Never a Dull Moment

On my way home from a mountain-filled, oxygen-deprived weekend with Mom, I stopped to play styrofoam-bowl-frizbee with my 94-year-old grandmother. She'd had a perm and was feeling particularly peppy. I stayed until the late card games of the Hamsfork Social Club got going, which is how I found myself, again, scanning the inky blackness beyond my headlights for the tawny bodies of antelope. On Hwy 189, again, in the dark, on a Monday night at a quarter to nine. A guy blew my doors off after the construction just before Round Mountain; he must have been going 80. I passed him ten miles later where he was pulled off to the side of the road, one headlight gone and him dragging a speedgoat off the highway into the brush at the edge. Maybe it was a deer- all I saw was guts. I didn't stop to see if he needed assistance. I just assume everyone has a cellphone. After all, this is the Jonah Field.

The construction is a good thing, and it's almost done. It's done by Legrand Johnson out of Salt Lake City, a massive, capable outfit with acres of yellow equipment in a chain-link pen down there, big Cats and graders and shovels as far as the eye can see into the smoggy distance, white company F-150s in rows like an off-duty battalion. Between polite orange signs ('Bump' and 'Your Tax Dollars at Work'), they've widened the two-lane highway, added broad, safe shoulders, and they'll probably put those ruts over there that make a flatulent buzz when you hit them that my nephew calls 'the dinosaur noise.' It's to wake drivers up who've drifted off to sleep and subsequently off the road. It works, whether you're sleeping or not. My mother's Buick's windshield looks like crocheted fishing line after a summer of 189. She refuses to replace it until they finish. Which will be soon. Did I tell you it snowed in September?

I listened to One Night in Bangkok from Chess half the way home. I love how blatantly disco it is and Murray Head's sarcastic and conversational take on Tim Rice's whimsical, innuendo-laden narrative, and that delightful symphonic excerpt at the beginning that they so rarely play on the radio when they play that song. The rush and tumble of violins like a waterfall into the pulse-like pounding of the tympani. Larry would be so proud. She's the one who recorded that whacky birthday cassette for me nigh on ten years ago, after our tour of Europe. My car stereo keeps trying to eat it, that and Paul Simon's Graceland. I simply can't understand why it dislikes those but withstands hours of Cake and Frank Sinatra. There's just no accounting for taste.

Sometime I'll blog about my truck, which is an adventure in itself. I have to take a flattering pic of us together first, something that hides Monty's rust and my thighs. Sometime, too, I'll blog about this weekend and add more photos of this astonishing locale. Tonight it's just nice to be back in my own bed. Saturday morning I woke up in a black, windowless room (I can sleep all day in there, it's my room when I'm at Mom's) and saw the clock with the red digital readout (9:27am) and thought "where the Hell am I?" There isn't a digital clock at my house, see. I love it when you sleep so hard that you're totally lost when you wake up. It means you really slept. Which is what I'm going to do now. It was a bad week maybe to take a Monday off, being 'Celebrate Evanston Week' and City Hall going headless chicken, but it was totally worth it. I've just got to get caught up or I'm going to drown in purchase orders. What a way to go.