March 4, 2008
Living in the Boonies
I’ve coined a new term for myself: directionally retarded. It was, afterall, my own fault that I ended up in the middle of nowhere today while driving to the designated voting area for my precinct. In my hurry to get out the door, I mapped out 111 Upland instead of 1111 Upland Ave. Thus, my attempt to be a responsible citizen and make my vote count ended with me on the phone with a friend and his computer screen while sitting in my car in the middle of a dirt road, staring at a threadbare abandoned sofa and it’s loveseat mate, trying to ignore the dead skunk that lay in a pile of congealed blood and guts just beside my car (I didn’t kill it, I promise), and inhaling the red dust thrown up by every single Ford F-150 that passed me by. There is something to be said about the pleasure that some of my neighbors must derive from leaving furniture on the roadside: here a sofa set created an almost sarcastic seating arrangement on the roadside, and just two days ago I almost suffered a head-on collision with a torn up mattress while driving south down the only elevated loop that runs around this great city in West Texas. Between these sightings and the massive tumbleweed that perpetually threatens to scratch away the already rusting paint on my poor car and to replace my arm hairs with spiny thorns, I can never forget that I am in cowboy country. And what better reminder than the fact that, as I stood in line to cast my vote at the obscure middle school on the country road, I was for that moment the only voter not voting in the Republican primaries.
Whispers 