. . .
I apologize for my lack of attention and proper posts, Blogreader. It is one-thirty in the morning again, and I am just arriving home from work. The last week of a project of this magnitude can either be like a warm spring breeze or like walking through a field hip-deep in mud. This one is skewing towards the mud. They almost always do.
I have been reading your blogs (those of you with blogs, anyway), although I'm sadly not commenting much right now. To soothe your wounded feelings (should you be thinking I no longer like your blog), I have not even really been able to keep up on my emails lately. I have dropped off the radar even in my private life, is my point. These days an email from me is like a Golden Ticket, provided being my friend is somehow analogous to a tour of a magical and wonderful chocolate factory where all but one of you are certain to perish.
Just a couple of days remain until I am at last unshackled once more, and free to pursue my, uh, pursuits.
Driving home tonight, I saw three men standing on a corner, waiting for a bus. This was very near the building in which I work, which is not the best of neighborhoods. It was a little after one, and a persistent cold rain had started to fall. I sat in my car and vacillated between suspicion of the three men standing in the dark in the middle of the night, and sympathy for the three men stuck in the rain, standing in the dark in the middle of the night.
Sympathy won out. I felt terrible for them long before the light turned green and allowed me to roar once again towards home.
The expressway is strangely beautiful when it is empty. So wide and seemingly clean. The lights which run along the sides played off the wet surface and I sort of wish I had pulled over to photograph it for you. I never remember that even such places can hold a beauty. I saw only six cars in the approximately three miles I was on it. The highway was mine.
I will post more properly tomorrow. At the very least, I should be able to cobble together another fiction excerpt to amuse you. But if I am very lucky, I may have time to share some pictures I took recently, and perhaps recount the Peep Jousting Tournament we conducted in between other things today at work.
9 comments:
I really liked the paragraph about the expressway and the lights, I can imagine it. And I'm very intrigued about the Peep Jousting Tournament.
Hi Maht. Awww.
I love the quiet calm of being the only one on the highway late at night.
I look forward to the Peep Jousting post :)
When I first moved to LA, I used to go out and drive on the freeways at like 2 in the morning just because it felt so freeing. It's still never been as pretty as Lake Shore Drive or driving up the Dan Ryan/Edens home to the northside. Lucky you!
I saw those same three guys from my car, and unlike you, I locked my door. I know that that could be viewed as a very terrible or non-PC thing to do, but I grew up in and around neighborhoods like the one we were driving through. We consider locking your door "street smarts".
The described location wasn't very far from where they found a female nurse's strangled body in her car, parked on the side of the expressway. (Uh, yeah. It's the same expressway mentioned in the blog.)
I know that our culture teaches us that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you just gotta go with your gut.
Sorry, this comment seems to coming across as really negative, and I didn't intend it to be. A lovely night though.
Peep jousting sounds good. Peeps have been very topical over at my place recvently, I guess for obvious reasons.
I'd say you could combine locking the car door with feeling very sympathetic - like the way I'll admire someone's jacket, or think someone has a lovely face, while also instinctively putting my arm over the front of my handbag.
Beautiful image, though, the expressway.
Hope project finishes well!
V: See Tiny Olive for the flip-side of this post, I guess. Peep Jousting will be up soon.
TSP: Hi. Awww?
Struggly: It was kind of nice, although I was incredibly tired, so maybe my mind was just making peace with everything.
Liz. This was the Eisenhower, so it is not even one of the pretty ones. Something about it last night, though...
Tiny Olive: You should consider starting a blog yourself. Maybe to get you started you can just post the inverse of all of my posts.
I loved your take on the same situation, though. And your comment isn't negative. It's honest, which is nice.
I think after working that late, and then with the rain and the hour, I was prepared to feel sorry for anyone in the situation of being awake and out. Perhaps I assumed that they, too, had planned on working a normal day, and then found it doubled by the demands of their jobs. Their body language was not mischevious. They hopped to keep warm. One of them was trying to decide whether he wanted to open his umbrella. And one left the curb to peer back down the road, wondering when their rescue from the elements would arrive.
I have street smarts, but they didn't set off my radar at all. Perhaps it's something to do with how difficult it is to get into my car. I hadn't heard about the nurse, though. That's terrible.
Ms. B: You snuck in while I was blowing wind at Tiny Olive.
I am, even as I type this, making plans to abscond with your handbag...
Mr M, thanks so much for NOT absconding! Actually, that particular bag is a cool in-between-sized thing on wheels, but with a shoulder strap. It has a handle that pulls up from a secret compartment if you want to use it for a suitcase.
My current handbag, though, you'd probably also want to steal. It's orange and intensely lovely.
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