glow

Each morning I drive a winding 40-mile stretch of backwater highway to get to work. This strip of road is a regular Tornado Alley for small, defenseless animals, and most anything that gets too close is sucked in, chewed up, and then spat unceremoniously onto the gravel shoulder like gristle on the edge of a dinner plate. In the four months since I started the job, I have witnessed a morbid menagerie of mangled corpses littering its path. I’ve seen cats, dogs, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, chickens (and other assorted birds), moles, snakes, turtles, armadillos, countless deer and possum, and even an otter once near the river. I’d say better than half the vehicles on the road in this part of the country are pickup trucks — hell, I drive one myself — and perhaps this statistic has some bearing on the elevated death toll, with trucks being larger, less maneuverable at high speeds, and so forth. Maybe, maybe not; I don’t know.

When I was three or four years old, my father’s best friend was killed by swerving to miss a deer. He lived high in the Rocky Mountains, and the abrupt turn sent his car flying off the narrow road and down into the valley below. This tragedy resulted in my being raised to believe I should never, ever endanger others or myself by attempting to dodge an animal in the roadway. However, I am a big fluffy teddy bear, emotionally speaking, and fortunately for ‘others or myself,’ I haven’t had to test the fortitude of this parental directive yet. Even passing by the crumpled little body of a kitten chokes me up, much less actually being the one who’s done the crumpling. Hopefully, knock on wood, I’ll never have to find out how I’d handle it.

It seems there isn’t much that can be done to prevent these vehicular homicides. A significant amount of research has been conducted in the interest of reducing collision incidence, specifically with deer, which pose a greater risk to vehicles and their occupants. Fencing built along the edges of roadways is very effective, but also quite expensive and labor-intensive. Certain states, specifically Colorado and Alaska, have built underpasses for animals. These special tunnels extend beneath busy highways and provide the wildlife with a safer alternate route, but their construction is also very costly.

Thanks to the Israeli government, I have a better suggestion. Authorities in and around the Negev desert became concerned with the growing number of camel-related traffic incidents in their area. The Negev is home to hundreds of pickup trucks and more than 5000 camels that are used for transportation and commerce. In the effort of preventing further accidents, the Israeli government held a meeting between camel herders, Bedouin elders, and members of the Transport Ministry and the Nature Reserves Authority to determine a helpful solution.

What they decided was simple but extremely successful — they elected to affix phosphorescent strips to the camels. Now, in the event that a camel is blocking the path of an oncoming car or truck, it conveniently glows in the dark. The program was only initiated a month or two ago, but there hasn’t been a single reported camel accident in the Negev desert since.

Just picture it with me, if you will: thousands of tree-hugging, wildlife-loving volunteers hiking hand in hand through the woods, putting little glow stickers on every creature they can catch. Picture camping out in the weeks that follow, the trees alight with phosphorescence, each squirrel and toad become a lightning bug, twinkling new stars everywhere. Envision our highways free of carrion! Imagine all those tire treads clean as a whistle! I don’t think that’s so crazy. Regardless of how my congressman feels.

C’mon, folks — are you with me? Let’s start with our pets.

three cheers

Once, when I was a younger man and possessed of a higher margin of optimism and/or foolishness, I packed a box with books, loaded it into my car, and drove across the United States to California, presumably to make my fortune. Only a couple of long weeks later, my pockets were empty and the car had begun to stink from dirty laundry and hot nights spent sleeping parked on quiet, inconspicuous residential streets. It was then that I first began to seriously consider the possibility of my own homelessness. Being lost in a city with an already inestimable population of homeless was, needless to say, not very reassuring in this respect.

Luckily, work came along in the form of a few days cantaloupe harvesting downstate, not far from the Sequoia National Forest/Park. I speak no Spanish (save cucaracha and Fritos and stuff like that), leaving little opportunity for fraternization with my co-workers, and so the days were spent merely sweating, stooping and rising, and occasionally staring contemplatively off toward the horizon. My exposure to California up until that time had been limited to the Bay Area and all points north, so the flatlands were a novel experience for me.

