Author: Bill McCurry

My wife and I were not rookies when we got married. We had already lived in sin for years. We’d shared a joint checking account and a bathroom. We’d teamed up to face lost jobs, family holidays, and whether to fix the car or buy food. So, when my wife said her vows and made all our wedding guests giggle, we knew that our relationship was strong. As long as we made ourselves keep talking to each other, then the good, happy, loving things we had shared would keep us together.

I’ve heard people say that no matter how long you live together, it won’t be the same when you get married. Those people are pretty smart. At first it wasn’t so much that we treated each other differently. It was that the entire rest of the world treated us differently. We were sucked into the super-special married people club by everyone from our parents to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Anyone who thinks it’s no big deal if you can’t get legally married is full of shit.

All of that led us to start treating each other differently. Before we got married, I was living with my sweetheart. That’s a rather mysterious thing, and it meant something unexpected almost every day, which was fantastic. Once we got married, I was living with my wife. I had a lifetime of books and TV and personal observation to know what a wife was. Despite myself, I had expectations about how a wife behaved. And my sweetie had expectations just as powerful about her new husband.

Those expectations took a surprisingly long time to figure out. Just talking about it was not helpful. Talking about the manner in which we would talk about it helped quite a bit, considering that the only thing we have in common communications-wise is that we both speak English. A sense of humor helped. Without a sense of humor, I have no doubt that I would now be in a shallow grave behind some abandoned apartment complex.

Years of marriage passed, and our expectations settled into a dependable pattern. I did not expect her to have dinner ready at five o’clock on a dining table we didn’t own at which I couldn’t sit because I wasn’t home yet. She expected me not to object when she went to a party and I stayed home to sit in a dark room and sharpen knives. Our struggles as a couple changed. We made a little more money and tried not to let me do something crazy with it. We could afford to fix the car and also buy food, but more and more of the people we loved slipped over the edge into death.

As with many people, for years one of our struggles has been with sex. It’s not that we don’t have it and not that we don’t enjoy it. It’s an issue of timing. I know that’s true for a lot of couples, especially for people who are busy. And it’s almost impossible to have the same level of interest at the same time. Add that to the fact that sex is a sensitive and emotionally-charged subject, and it becomes a problem.

We’ve recently attacked this problem by scheduling sex. I admit that’s not the most romantic thing ever, but when you live by the list and die by the list, it’s a rational approach. And it’s been a helpful approach. It’s not exactly, “Hey baby, can you put me on your calendar for some nookie this week?” But it’s not jumping out of the hall closet at you naked, either.

An odd thing happened the other day. I made the, “…put me on your calendar for some nookie…” statement to my wife, except far more urbane and passionate. She opened her iPad, checked her calendar, and suggested a day. I suggested a much closer day, but she pointed out that we’d planned to eat dinner out early that evening. Being stuffed full of food would likely prevent her from feeling too amorous, and she didn’t want to feel constrained to not eat what she wished at dinner.

I considered that statement with what I’m sure was a stupid look on my face. Part of me understood what she was saying. Part of me considered that it wasn’t as if we’d be at a fancy restaurant that we rarely visit. We were just going to eat barbeque. A lot of me empathized with one of those girls in the bedroom doorway in her negligee, trying to pull her boyfriend’s attention away from Halo 4.

I agreed with my wife’s suggestion and then thought about it for an hour or so. Then I expressed to my wife that I understood her situation, and perhaps I was being unreasonable, but I kind of felt less desirable than a barbeque sandwich. She was kind and said she understood and that she didn’t mean anything bad. She just wanted to warn me that she probably wouldn’t feel much like hanky-panky after the evening meal.

Although I told her I understood, some part of this was still bothering me. I thought about it all night and for part of the next day before I grasped the problem. She didn’t have to forego dinner. She could just enjoy half of it and take the other half home to enjoy later. Then she wouldn’t be stuffed to a prohibitively non-frisky degree.

I was in fact not as sexy as half a barbeque sandwich.

In years of marriage I have not really learned all that much. However, one thing I have learned is when I starting thinking things like, “I’m not as sexy as half a barbeque sandwich,” I need to stop what I’m doing, not talk to anybody for a while, and try to internalize the notion that I am careening through the hallways of irrationality like a baboon driving a go-cart.

