Good, Bad, Good, Ugly & So On

I played hooky today. I hardly ever do such a thing and honestly, I don't know why, when I called in, I lied and said I was sick. That is to say, I am, actually, sick, but not really sick enough not to work, just sick with this measly cold/sore throat thing that won't quite go away and won't quite get really bad.

What actually happened was that I had to drive A to Columbia SC to catch a bus to Charleston. Why? Why, you ask, did I have to do this? A's dad said he would give her a car if she would get herself down to Charleston within a certain amount of time and so, it behooved us to get her there, since I am sick unto death of sharing my car. But it wasn't easy, since, thanks I think to Homeland Security or something, you can barely rent a car one way anymore. Only Herz & Avis will do it out of state, and they won't do it, period, full stop, for drivers under 25. A is 24 in 2 weeks. And so on and so forth and I won't bore you with the full, lengthy, endless rigmarole story of all this and the guy at the Herz counter at the Asheville airport who was a certified true blue total asshole and so on. So in desperation I said, okay, I will drive you to Columbia to take the bus. Because the bus from Asheville to Charleston takes 11 hours, you see - for a 4 hour trip by car - and that would have put her there outside the time limit. The bus takes one hour to get to Greenville and two hours to get from Columbia to Charleston, but it takes 8 hours to go from Greenville to Columbia. Public transportation, American southeast, end of 2006: forget it. Either have a car or you ain't getting there.

So we went off to Columbia this morning and barely made it to the bus in time and it was all exciting and yet a royal PITA and then I saw all the signs for the exit to the Riverbanks Zoo and I thought, you know what? Since I am already playing hooky it is time to have some fun while I'm at it. It's odd, but this is not the first time I have played hooky in Columbia: when I was about 16 or so, my friend A and I cut school and drove my mother's Jeep Wagoneer to Columbia. We had no idea what to do when we got there and no money, so we went to a record store, pooled our change to buy a hotdog and drove back. Big exciting 16 year old day: I've never forgotten it. Now that I am old, playing hooky has incrementally improved, since I had money & a destination and so, off to the zoo I went. I had a marvelous time - it's a nice zoo, although I was kind of surprised by the places where you could buy food & feed the animals, which is not something I associate with your modern zoo; also, they had pony rides. It was way cool. I took many, many pictures and wandered along happily in a zoo inspired daze and even bought an ugly coffee cup at the souvenir stand.

And so, all would have been great with my world, fabulous and happy and etcetera, except that when I got about halfway between Airport Road & Long Shoals Road on I 26 coming back into Asheville traffic came to a dead standstill and all my plans for the evening, which involved looking at my pictures and doing laundry and meeting my friend J for a beer, came crashing to a halt because I was dumb enough not to get off at Long Shoals but to think that perhaps the jam would end really soon. It did not. Not only that, but about halfway between Long Shoals and Brevard Road, the oil light started blinking in my car. Now, I know little about cars, but I know that when that light shows up you are supposed to turn the car off and leave it off until you get oil into it. Unfortunately, this was basically not possible, because it would quite literally have taken about four to five hours for anyone to get to me with oil, given the traffic jam. I thought about parking and climbing up to the Parkway and trying to get someone to meet me with a couple quarts of oil up there on the Parkway bridge and then climbing back down and putting oil in the car, but my heart quailed within me and I chickened out. All of which is a long winded way of saying that I drove my car five incredibly, unbelievably slooooooooooooow miles to Brevard Road and then poured two quarts of oil into it and then drove slowly home because Brevard Road is backed up too and in the middle of all this I had a nervous breakdown or two and screamed at my friend, my son, the sky and myself. Which is all very bad, especially because when I got home (it took me over an hour to get from Long Shoals Road to my house, which is to say like 11 miles) and found that the puppy had spread the bathroom trash all over the house again, I lost it again and screamed some more. And threw things. I am a bad person and I'm beginning to think I had really better start smoking again before I kill someone.

Then I decided not to do laundry - fuck laundry - but instead to drink a beer at home and I called my friend and told her I couldn't meet her and I told my son that a) I would drop his laundry off to be done by other people tomorrow and b) I couldn't cook anything except canned chicken noodle soup and c) I was unable to take him to the record store and then I looked at all my pictures and now I'm back to thinking it wasn't such a bad day after all. Phew.