I renounce yesterday’s post because it was a stupid diary entry and not a Spill.
This one is a diary entry too but.
I woke up late and fussy, even though the only real thing that wasn’t done was weeding and I can’t bring myself to care very much about somebody else’s weeding.
I made it in just in time which means three hours or so before class to meeble around with the Office Hours Requirement.
In that three hours I got the first real Monday night class prepped completely and properly. I knocked out the Census Report Requirement. I got a long way down the road toward prepping tomorrow’s classes too. Then I went down to the classroom and I fuckin’ nailed it.
I slapped their collective dicks about the pointlessness of a certification-driven life but I did it smoothly, well aware of the light hypocrisy in my words. I reviewed last week’s chapter and took an online quiz with the whole class and they got 13 out of 14. Then I got down to business on chapter two, and I told them to ignore the book–not all hacktivists are evil, and Snowden was a patriot and a white hat for a long damn time before there was a hacktivist gleam in his hero eye.
The old military guys wore bemused smiles about that. I don’t know if what I was saying rang true to them, or if I was pissing them off like some cartoon of a commie professor–doesn’t matter. Needed saying. I said it. I stepped to the line and dropped the three-pointer.
Then I tore through the rest of it. At one point I felt that disembodied lightheaded sensation like someone else was talking but I didn’t trip and I just kept talking anyway.
Afterwards I stayed late to try out some new things on a student computer for Wednesday’s class, and went out to eat at a Cubero’s for the very first time.
Back to the office, wrap it up. Almost nine at night and homeward bound.
There are two pieces of state route to get back out to the dirt road. One is twice as long as the other. I turned from the short leg onto the long big road and Bam. Traffic stopped dead in both directions. I got the flashers on and stopped dead too.
I checked the alternate route and as I suspected it would be forty miles longer to go around.
There was nothing but the middling jazz on the radio, so I decided that for the first time in … a year? Two? I would pick out a CD for listening to instead. I carry six or eight of them. The winner was:
It could have been Cake and it could have been Cracker but it wasn’t. The Mountain Goats are who I am right now and that is very often true.
That done, I said eff it, and turned around to do the extra forty miles.
As soon as I did, the tire light came on. This happens about once a month, because there is a very slow leak in the driver’s front. Hmm.
Back in town at right about the place I’d turn to go up the mountain, there was a gas station, and after some effort I found the holy grail–a free air and water station. I never knew it existed. I had almost given up on any of them existing anywhere in the state ever again. But it was there and I took on the five PSI required to make the light go off.
This same gas station also has a working pay phone, which I’d also never noticed. So it is holy ground of a sort.
(Someday I will tell you a story about how smartphones ruined everything that was good about a certain kind of buggywhip expertise that I used to be a genius at, involving pay phones and the tattered phonebooks that hung underneath them, and paper maps and a keen violent sense of intuition about neighborhoods and finding the best ones. It will be filed under tragedy and aging.)
Then I should have got back on the long loop around the blockage but I didn’t. I decided to go visit the best water machine ever and get three more gallons.
The best water machine is at the Co-op and the Co-op was quite closed. But next door to it is a convenience store, and in the parking lot of the convenience store there were four cop cars convened to handle a customer who got a little bit too mouthy for the clerk’s comfort. Four.
I got my water and eased next door to the crowded lot where things were wrapping up and the cops were slacking around. I approached them. “State Route North,” I said, “What’s the ETA on that opening?”
The cops told me it was opening as we spoke.
They only lied by a little. I waited five more minutes, having got back to the scene of the crime, but it did unclog pretty quick.
I hope that the guy who wanders up and down that road on his recumbent bicycle picking up recyclable trash was not involved, because he is an icon and the last of the hunter-gatherers in these parts.
Except for me.
And I am only one in theory.