Ready...ACTION!!!

Shortly after I crawled into bed last night, it occurred to me that - no matter how mundane my life might be - I'm really very capable of creating brief moments of imaginative situations to put myself in. (Like Calvin, of "Calvin and Hobbes" fame...but older.)

The scene begins.

The day had worn on with a stifling heat and was followed by the night that remains hot and humid. I lay there...in the darkness of the night...and there's a surprisingly, nearly impossibly, cool breeze blowing across my exposed flesh. The noise of the engine is drowning out all the other sounds.
Apparently I've been severely injured - but I feel no pain. I don't remember how I got here, and I find it odd that there are no voices in the darkness which engulfs me.
Why am I face down? Are the injuries so bad that my body has numbed itself, or have they shot me full of morphine?
Then the bed upon which I rest begins to shake in rhythm with the steady Thub-Thub-Thub-Thub-Thub-Thub of the whirling blades as the helicopter prepares to lift off...

No, wait.
The damn cat is scratching behind his ear again.
I hate it when he does that when I'm trying to sleep!

So, like some sick ritual that's stuck in a recorded replay ...

Again the poor, defenseless kitty-kitty is swallowed up by the looming arm of death and is swept into the maw of the beast...

And I hold Dangit in a forced cuddle until he's pissy enough to jump off the bed when I let him go. Hopefully the motor of the fan will lull me to sleep before he forgives me and jumps back up. :)


Ok. New scenario.

It's a beautiful afternoon. The parking lot is lit with an almost unnatural daylight. All of the cars are free of dirt, like they'd been parked there straight from going through the car wash.
Oh, look! An empty spot! And it's close to where I want to be!
I approach the empty spot and pull halfway in...and stop.
The all white van to my left is rusting on the bottom half. It's a cargo van with no back windows. It's parked perfectly in line between my vehicle and the building I wish to enter, and my driver's side door will be directly next to the the sliding door of the van if I park here...

F. That!

I backed out and parked my vehicle out in the empty part of the parking lot.
(I guess I have a sense of self preservation after all!)



Ok, last one. (In storyteller mode this time.)

I swapped out the Cadillac and the Lincoln at the mechanic's shop.
Whatever's wrong with the Lincoln still hasn't been fixed - but it's still drivable - and the Cadillac was in serious need of new air shocks. (I say this because there were times when I was driving down the highway where it felt like the car was going to separate from the frame and start spinning like a Tilt-A-Whirl. Not good.)

Well, the Lincoln gets shit mpg. Hopefully when it's running right we do slightly better than the 8 I think it gets...but it's old and huge and heavy...so I'm not holding my breath.

Thankfully, I still have the trusty Buick. Not only does it pull out small trees by the dozens, (yes, guilty) but even with over 295,000 miles and some cosmetic damage (dent, door dings, etc.) and perhaps some structural integrity issues (area of rust), it still runs like a champ.

Apparently, when a Cadillac gets new air shocks, they need to bring it in to have the computer...well, shit. I don't know. They needed it overnight, anyway.

So after work that night I swung into the mechanics yard (with the Buick) to see if it looked like they'd begun working on it.

You almost had to see it for yourself, but I'll do my best to describe it.

It was night, so it was dark. (Besides what was lit up by my headlights.) There were 4 demolition derby cars parked back there in haphazard fashion, (the Lyon County Fair is this coming weekend and the mechanic's son is in it and the mechanic himself is one of the flag wavers) The demolition derby cars all have 5 gallon pails over the smoke stacks - which, of course, are sticking out of the engines. There were maybe 3 old vans on the lot - and a handful of other vehicles that were either still needing some repairs, or were abandoned by owners who decided the $40 headlight was more than the value of the vehicle.

I thought, "Wow. Ghetto!"

Seriously. The Buick became a gem when it left the street to enter this mix.


So after rolling up all 4 windows of the hopefully disabled vehicle in case of rain, (the keys were left in the ignition thank you very much) I glanced into the back of the car and finally found out where the battery is. (Check under the back seat if you haven't located the one in your own vehicle yet.)

So then I wandered back to the Buick and sat there for a bit.

The night seemed to hold the town hostage, tied and gagged in a blanket of blackness . There were no headlights coming down the street from either direction, and no pedestrian traffic had been spotted for hours. I turned my vehicle into the alley that brought me to a long abandoned lot and the only life I'd seen since I started out on this miserable journey.
The husks of wrecked vehicles littered the lot like the skeletons of warriors on a battlefield to some ancient conflict. Only one vehicle appeared to still have paint... or at least have the exterior panels all still painted in the same color. I wasn't surprised to see that the hood was partly up and all 4 windows were mostly down, but was nearly shocked to find the keys in the ignition and that it still had the rims and stereo intact!
The back seat was no longer attached, but it remained in the vehicle.

But that's all boring. It needs a bit more kick.

The area was not void of life unlike the the rest of the town. There was a homeless man sleeping next to the shopping cart that held all of his worldly possessions. The rats that scurried about gave this man a wide berth as if he were nobility that should be offered only the highest respect.
The skeletal husks of the abandoned vehicles appeared to twist and bend in grotesque convulsions as light flickered, died, and flickered again as flames rose above the rim of the barrel in which a fire was lit. Several people were gathered around the fire, dressed in patched street clothes and roasting my neighbor's stupid little dog...

Oops. Reality check. ;)

So anyway, a mere $675 later (new brakes also - front and rear) the car is back in my possession. (The Lincoln is not. Hope he gets that fixed soon even though it's just going back in storage.)

It's too bad everything costs so damn much. I'm tired and don't want to go to work.

Maybe if I just daydream (overnight) I can call in that helicopter...