What in the world am I thinking? It’s not as if an hour of sweaty bouncing around will define my value as a husband, or a human, or a primate with the ability to speak and tell knock-knock jokes. I should just enjoy my own damn barbeque sandwich, not get spun up about it, and see what happens from there. I need to take the crazy emotion out of it. From now on, whenever I think or say “sex,” I’ll just imagine I’m thinking or saying, “backgammon.” As in, “Hey baby, can you put me on your calendar for some backgammon this week?” That should help.

Looking back, I see that when we got married we were ready for hard work. We thought we knew what that work was going to be, but time fooled us. The happy, loving things have been great, but that’s not what’s kept up together. Instead, the pain-in-the-ass struggles that make us want to punch each other in the throat have kept us together. When we make it through one, it’s daunting to think about what it would have been like going through it with someone else. We have so much invested in overcoming so many obstacles together. To hell with the happy, smiley stuff.

Of course, I can’t forget all the times we’ve talked about how we’re going to talk about things. I have some new terminology to add now—instead of sex, we can say backgammon.

That seems weak, doesn’t it? Maybe “sweaty backgammon.”


Mmmmm… backgammon.

By Forsaken Fotos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55229469@N07/32825125916/

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

 

 

 

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You have clicked on a link and reached the weirdest of all my posts. I wrote it because I am stupid, or my computer is stupid, or possibly because the internet is stupid.

For a variety of reasons, I self-publish. Actually, there are only two reasons. First, although people who weren’t my mom told me my work was worth reading, no literary agent agreed with them.

Second, my dad died. Afterwards I said to myself, “Why wait another five or ten years for an overworked literary agent who drinks too much to give my book a shot? And then wait a year or more while they sell it to a publisher – maybe? And then wait another couple of years for it to be published?”

In other words, I got tired of abasing myself before people to people who could crush my dreams. If I wanted that, I could keep my day job.

I’m glad I chose to self-publish. I’m selling books and plan to sell a lot more, like I’m at the salad bar of success. There’s a lot to learn, including to PROTECT YOURSELF. People can sue anybody for anything. Somebody could sue me because they read one of my books, laughed so much they dropped their keys down the storm drain, got stuck outside, and lost a toe to frostbite. A toe has got to be expensive.

Enter Infinite Monkeys Publishing LLC, of which I am the sole shareholder. Now I need to display Infinite Monkeys Publishing LLC on my website with pride. I created my site, and it works pretty well, so I figured it would be a thirty-minute job.

Five hours later (two of which I spent cursing the software, its developers, the support forum, the entire user community, and my liberal arts degree), I had tried everything I could think of without meditation and beer.

My choices were:

  1. Meditate, drink, and try esoteric approaches unavailable to the unaltered mind. And not get any writing done today.
  2. Brute-force the son of a bitch so I can write about bloodshed and whimsy.

I chose the second. It involved creating this post and naming it with the exact phrase I want on the homepage.

To celebrate, I will now write about somebody throwing a magic knife *through* some dude and killing the guy behind him too.

Today a well-meaning person wrote the words, “All books should be interactive, like ‘choose your own adventure’ stories. They’d be a lot more interesting and different every time you read them. Movies should be like that too.”

That’s an intriguing thought. Songs could also be that way. Just stop after each chorus so you can decide what the next verse will be about. It would be whimsical to add verses about rhinos and depilatories to “Stairway to Heaven.” Bus passengers could vote on which way to turn at each intersection. We could apply the theory to lots of different things in life, although marriage is already a “choose your own adventure.”

Yeah, that’s sarcasm. It can be hard to identify, so I need to label it sometimes.

Here’s why “choose your own adventure” is a bad idea for books, unless they’re literally a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. A main character’s job is to get into trouble. That’s not totally accurate. A main character’s job is to suffer, over and over. Whenever she or he solves a problem, it lands her or him in another problem that’s just as bad or worse. If that’s not true, the hero’s ultimate victory won’t be as satisfying. It’s a dynamic that’s well-known to people who run role-playing games.

But we ourselves don’t choose to suffer, unless some psychological trauma is driving us to. When it’s time to decide what’s next in the story, we’ll usually choose something that makes us look good. We won’t choose the adventure that says “villain shoves scorpions under my eyelids.” Indiana Jones wouldn’t sprint through a tunnel inches ahead of a giant boulder if he had a choice. He’d take the gold statue and go out the back way to avoid the poison darts, the bad French guy, and a skewered Alfred Molina. Then he’d fly home in a snake-free plane.

Let’s not choose our own adventures. Most of us will choose small ones.

Photo by Vlad Chețan from Pexels

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When I was small, my parents would sing a certain lullaby to me. I don’t think I’ve heard it since. Like any writer, I took that tender memory and perverted for the sake of a story. I made a rough, funny character write and sing “The Whore Song,” set to the lullaby’s tune.

The writing business as usual.

Now this story is being transformed into an audio book, which thrills me quite a lot. The producer asked me whether “The Whore Song” was set to a specific tune. Did I write it? Was it copyrighted? Did I intend to violate the copyright like I was a Chinese cell phone company?

My mom sang this song to me more than fifty years ago, which in the music business is like 12,000 years, and the Beatles would be like four woolly mammoths about to go extinct. Ask anybody under age 20 who the Beatles were. You’ll see. But back to the song–it couldn’t be copyrighted after all this time. Definitely not. No way.

Or maybe it could. Research was in order.

The song’s first line was, “Go to sleepy, little baby.” Plugging those five words into a search engine returned several thousand websites, and the first hundred were about lullabies I had never heard of. Sometimes they had no more than a couple of words from my search. I tried, “Little sleepy? Baby to go!” for the hell of it. Failure. Woe.

Down around the 150th result, Google yielded to me the proper website, just like a middle-aged man would give up his high school football championship trophy.

So, it turns out the lullaby is a folk song of African American origin. In the 1930’s and 40’s the singer Judy Canova always closed her radio show with it, and she said her mother sang it to her when she was small. That’s more than a hundred years ago. Judy Canova would have been a much healthier and fluffier mammoth than Ringo Starr. This song had to be out of copyright. Right?

Maybe. My producer is checking it out.

One thing came out of this experience. (Well, two things if you count the suspicion that Google shows websites that pay the most for advertising rather than the ones you’re searching for.) I don’t think I’ve heard this song (at least that I recognized) since my mom sang it, but now I understand why she sang that song. My mom was a huge Judy Canova fan.

Right now it feels a little like she’s still alive and has just filled me in on this detail.

Judy Canova’s 1946 recording of the lullaby Go to Sleepy, Little Baby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqVYWOsfiuk

From National Geographic News. They know their mammoths.
news.nationalgeographic.com

There’s this thing called the Hero’s Journey, which is not the same as driving to El Paso with three kids in the back seat. It’s a type of story that is found in many different cultures at different times in history. In recent years Joseph Campbell explained it extensively. It’s sad that he’s dead now, but at least he can’t tell me I’m wrong about everything I will now say.

Most movies and many books leave out the best part of the Journey!

Every Hero’s Journey has certain parts that always come in the same order. For example, one of the parts is Refusing the Call. It shows up in Star Wars: A New Hope, which is the Real Star Wars Movie.

Obi Wan: “You must become a pilot, Luke.”

Luke: “No, I’ve got to fix evaporators and stare at the desert while my theme music plays.” (Refuse the Call)

[Then the Empire barbeques Uncle Owen and Aunt Maru]

Luke: “I guess I’m going after all. Sell the speeder!”

People often use the Real Star Wars Movie as an example of the Hero’s Journey because it shows the steps so clearly. For example, three of the last steps in the Journey are:

  • The Ordeal (destroying the Death Star)
  • The Road Home (flying back to the luckiest moon in the universe)
  • Return with the Elixir / Prize / Weapon / Magic Horse / Hope for the Future / Whatever (Luke getting a hero’s medal from his sister, which really gives the rebels new hope—until the next movie, which starts on a planet so cold they wish they’d die.)

Yet the best part is left out—the Resurrection. It comes after the hero has bitch-slapped the bad guy and hit the road for home, but before he returns with the prize (not a toy unicorn). It’s the last challenge, often unexpected, that threatens to destroy the hero and everything he loves. The Real Star Wars Movie doesn’t have it, but the Lord of the Rings books do. (Peter Jackson left it out of the movie.)

When Frodo comes home to the Shire, it is being destroyed. He (and some of his very tall buddies) fight and save it. Frodo commands the defense as if he were a mighty lord, or maybe a squatty king. He is transformed from the hobbit who started the journey.

The Resurrection is where the hero is finally transformed into his new self by everything that’s happened on his journey. He becomes worthy to bring home the prize. The prize Frodo brings home is peace. You just don’t have time to put that sort of thing in a movie. It’s probably the first thing you’d have to cut.

