introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ghetto sled friday, indeed. - thirteenth of august, 2004 "i crashed your pickup truck and then i had to drive it back home i was crying i was so scared of what you would do of what you would say..."~ani difranco *sigh* we were supposed to get on the highway, probably. i just wanted to get home. but when we got to the intersection i remembered that i left my sauconys at my mom and dad's house and i had to go back. he turned at the light and looped around. see, i was supposed to volunteer tomorrow at POWER, this place where women who have recovered from drug addictions live...a sort of halfway house maybe. i was supposed to go and help weed the gardens and do a little light yardwork and then, these women were going to make us some dinner and we could talk and learn from each other. i have been very interested in women lately...in learning from other women. so there was going to be yardwork. and that meant that i needed my sneakers. but i hadn't gone to my parent's house on my lunch break because michael francisco was in town doing the network upgrade at work and i ditched him for lunch yesterday so we made a deal to go today. and at noon, we collected our key fobs and our cell phones and headed for max and erma's for salads and soup and i missed the afternoon trip over to the house to relax mid-day. we had a good lunch on the company and headed back to work late....excuseable when one is entertaining visitors to the site. so i needed to go back to get the blue shoes because those are the best shoes when you're digging in someone else's dirt. he looped back. we were talking about the computer (this very computer that i'm typing on now.) with the new job, we could afford to fix the thing. the hard drive on the iMAC crashed last week and we needed to get a new one....and update the OS. three hundred dollars later and we're in business. we were talking about how we must be getting our ends together because it was budgeted for emergencies, sort of. we could afford it. and then thats when it happened. it was the kind of sound that you might confuse with a tire blow out at first. but, the drag of metal on asphalt sound that followed for about seven seconds afterwards was indicative of a much more serious incident. there were sparks. there was smoke, rank and black. there was a drag mark about a hundred feet long. and we were only going fifteen miles an hour, if that. the tire had, unexpectedly, detatched from the axel. the axel might very well be broken. all we knew was that when we got out of that car after that street-sled we were looking at a tire that had not blown out and that was perpendicular to the tire well. yes. this is a bad thing. but i got to thinking as we waited on the tow truck. it could have been the highway. we could have taken six cars with us. we could have rolled it over the embankment into oblivion. it could have been a lot worse. we could have been killed.... but we weren't. thanks to my needing those blue jazz sauconys, we're safe. sad. no, make that depressed. the mitsubishi galant sits in some lot probably on some sort of block. it waits for a check-up and a decision to be made about what to do with it. who ever heard of such a thing happening? so we drink a few beers. we stare into space. we make other plans for the weekend. and we ask ourselves this: why didn't pep boys tell us at the inspection a month and a half ago that our ball joints were out of whack? that our struts needed strutting? that whatever was wearing out was on the skinny end of worn? and we try to figure out exactly what we're going to do. friday the thirteenth. coincidence? perhaps. perhaps not. silly. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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