The cantaloupe fields in which I worked were adjacent to another farm and many more acres of tilled, aisled earth, but planted instead with onions. This neighboring farm was also harvesting, a process which caused the papery shell from around the onions to slough off in fluttery flakes all over the ground. When the wind blew, it kicked up a veritable blizzard of onion paper, which would whirl and dance and cling in your hair and seemed to exhilarate half my fellow work crew in a tickertape-paradey sort of way and blind the other half cursing and spitting into the dust. I was fascinated by this dichotomy, and occasionally the feeling of those moments rushes back to me, and I am standing outside in 100° weather, looking out across a long flat stretch of southern California and watching it snow.

One of these occasional rushes came over me this morning as I drove to work. I recently traded in my old blue station wagon for a newer pickup truck, a big white GMC with power windows and a working stereo and 50,000 fewer miles on the odometer. Driving it is heaven, and I finally feel as if I blend into my redneck surroundings, but I’ve noticed a considerable drop in fuel efficiency. And by considerable I mean expensive. The effect is eased somewhat by my refraining from use of the truck’s air conditioner, a luxury whose unfamiliarity makes it easier to do without. But nonetheless, it’s Georgia, and it’s August, and it’s hot, and I'm only human, and it's only money.

Cooler temperatures leave the morning the most tolerable time of day to travel AC-free, and thusly was I rolling along this morning, windows at half-mast, the damp air blowing seductively in my ear. Marvin Gaye was on the radio, asking big questions, and I was zoning out a little, wooed by the breeze and the music, when suddenly a tractor-trailer boomed past me, hauling a full load of chickens to their certain doom. I snapped awake, and it took a moment for me to figure out what was happening. At first it seemed I was seeing spots, and for an instant I even thought I might have collided with the transfer, that this was what dying was like, until I realized I was only watching the soft descent of the ten or twelve white feathers that had been sucked into the cab of my truck when the chickens roared by.

---

Since I was a child, I’ve had trouble waking up. In the mornings I struggle, sluggish and slow, slurring and surly, nodding in and out of consciousness like a junkie. Regardless of the amount or quality of sleep I receive the night previous, such is the case each new day, again and again, almost without fail.

I have come to accept this as the way things are, the way I am, and have tried to adapt. Currently in my favor is the fact that I make my own work schedule. I do not clock in, and neither do I clock out. And whether I arrive at 7:30 or 9AM is left to my own discretion. This is a privilege of which I take liberal advantage.

The lengthy explanation is to distinguish the fact that I make the drive from home to work at a fairly wide range of different times each morning, depending on when I’ve managed to forcibly drag my sorry carcass out of bed. Yet somehow, against the odds, nine mornings out of ten, I pass the same old man walking carefully to his mailbox.

Carefully, yes, but not so carefully as to take almost three hours. Surely, I think, he must walk up and down his driveway from seven to ten for exercise, thus avoiding the danger of walking the busy road. What else could explain it? It’s too early for the mail to have run. But perhaps he’s sending mail out. Perhaps he’s retrieving the day's newspaper. It seems unlikely that my stilted schedule would be shared by anyone else, but who knows? Maybe he has trouble getting up in the morning too.

---

Tonight I had one of those moments where you’re in the midst of laying waste to a delicious meal, and in working your way across the plate you notice a bit of Chinese egg noodle stuck to the edge, all by itself. Your hand flies out, grabs the shred, and it’s into your mouth and gone. And then, with an audible clank, the wheels in your head start turning. You wonder, why did I clean each and every morsel of food from my plate yet leave one solitary tatter on the sidelines like that? Did I leave it there on purpose? Oh no, did I drop that on the floor? Did I drop it on this nasty, nasty floor and then forget about it?

By which time, of course, it’s much too late to make any difference.

the eyes have it

There is a nineteen-year-old kid who works for me in the shop on the rare occasion that I can manage to schedule myself a day off. Yesterday was one of those irregular occurrences, and when I returned to the office this morning, I found the following list on the front desk, bordered on its left side by hand-drawn checkboxes that I would assume classify it as the “To Do” variety. It read:

• Hook up system
• Do laundry
• Tint windows
• Hang poster

Ah, to be ten years younger, when the extent of my concerns was such as this. Nothing that involves business or finance or any greater responsibility than lightening the skidmarks in one’s own underpants. But boo hoo, I’ve broadcast this boring woe-is-me-just-look-at-all-the-wrinkles libretto too recently to rehash. Besides, if I’d written a comparable list at the same age, it would have looked more like this:

• Attempt to further ingrain tenets of Communism in terrarium’s hermit crab population
• Sniff clothing from floor to ascertain degree of odorous objectionability; separate
• Tape aluminum foil over apartment windows
• Hang roommate

Oh, and each item would have begun with “Get stoned and…” to boot, so I think the kid’s probably got me beaten in the responsibility department by a sizable margin.

---

Sometimes I am struck in a very Jerry Seinfeld sort of way by the warnings printed on product packaging. This happened Friday when I had occasion to examine the label on the outside of a tube of vaginal cream (please don’t ask) and found it to read “Not for ophthalmic use.” The warning wasn’t on the box or even the back, where the other warnings were listed, but right on the front of the tube, just under the product’s name, in big bold letters. Now there’s a story I’d love to hear.

about the weather

As I write these words, there is a hurricane building strength down in the Gulf of Mexico. Tropical weather systems are multiplying, combining forces and gunning for the coast. Meanwhile, the shockwaves from this meteorologic conflagration have been rolling outward, causing high winds, violent electrical storms, and unseasonably heavy rainfall all across the southern United States.

Earth’s weather affects its denizens in many different ways, some direct and others more circuitous. A sudden downpour can destroy a house as easily as it can a briefcase full of paperwork. Heavy winds can pick up and carry away a beloved family pet as readily, and thoughtlessly, as your hat. Rain and hail and sleet and snow have no flight plan; they simply fall. Wind has no planned trajectory; it merely blows. We can only duck and cover, and hope for the best.

Three weeks ago, at the end of a particularly long day at work, my cell phone rang in my pocket. It was my wife Holly calling.

“I didn’t want to tell you over the phone…” she began, a phrase that always sends my stomach diving down into the heel of my left sock, “…but I couldn’t wait ‘til you got home.”

I thought my silence on the other end of the line would have been answer enough, but she wouldn’t flinch, drawing out the suspense, so finally, timidly, I answered, “What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

And I started laughing.

My wife and I have been trying to get pregnant for a long time now. She was pregnant a little less than a year ago but miscarried about six months along. Since then we’ve both been gunshy about starting back up in earnest, but recently we’d decided we were ready. She had gone off the pill and was one month into the three-month recommended limbo period between halting the flow of extraneous hormones into the system and proceeding with the flow of — well, you know. One month, and suddenly there we were again: Parents Pending.

I was on Cloud Nine. Cloud Ten or Twelve, even. We were in the midst of a huge race at the track where I work, a massive influx of people and product, constant scrambling to accomplish everything that needed doing, and still I coasted through the weekend like I was on roller skates. The weather was beautiful, sunshine and clear skies. It was an incredible few days.

Then, late Sunday night, it began to rain. On Monday, Holly miscarried again. After three days of the nicest weather of the year, that Monday’s temperatures were the area’s lowest in 126 years of recorded data. It seemed only fitting.

The two of us, my wife and I, slipped into a familiar malaise. Work kept me busy, but it couldn’t hold my attention. Holly started back to school, and word problems and quadratic equations vied for her thoughts, but woe was winning. We spent a lot of time staring silently into space, feeling sorry for ourselves.

As for the weather, it continued to be on again, off again, alternating between gorgeous and dangerous. The nastiest storm to hit the area grounded last Thursday night, a week ago today. The rain was bad, but the wind was worse, pulling down trees, billboards, and power lines all over town.

At 5:15 that night, Brad and Lisa Cunard, an Atlanta couple in their mid-thirties, were driving home from the local printing company they co-owned. Brad was at the wheel of their Toyota Land Cruiser, and Lisa shared the back seat with their two sons, Max and Owen. They had just picked Max, 3, up from day care; Owen, only six months old, had been with them at work.

Several minutes from their home in the Virginia Highlands neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, an oak tree that had stood tall and strong for over a hundred years began to sway. It waited until the Cunards’ SUV was almost past it to fall, landing directly across the back seat. Brad’s wife Lisa and their sons were killed instantly; Brad stepped from the wreckage without a scratch, out into the rain and the rest of his life, alone.

The funeral for Lisa, Max, and Owen was on Tuesday. All three were buried in the same coffin, which was the light blue color of a cloudless sky.

I am a lucky, lucky man. No matter what falls.

–

SUBSTITUTE

excuses, excuses

I work for an entity economically dependent on spectator turnout for a small scheduled series of competitive events per year. This system itself is dependent, of course, upon the endurance of these scheduled fifty-thousand-plus-crowd events by its venue’s employees. The spring and summer slots in the roster are the gauntlet, taking place within a month of one another and comprising the largest percentage of the yearly head count.

