Cheesy? Yup. Creepy? A Little. Home? Of course.

The thing they leave out is that the ice cream truck in our neighborhood plays King Missile’s “The Boy Who Ate Lasagna and Could Jump Over a Church”. But they also scoop out Haagan Dazs, so it kind of evens out.

A Day Late, A JPEG Short

Screw it.

I was going to have pictures on here to complete my Snakes On A Passport story, but I am so out of practice on this whole “blogging with images” thing… So I guess you are just going to have to follow some embedded links.

This is a link to a picture of a venomous diamondback rattlesnake.

And this is a link to a picture of a non-venomous diamond backed water snake.

I am guessing that I ran over the latter of the two, but try telling that to the kid next door as he loses a limb.

It ain’t easy.

And, yes, I am back to blogging again. Welcome to the Man Room (AKA the garage).

Snakes On A Passport

(Yes, I must give credit to Dawn for the title.  Read on.)

It had been a long day.  The requisite hours at work and multiple errands, followed by a leisurely drive through our neighborhood right at dusk.

At the end of our street, we saw moms walking with their kids and people walking their dogs.  Normalcy.  And that is why I questioned what it was I saw in the road – or thought I saw in the road.

While I was turning the car around, Dawn looked at me with a question mark over her head.

“I think I saw a snake”, I explained.  I did not got into any further detail for fear of looking like an idiot when our headlights illuminated a large twig or a rope.

But, sure as shit, when I pulled over next to the pond 50 yards from our house, there was a snake in the road.  It was not moving, so I assumed it was dead.  But I was also looking at it from about 8 feet away in dusk, so I turned the Passport around again to shine it with the headlights.

And then it started moving.

All five feet of it.

Since our neighborhood has all sorts of end-of-the-day foot traffic from the fitness minded, my first instinct was to run over it.  Then Dawn said, “Run it over!”  So I did.  The tires yelped “ka-thunk”, PETA planned a protest, and backyard ministers winced.  But I was just looking out for the neighbors and their pets, so even my eco-friendly mind was nonplussed.  However, I wanted to make sure the job got done so I quickly turned around…

… and saw nothing.

Not even a hint that the five foot long behemoth had even been there.

And that is when Dawn turned to me and asked – ok, told – me to roll up my window.  Suddenly, life lessons from her childhood were reinforcing themselves into her mind.  Namely, how her dad had always told her to NEVER run over a snake because it will strike the vehicle and latch on for dear life.  It was then that I knew I was driving around a lethal weapon in my undercarriage, and I am not talking about Taco Bell flatulence.

She told me it was some sort of diamondback.  Hell, I saw the skin markings myself, but I also saw no rattle on the end.  So for all I know it could have been Randy Johnson.  Or Doug Davis.  (I was praying for Doug Davis.)

Visions of forked tongues through air conditioning vents and scaly creatures roaming the floor boards filled my head – not mention creeping the shit out of me.  What were we going to do?  We felt trapped in our own Honda, afraid to exit for fear of bites.  Irrational as it may seem now, it was the gospel then.

So I did the only thing that I could think of at the time.  I drove down another street in our neighborhood that two of my co-workers live on.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe I thought either of them might see a lifeless body hanging from underneath the car (hissing the words “I know what you did last summer”).  Or perhaps they could run interference for us, amusing the death-grip snake while Dawn and I ran our happy asses home.  “Hey, look, snake!  Free cats!”

But, alas, neither of them were outside so it was time to formulate Plan B.

Plan B turned out to be running our car through the automated carwash (using the cycle with undercarriage wash) and hoping that the snake would either sink its lifeless body into the drainage area (best case scenario) or slink away laughingly due to all the suds and water.

Neither of those happened, but the Passport looks freaking awesome!

It was kind of scary when the car was covered in foam, making a peek through the windows impossible, and the blowers of the wash turned on giving the entire scene a cheap, B-movie horror flick feel, complete with cheesy soundtrack…

By then, I had exhausted all our options.  We had to get home, no question.

After parking in the driveway (there was NO WAY that I was pulling this transporter of death into the garage), I talked Dawn into exiting first.  My thought process was that I could make it to help quicker since I was behind the wheel, while she would have to climb over my poison-stricken body, kicking me to the side while “Every Rose Has Its Thorns” played in her head, should something wicked happen to me.

