Quick Note: Oliver, keep all your comments in one post, and if you continue to correct my grammar, there will be a reckoning akin to none this realm hath seen.
ANYWAY - So, like the four of you who read this know, I'm in a long distance relationship. My man-boy is in the Air Force, specifically in the Intel bit of the Air Force, and for whatever reason, he was assigned to work with the Special Operations macho-masochists. Maybe the small animal he sacrificed to the God of Interesting Military Assignments wasn't a virgin, or he didn't do it under the full moon or something. Now, I know working with the SpecOps sounds really cool, like he's skydiving out of a plane while doing calculous on his watch to triangulate the exact degree at which he needs to shoot a missile in order to prevent WWIII with minimal civilian casualties and save the love of his life (someone else, please - I just can't miss my test on Thursday to be dangled over crocodiles AGAIN), but that's not actually what happens. I know, right? I was really disappointed too. No, he spends his days in a small, concrete room for 12 hours watching a computer screen. He's not really allowed to tell me what he sees, and I'm probably less allowed to tell the internet, but he's equated it with watching grass grow, and since he's watching a desert, there's not even that thrilling escape from boredom.
Now, this wouldn't be quite so bad if after work or on the weekends he could go do something exciting, but that would require being stationed somewhere larger than our high school. No no no, that's not a bad metaphor - that's literal. The town he's stationed in is the size of our high school, or about 2,500 people, if you don't include the military. Including military stationed there, it's probably, maybe, the size of the four major high schools in our area. Fly poop is more densely populated that this place. And since none of the military members want to actually stay there more than the required three years (OH GOD WHY?!), there's not too much investment in entertainment around. There's two chain restaurants (one of which is the major corporation I work for, as if I didn't eat enough of their food already), a Walmart, a gas station, a Hastings (which is something akin to the love child of Blockbuster and Borders but sneakier), and a plethora of Thai restaurants. Why Thai, you ask, in this God forsaken speck of spittle on the map, this place where couples have matching tooth decay from tobacco use? I have no clue, but I counted three, and that's like one on every block. If there was a Hell on Earth, this place would be the waiting room.
He's only been there since December, though, so not long enough to go insane and start wearing the skins of his coworkers yet, and the weekend before Valentines Day was the first weekend I had the time to go see him. Now, I was hoping to have a certain other serviceman drive down with me, but the timing just didn't work out, and all told it's not a hard drive as long as the weather is nice, and it's not long.
Not long.
Only 7 hours one way if you drive like a bat out of hell.
Not long...
As you can imagine, though, it'd been two months since I last saw my man-boy, and I was ever so excited to go see him. I spent the week before meticulously preparing. I picked up a box of stuff his mom wanted me to take down to him, which was slightly akin to herding cats in an old fashioned diver's suit, I burnt myself all sorts of CDs, I had books on tape, snacks, energy drinks, and I was good to go! Boyfriend, here I come!
12:30 pm - Fill the tank of my CRV and get two greasy slices of pizza that are sure to save well, plus a bottle of water. Call my mom to tell her I'm leaving, and then hang up to begin my sing-a-long with the radio.
1:00 - Energetically sing-a-long to Toxic, Animal, Sexy Back, and then notice that the stations I want to listen to are getting fuzzy. Turn the radio to the oldies station, continue sing-a-long to Hotel California, Taking Care of Business, and American Pie, and try not to pretend I'm singing without my dentures.
1:15 - Radio is totally dead, leaving only ominous sound of static. I pop in my first book on tape, Lies my Teacher Told Me. Try to respond to the tape like I'm having a conversation, including fake laughs, arguments, and vigorous nods. Convince myself it's entertaining.
2:30 - Bolt into the truck stop to pee.
3:00 - Call my lazy ass boyfriend, who doesn't answer, leaving me alone to the open road and the impending madness. All around me is flat and barren, the kind of post apocalyptic scene Cormac McCarthy described in The Road, yellow and grey and decayed with the occasional buttress of forlorn rock standing stalwart against the horizon like a soldier's corpse still defending his post after the bomb had gone off.
4:00 - Beginning to question my own sanity, and frantic that my man-boy was not picking up the phone (therefore rabid wolverines ate him in his sleep and I was driving not to a weekend of love and relaxation, but a tragic funeral where I would have to dig the grave with my own hands because in this town "back hoe" means a prostitute specializing in anal), so I called my mom. After a debate over whether or not my sister joining the "Go Green" club at her elementary school would drive my father into a righteous rage over a consumer's right to all the plastic bags he wanted, I had her call the man-boy on his Skype. Praise jesus, he lives! He was sleeping while I was trekking to see him, but still, he lives!
4:30 - Stop in an even sketchier truck stop. Afraid manager will make me buy a can of chew and say "purdy" to use the bathroom.
5:30 - Turn off the book on tape, quite sure that the narrator's drone would be the soundtrack to my madness. Already I am contemplating getting out of the car and finding a cow to tip just for the sake of something to do. The only reason I don't is a fear that the cow will try to eat me instead.
6:00 - Find the last piece of civilization self-aware enough to have two whole gas stations and today's newspaper. I stop and get a Subway sandwich and try to make conversation with a clerk while buying Advil. At this point, I feel like my spinal cord is only duct taped into my spine, and turning my head has the distinct sensation of pulling the duct tape loose. The clerk is uninterested, and tells me that I have at least another hour and a half, two hours, to the Air Force base like it's the typical drive to the super market for her. The withering look she gives me when I choke makes me want to take her hand and say "There are places you could go, honey. Places better than this, if only you dare to dream!" But I take my Advil and get back in the car, making sure to empty my bladder again because I can "hold it" just about as well as my one year old cousin.
6:30 - Start to panic, because as empty as the drive has been thus far, I did see the occasional house or car going the opposite direction. But now it's dark, and I don't know where I'm going on a one lane highway, and I feel like I'm one busted tire away from Halloween 27. Speeding towards either my own demise or my boyfriend, I can't tell which, I catch up with a red Mustang going only slightly slower than me. Rather than pass them, I being following at what I think is a reasonable distance. Another human being, thank god! I'm not in the Twilight Zone! Apparently, though, what for me was a reasonable distance was to them aggressive tailgating, and after about twenty minutes, they try to shake me. They slow down, I slow down. They speed up, I speed up for fear of losing them. Finally, they pulled over to force me to pass, and I almost wanted to pull over too and explain "I'm not going to kill you, I'm just scared out of my mind and I don't want to be eaten by mutant tumbleweeds in the middle of nowhere." But that had a distinct possibility of not ending well, so I went past and drove alone.
7:30 - I finally pull up to the base gate, and see my boyfriend waiting for me in the cold, a big grin going ear to ear. After seven hours alone, when he pulled me out of the car for a hug and a kiss, the sensation of another's touch seemed so alien. But then I got used to it. Heh.
The drive back was almost the same, with two distinct differences. I did the really boring stretch I'd done at night in the morning, so I could see exactly how desolate the surrounding area was. At first I was counting tumbleweeds, but after fifteen or so minutes I hit triple digits and decided to stop. I was, however, convinced that someone was going to jump out of my back seat and shout "It's a twista! It's a twista!" The other change was that instead of listening to the book on tape and letting it lull me into a complacent state of insanity in which I might try to kill the president, I listened to my only Regina Spektor album three or four times in a row, picking apart the lyrics for religious meaning.
The moral: I hope New Mexico falls into a sink hole next time my boyfriend comes home. Also, Regina Spektor is probably a secret disciple of the new Moon Goddess.
