eloisel
Forever Empress E
Years ago I felt the need to leave Texas. I was supposed to go to New York and live with my sister. There had been snow on the ground for a couple of weeks and it was snowing the day I was leaving. As I decided I really didn't care for snow that much, I went to California instead. Took out the map and drew a straight line from where I was to Los Angeles, CA, because, don't you know, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. That trip to California proved that old saying is a truism that does not apply to real life. Was an interesting trip, though. Stopped for gas in a quiet little town late at night. The station was one of those pay with a credit card at the pump kind. The sign on the pump said not to pick up hitchhikers because the entire town existed to maintain a maximum security institution for the criminally insane. As I left that town, it started to rain. My windshield wipers quit working but I was afraid to pull over to the side of the road because I kept seeing strange movements along the tree line. So, I tied one end of some string to the windshield wipers and threaded the other end through the little side window. When I pulled the string, the wipers came up, then I'd let the string go and the wipers would go back down. I drove for about an hour that way, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, seeing Jason on the edge of the treeline waiting for me to give it up and pull over so he could hack my brains out. The road took me way up in New Mexico where a light just above the tree tops followed me around the mountain for several hours. All I could think of was Barney and Betty Hill's story of their abduction by aliens in the 1960s. By morning I was headed down out of the mountains on a 12% downgrade - burned up my brakes and had a flat. People that lived on the mountain came zooming down that road on their way to where they went during the day. Finally a nice police officer that looked like he'd been abducted by aliens and possibly escaped from the mental institution stopped and changed my tire. I made it to a mechanic that fixed the brakes fairly cheap. Then, as if things couldn't get stranger, I wound up driving through miles and miles of white sand, without a road turning off the one I was on. After about 50 miles I came to a cross road with a stop sign and a traffic jam. The wind was blowing so hard it literally pushed my car off the road while I was waiting for the jam to clear up. There was a little store/gas station/restaurant/out post at that corner in the middle of nowhere. I got out of my car and blew into the Twilight Zone. The place was filled with the grizzliest looking old geezers I've ever seen. Old prospectors never die, they just go to that place in New Mexico, drink coffee and watch the wind blow white sand. From that experience, you would think I might suggest avoiding the high roads, the winding roads and the straight roads. Not at all. In this life it is better to have strange times to reflect on in your old age than to look back over your history and wonder why you haven't bored your self to death long ago.BitchSlapSmitty said:
