I drove over to Crossroads to the Home Depot there, and on the way had a little chat with myself about my attitude toward another driver.
The person in front of me, in the left lane, was not going fast enough for my taste. I considered slowing down and getting behind an even slower car already in the right lane, but didn’t.
Finally, she (yes, I checked to see) put her turn signal on indicating a move to the right lane with the intention of slipping between two cars, one of them being the one I had contemplated moving behind.
“Great,” I thought, and started accelerating in anticipation of passing her ass. As she continued to hang in the left lane with her right turn signal on, I grew a little more perturbed, until she finally moved over to the right just in time to make me miss the exit I needed to take to get to Crossroads.
After a short ejaculation of expletives, which I witnessed while observing myself from outside of myself, I thought, “You really need to calm down. You do realize the part you played in this little scenario, don’t you? You’re in absolutely no hurry. You could have slowed down and moved over earlier like you thought of doing. Now you have the mile-and-a-half out of your way—until the next exit, the Cary Parkway, where you can turn around—to think about the consequences of your choices.”
So, I said a quick little prayer, “Lord give me patience, and do it now!”
At Home Depot, I bought a $50 gift certificate for my ex-wife’s birthday—one dollar for each year of her life now. There’s good news and bad news about getting her gift to her by her birthday, which is tomorrow:
- The bad news: It’s not going to make it to Charlotte by tomorrow.
- The good news: She’s supposed to be at the beach all week, so won’t know what day it arrives.
I calmly drove to Helios, where I spent the afternoon blogging, chatting with Mark Z. on and off, having lunch, and sending a couple of birthday e-cards.
I decided to go to Flex early tonight and leave when Scareyoke started, instead of going there when it starts and being annoyed.
That worked out well. I played a few games of pool, several games of a fun word game on one of those game kiosks, and got a bag of most-delicious-looking tomatoes from Military Mary’s garden. I see some serious BLTs in my future.
I’m not going to go on and on and on (just on and on) about Owen Meany while I’m reading it again, but “they” say you should start off a book with a strong opening sentence—one with a “hook” in it.
I was just looking at the opening sentence in this one. A hook? How about enough hooks to catch a school of scrod?
| I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. |
I believe I saw this on a list somewhere once as one of the top opening sentences of novels. Amen!