I read lm's diary about driving and the warm air.  I was reminded of a time, which seems like it was decades ago, but in reality couldn't have been more than four years ago.  I was working at the 411, I think I was still in training but I can not remember.  Oh, yeah, I can pinpoint the time frame down a bit, now that I concentrate.  Ronald Reagan had died and CSPAN or some channel was re-airing the funeral.  So whenever that was.

I was at the apartment of a friend of my brother's.  She was recovering from gall bladder surgery, and she had a friend with her as well.  Both I believe wanted to sleep with me, if not that night, at least some time in the future.  I was not so sure.  The night was full of teasing and talking and watching the re-run of the fucking Reagan funeral.  It was surreal.  I can't imagine how my perceptions would be different if I had been on drugs.  But I was sober.  Unless you count the contact high from second hand Marlboros.  Both of these women smoked like it was going to be illegal in 20 minutes.

Around 3 or 4 in the morning  I grew tired of the smoke, and the lack of any sort of move towards sex, and I left.  It was foggy when I had gotten there.  It was foggy when I left.  I was tired, but restless.  I wound down the window, and let the cool, moist air blow over me.  I had had the Impala on Interstate 80 a few weeks earlier and I knew she could get up to 80MPH.  I didn't attempt to do so in town.   In fact I drove slow enough that I hit almost every red light there was between the ZOO and the highway to where I lived.  There is just something I find, intertesting about sitting at a traffic light at 4AM, with no one around. At 4PM it's bumper to bumper, but then I had the whole road to myself.

It was nearing sunrise, by the time I got to the Y intersection of the highway I had to travel to get home.  It was not as foggy on the highway, which was good, since the deer population was still quite high.  I kept to the right and made another right to a dirt road that went by a crumbling garage and house.  If you looked quickly as you drove by you could see the roof was missing in several places.  And if you paid close attention you could see that on the far end of the house, which had missing parts of the roof as well, that people still lived in the falling down crumbling house.  I drove on.

The fog became thicker as I drove, which made sense, as I was getting closer to the river.  The sun was up, and the fog would soon be gone.  I drove over the old one lane bridge.  The Impala barely made it across.  I couldn't imagine firetrucks making it across.  It was that narrow.  I drove until I got to the parking lot of the trailhead of the Rails-To-Trails extension. I didn't get out of my car.  I just sat there and promised myself I'd do something to change the way I felt most of the time.

Time is a motherfucker.  it just slips by when you least suspect it.