But don't shoot me, here it is now. If you're really disappointed about the 24 hour difference, leave a comment and I'll send you a draft of the next one early.
Yep.
But anyway. As promised, here is Lost Frog. It's a little different.... one of those freewriting projects that got out of hand. It was a story I wanted to tell anyway, but it kind of became a whole 'nother monster here.
Enjoy.
___________________________________
I'm not sure why I called this Lost Frog. I knew I was going to write a story about being lost, but I wasn't sure what I was going to call it, and my eyes wandered to the left of the computer screen, and there was this toy frog, so I called it Lost Frog. On second thought, that means I actually know exactly why this story is called Lost Frog, it's just a stupid reason.
Not changing it though.
But about being lost. That's one of my things. (You know, like being cool, having a bunk bed, exploiting open source software, getting lost...) If I take one wrong turn, it's a two hour delay. Two wrong turns and I end up in Sacramento California.
(If I wanted to end up in Sacramento, I end up in Tokyo, Japan. The car swims. I bet it could give Phelps a run for his money. Or a swim for his money I guess. We could be snoozlepack* and say an elephant ride for his money.)
I didn't realize that I didn't have a sense of direction at first, because I have a very good memory, except about doing laundry. I used to aimlessly ride my bicycle hither and yon, and the thing about a bike is that you can awkwardly pick it up and turn around at any given time. You can't exactly do that in a car. It's not as risk compensation-y. So of course, after I got my driver's license, I knew all of the very local neighborhoods perfectly, having done nothing for the past two or three summers but meander about them. Now when riding shotgun in a car, I didn't have to pay attention to directions. I usually would read a book, (and get carsick) or stare out side window and just watch stuff go by. Sometimes I would imagine what would happen if there was like a large ax attached to the side of the car and it just whacked through all of the telephone poles.
Yea, I don't know about me.
The one thing I didn't do was pay attention to where I was going.
I've gotten better after having driven more often, but I still am awful. I like to use the excuse that I don't have a compass, except that I do have a compass on my freaking key-chain so that's kind of a really dumb excuse.
I'm not actually sure how I would use that to find things anyway, but it was a funny joke, so I'm leaving it there.
Anyway, there is this one parish that's a little further away that I assist at occasionally, I have the way there down pat. I get it. I know when to turn, and then when to turn again, and then I just keep going until I'm driving by the Church and stop the car stop the car dangit turn around.
So I kind of get it, it's not the worst. When I tried to get to a Men's rally, I ended up on my way to New York City.
I don't even live in New York.
But about that parish.
I can't ever ever ever get home the right way when I'm driving by myself. Everyone in my family magically knows exactly how to get there, (maybe because they go there more often than I do.) So when they're driving with me, sure I go the right way because they scream at me and poke me, which is a driving hazard, so risk compensation and the instincts of survival force me to go the right way.
But when I don't have that potentially dangerous situation, my brain goes into "oh, you needed to be home in fifteen minutes I'm so sorry" mode.
Did I mention that I live in the suburbs and the one wrong turn that I make every single time basically puts you into a meandering back road that forces you to drive through cornfields and around tractors for two and a half hours?
I don't even know what a tractor does.
The first time I made the mistake of attempting to drive home by myself, I took about an hour extra, which was even worse because I have an OCD thing about wasting gas.
Gasoline.
I really messed it up the second time though. There's this old thing that you've probably heard, goes like fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, or something like that, and this road has pulled it off way too many times. It doesn't even make logical sense. I should completely realize where I'm going by now, I've messed it up enough. You learn by making mistakes, right?
If I go down the road I'm supposed to, I just end up on the other one anyway. I'm sure that the gas stations purposefully move the roads around just to annoy me.
And make me buy gas.
Gasoline.
I went down the wrong road, and though as soon as I made the turn, I started to get that sinking feeling, it took me until I saw the Tractor Supply Co. to realize that I was lost, because I have never seen a Tractor Supply Co. in my area. The only one I ever saw was when I was on my way to Maryland for a scholarship competition, several hundred miles from my house.
I lost that competition by the way. Wasn't even a finalist. Maybe it was because I was asked to write an essay on theology, and instead I wrote one on chocolate chip cookies.
Okay, it was kind of about theology, but it was theology through cookies.
Oh well.
So I saw the Tractor place, and my first thought was, "hey, I heard that they sell really good boots there!" my second thought was "am I in Georgia?"
My third thought was to pull over, but I had already kind of gone past the side road by then.
There is this funny thing about Jersey. It's that you might live in the suburbs all your life, be exposed to a wee bit of farmland, but you don't realize how much of the state is still agriculture, until you are driving along a one step up from dirt road for fifty miles without a way to turn around without driving all over somebody's corn.
By the time I had found a place to turn, I had no idea where I was, and I started feeling like I'd run out of gas and be stranded in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but what I had in my pockets to survive. I wasn't sure if I was ready for that just yet, I'm still working on the whole survival-kit-in-a-pocket thing. I might be turned into a movie though, if I got out alive. If not, at least the boy scouts would remember me at the campfire.
Does anyone want to hear the one about the new driver on the endless country roads?
Actually, even they wouldn't, because I hadn't been to boy scouts in forever. Possibly because of having gotten lost on the way there. Possibly because of bears eating the troop. I won't say one way or the other.
I eventually broke that most sacred tradition of the male race, which is "don't ask for directions."
I didn't even do that right, finding myself on the way to that city near me that we tend to avoid for reasons of not wanting to be murdered. I did figure out where I was, (kinda) and am now writing this in the relative comfort of my house, un-murdered, and not the subject of a ghost story.
I did take an extra two hours to get home though.
Maybe I should learn how to use that compass.
*One of Sam's evil plots is to subtly manipulate the english language into changing the word "Arbitrary" out for the word "snoozlepack." Please consider editing your vocabulary to assist this important cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment