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A Day Not Clicking
I got off to a slow start today. Everybody at the diner was having a slow start too.

I was trying to look forward to the Home Depot shopping chore but it’s a thirty mile drive and the farther you get from this little (five square mile) world out here the more you realize you didn’t really want to leave it at all, why not just try to get what you need at the Rappahannock Farmers Co-Op. But they didn’t have the six foot aluminum step ladder last time I was there and Home Depot has that one stop shopping thing going on which is what you need if there are more than two things on your list. I had three.

So this morning I got 25 miles into the trip and came to a rise in the road which allowed me to see about 200 cars in front of me, waiting I guess to turn onto 66. There’s a fifteen mile stretch of the trip where I’m unlikely to see 10 cars total on the road and now I was looking at what seemed like madness. I gave it 15 seconds of thought and made the easy U-turn.

If I headed back to Warrenton I might find that Walmart which has eluded me so. I can’t begin to describe what a disappointment that was. Except for the enjoyment of the female form in aisles 16, 18, 13, 11, and 8b. Some of the women were with their kids and husbands and I thought good job everyone. I felt a little panicky at one point, a thing which afflicts me briefly but with force and has been triggered more often at Walmarts than any other place. Still, I remain a faithful Walmart shopper. I got the feeling people would soon start pointing and hissing at me, their eyes glowing red, their overbites transformed into bloody fangs, if I didn’t act immediately so that’s what I did–bought a coffee maker and some baby powder. Also I didn’t know there were still extreme punk rock looking, black leather clad, half shaved head, half long dyed black hair wearing dudes but in the Warrenton Walmart I saw three.

I kept driving, on to Culpeper, where I came upon another Walmart and just pulled in like that’s all I know how to do, shop at Walmart. This one pretended to be a SuperStore but I’ve seen the latest editions in the New Orleans area and this was a step down. After fighting off the onset of a parking lot panic attack I set out through the sultry heat into discount shopper’s paradise. I found a six foot step ladder and an 18 foot extension ladder, which I’ll have to have if I am instructed to paint the stair wells or clean the gutters. The woman at the check out said, referring to the 18 foot fiberglass extension ladder, I know the price of that one because people keep saying can you put that in a bag for me. I don’t think I actually laughed but let her know that I thought she was the perkiest, funniest, most helpful Walmart checkout person in the history of retail shopping. I was supposed to get some of that black flexible gutter pipe extension but that was all about the Manassas Home Depot and I was miles from that now. I also found a replica pair of the cheap sunglasses I had stepped on ten minutes after imagining that I would step on them, that first day I arrived on the Rappahannock property. Maybe this whole day was about those sunglasses.

I headed back down that road from Culpeper to Sperryville, 522 I think, and it’s a doozy, nice and peaceful, easy to drive if you remember to dodge the oncoming gooseneck trailers pulled by big dualie farm trucks which tend to weave into your lane at 55 miles per hour. Some nice green mountain scenery though, which means you’re back in that bubble you realized too late you didn’t mean to leave.
- jimlouis 8-23-2003 12:07 am [link] [2 comments]

Cat On My Back
It was a period of time consisting of mere minutes. One minute I was performing one of my duties which, don’t begrudge me my good fortune, consists of swimming around the pool testing various properties ( alkalinity and ph bromide reactivities to human skin, floatability, shallow end rope divider tensile strength, temperature, pine needle irritability, and other multi-syllabic obfuscations meant to put in shadow the fact that I am floating around the pool at midday) and the next minute I am kneeling on the rough ass pool deck, attending to the sometimes malfunctioning pool sweeper device with a 20 pound former Brooklynite feline, claws fully working, attached to my shirtless back. I screamed. And then Herman just sittin’ there lookin’ at me like, what. I have read Pet Semetary, probably saw the movie, and recently listened to it as a book on tape, so don’t tell me I don’t know about cats that have returned from the dead to bring moderate levels of discomfort to those around them.

My employer, Mr. BC, says he saw a large bone in the grass just alongside the driveway while he was jogging the other morning. He said it appeared to have been chewed on one end. Which is a thing all goblins learn on their first day of school. Retrieve bones from cemetery, bite off end, suck out marrow.

I forgot to mention there is a small family cemetery on the property. And one of the graves has a bit of a, uh, subsidence problem.

I could make a short, ridiculous, Halloween movie out here if I had a camera and a handful of kids who would do and say more or less exactly what I told them and would work for popsicles.

Mr. BC held my hand yesterday and we got that letter of verification for the right to dump trash in Rappahannock County. At the treasurers office I also got a green cap, and a Rappahannock decal for my windshield. I was so happy about that decal.

I paused leaving out of the dump, right by the office, like I has a rat snake in my boot or something, just in case the dump attendant wanted to admire my new decal. He didn’t.
- jimlouis 8-21-2003 5:15 pm [link] [5 comments]