big as the sun crashing into us will in the end just be a footnote for future civilizations to regard and, probably not learn from. Goodbye Bosch, goodbye Kafka, goodbye Hendrix, I hope someone's got you in their time capsules. But I'm not going down with gloom. No, I have a couple thousand off beat tourist attractions on my GPS that I have yet to see and dammit, if the closest one to my current location is the enema museum then so be it. Lead me oh not completely infallible GPS device. I will follow. I think the reason Bernadette doesn't love my GPS device is threefold: one it once took us way out of our way to find a Starbucks that apparently did not exist and two I think she resents that I so willingly do whatever the GPS tells me to do while on occasion only begrudgingly do what she tells me to do and three, the third reason is, I don't really know why Bernadette doesn't love my GPS. For my part I think it is a good device and the reason I might prefer it to the interaction of a human co-pilot is because we all make mistakes, GPS, humans too, but when the human tells you to turn left three feet from the intersection and you miss the turn because come on, three feet? That's not enough time to react, I mean it would be if I could hit a 100 mph fastball but I can't so...anyway, it can sometimes get heated, between us humans, whereas if the electronic device messes up I just say, oh that's interesting that I just drove five miles out of my way to an enema museum and end up in warehouse parking lot, across the street from a paint store and a Red Lobster restaurant. Now the next logical thing that may come to mind, about how men won't ask for directions...I think for many of us every location we are trying to find but can't, is like an enema museum. It's not that we are worried about appearing unmanly for being lost it is just that we are embarrassed to go, say for example into a Red Lobster restaurant and ask, um, excuse me ma'am or sir but this morning without any sort of coercion whatsoever I decided to go out of my way to see the local enema museum and my GPS led me to that parking lot over there and as you may be aware, there is no enema museum over there. Did they move it? Or, are you aware at all of any kind of museum within a block of here because maybe the enema part is a misprint? Just for a second while we're on the subject of navigation devices, or hell, devices of any kind, I would I think be remiss not to bring up one of the greatest device lovers I know, Mr. BC. Does he have an iPad? Sheeeit, he's got three of them. Hell, he uses one of 'em and a 10 dollar app to navigate narrow channels in his boat. He's a geek BC is. I mean that in the modern (almost) laudatory sense of the word, as in a lover of all things technological or gadget-like. Pretty much all men are geeks in some way, and women too, they can obviously be geeks, I just hope we can be clear that I'm not talking about people who bite the heads off chickens. None of the people I know, nor I, have ever bitten the head off a chicken. I saw a guy in NY, back in the very early eighties, bite heads off little white mice, but that was performance art (which may or may not be in someone's time capsule, because remember, we're all going to die soon, the apocalypse is now, and what do future life forms—let's just hope white mice don't take over the planet—need to know about us?), of course I guess all chicken decapitators are performance artists of one kind or another. I want to move on here, because I feel like I'm belaboring a non point, but please let's be clear, for the record, that, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. BC has never bitten the head off a chicken. What do you do when you fail? Do you shake your head, bemoan your bad luck and set sail for home waters, tell the Queen, sorry, I couldn't find any gold or other good stuff. No man. You move down the list of off beat tourist attractions and keep moving. You move way off your northern course and head west (which, in general, in Virginia, if you are east of the mountain range, is a good way to see pretty country). You head for Glasgow, the Town that Time Forgot. Plus, as an offbeat tourist attraction, it would be nearly impossible for an entire town not to exist in some fashion. There is no way I could miss it. Jumping ahead, yeah Glasgow exists, and yeah, it kind of small and old and forgotten looking (there is a Moose Lodge) but I'm sorry, I had to keep on driving because growing up in Texas and having driven over a fair amount of it, well towns like Glasgow would take up your whole device hard drive if you listed every one. It is however near that other nice attraction, which I have once been too, and honestly cannot right now think of its name (I am distracted because my cat is unfairly attacking my left arm), but it is a nice piece of natural beauty and for some reason I was thinking would be a good place to be when the world exploded. I mean I remember thinking that in the past, before I knew the world was about to explode any second now. I could head there right after I hit another nearby attraction—King Kong Crushing Airplane. Now this was fun because the GPS was taking me down these tiny roads to finally hook up to what is a two lane highway running, not really contiguously, all through Virginia, Lee Highway. I took the right and was about to continue on six miles to see Kong when I saw up ahead an elephant standing on its hind feet. The elephant was artificial. An advertisement for the small zoo, which I'm not kidding, had a sign out front that said—Have your Picture taken with Baby Tiger. I cannot adequately describe how much I wanted to have my picture taken with a baby tiger but whereas going off half cocked to an enema museum is the kind of thing a man can do alone, going into a roadside zoo to have your picture taken with a baby tiger, isn't. As consolation I took a picture of the elephant and kept on moving. About a mile up the road I saw this decrepit looking junk yard behind a high wall with a gated entrance, only the junk was not cars or household scrap but artificial animals, not unlike the elephant I had seen by the zoo. I pulled into the gates and parked on the grass next to a giraffe with it's head lying separately next it, and a very realistic looking alligator, and between the two a dinosaur lying on its back. Tall grass was growing up around all of it. I asked a Mexican man who appeared to be working around the yard if I could snap some pictures and he nodded. And would you lookey there. It was King Kong, faded, in need of some fresh paint at least, and he was crushing (well, not really crushing) an airplane. Oh sure, after I left I kept going the several miles just to verify that there would not be a King Kong Crushing Airplane at the GPS coordinate and of course, there wasn't. To verify the Kongless coordinate I had passed the Interstate and just like that all magical sensation had evaporated. The trip was over but I was still a hundred miles from home. I zoomed down the Interstate remembering the recent past with fondness. I could go back I guess, with Bernadette who is due for a visit, maybe they would even let us pet the baby tiger and we could go to the other place, where I've imagined for many years now as one of the places to spend an apocalypse. No, now I remember, it wasn't a place to go during the apocalypse, it was a place where I felt certain there existed an actual vortex to another world, that was it. So, maybe we could do that next week. I was checking my email a minute ago and in the process saw a headline that said the subsurface methane bubble world explosion theory that suggested we were all within minutes of foreseeable extinction has been debunked. I hope that doesn't lessen the urgency I was feeling to see all the rest of my GPS's offbeat tourist attractions. |
return to: Mt. Pleasant |
"...tpleasant/?51915"The Enema Museum A couple of things ran through my mind on the way ......" |