The moral of the story: Read more books.

“You want me to go where?”

My wife and I dig Ghost Tours even though neither of us has ever seen anything in the least supernatural. We like enthusiastic tour guides, especially those playing costumed characters with conviction. We’ve ghost-toured in lots of cities such as New Orleans, Nashville, Boston, Edinburgh, and Inverness.

Savannah claims to be the most haunted city in America. A slew of websites say it’s pretty darn haunted, which is a recommendation. So, last week when we visited Savannah with family, we weren’t leaving town until we enjoyed a ghost tour.

A ghost tour in a hearse. Cool!

Along with my wife’s brother and his wife, we stood on the curb at 10:00 p.m. when the hearse pulled up as scheduled. The guide was friendly, although he looked kind of like he’d driven there straight from rehab. He wore jeans and a t-shirt, so a costumed character performance was out.

The tour folks had cut windows into the sides of the hearse and mounted eight seats where the dead people used to go. The plastic seats could have come straight from an elementary school cafeteria and were mounted on posts. They bobbled around like one of those coin-op rocket ships in front of a grocery store. We did have seat cushions. Well, we had large-ish kitchen hot pads laying on the seats. Safety clearly came first, since we had seat belts—three straps bolted to various spots on the floor. No two straps matched up to create a full belt.

If we had been t-boned, we’d have hurtled around like seeds in a cantaloupe dropped off the Tower of Pisa by Galileo.

This could all have been very bad. However, my wife and I arrived looking for reasons to be entertained. The tour provided a quite modest number of reasons to be entertained, so it’s good that we jumped on and rode them like they were Secretariat.

Our guide stopped at The Pirate House, disembarked, and stuck on a Halloween costume pirate hat. Then he gave us ten minutes of readings from Treasure Island and some ghost stories, throwing in a little Pirates of the Caribbean accent one out of every five words.

That was not the highlight of the tour. But it was close. He was enthusiastic. We were entertained. We found reasons.

After another hour of riding around listening to ghost stories, we reached the highlight of the tour. We stopped to visit a windowless concrete block building that housed a little collection of curiosities. I mean spliced-together mermaid skeletons, creepy newspaper clippings, a stuffed river otter, and so on.

The tour highlight: a two-headed turtle, an albino raccoon, and a picture of the Sacred Hairy Family of Burma, all right next to one another. Entertained. Reasons. Ride them like the wind.

I mean, they already had our money.

The Tokyo Hearse, complete with Buddhist temple. (from Dark Dissolution, http://darkdissolution.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html)

My wife despises things that beep. Whenever a blackout ends, her first recovery checklist item is reprogramming every beeping thing in our house so that it becomes a non-beeping thing. So, when our security system randomly began beeping at me Wednesday night I knew right away that it would bug her when she got home. That was literally my first thought. I had walked halfway through the house before wondering whether somebody had broken in to steal our collection of four dozen unmatched coffee mugs.

Well, the system wasn’t sounding an actual alarm. It was just beeping the way it does when a door opens, telling you to watch the cat sprint outside and fall over in the dirt. I felt confident about diagnosing keypad error messages, and this one was easy since it just said to call the alarm company. I examined all the control keys, but none looked like it would connect me straight to the alarm company, as if the keypad were also the bat-phone.

Out of the universe of things that can be known, I have not learned many. But I have learned not to manipulate an electronic security system by randomly pushing buttons and hoping that something good happens. I’ve never seen it done successfully, even in spy movies where people fly airplanes sideways all the way through empty buildings and live. I called the alarm company.

The nice alarm lady told me to push Cancel twice to make the beeping stop. Then she had me push a different button, which gave me a “Low Batt” message. Beautiful. I just needed to change the backup battery. I knew we had the manual, because my wife keeps a kitchen drawer full of manuals for every household system, appliance, tool, and piece of electronics we own. It sounds terrifying, but because of her organizational skills, I had the manual in my hands within seconds.

The battery was the size and weight of a big, shiny, black brick, like something you’d throw through a window at a black-tie riot. I slid it out, ordered a replacement, and was watching TV all relaxed and smug when my wife got home.

At midnight the security system started beeping again and woke us up. I figured maybe I should have hit Cancel twice again after I took out the battery, so I did that.

