karmic(?) ubsurdity

I had a day yesterday. I suspect karma may have something to do with it, but if that is indeed true, I'm worried because I really don't know what I've done. At any rate . . .

My day began with heading down to the emissions testing center since my (17 yr old) astrovan is need of renewal. It didn't pass. At all. I'll need to take care of that.

Possible source of weird joojoo number one: polluting the environment despite not only being an environmentalist but working in the field.


So, after this disappointing news, I got on the road to head back to Sandpoint for a couple days. Traffic was getting questionable as I approached Post Falls, so I decided to try a different route that had been on my radar for awhile, but through which I'd never actually gone. This route took me through Rathdrum and spit me out back on 95, north of Coeur d'Alene, thus bypassing the corridor with lots of traffic lights and potentially heavy traffic. Saved me 5-10 minutes, and is a more pleasant drive.

So ok, feeling pretty good after this. Arrive at the hatchery to find that the bench and, more importantly, my mailbox that sits on top of the bench, are gone. Hm. See the bench a ways off under some trees (my guess - appropriated for sitting...suspicious) and find my mailbox inside the hatchery building. Fourth of July cleaning? Perhaps. But in case there was any attempt to deliver me my mail, it would have been unsuccessful this week, which is not a good thing. I'll have to check with the post office on that.

Go into my trailer to discover that the little (probably 3-6 mm long, or smaller) spotted beetle-bugs that I occasionally found around my trailer before this week have multiplied in my absence to a number best described as problematic. Work up quite the sweat getting rid of all of them I can find (it's approaching 100 degrees outside, and my trailer isn't any cooler). I think I made a solid dent in their population, but I still find them frequently for the next 20 hours. I will probably find more when I return for lunch.

Ok, so having scourged the trailer of beetle-bugs (I don't have a more specific name as of now), pores saturated and body covered with sweat, I jump in the lake. This part is not odd or bizarre, just nice and refreshing. I then head into town to get some work done at the library.

After leaving the library, I swing by the store for some groceries, and then back through town to get on the main road that takes you out of town and across the bridge south on 95. There's often some backed-up-ness on this road, so I when I see a long line of cars ahead of me as I approach the T-intersection, I don't worry, just wait for some nice person to let me in so I can join the waiting fun. After moving approximately 1.72 blocks in 8 minutes, traffic stops completely. Less than a block ahead of me, I can see the traffic light for the right turn, and as it goes from green to yellow to red to green to yellow to red to green . . . you get the idea . . . and we haven't moved a foot, I start to get suspicious. It's seeming less and less like your run of the mill traffic slow down. Eventually, I realize we ain't goin' nowhere anytime soon, so I cut the motor, and try not to let the heat and dehydration get to me too much.

After some 35 minutes of people watching and eight or nine songs on the radio later, traffic starts to creep. We even crawl for a few minutes, then creep again. A woman walking along the sidewalk who had come from the other direction (traffic was only stopped going our way) told us it's bad, and it's gonna be awhile. Well, it had already been awhile, but seeing as I really needed to get back to my trailer at some point, and the only other options were driving 1.5-2 hours west around the lake or parking my van in town and walking, I decided to sit it out a bit longer. Just as I began weighing options for walking - ie what I should take with me, what I could just leave in the van, whether I could reasonably carry all my perishable groceries as well as my laptop the 4 or so miles back, etc - we began crawling again, and then even bearwalking!