I started the job in mid-April. The first of these events was held May 16-18, as earlier reported here, and took an enormous amount of energy from me to succeed. It also tore my store to shreds, and I have only just restored its former lustre.

Well, had.

The second of these events is this weekend: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It is the First Annual, a new addition to the list. Advance ticket sales ended last Friday, and each day since, all day long, the phone has rung off the hook in the office with people still trying to buy them. No one knows how to estimate the final turnout numbers. I don’t even like to think about it.

Sunday’s portion of the affair will be nationally televised. Feel free to tune in with your local CBS affiliate around 4pm Eastern and feel the sympathy for me flow from each and every pore of your body. Play the home game, wherein you ask each observer whose face appears on your screen if they want to buy a t-shirt. And if you know what I look like (lucky devil), you can Waldosearch for me in the crowd. But you won’t find me, because I’m invisible. Just ask anyone.

This is an attempt at explaining how buckshot my diary has been of late. All three of you who read this thing: I don’t mean to sound like a wuss, but I’m tired, man. I can only promise I’ve got a few things in the tumbler for later. Meanwhile please send me gnarly positive survivalist vibes and set things ceremoniously ablaze.

(It’s okay if this is only a candle.)

stop me if you've heard this one before

The signs are unmistakable.

First, I began to notice the physiological effects. There was the slowing of my metabolism, a gradual transition from ‘girlish figure’ to ‘pregnant-and-starting-to-show’ that has begun to challenge the strength of the stitching in the waistband of every pair of pants that I own. Then there is my head, whose melanocytes, while not officially on the endangered list just yet, are certainly displaying the effects of lower melanin levels, as evidenced by my silvering temples and their curly rogue counterparts in locations scattered all over my scalp.

There are other indications, though (fortunately) less evident to the casual observer. I used to subsist on the sole blackbrown nutrition of coffee and cigarettes and needed only two or three hours of sleep per night to be right as the mail. Now my eyes feel heavy at ten-thirty, and any more than one cuppa joe attacks my sad bladder with the fury of swarming bees.

Most disturbing, however, are the psychological symptoms. I have begun to notice myself complaining about how much better things used to be. I bitch about the economy; I bitch about Hollywood; I bitch about “those damn kids and their miserable excuse for music.” I am developing a penchant for bad puns and have also begun to be drawn in by the sirenic allure of gardening as a gratifying recreational activity.

These are not psychosomatic indicia brought on by my recent birthday. It is not my imagination. These are facts, and facts don’t lie. Each example points unsympathetically in the same direction—namely, I am getting old.

Nothing could be more surreal than witnessing the many clichés about aging materialize in so many aspects of my being. I’ve always been lucky with regard to my health, and while I still am relatively so, this new plague of minor illnesses and irritations leads my brain (always slow to adapt to change) to conclude that there must be some larger problem. I rack my brain, thinking, ‘Have I forgotten I’m taking something? Is my wife perhaps slowly poisoning me in order to claim our insurance money and then run off to Brazil?”

My wife is not slowly poisoning me. My life is. Not its events but rather its simple passage. My body shop is going out of business. I am dying. I know I’ve always been dying, of course, just as all of us are, but I am only recently beginning to notice. I’m like a cartoon character that runs off the edge of a cliff and doesn’t begin to fall until slowly they realize that the ground is gone. The ground isn’t all that far below me now, but my feet sure aren’t touching any more.

I know that aging is an inevitable part of living. I’m not used to it being a noticeable part of living, but hey, I knew that was coming too. I guess I’d be more upset if it weren’t for all the evidence of my persistent immaturity. For example, a few days ago Holly and I were riding in the car, and she was telling me about some horrible thing that Dr. Laura Schlessinger said or did, and my intellectual response was, “What a stinky butthole.” Then, several minutes later, we passed a traveling carnival that had set up in a local mall parking lot. I watched the ferris wheel spin, saw the neon lights, smelled cotton candy, and for a moment I thought about what it would be like to forsake all of our belongings and ride across the country in an eighteen-wheeler, deep frying funnel cakes and bolting the tilt-a-whirl together every night. And I figure, hell, if I’m not too old to fantasize about running away with the carnival, then I probably shouldn’t be worried about aging quite yet.