7.28.2005

Please, don't leave me...


There'll be some like this...
click pic

...and some like this.

I'm leaving Friday morning for Sun Valley, then Moab, UT. Flying the li'l' rocket out to see friends in sunny places.

This is why my little plane rocks: no security check in, no flying to Denver, changing planes, flying to Grand Junction, getting a rental, then driving to Moab. Here is one (rare) clear cut case where my little airplane beats crap out of the airlines. By about five hours.

Anyway, stepping off my Grandstand: I'll be rafting with friends and their adolescent sons for a week or so. So no new posts until about the 8th or 9th. I'll have a ton o' junk for you then. But for now, have a summer...

CCH
click pic

7.27.2005

Too Tense

Tense issues. This language - what is a verbose pendantiphile like me to do?

"I can't find my keys" is followed with,

"Aha! Here, under the dog, I found my keys."

Hence,

"If you would just mind me, you wouldn't lose your keys."

"Indeed, if I had just mound him - I wouldn't have lost my keys."

Why minded? The -ed is an awkward addition to a nice tight word. (You think not? Try adding -ed to "find" and saying it out loud.)

Maybe our linguistic progenitors thought mound rang vaguely sexual as a verb. It does to my sophomoric ear.

7.26.2005

The Bile Driver

I do not understand. Your motivation. Your drive to compete in something as mundane as getting from one lane to another. Your willingness to endanger you, me, the ten cars following us most closely. Those four people waiting so patiently at the bus stop we're blazing past.

I am half a mile from the Queen Anne turnoff, and I’m in the middle lane. Traffic is heavy, but moving at 50. I signal to move to the right lane, there behind the delivery truck, and ahead of you in your gray Detroitasaurus. I give plenty of warning. I move thoughtfully.

Are you a child of scarcity?

The slowest triplet, never quite getting a nipple?

Perhaps chosen last for every team game on the playground? (So was I – but it didn’t affect my driving.)

Maybe you have other…uh…shortcomings.

But when I signal and you race up to close the gap so I can’t get in, I’m left to wonder. And left with fewer than ten seconds to figure out how not to be committed to crossing the Aurora Bridge.

You tailgated the delivery truck so closely to keep me out, I thought you might touch. Such intensity, and all so pointless.

Utter satisfaction is mine when I simply press the accelerator and find a nice gap in front of the delivery truck.

Painless for me, and for the truck driver. But you - there was rage inside your gray velour cave.

The best part was seeing you then shoot off to the side streets on Queen Anne, hoping to get ahead of me. And then I see you fall one too many cars back as you rejoin McGraw. You probably weren’t even going to McGraw in the first place. You just had to teach someone a lesson. Some stranger.

Why so angry? I hope you don’t have children.