Adventures In Solitude IV: The End Has No End

The End Has No End – The Strokes

My parents should be back sometime within the next 48 hours and I guess I should be wrapping things up here. This is the part where I tell you about how much I’ve learned and about the profound change I’ve gone through spending so much time on my own and about the eternal struggle between man and his own nature and how it can only end in one’s own destruction…but that would all be a load of bullshit. Instead, I offer an amusing yarn.

In the last of my many firsts that I’ve inflicted upon myself over the last two weeks, I decided to fill up the gas all on my lonesome. It’s not like I’d never done it before, I’ve usually been under some kind of supervision that’s all. Now this scenario requires a little bit of visual explanation, so bare with me. As you all know, pumps are arranged in pairs and if you were to go to an empty lane you would pull ahead to the second pump so that someone could use the pump behind you. Simple, right? On this particular day, someone was indeed occupying the second pump so I pulled in behind him and began doing my business. As I finished up and got back in my vehicle, I hear the car behind me honk at me. At this point, the car that was at the pump ahead of me is long gone so I’m thinking that the person behind me thinks that I’m being inconsiderate for not using the second pump. Now I’m mad because I feel like the honker hasn’t taken into account the situation that I drove into and is just being a jerk. So I pull ahead to avoid a confrontation and I get honked a second time. The fuck, right? Eventually I drive around to get a look at the person who was honking at me (this old black woman) and I just raise an eyebrow like “What do you want?” She points at me in a semi-accusatory, semi-??? manner. I drive off.

I don’t make a habit of getting mad at strangers, but I was telling myself that I should have got out of the car and explained that I couldn’t pull ahead and that she was being quite rude. Luckily, I was almost home and by then I’d gotten over the incident. Not worth having a heart attack over, I figured.

Fast forward to the next day. I’m still thinking about the encounter, but something else about it is bothering me. I was done with a desire for confrontation, now I just felt like I was forgetting something and it had something to do with the woman. She was honking…and pointing…but it wasn’t malicious and she only began to do it after I’d already got…back…in the vehicle…! I rushed to my garage to check on the van and I realized exactly what the woman was trying to tell me. I had left the fuel cap off and the lid on the side was still open.

It never ends, my friends. It never, ever ends.

To follow up William’s excellent April Fool’s post yesterday, one of the best sports-related gags ever: The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch.

And just for fun, Charles Schultz’ Watchmen. This made me smile.

We’re very lucky in the sense that we’ve got two visionaries in the band.
Right.
David and Nigel are both like, uh, like poets you know like Shelley or Byron, or people like that. The two totally distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, basically, you see and I feel my role in the band, is to be kind of in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water, in a sense.