At four a.m. it beeped again until I hit Cancel twice. Perhaps I needed to reinstall the dead battery, so it could keep the seat warm for its replacement. I did that. The beeping had pulled my wife out of some horrific nightmare, the nicest part of which was being trapped in a car that was washed away by a river of blood. I am not exaggerating. She lay awake while I slept until eight. That’s when the system beeped again. I hit Cancel twice.

My wife in her days as a James Bond villain

We studied the manual the next day because there’s got to be a setting for this, and I hate to call companies for help before I read the damn manual (unless their keypad message says to). We found a possible solution (that didn’t work), and then another (that didn’t work). We were handicapped by the fact that we had to wait for four hours to find out whether a solution worked. And as crazy as it sounds, we had other things to do during the day, so that limited our trials.

At bed-time we decided to just turn off the beeping functionality. Brute force.

At three a.m. it beeped. I pressed the Cancel button an improbable number of times. “Press” may not be the right word. Ten minutes later the system began beeping again.

I called a different nice alarm lady and explained our situation. She said that the system should only beep every twelve hours, not four. I invited her to wait on hold for four hours to experience the joy of the next beeping with me. She declined and said the only ways to stop the beeping were to install a fresh battery (which wouldn’t arrive until Saturday), or power down the system by unplugging it inside the house.

“Yes, power us down! We don’t care about death as long as we can sleep. Where do we unplug it?”

“It could be somewhere in your garage, or basement, or laundry room, or attic. Or in any closet in your house.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

For the next half-hour my wife and I re-enacted the scene from “Practical Magic” in which Sandra Bullock rips up the entire floor of her Victorian house looking for a deadly, chirping beetle. Our scene was less picturesque in that we were throwing around clothes, and boxes, and vacuum cleaners, looking for a fist-sized, gray transformer plugged into a random outlet.

At last my wife spotted three feet of near-invisible wire running down her closet wall, going from nothing to nothing. Her cedar chest squatted on the other side of the wall. It was a brutal, coffin-sized thing holding her entire past, which weighed more than her current husband. We threw everything out, moved it, and tore the dread transformer from the outlet behind it.

The creature was dead. I wanted to snip it off at the wall and dangle it from the mantle by its wires. We went back to bed just before dawn. My wife patted my shoulder and muttered, “My hero.”

Now it’s Tuesday, and our home is once again as secure as the belly of a constipated whale. I’m sitting around with no tangible threats for us to slay, after which I can take all the credit. It’s one of the curses of modern man. Tonight, I will secretly break the clothes dryer so I can look good fixing it tomorrow.

We all know that most Canadians are polite. I now know why. They sublimate their fury. Canadians drive like enraged Mongols. They walk through public places like they were electrons pinging around in a supercollider. I can only confirm that’s true for the ones in Montreal, of course, and only for some of them, but evidence is evidence.

Our hotel in Montreal sits next to the largest mall in Quebec. I mean I could spit on it from my window if I wanted to, and if my window opened. I was surprised, since I had only been looking for a reasonable rate at a hotel that was still inside Quebec. We had gotten into town right in the middle of the Montreal evening rush hour that lasts from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. We were tired and snippy, and we just wanted to eat something cheap and fast, then go to bed.

At the mall I realized that only one in fifty or so Canadians is overweight. I now know why. Fast food at the largest mall in Quebec was not a double cheeseburger with super-size fries. It was a small bowl of tortellini that cost the same as a double cheeseburger with super-size fries. I wasn’t getting the same dollar to calorie ratio that I do at home, but I didn’t feel cheated. I felt kind of smug and superior. I drove around and cut people off in traffic for a while, and all the nastiness went away.

These Legos have nothing to do with anything except I saw them in the mall and thought they were cool. The Midgaard Serpent is just out of frame to the left.

When I walked into the restaurant last night my feet stuck to the floor. The smell of grease choked me up a little, and I couldn’t hear my wife over the pressure cookers and fans. I assumed the fans were there to keep the sole employee from exploding like a CO2 cartridge in a bonfire.

I decided that I had done something bad without knowing it, and my wife was bringing me to Uncle Nick’s Greek Fried Chicken to punish me.

One of the fun things about visiting other cities is eating at restaurants we’ve never heard of. McDonald’s, Chipotle, and Waffle Houses are everyplace, so why eat at one of them in when you’re in Nashville or Columbus? We don’t like those damn places much even when we’re at home.

