Traffic Thoughts

If your Toyota Echo or Corolla accelerates unintentionally, sit back and enjoy. I've driven one too many four-bangers that couldn't deliver intentional acceleration with gas pedal pushed to the back of the radiator.

Trying on the indigo-blue jeans Thumper bought me last night, I am still wearing a blue oxford button down and suddenly I am my first GI-Joe. If I held one hand in a steady open grasp and the other in a permanent thumb and index finger point, I'm sure I would frighten several people who were kids in the sixties.

Thumper also bought herself some undies, one size larger. She explained that this replaced the pairs that I keep washing and tossing into a dryer set to "inferno." These were pre-shrunk.

She did not appreciate my first guess at her "raison d'achat."

According to the weather forecast, the mid-Atlantic is either in for a winter storm this weekend, or Armageddon. I'm still trying to parse the report's tone.

New Yorkers.
Philadelphians.
Liverpudlians.
Orlandians.
Tampons?

If you're coursing around in a BMW just be aware that I already suspect you of something, somewhere.

Santas Fe?

Hong Kongolese? For that matter.

Out of the blue (the best things usually come from there) I got a writing assignment offer today. Of course I accepted and shot the editor off a snappy note saying so. Also using the wrong possessive therein. This now equates me to the writer's equivalent of an exciteable Chihuahua who pisses himself when petted.

Bunny on.

Sorry, there's a bit of Gore-Tex stuck in your teeth

Just before the Amtrak train got to New London, the moon came over the horizon and I knew it was going to be one of those nights.

New London is usually where I hang out the right hand side window of the train, looking at the massive General Dynamics submarine pens. These are places where we build the sleek, swift and terribly beautiful machines that, if I were by accident of fate assigned to, would have their interiors completely licked clean of paint as claustrophobia took hold.

Thankfully, I'm too old and just not nautically inclined. Not only won't, but by the hand of Providence, can't go there any more.

The moon, on the other hand, was a different issue.

I knew I had been out of sorts all day, but I ascribed this to getting on a train north to go to see Mom. Not that seeing Mom was a bad thing in itself, it was just the ancillary issues of being treated like a twelve year old and constantly being asked if I was truly relaxed (it'll take two more bourbons, but yes) and why wasn't I hungry (get to that in a minute) that set a number of anatomical functions to overload in the station waiting for the hour-late regional. Now the moon set me straight and I realized that farting quietly during a jackhammer interlude only to have my good wife ask a radius of humans within twelve feet of the source of her voice if they too smelled methane had nothing to do with being stressed about going home.

It was the moon. The full moon that was going to rise and did rise above the frozen Connecticut shoreline that had had me on edge and itchier than I usually am in the dead of winter. Ok, so I exfolliate abnormally between December and March, an event that by end of January has me drawing my back across rough-edged walls in a manner that would put a rutting elk to shame. I thought it was just the humidity, or lack thereof, and then I thought that rutting elk, with onions and a little red wine, would taste just dandy about now. Barring that, I could tear the heart and liver out of the conductor.

Yep. Full moon. Freezing night. My "favorite" allignment of the planets, it was time to go hunting again.

I hate full moons in winter. They constantly remind me of the poor career choices of my youth. Rather than die once and join the undead I opted for the carnal pleasures of temporal existence and made my Faustian bargain to go hunting for fresh hot flesh once a month.

Boy, did I fuck up.

Rather than the creature of the night who has to be invited in, the one who Anne Rice romanticizes in a collection of best-selling novels and films, I'm the monster who bashes through your door uninvited and wholly without formal announcement.

Ladies and Gentlemen; Claude Raines.

Nope. Crash! Growl! Snarl! Screech! Munch munch munch.

I didn't really have a choice. I camped a lot as a kid so I guess this was inevitable. My parents were pretty strict, I didn't get the car a lot so driving down to the French market at midnight was pretty much off the books. I opted for the canopy of the stars in a sleeping bag and don't worry, they're more scared of us than we are of them.

Another useful life lesson on the ash heap. Thanks, Dad.

So here I am, on train 175 to Providence, sorry but I got to get off in Kingston. A bit of motion sickness, you understand. But in reality, while my old buddy Duncan is no doubt burning candles and brushing over the toussled hair of his newest URI RA (Duncan's over two hundred and sixty five years old, he really should stop robbing the cradle and date in his age group), eternally twenty four, I'm tromping through the woods, hoping the Merrill's hold out moisture and looking for some Pat's fan who's had one too many 'gansetts.

This sucks. I hate this. And I hate this time of year. Instead of building a blazing fire, mulling wine and slitting the wrists of the willing, I have to tear through layering to get to the juicy, fleshy parts. And don't I pay? Not only in Persian throw rugs ground down with muck and forest compost, but industrial-Prilosec stomach churning through whatever L.L. Bean has concocted to tame the elements this year.

No no no. No gentle seduction by candlelight for me. No soft sighs, punctuated by sharp inhalations as the carotid is punctured. Rather I've got the unholy screaming, flailing and yelling, dragging them into the woods behind a tree where I can tear their throat out without attracting the undue attention of the Alpha Nu Omega pledge homebound in his screaming-yellow Chevy Cobalt.

No novels devoted to my lost cause. One good song, but I don't want to move overseas, especially now with the Pound to Dollar exchange being as shitty as it is. Guess I'll have to slaughter, call Mom to tell her I'm an hour late and catch a cab to the train station I was supposed to meet her at at seven.

Right, and like I have eighty five bucks to spare. College kids are loaded. With what I pulled out of his wallet, I couldn't get an Awful Awful at the Creamery.

Rawhoo!

Bunny on.

Is That an Icicle or Are You Glad to See Me?

Found myself in New York City this morning, for once quite by design rather than the happenstance of past years. And found myself there to be cold, quite cold, really fucking cold to the point of gulagian discomfort.

Last night I played some Lewis Black, ranting on about cold so from that perspective I am not going to apologize for the use of colorful invectives. Particularly against this fucking weather.

Mothers, put your children away, lest they Twitter that Mom's reading a blog that talks like they heard teacher when someone opened a door right into her new Corolla.

But to the cold: I laughed at Black's archetypical rant against the weather last night but somehow, although the words and vocal intonation played in my head this morning, it wasn't so funny after all.

FUCK ITS COLD!!

Somewhere around nine I was walking through Times Square waiting for a ball to drop. One would do although two would take some of the additional discomfort of walking out of the picture. I gave in around fiftieth street to barrel into a sporting goods store (they were open) and bought a N.E. Patriots wool cap.

Coupla' reasons. One, I'm a Pats fan. Two, I'm not a not a New York fan of any stripe but thats beside the point. The point being that the Giants are truly, like the Yankees, a team of the Devil. Anyone with the audacity to rob someone of a perfect season just to claim a silly little Super Bowl ring has to be in the employ of a certain B.L. Zebub.

The season was such big news that it even made NPR, not normally known for sports reporting outside of U Penn sculling. I remember Carl Kassel announcing an almost perfect season for the New England Pahtroyuts. Remember, this was NPR. Patriot is a foreign word.

Then the New York Devil-Worshipping Harbinger's of Hell win the Super Bowl.

I think that may have a lot to do with weather today.

At least to my Foxboro state of mind.

Bunny on.