There’s a cricket living in my garage. And with the acoustics in the garage, he sounds like the biggest cricket in the history of cricketdom. He’s not a cricket, he’s a Cricket. He’s Cricketasaurus Rex. The Cricket does not need a prop.
When I walk out into my breezeway (which is now technically a mudroom or perhaps a vestibule, since we’ve turned 2/3’s of the breezeway into part of our kitchen), the Cricket chirps happily away, serenading our grill and snow blower and my golf clubs until I step down out of the house. Then all of the sudden’. Nothing.
And I love that. It makes me happy, that Cricket quiet when I open the door. Sort of like an apprehensive hush, like the way a murmuring crowd goes still when the house lights dim or the orchestra raises their bows, meaning the star is about to take the stage. Like maybe it’s just a part of his morning that he waits for’ the girl! The girl is coming! The girl’ ooh, here she is! Shhhhh Shhhh shhhhh, can’t miss the girl!
Of course, he’s probably just whispering to his friends ‘Oh jeez, I hope she doesn’t step on me. Because seriously, have you SEEN the size of her feet!?’
I am the only person in the world to find that funny, and you know what? I don’t even care.
So something peculiar happened earlier this week.
I have a bit of a brain cloud. I don’t know how else to explain it. I had been a bundle of energy on Sunday, fitting a million projects into the hours between sun up and sun down (went to an art festival, gave myself a manicure and pedicure, did every bit of dirty laundry in the house AND put it away, slipcovered my loveseat, which was harder than I thought it would be but now Tilly won’t go near the thing, took out all of the trash, reorganized my bathroom cabinet and realized that I have a serious nail polish addiction, made dinner, and watched two DVDs as well as the last six episodes of Sex And The City, four pages of my scrapbook, and obsessively kicked some ass in Expert mode on Internet Backgammon’ phew) but then on Monday, I was having a hard time thinking. It was like I have a finite amount of gumption for the week and I used it all up by Sunday evening.
And with this brain fog, I find that I have zero concentration. I find myself only able to act if I plot things out in my head. I suspect that someone has slipped me a roofie. And for some reason, my suspicions fall to Pineapple Girl, although I realize that the notion is quite absurd. What is more, my lips are all funked out again. It’s like I bought a ‘Give Yourself Collagen Injections At Home’ from an infomercial starring Barbara Hershey and Jessica Alba, only things went horribly awry. What is more, perhaps I had a muscle spasm and instead of injecting my lip, I accidentally injected my lower eye lid, because Eye Infection? Yeah, I’m your bitch.
So not only have my superior intellectual abilities left me, but also my face decided that I was just too cute and is now revolting. In both senses of the word. And don’t clamor for pictures because the answer is simply hearty laughter.
Apparently, my appetite is also flustered by the brain cloud, as I am not interested in anything but water and the occasional ice cream sandwich. Which, according to medical science, do not provide any noticeable benefits to brain clouds. But I’m still gathering data for my study.
I had something else to say but I thought I heard someone talking about candy and I just completely lost it.
Oh. Yeah.
So earlier this week, I had left the house with a vague idea of what I was going to do that day, knowing that it involved going to the other side of town, but once I got to the other side of town, I didn’t know what I was doing over there and then decided that I needed to wake up because my head was full of the fuzzies and what better to wake me up than something from Sbux and there was an Sbux in Barnes & Noble, but then I’d have to park and also deal with pseudo snobby book people inside, looking for their Chicken Soup For The Pet Groomer’s Soul or something and I just didn’t want to deal with that and it would be easier to just go back to my side of town and go to my local Sbux with the drive through and where it wouldn’t be a hassle to get the drink I wanted and’
Candy?!
Anyway, I got back on the highway but by the time I crossed the river, I decided that obviously a venti cup of anything wasn’t enough to fix what was wrong with my head and I obviously needed a nap, so I decided to go home instead and do just that.
This is where the strange thing happens.
I was in the right lane because my exit was coming up. A minivan was merging into traffic. Well’ I use the word ‘merge’ like a verb, there, but something you should understand about Green Bay drivers is that they do not understand what this word ‘merge’ means. They feel that they have every right to be on the road and it is the job of the cars already there to make them feel welcome. Thus, if you are in the right lane and a car is merging, they completely expect you to make way for them by swerving into the left lane temporarily and then adjusting as you see fit. They will not speed up nor slow down. In fact, in most cases, they don’t even look to see if there are cars coming. They view the word ‘merge’ as something passive, like ‘getting killed’.
By the way, I am not advocating that drivers not be courteous to merging traffic, but rather that merging traffic should not take so much for granted.
