I went to see Granny this weekend. The trees in Appalachia are changing colors, very vivid this year,and it's early yet. Nice visit, nice drive.
Until I drive home. I'm driving down a dark country road, cranking old X(the band, not the rating) tapes when a groundhog decides he has to cross the road now. Wham! I hear some disturbing sounds from under my car-dragging, scraping sounds. I pull over at the first gas station I see. I figure I'll have to manually extract the pulverized remains of a suicidal mammal from the chassis. Oh, what fun. I'm half right.
The goddamn beast tore the front of my spoiler right off the frame, was scooped up by the now dragging spoiler,which was then bent into a backward "c" shape, smearing great greasy gobs of gooey grimy groundhogs guts everywhere. There's no recourse but to crawl under there and rig the spoiler with duct tape long enough to get home.
I enter the gas station/store.
Where's your bathroom?
The clerk gives me a strange look and shuts the door to her bullet-proof Plexiglas cube.
We don't have one.
I look at myself in the vid-cam monitor. My upper body, face and arms are streaked with grease, groundhog viscera and clumps of bloody brown fur. I don't even attempt to explain, I just go back outside and do the best I can with the bucket for the windshield squeegee.
When I get home, I take a very long shower.
I tell a co-worker about this. She says she crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and was startled by how many dead ospreys she saw.
Today I saw a dead fawn on the median strip of a busy suburban boulevard. Juxtapose dead Bambi with a strip-mall and a condo sub-div.
It's getting weird.
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