Thursday, March 14, 2002

planewatching (look out irvine)

today seemed like it was going to be bad for some reason. i woke up feeling borderline sick and took five pills of echinecea trying to prevent being no longer borderline but actually sick. i can control you body. i will. bend spoon bend. i then had to take my mom's minivan out to this place so that they could do an estimate on it since my sister bumped it while she was home over spring break into a parked car. the minivan has the tiniest of scratches on it, but for some reason the insurance folks are still demanding an estimate. so my mom told me to bring it there at 11 o clock and to ask for harry. well, in case you have not learned this yet from your own experiences, let me let you in on a little secret: mapquest sucks. it printed out the most roundabout directions in the world and told me to make a wrong turn and so i got there about twenty minutes late. the secretary was a bitch from hell and is so the ageing slut who works at the front of every car place all across these united states. and my dad sold cars, so i am not just making mysoginist generalizations - from my many encounters they have all applied far too much make-up, have had bad perms, and even badder dye jobs - basically they are trying as hard as possible to extend the shelf life of their feminine charms, but it just never seems to work.

anyways, she tells me to sit down, and then just as i sit down, she tells me that i am twenty-five minutes late and that i need to reshedule because harry has an appoinment at twelve. first of all, i was twenty mintues late. i hate it when people feel the need to make your lateness sound just a little bit worse by adding a small amount of time to it - so small that you won't dispute the erroneous time because you don't want to seem petty. but yeah - i was only twenty mintues late. and secondly, nothing is wrong with the car, it should not take more than ten seconds to look at it. but, i was too tired and too sad already to fight with her, and got an appointment for tomorrow at nine. nine fucking o clock. god, that's early. and then she answered the phone a couple of times, and each time said, "it's a great day at koon's collision." no, it is not bitch. it is a horrible day at koon's collision and how about you just say "hello? how can i help you?"

and i seriously felt like crying, but i didn't. i got in my car and it was hot because it was a sunny day and i had left the windows up. heat trapped inside. i got in the car and felt the soothing heat, which made me aware of the sun - of what a beautiful spring day it was. and i sped out of koon's collision center, rolled down my windows, and let the spring day in - i removed the physical boundaries erected to make me distinct from the action and the actual world outside. the drawbridge was lowered from the castle over the moat. the berlin wall came fucking crashing down. and my car was filled with the dancing slightly chilly spring air - moving in circles around the interior of the car, fluttering loose papers, candy wrappers, and moody boys.

what happened after that was a totatlly different day. as ice cube said, "today was a good day." and can you get any more explicit than that? is that what "explicit lyrics" means? i came home and dug my bike out of the back of the shed, threw it into my mom's minivan and headed for huntley meadows park for some fun trail biking. but, i get there and see a stupid sign saying that no bicycles are allowed. what the hell is that? what's next? no smiles allowed? no happiness allowed?

so, i decided to bike down the parkway along the potomac. i drove far past where i normally bike along the parkway. past belle view. past old town. and stopped right past the airport at gravelly park. i got on my bike and took off. remeber E.T.? where that boy starts flying on his bike? that was me. i was waving to people in passing airplanes, singing with the returning migrating birds, and spitting as far as i could, competing against no one but my own sense of how far a boy should be able to spit in this day and age.

if only my bike didn't sound like a dishwasher, this bike ride would have been perfect. it sounded so horrible. my bike's chain is somehow almost entirelly rust and so squeaks and cranks nonstop. but the potomac was probably ten feet to my right. i was wearing a short sleeve shirt. i had my pants rolled up so that they wouldn't get caught in my bike chain. the sky was so blue. all the monuments were right across the river looking so bright and sunshiney in their white stone glory. i biked as far as i could on my rickety bike until my tiredness overwhelmed me. i got off my bike and went and layed next to the potomac. my backpack under my head. and took a nice hour long almost nap on the riverfront. the washington monument was to the right of my pressed together knees. the lincoln memorial was to the left of my pressed together knees. i shifted my legs to the right and parted my knees and lifted my pelvis a little so that from my viewpoint it looked like the washington monument was my erect penis. i'm such a little boy sometimes. i rested some more, listening to the sound of planes taking off and landing and to everything else which was just a jambalya of sounds. i didn't try to detect what the ingredients were. i just enjoyed the peacefulness of it all. the planes were seperate because they were like a big chicken bone in the soup, something that disrupted the flow of everything else.

i biked back to gravelly point and fell in love with this species of mine. there must have been at least thirty people sitting there as close to the airport fence as possible watching planes land. seeming like they were within a tippy toe arm's reach away from the landing plane. think wayne's world - that's exactly what it is like - the planes were so close. families, couples, and people by themselves all gathered here to marvel that somehow we got these huge fucking things up into the air. i joined them and thought the same - thinking how insane it is that this huge piece of metal can somehow fly through the air. watching it land, sort of worried each time, thinking that it was for sure going to hit the trees or something. its just so low.

after that, i called sarah and went with her to starbucks to get some coffee. i yanked the india arie cd from there, and we sat for an hour or so enjoying the setting sun and just talking and not talking (but that being the most wonderful thing on earth - not awkward at all). we then went to wal-mart so that i could buy some wd-40 to try to get the rust off my bike chain. wandering around that area of wal-mart, we walked by the skateboards. they were selling skateboards for $9.92!!! i could not resist. it's only ten bucks. i tried it out in wal-mart doing much better than i thought i would do. sarah bought a basketball. i then skated around the wal-mart parking lot for a while, exclaiming very proudly that i am a skater - that i am a fucking skater - whoo!

we then went to this weird taco bell/kfc combo place which did not even sell 7 layer burrtios and when i asked for a burrito supreme with beans instead of meat, they told me they don't make them that way. i wasn't about to ask why not - I just ate the crap. and then we went to sarah's and played a couple of games of horse with her new basketball. i lost all of them. h-o-r-s-e. i think sarah was only h-o-r each time. i was no iverson. but that is okay. today was a good day. fade us out cube.

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