So the minivan was running out of lane but was driving nose and nose with the Monte. I switched to the left lane because defensive driving is always the best idea in any situation. The minivan settled in along side me, going a bit slower than I was. My exit was less than a quarter of a mile away, so I sped up and changed lanes again, in front of the minivan and then looked in my rearview to scowl at the minivan because he had made me change lanes to accommodate his stupidity.
The driver was an old man. He looked like a retired pastor, had that safe sort of clueless look. He smiled to himself and then adjusted something that looked to be on the passenger size sun visor.
I probably muttered something to myself about old people driving beige minivans with running lights.
I put on my turn signal to get off the highway. I noticed that the minivan was getting off with me.
I proceeded down the escarpment and then got off the main drag to my shortcut. The minivan followed me. This was not out of the ordinary, as the road to my little short cut is also the main entrance to a suburb which is about 30 years old and contains many original owners.
Look’ I made a picture for you.
Where all those squiggly little cul-de-sacs are in the middle? Hilly as all get out. My house is at the base of that group of hills, but I like to take the hilly way in and get to see the lovely view that I pay for with my property taxes. But I digress.
So I entered the little residential neighborhood and then signaled to turn into the hilly twisty road in the middle.
The van followed me. I raised my eyebrows and checked my mirror again. The old man wasn’t looking at me intently, he seemed to be in his own little world, and kept messing with something up on the passenger size sun visor.
I shrugged and kept driving, figuring that he would turn off into one of the little cr’ches of homes nestled within the hills.
He didn’t.
I was probably being paranoid. I could actually see my backyard from the stop sign, could have hit my garage door opener and probably opened my garage door from there. But instead, I turned right, figuring I could go down my street the backway, no big deal, but this would prove that he wasn’t following me.
He turned right too.
Ok, no big deal. This was technically a more traveled street. Sure, the path I took to get there was not the most direct, but it wasn’t like I DISCOVERED that short cut. Lots of people probably used it to avoid the traffic lights on the main road.
I turned down a little two block street which intersects with my street.
The minivan followed me.
I turned up my street.
The minivan followed me.
Ok, now he is definitely following me because I was one block shy of going in a complete circle. I didn’t know what to do. I could have pulled into my house but then what? Then he’d know where I lived! And what was up with this? He was an old man! An old man in a beige minivan with daytime running lights for safety! He wasn’t the American Psycho. He wasn’t Rutger Hauer. He was this old short looking man who probably had gout and a heart arrhythmia.
I turned up my CD player as a talisman against the old man, figuring that he wouldn’t get too close if I were blasting the Nine Inch Nails.
I turned again back on the original road. He followed me.
I took another right and sped up that block as quickly as possible and then turned right again just as the minivan turned onto the street. I turned again, back onto my street and then raced down it, past my own house again, to the end of the street. I watched in my rearview mirror as the minivan followed, two blocks behind.
I turned right again, raced up a long street, then took an unexpected left, thanked the heavens for the extra gas-hoggy Z34 engine, and then took a short cut through the parking lot of the snooty grocery store and then sat there at the light, watchful for the beige mini van in my rearview mirror.
But I had lost him.
Of course, when something like that happens, you realize about three minutes later all of the things you could have done. Like use the cell phone sitting there in my little phone holder thingy and call the police. Or just let him follow me to the police station. Or simply stop the car on the side of the road and see what he would do. And then maybe peel out of there like the Dukes of Hazard, leaving him sputtering in a cloud of dust like Roscoe P. Coltrain.
And even though it was this eighty-year-old guy in a beige minivan, it was still bizarre. Why was he following me? What did I do? Gave him angry eyebrows in my rearview mirror? And then it occurred to me that he probably GOT OFF THE HIGHWAY for the sole reason of following me. What the heck is up with that? And an old man? For some reason, why does that make it less likely that he was a crazy? Because it seems like the crazy people all get themselves killed (or merged) by the time they hit the realm of senior discount for the all-you-can-eat buffets. Or maybe Geritol pacifies them. Maybe that’s what Ensure really does. Ensures that we don’t have crazy old stalkers waiting to kill us in our garages with the questionably sturdy back door, ready to bludgeon us to death with their Slim Whitman commemorative crowbar or something.
So yeah. That was weird.
And this morning? When the cricket stopped chirping when I walked out the door into the breezeway (or mudroom’ or vestibule’ whatever), I could almost hear him whispering ‘Oh man, she’s gonna get it this time. I cannot WAIT for this shit, yo.’
You know, I simply cannot believe that I stopped swiping the first comment from -b and he has YET to take even one. And he STILL hasn’t signed up for Journalcon. Sheesh.