In Nashville I picked out a place called the Whiskey Diner—lots of dead cow and single malt scotch. However, my wife leaned heavily towards the Frothy Monkey, a hip coffee house with comfort food. I was skeptical, since we’re not hip, we’re suspicious of comfort, and neither of us drinks coffee. But I agreed to go with her to the Frothy Monkey for one excellent reason: when it turned out to be horrible I could hold it over her for the rest of the trip and achieve the moral high ground, from which I would dictate all future food decisions.

Sadly, the Frothy Monkey served up some pretty fine food. The grilled salmon sandwich did not suck. So, I arrived in Columbus with no record of being correct when she had blown it. When she suggested Uncle Nick’s I said, “Uncle Nick’s Greek Fried Chicken? Sure, sweetie, it sounds great. I’ll pull up the directions on my iPad, without which previous generations must have circled the same four blocks in bewilderment, until they gave up and built a new home on whatever sidewalk they had run out of gas beside.”

Uncle Nick’s had four parking spaces. That was fine, since it had three tables, also sticky. The only thing Greek about the chicken was that it shared a menu with gyros and baklava. The menu also offered family packs ranging up to 200 pieces of chicken with 300 orders of potatoes, which could be the right size for some Greek families I guess.

We ordered chicken from the skeezy guy leaning against the register. Then we waited. We waited some more. A fellow wearing flip-flops came in and picked up bags and bags of food. He might have been the 200-piece chicken guy. My wife was very quiet. Or, maybe she was talking a streak and I couldn’t hear her over all the pressure cookers. At last, Skeezy Guy brought us chicken. This is what it looked like.

Without exaggeration, it was the best fried chicken I’ve eaten in 20 years, damn it. I may not get to make another food-related decision for the rest of the trip.

https://www.unclenicksgfc.com/

https://frothymonkey.com

I am objectively a lousy father. Compared to my father, I am a psychotic crack addict trying to raise orchids in a toilet.

It started with a rose-colored memory of my family’s driving vacations when I was a boy. Swinging through the western states and the national parks. Driving from Texas to the arctic circle and back. That sort of thing. My wife and I had long discussed a trip like that, and we finally decided to do it: Dallas to Montreal and back.

Many lists were made, and my wife declared them good. We packed the necessities, like phones, computers, and some other stuff, maybe underwear. We got the house-sitter, and the person to come in multiple unspecified times a day to check on the cats, and new shells for the shotgun. We packed the night before departure. My wife would no more wait to pack last minute than she would kick a puppy over the backyard fence.

This morning, the day of departure, we loaded the car and did a cat headcount. We came up one head short.

That didn’t worry us much. This cat is a big baby, and he probably hid someplace because we were acting weirder than usual. We checked his usual hiding places. We searched unusual hiding places. We looked behind things and under things, in every cabinet twice and every closet three times. We shook cans of treats and containers of food while calling his name like the kid in Shane. He did not appear.

My wife felt sure he was hiding in some super-secret kitty spot. I thought maybe he had run out when we were loading the car. He could be wandering the neighborhood, dazed with hunger, staggering onto Crazy-Street, the six-lane race track behind our house, to be crushed like a cat-shaped jar of jelly. My fears were valid—we once had a cat that sneaked out the front door and never came back.

We searched the neighborhood. No cat. At last my wife reasoned that the cat was too much of a coward to ever go outside, so we should get on the road. I agreed, but I felt bad about it—like a rotten kitty-dad. We notified the people staying in our house to watch out for the cat and tell us if they saw him.

I pulled the car out of the driveway, certain that our cat was, at that very moment, dodging cars someplace down the block. I drove the other way though, because Montreal is in that direction. After five minutes I couldn’t stand it. I turned the car around and drove home. Our cat was laying where he always lays, on our bed, with a, “Holy shit, what are you doing back?” expression.

As we drove our first leg to Little Rock, I felt relieved and thrilled that our cat was safe at home, thinking bad thoughts about it. But all the way there a voice in my head said, “YOU WERE WILLING TO LEAVE YOUR CAT BEHIND TO GET SQUISHED BY A CAR, WEREN’T YOU? ASSHOLE.”

Little Rock is beautiful. Here’s a picture.

By the way, east of Dallas I found out there are no Buc-ees on the way to Little Rock, and I strongly recommended we go back home.