Eccentric Flower:199812/losing stamina

twenty-eight december (retroactive)

losing stamina

Three days down, three days up. On the 27th, Chattanooga to mid-Virginia: Eight hours. On the 28th, mid-Virginia to DC: Four hours. Tomorrow, the old familiar leg home. Went out with Nonelvis and her sister this evening and drank beer. Beer is (it struck me too late) a really inefficient way of getting drunk, which is what I really wanted to do. With my trick metabolism, I have to drink fast if I want to feel it. I can't drink beer fast enough. What I should have done was imbibe a couple of shots of something.

It had been a really exhausting two days. On the leg up from Chattanooga, my knee and shoulder were hurting from the falls I had taken ice skating (I said I remembered how; I didn't say I was good), my back and neck and hip were sore from the cumulative effects of driving, and several days in a strange bed had left me running on limited sleep. So I was mostly concentrating on the road, not the roadside weirdnesses. However, we did note a few goodies.

For example, we saw a McDonald's billboard which gave several exits/locations and had the words "Sooner or Later." Isn't that ominous? Sooner or later, McDonald's is gonna get you. Resistance is futile. Later, at a McDonald's (yup, we succumbed, but only so I could get more coffee - although I'm not sure their dishwater qualifies) I noted that the strange little stirring rods they provide for coffee were in a bin labelled "Styx." Cute terminology, but, um, haven't they read any mythology in the Tennessee Valley? By the by, have you ever heard the rumor that those stirring rods used to be tiny little spoons, but McD's changed the design because people were using them for cocaine?

We also saw a really grimy eighteen-wheeler which had "www.washme.com" scrawled in the dirt on the back. Ah, internet penetration.

Went to Rowe's again, badly shaken after a near-death experience on the highway. (I went around a slow car on the left; someone else went around the car on the shoulder, and we both tried to occupy the same space as we finished passing.) We each ordered the meatloaf plate, and as one of our two vegetables, we each ordered turnip greens. The waitress commented that we were "eating healthy tonight." Ah, yes. I have a plate of meatloaf with gravy, mashed potatoes with more gravy, and super-buttery dinner rolls ... but a little bowl of greens makes it automatically healthy.

I love the South.

I was in a state of near-exhaustion by the end of these two days, and after the beer, I went to sleep around nine p.m.

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