Wasting Time
Dec. 14th, 2006 09:20 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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tamingthemuseTitle: Wasting Time
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spikespetslayer
Rating: G
Fandom: None
Summary: Travel can be dangerous--or just a waste of time
Author's Note: The story is true. No intention of offending anyone from Arkansas or employed by Wal-Mart is intended. I hope that it gives you a giggle; it took a long time for us to be able to laugh about it.
Wasting Time
I love to waste time. I love to squander endless minutes doing nothing but reading; it doesn’t matter whether the stories are in print or on a computer screen, my eyes devour the words like food and digest them completely in the bowels of my brain. Sometimes they get regurgitated into conversation; more often than not, they’re stored, an endless useless fat of facts both interesting and not that come out at inopportune times and strange places.
Maybe that was my true motivation for trying out for Jeopardy a couple of years ago—proving that the useless information that I carry around isn’t so useless after all.
You know, you watch a show for so long on television you get a feel for it. A sense of the rhythm of the show, the personality of the host, the way they phrase things and turn words into answers that you make into questions. That was the one thing that I counted on and the thing that made my failure so disheartening.
But even more interesting was the trip down to the city where I was to try out.
We started off the day before. Within the first five miles, my girlfriend was speeding, doing ninety down the highway and making my life a living nightmare. I told her more than once to turn the car around if she was going to drive like that; she told me to shut up and ride.
As soon as we passed into Arkansas, however, the tone of the trip changed and we realized that we’d entered the Twilight Zone of Road Trips. Our first indication was the flat tire just beyond the last exit.
There is nothing like sitting by the side of the road with a flat tire and trucks flying by at a hundred miles an hour. Just like there’s nothing like being on the phone with your auto club and having them tell you that they’ve tried several times to get roadside assistance out to you and there is nothing open at that hour of the night. Just like there’s nothing like looking to your right and finding that the sun is still in the sky and there is no way in this world that everything in the tiny town that you just passed closes up at four-thirty in the afternoon.
Time. We had nothing but time on our hands. We thought that we left with plenty of time to spare, to squander seeing the sights of a city that neither one of us had ever been to, but found that time wasted, dissipating into seconds and minutes in a broke-down car on the side of a busy highway. Shock rocketed through us when we realized that of all the cars and trucks passing, there was not one person stopping to assist us. Shock quickly turned to anger and she was out of the car in a flash, working on the tire herself.
Of course, she already knew how to change a tire; she had taught her friends in high school how to change a tire, my little butch girlfriend. But changing a tire in a front yard and changing it on the side of the road with trucks passing you way too fast are two different circumstances. I found myself wondering if emergency services would come out and rescue us if they were called or if they closed up shop at four in the afternoon as well.
But with the tire finally changed, we headed back down the road and on the way to our destination. Night was falling fast and the sun was slipping behind barren fields and into the curve of the world’s bosom as we traveled. One mile.
Yes, one mile. That’s all the farther we got when our spare tire blew as well.
Sailors would have blushed at the language that poured from both our mouths. I was astonished at the amount of creative cursing that we were both doing as we steered off the side of the road again, this time onto an off-ramp that led to nothing—nothing but barren road. There was not a town, farmhouse, or animal in sight anywhere we looked. We had entered the next phase of the outer limits of traveling.
I called my auto club again, thanking the heavens that I carried my cell phone with me. This time they did find a tow truck that would come out and pick us up—don’t ask me where from, they didn’t tell me that. The man driving the truck was fascinated with my cleavage and two women traveling alone; hence, I made my girlfriend sit in the front with him and sat behind her, praying that he wouldn’t pull over and tell us to put out or get out.
As he scratched himself and passed gas in the drivers’ seat, we wondered who we had offended to cause us this kind of terror on the road. We realized that we were going back north instead of south and he gruffly told us that it was the only direction that he could go—he couldn’t possibly head toward the Tennessee line. That was out of his service area.
With a sigh of relief, we did arrive at a Wal-Mart, the black hole of retail—in time to see the employees closing down the tire center. Begging, pleading, crying, we asked them to give us a new tire. Sandy flashed money in their faces and told them what was happening and they relented, taking ten minutes to put that ever-so-precious rubber ring on our rim and air it up before screwing the lugs back on with a vengeance. To my utter shock, they asked me for my autograph. Shades of Ken Jennings, they asked me for my autograph and I gave it to them.
Back on the road, we headed back south, praying for a miracle.
We got our miracle. We made it to Memphis. I tried out for the show and missed the cut by one question. End of story.
Not quite, actually. When we started back home that evening, I refused to go home through Arkansas again. I made Sandy drive miles out of our way and head through Kentucky instead of that cursed state.
All in all, I think it goes back to something my grandmother used to say. She always told me that they were never poorer or more in financial dire straits than they were when they lived in Arkansas. I think the damn state has a biological scanner set up at the border. No matter what it is that tried to keep me there, I doubt that I’ll be driving through there again—at least, not without a trunkful of tires.
