Last Dance

I've decided to make a concerted effort to write a weekly report of what I see riding to and from my out of town project.  I'll try to do my write-up on Thursdays, but sometimes Thursdays are busy.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't mark your calendars.

This week's ride was especially eventful.  I was forced to ride in the very back of the SUV in the temporary seating known in my family as the "back-in-the-back."  Riding on top of the rear axle feels similar to six hours on a Pirate Ship ride at any local fair -similar amounts of gasping, screaming and vomiting included.  I managed to keep my lunch in me for the entire trip, but only barely.   Despite being sloshed around like a beer can in the back of a pickup truck, I managed to observe a few things during the ride.

But before we go there, I feel that I should set the stage a little better.  In addition to bouncing around like a fun-house in the car, our driver has a death wish.  This means you get to enjoy the up and down motion of the potholes as well as the backward and forward motion resulting from him alternately hammering the gas pedal and slamming on the breaks.  The traffic is difficult to describe.  When it's heavy on the highway it's not unusual to be surrounded on all sides by eighteen wheelers.  This has happened to me in the US before, but the difference here is that the trucks are usually less than a foot away -blocking out the sun.  They are also jockeying for position on the too-narrow road, so they're driving at oblique angles beside us in an attempt to either cut off, or avoid being cut off by other trucks.  All the while, shirtless, shoe-less and helmet-less young men dart between the gaps on motorbikes, and pedestrians, usually bearing  children, try to squeeze their way across the street without getting flattened.  It's amazing we don't see more fatal accidents


We usually sit in traffic for at least 20 minutes while trying to leave the city.  On Wednesday we were sitting behind a truck used to move workers from place to place.  It's essentially a smaller version of a box truck with perforated walls and open at the back.  There are benches on either side where the workers sit.  Last week I passed a person wrapped up and lying on the floor of one.  I couldn't tell if it was a dead body or not.  I think it may have been.  Anyway, there was only one guy sitting in the back of this truck.  As we sat in the gridlock, the window of the truck's cab opened, and the person in the front seat passed a two foot bong to the the guy sitting in the back.  He grabbed it and the proffered lighter, took a hit and sent it back through the window.  They had to be careful to not spill the water.  There's really nothing worse than getting bong water on your clothes*.

*Confession time:  I went to a party the night before I left home for my freshman year of college.  Everyone at the party was smoking out of a bamboo bong.  For some reason I don't remember, I found myself sitting alone in the living room with the bong.  I wanted to look at the bottom to see if the base of the pipe was the natural ribs of the bamboo.  So I turned it over and spilled about a pint of month-old bong water on my jean shorts.**  Every other article of clothing I owned was already crammed in various bags in my room as I'd planned to wear the same clothes in the car with Mom and Dad to Kentucky.  So I spent eight hours in the car with them the next day wreaking of month-old bong water.  Classy, I know.  I don't know how or why they never mentioned it.  Even after washing the shorts they still smelled.

**Screw you, it was the mid 90s.  Jean shorts were cool back then.***

***They were to me... SCREW YOU!

Later in the ride we passed a funeral.   Actually it wasn't a funeral, it was a funeral prep.  A group of people stood by another people-mover-truck like the pot-smokers were riding in, while three men hand-dug a grave.  Just their heads, shoulders were visible above the ground -along with their shovel scoops throwing dirt in the air.  Have I mentioned that the temperature on Wednesday was a suffocating 95 degrees with 99% humidity?  I'm assuming the truck was holding the body.  This was not in a cemetery, mind you, but in a rice field about 10 meters from the side of the highway.

Next we passed three young boys fishing.  Nothing especially noteworthy there, except that they were fishing in a puddle in the middle of a rice field.  The puddle was about 5 feet wide.  It's the rainy season, so there are a lot of puddles around, but I'm feeling confident they didn't catch anything.

And I can't believe I didn't mention this the last time I talked about funny things on the side of the road, but every week we pass a sculpture retailer who specializes in animal sculptures.  Full color, life-sized animal sculptures.  Just imagine two life-sized giraffes crossing necks on your front lawn and you're part way there.  You can also choose from an elephant, a water buffalo (complete with feeding bird on it's back), a silver-back gorilla and a vast array of elk, deer, monkeys and birds.  A 20 foot cement shrugging Christ has nothing on the giraffes.


Lastly, I'd like to observe a moment of silence for a fallen friend.  The Light That Never Goes Out went out on Sunday.  We weren't home to witness it's final moment.  In fact, we didn't even notice it had gone out until we turned the lights out before bed that night.  It's safe to say that the house is no longer the same without it -last night I had to physically turn a light on when I got out of bed to get a drink of water.  I looked back through my posts and found that I'd written about the light in late February, after it had been running non-stop for approximately ten days.  So it ran non-stop for about four and a half months.  Let's call it 150 days, or 3600 hours.  Standard lamp life for an MR16 is 2000 hours (like I've said, I'm really good at pub quiz), so TLTNGO likely doubled its life expectancy.  So I urge you to raise a glass at glass raising time to our dear departed friend.  And I wish that you all double your expected lifetimes as heartily as TLTNGO Today's title video is my dedication.