So, at a slowish pace, we finally crossed the bridge. There had indeed been an accident, and a doozy of one too. Just past the two gas stations between the long-bridge and town (those of you familiar with Sandpoint will know what I'm talking about) was a small, oldish hatchback with its front completely smashed in and a SUV flipped completely upside down, with its top half (think a horizontal line from the top of the hood back - everything above that) completely smashed flat. Glass and flecks of paint and plastic everywhere, of course, but what struck me as I drove past (I got a better look than usual since we were going so slow) was that you could see all the random little things that are tossed in various pockets and corners. Little bottles of lotion and sunscreen, a granola bar, a pen or two - that kind of thing. And then I wondered, How does that even happen? There's a bit of a curve in the road there, and the speed limit drops from 55 to 35, but this wasn't a flipped over in a ditch kind of thing. It was just laying there in the middle of a two-lane road, hemmed in with guard rails on either side. Perhaps the driver was distracted and realized they were going to run into the slowed or stopped cars ahead, and swerved radically, thus flipping themselves? And the small little hatchback ran into them from behind? No clue. I do hope that nobody was seriously injured. I also wonder if we have some sort of preordained traffic destiny. Maybe each of us has a specific length of time required to sit in traffic, and where we scoop off the top in one case to save time, we'll get pounded at another time. For example, while I saved 5-10 minutes of traffic by swinging through Rathdrum instead of CdA, I obviously lost substantially more than this later that day.

At any rate, I finally got back to my trailer an hour after departing Safeway (rather than the usual 12-15 minutes), and when I went to grab my groceries saw that a chocolate bar had not only melted at the bottom of the paper bag, in the extreme heat it had oozed all over, getting gooey chocolate and cocoa oils everywhere. Well, I sigh, but nothing is ruined (besides a good part of my chocolate bar) so I salvage what's left of the chocolate and put it in the fridge to solidify it, clean the goo off everything else, and decide to mix myself a glass of emergen-C to help with this headache I've developed somewhere between the library and home.

I grab the full Brita filter I so thoughtfully placed in the fridge before leaving, fill up my favorite glass, dump in a packet of lemon-lime and a packet of raspberry (they taste way better when you mix them), and give the glass a good stir. I take the glass in my right hand, lift it towards my mouth, and am startled to find that the bottom of the glass is no longer attached to the portion of the glass actually in my hand and emergen-C has gushed out this newfound waterway and is rapidly spreading across the counter, stove and floor like a little pink mini-lake missoula flooding across the Columbia Plateau.

At this point I grabbed my phone, stepped outside my trailer, sat on the step, and called Rachel because I needed to share these events with someone who would understand their absurdity. She agreed, we chatted a bit - this part was also nice - and then I was drawn back into my trailer by the evaporating, increasingly stickified emergen-C coating my countertop.

Thus, back to our chain of odd events. How or when this crack around the lower circumference of my favorite glass which led to a splitting of top and bottom occurred, I have no idea. But I was left with a hollow glass cylinder and a dense paperweight-ish glass-bottom sitting on my countertop, neither of which I wanted there nor in the plastic bag I call my trash either (sharp and heavy glass inside flimsy plastic seemed like a poor choice). So, what to do?

My first inclination was to smash them gleefully against the rocks on the shoreline, but then you've got broken glass everywhere, which is not a good thing. So instead, I took the top cylinder into the hatchery building, and threw it in the trash sitting inside the bathroom where I shower and go No. 2 (and where it sat for several days mocking me before it was eventually covered by paper towels), and decided that, due to its heft and the bizarre nature of the whole thing, the bottom portion of the glass deserved a different fate. Its fate, I decided, would be to sit at the bottom of Lake Pend O'Reille for all of eternity. Or at least until forces of water and pressure slowly grind it into bits and pieces at which point it would join the sandy bottom of the lake, and continue its journey through the rock cycle. But, I digress.

Satisfied that I had a good plan, I took this chunk of glass with me to the dock, and, looking at this glass in the palm of my right hand, said something like:

I don't know what it is about today, but there's some bad joojoo going on, some weird and bizarre karma. I'm not sure what the source of all this is, but seeing as you are a direct manifestation of the latest occurrence in a strange day, I imbue within you all the bad joojoo responsible for today's events. As surely as you will sink to the bottom of this lake, may the negative (or at least odd) energy surrounding me find itself vanquished.

With that stoic monologue, I gave the glass bottom a mighty heave, and watched it arc into the lake with a solid splosh. Smiling, I looked down at the hand that had thrown away this manifestation of oddness, and saw that, in the act of throwing, I had made two small but clean lacerations in my first and middle fingers, and sighed at the blood slowly trickling out.