No Freeway For Young Women

(Pre-Script: This post best read as the song, " Any Other World," #50 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

Remember that one time when you* (*and by "you," I really mean "me," or "I," as the grammatically correct case may be.) were driving and singing in the car, and you sounded so great singing in your car like that, you sounded just like a professional singer, in fact, and especially when you drove over a bumpy part of the road and it gave your voice instant vibrato that only opera singers and Celine Dion are usually capable of making their voices achieve? Move over, Adam Levine, because you are doing his song one better? Remember that? Yeah, and you were so so happy because it was your day off so you thought, heck, I should go back to the beach, I have several hours of no one counting on me to be responsible to them in any way? Just I am accountable for me, and I am totally okay in this moment? This blissed out moment that you earned yourself after a hard, arduous, mentally taxing workout that you did it, you did it anyway, and now you were rejoicing that you did because for the rest of the day you can proclaim to anyone who does or does not want to know, "I DID it?" Yeah, And then what happened? You looked up and saw that a police officer was aiming his radar gun at you. And everything inside of you pulled tightly into itself, a snail receding into it's shell, a turtle phoning home, if you will, only you had to keep your head up, "keep your chin up, son," because you were still driving after all, and driving requires paying attention. Never mind that you suddenly are no longer feeling free, light and easy. Yes, your voice still sounds just like a rock star, or at least it would, if you hadn't been shocked into no longer singing, but you now feel unsure of your driving. You now feel a strange unusual kinship with Bambi's mother right when her ears perked up, before she started running running running no matter because she could not run fast enough to prevent her own slaughter. That's exactly what it feels like when the police officer aims his gun at your face as you drive by, isn't it? Doesn't it make you wonder what the heck are all of these police officers doing, trying to scare a safe driver into unsafe driving practices, instead of leaving well enough alone on the freeway here, the FREE-way, how ironic, it hits you, how ironic, you think, and you realise that there is no freeway, no freeway for you. Same on edge feeling you get when you see a wasp or a hive of wasps or worse yet hor-nets whenever you are frolicking about in a garden or a wilderness or nature or even just outside of the local Safeway; Anywhere a wasp or hor-net can haunt. You don't exactly know the difference between wasps and hornets, You only know that they are not honeybees, they are not sleepy nectar drunken bumble bees, they are vicious harbingers with stingers who do not die if they sting you once, they continue to sting and sting and sting, and hornets are worse because their name is two syllables of torture, not just one. So this is the association running through your mind when you are accosted by that silly radar gun aimed at your once shining face from whence melodious sounds have been emerging. It occurs to you to wonder, don't the police officers have some hardened criminal to dig up out of a basement somewhere? Instead of not leaving well enough alone? Nothing to see here, officer, we are all obeying the law here, we are all above ground here and not avoiding the sunlight. A criminal would be hiding his crime in the dark underground. Go there instead, Mr Policeman. There is nothing to see here, you think, but your spirit is now slightly dampened.

You know, I have never tasted venison stew, but it has always sounded delicious to me. Venison stew is one of those things people eat in novels which take place in some out in the wild location when the main character/s is/are starving and out of hope, but then low and behold, they stumble upon a lone warm cabin in the middle of the wilderness, which contains an old man and woman both with rough hands who happen to have a large cauldron of venison stew brewing over their lit fire, and they offer the stew to the starving main character, who proceeds to eat the stew with some sort of freshly baked bread, the character proceeds to sop it up with this still warm bread. "Venison Stew," doesn't that just sound delicious? I now wonder if it tastes like the sudden awareness of bitter betrayal, in the middle of a naive run for freedom.

-XOXO,