But once we were safely inside, I returned to the car with a flashlight.  I figured that if anything happened, I could always play cop and ask the snake for its license and insurance.  However, after sweeping the underside of the Passport with the beam, I determined that there was no danger present.  I then told the little kid from next door that he could get out from under the car – and give me back my flashlight.

Look for a follow-up to this entry Thursday night…

Just Another Day At The Office

It was the perfect storm, and it all started with a motorcycle.

From my fourth floor workspace, accidents are common viewing. Usually fender-benders, though there was the recent excitement of the Jeep that rolled over and the personified relief felt as co-workers watched the driver walk away from the wreckage unscathed. The thing about the motorcycle was that it snuck up on everyone, a grim foreshadowing of what was to come.

There were no squealing tires, no loud clap of metal on metal, only distant sirens that came all too near. A firetruck. An ambulance. At least two cop cars, shutting down northbound traffic on the service road of what I sardonically call “The NAFTA Highway”. Slowly, some of my co-workers worked their way toward the ample thigh-to-ceiling windows. A few even went to the office of one of the vice presidents of my company for a better look. I could see out those windows from where I sat, speaking on the phone to a vendor in Houston, probably about an overdue lawn cut. As I watched my peers gather around the glass, I chuckled to myself because of the reason I was in that office once: to move that VP’s iTunes library to an external drive that she brought from home so that her music would quit slowing down her company issued laptop.

She had Abba… and The Shins. That made me giggle, perhaps because I have both, as well.

“They’re giving him CPR”, someone said, loud enough for my corner of the office to hear. I still refused to budge, ass firmly planted in my comfortable chair. As a man of almost forty, I had seen my fair share of accidents and been subjected to the brake lights of drivers ahead of me who could not help but look. And, yes, I always looked, too – but only because I was already slowed to a crawl thanks to those in the lead. At least, that is what I told myself.

This time, however, I would not succumb to temptation. The main reason I abstained was because I did not want to see, although being at work had a lot to do with it, too. Hell, I always feel behind after a thirty minute team meeting. How could I possibly justify gawking at EMTs trying to save a man who was in an accident that I didn’t even see?

There is a wing of cublicles on my floor that bisects offices on the northeast and southeast side of the buiding. My desk faces the northeast corner, where all the excitement below was happening. But the people in that middle wing of cubicles had the best – or worst – view of what happened next. And if it were not for the motorcyclist, they never would have seen it.

I heard a loud, collective gasp followed by a few shrieks. I looked toward the twenty or so gathered around the east windows, just in time to witness one female passing out and falling backward while shrieks turned into screams of horror, their lives forever changed because they just had to watch the drama involving the motorcylce.

—–

All involved – the EMTs, the cops, the firemen – heard the sound at the same time. What the Hell was THAT?

—–

On top of the bridge above – known in highway vernacular as a “flyover” – two people wailed and clung to each other. The question clung in their throats, never to be answered satisfactorily… Why?

—–

Two of my co-workers saw most of the fatality. They saw the car pull over to the shoulder of the flyover and the young man get out. However, the drama of the CPR below drew their attention back downward. The next time they looked toward the car, they saw the man hanging over the side, with his arms now gripped by another man who had parked his truck on the bridge. Whether the young man wiggled his way free, or the good samaritan lost his grip, or some combination of both, we will never know.

He was soon free – free of whatever burden had so affected him that he felt the only way out was to end his life. His body turned in midair, slowly, just like a movie stunt. Over and over.

And then he landed on his head, hitting the pavement of the service road below, just yards away from life saving techniques being practiced.

Word traveled around the office quickly and I ended my phone call, unable to concentrate. Upper management walked the aisles of the office urging people to get back to work until they realized that the CEO was in the middle of those east-facing windows, among those affected by the jump. They still tried to restore normalcy, or some semblance of it, because there was about 90 minutes left in the workday.

But there really couldn’t be normalcy once the sheets came out: one over the jumper, one over the guy on the motorcycle – someone who never knew that his last breathing day would become a footnote to a different death.