Author:
spikespetslayerRating: G
Fandom: None
Summary: Travel can be dangerous--or just a waste of time
Author's Note: The story is true. No intention of offending anyone from Arkansas or employed by Wal-Mart is intended. I hope that it gives you a giggle; it took a long time for us to be able to laugh about it.
Wasting Time
I love to waste time. I love to squander endless minutes doing nothing but reading; it doesn’t matter whether the stories are in print or on a computer screen, my eyes devour the words like food and digest them completely in the bowels of my brain. Sometimes they get regurgitated into conversation; more often than not, they’re stored, an endless useless fat of facts both interesting and not that come out at inopportune times and strange places.
Maybe that was my true motivation for trying out for Jeopardy a couple of years ago—proving that the useless information that I carry around isn’t so useless after all.
You know, you watch a show for so long on television you get a feel for it. A sense of the rhythm of the show, the personality of the host, the way they phrase things and turn words into answers that you make into questions. That was the one thing that I counted on and the thing that made my failure so disheartening.
But even more interesting was the trip down to the city where I was to try out.
We started off the day before. Within the first five miles, my girlfriend was speeding, doing ninety down the highway and making my life a living nightmare. I told her more than once to turn the car around if she was going to drive like that; she told me to shut up and ride.
As soon as we passed into Arkansas, however, the tone of the trip changed and we realized that we’d entered the Twilight Zone of Road Trips. Our first indication was the flat tire just beyond the last exit.
There is nothing like sitting by the side of the road with a flat tire and trucks flying by at a hundred miles an hour. Just like there’s nothing like being on the phone with your auto club and having them tell you that they’ve tried several times to get roadside assistance out to you and there is nothing open at that hour of the night. Just like there’s nothing like looking to your right and finding that the sun is still in the sky and there is no way in this world that everything in the tiny town that you just passed closes up at four-thirty in the afternoon.
Time. We had nothing but time on our hands. We thought that we left with plenty of time to spare, to squander seeing the sights of a city that neither one of us had ever been to, but found that time wasted, dissipating into seconds and minutes in a broke-down car on the side of a busy highway. Shock rocketed through us when we realized that of all the cars and trucks passing, there was not one person stopping to assist us. Shock quickly turned to anger and she was out of the car in a flash, working on the tire herself.
Of course, she already knew how to change a tire; she had taught her friends in high school how to change a tire, my little butch girlfriend. But changing a tire in a front yard and changing it on the side of the road with trucks passing you way too fast are two different circumstances. I found myself wondering if emergency services would come out and rescue us if they were called or if they closed up shop at four in the afternoon as well.
But with the tire finally changed, we headed back down the road and on the way to our destination. Night was falling fast and the sun was slipping behind barren fields and into the curve of the world’s bosom as we traveled. One mile.
Yes, one mile. That’s all the farther we got when our spare tire blew as well.
Sailors would have blushed at the language that poured from both our mouths. I was astonished at the amount of creative cursing that we were both doing as we steered off the side of the road again, this time onto an off-ramp that led to nothing—nothing but barren road. There was not a town, farmhouse, or animal in sight anywhere we looked. We had entered the next phase of the outer limits of traveling.
I called my auto club again, thanking the heavens that I carried my cell phone with me. This time they did find a tow truck that would come out and pick us up—don’t ask me where from, they didn’t tell me that. The man driving the truck was fascinated with my cleavage and two women traveling alone; hence, I made my girlfriend sit in the front with him and sat behind her, praying that he wouldn’t pull over and tell us to put out or get out.
As he scratched himself and passed gas in the drivers’ seat, we wondered who we had offended to cause us this kind of terror on the road. We realized that we were going back north instead of south and he gruffly told us that it was the only direction that he could go—he couldn’t possibly head toward the Tennessee line. That was out of his service area.
With a sigh of relief, we did arrive at a Wal-Mart, the black hole of retail—in time to see the employees closing down the tire center. Begging, pleading, crying, we asked them to give us a new tire. Sandy flashed money in their faces and told them what was happening and they relented, taking ten minutes to put that ever-so-precious rubber ring on our rim and air it up before screwing the lugs back on with a vengeance. To my utter shock, they asked me for my autograph. Shades of Ken Jennings, they asked me for my autograph and I gave it to them.
Back on the road, we headed back south, praying for a miracle.
We got our miracle. We made it to Memphis. I tried out for the show and missed the cut by one question. End of story.
Not quite, actually. When we started back home that evening, I refused to go home through Arkansas again. I made Sandy drive miles out of our way and head through Kentucky instead of that cursed state.
All in all, I think it goes back to something my grandmother used to say. She always told me that they were never poorer or more in financial dire straits than they were when they lived in Arkansas. I think the damn state has a biological scanner set up at the border. No matter what it is that tried to keep me there, I doubt that I’ll be driving through there again—at least, not without a trunkful of tires.
