August 21, 2000

by the road

The Netherlands -- "Nederlands," as it says on the web page -- are being a perverse b*tch. Every time I try to do a network diagnostic, it keeps timing out. Well, fooey on them. If it doesn't want to be helpful enough to cooperate with a simple diagnostic, it doesn't deserve attention. I have better things to waste my time on. Useful things. Fun things.

Let me try that just one more time....

Damn Netherlanders.

Fred is sitting with a wide-open, pink mouth in front of the keyboard. He's staring up at me with shiny little black eyes. It's absolutely adorable. I went around the office to rouse support for his plushdom, and damned if I can find any sympathetic people out there in the cold hard world outside of my cubicle.

earlier...

Friday. There was a bottleneck on the freeway on the way out of Redwood City, which I only noticed because the new driver of the shuttle had such a frenetic stop-and-go quality to his driving that I was nauseous. Remembering the Flamingo's stories about perception of movement and physiological equilibrium, I made a determined effort to stare out the window. I had a headache, and the seats were inadequate with their head support, so I had it leaned up against the glass.

Bump-ka-bump-bump-thump. And that was just the glass against my skull. My headache was doing something else altogether. I could hear each little heartbeat in my temples. Thump-a-thump-a-thump-a. The combination of the two was like a nightmare out of an Indiana Jones movie, tribal drums pounding on all sides. Help. We're surrounded.

Bump-ka-a-thu--bump--nk-a-thunk-a-BUMP-BUMP-BA-BA-BA-("Crumbs.")-thunk-a--bump.

The bottleneck was more observable than physiologically noticeable. My head was still rattling on the windowpane. We were passing through a long stretch of those irritating hills that California should be famous for, the original landswells; long, rolling stretches covered by straggly yellow grass that can spike straight through bare feet, and shrubs that haven't seen rainwater since before the Great Depression. An advanced degree in music apparently does not involve training on rational thought; despite the fact the banging was making my headache worse, I felt too ill to actually lift it off the glass and deposit it somewhere else. This is why I happened to be conscious and open-eyed when we realized that the entire side of the road -- in fact, most of the hills as far as the eye could see -- were on fire.

There were a great many gawkers lined up on the side of the road. Cars were slowing down so the drivers could admire the smoky view. After all, if you had a chance of being caught up in a wildfire and dying a horrible, painful death from smoke inhalation, wouldn't you want to linger and smell the fumes? I would.

The driver performed his first and only intelligent deed that trip by honking the line into motion again. I settled back, nausea-stricken, and counted bump-kas again.

Bump-ka-a-thu--bump--nk-a-thunk-a-BUMP-BUMP-BA-BA-BA-("Crumbs.")-thunk-a--bump.)

Saturday. I was supposed to go to dinner with a few friends, but I didn't make it. There was a mixup about where we were supposed to meet, how we were supposed to meet, and I blew money on BART and didn't get anywhere that I apparently needed to be, so I finally got pissed off and came home and found a message on my machine from my friends I was meeting ("Where are you? We're sitting here, waiting for you...") that had come in on my answering service exactly -- and I kid you not -- one minute after I called in from the BART station to check my messages to see if they had called. In fact, they were probably trying to leave me a message while I was listening to my messages, and cursing the fact that I hadn't gotten a message from them.

So I went home, as I say, having blown a solid three hours traveling back and forth and waiting for them, barked at my roommate, and crawled into my bedroom to sulk for a few minutes. BART bites the big one. Of all the transit systems in the City of San Francisco, BART is the one that I loathe the most. Psychopaths are created on BART. I see the ads out for that new movie, The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez. You know the one: "Deane, a child therapist, uses her empathic "gift" to embark on an uncharted and perilous journey through a serial killer's demented mind." Screw the special effects. Just ride the BART train for an hour and you'll start seeing through those serial killer eyes.

That afternoon, though, I had lunch with my sister, and that was nice. She's been in town for two months now -- did I ever say? I'm big on the dashes today -- and she's heading back to Seattle this week, sometime. Maybe Monday. (That's today, isn't it?) Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Friday or Sunday. She's not sure. What she does know is that she's been spending so much time with her friends that she's made here, working at a sports store that she got hooked into by going to coffee with some random guy she met on the Internet, and...

...and I've lost track of that sentence. I'm too lazy to go back over it. Never mind. You'll just have to figure it out for yourselves.

Fred is so damn cute. Except somebody came by while I was in this last meeting and scotch-taped his mouth shut.

Sick. Sick sick sick sick.

Smurfette has gone to Arizona for a month to recuperate from her ex-job, (Britannica.com), and a chronic fatigue condition that's been going on now for, oh, pretty much forever. You know what I think it is? I think she's allergic to San Francisco. I'm not going to tell her that, though, because I like having her for a roommate.

Selflessness be damned.

There was a large white stretch limo stuck on Powell street, one block away from the cable cars. This was on Saturday, on my bad-tempered way back from the BART station and my abortive dinner-that-almost-was. (I ended up eating instant macaroni and cheese, in case you're wondering.) A radiant little bride and groom were standing up inside the limo through the skylight, waving happily to passersby. They got an ovation from a cable car. Several German tourists applauded them. A street vendor offered to buy the bride.

It cheered me up enough to go in to Burger King and buy myself a frozen coke, which promptly burned my fingers white and rasped the roof of my mouth.

In case anybody was wondering, I bought Starcraft at Costco. Not Age of Kings. I wish I hadn't bought it. I've been playing the damn thing, to the detriment of my homework.

Got my coworker a swiss army knife for his birthday, since I could afford it, and since my sister was working at the sports store and got a big discount.

Got five pound weights for me.

Need to cut my nails.

Back to Friday. After we passed the roadside wildfire, we traveled on without comment for another two or three miles before suddenly coming across a pensive looking man standing on a bed.

Another five miles after that, we passed a pickup truck parked by the side of the freeway, carrying a load of floral print mattresses, five teenagers, and a dog.

The shuttle was quiet for another five or ten minutes before someone saw fit to comment.

"Some weird sh*t going down today."

POSTSCRIPT : I was finished with this entry, but the Flamingo sent me a link to make me drool.

So follow it here, to one of my heroes: Ambrose Bierce and the Devil's Dictionary.