My Dwive Home

by John Bewenz


I got a flat tire. Very sad.









So I had to spend a lot of time trying two leak plugger thingeys and then putting the spare on. I was happy that it was warm and sunny outside. But the spare tire is dinky and I had to drive all the way home on the highway at 50 miles an hour.



That was sad.









But I had a Mountain Dew Live Wire from Wal-Mart, and that made me happy!








So I drove on in the sunshine. The sun was going down so it was very pretty outside and I liked it.








I looked forward a lot because that was the direction I was going...








Lots of people passed me because I was going so slow. I felt bad because they all had to get around me.









My class started at this time, but I wasn't there because I was driving because it took so long to fix the tire. I got there 50 minutes late and came in the back.








The sun kept going down and made long and longer shadows.








Even going slow, I still liked my car. It's a Mazda.









It was probably interesting for everybody passing me--looking to their right and seeing this college age guy in an anachronistic brown leather two-snap driving cap munching a sub, contentedly motoring along in a cool sports wagon at 53 miles an hour. Then we hit the rush hour traffic and we were no longer contentedly motoring. I've been in enough traffic and was feeling happy enough that I was still content, but you could hardly call what we were doing "motoring." It wasn't as bad as I expected though, and I always liked it when I could go over into the left lane and drive with the fast people, 'cause "fast" in that case was more like 30mph.

Class was good even though I missed stuff at the start, and I answered a question and the professor really liked my answer and said so like 3 times. And when he was leaving I called out and reminded him to take his wireless mic off 'cause he would have left with it on and we would have heard all kinds of stuff! The two guys in front of me laughed and turned around and talked to me for a sec 'cause he had left it on once before and walked out of the room and we could hear him talking through the speaker in the classroom. Then we had a teacher evaluation survey, and I was the last one to leave. I said to the nice girl who had to wait for me "Sorry 'bout that. Survey people always hate me :-) I actually think about what I say!" And she smiled and said "have a good night!" and I said "you too!" and walked out the door and sang "Folsom Prison" loud in the big tall hall. In the bathroom I was still singing and when I hit the low note it happened to resonate with the room at that point and sounded really loud and sweet, so I felt powerful like Johnny Cash and smiled. Then I walked over to the other side of the room and it didn't resonate anymore so I didn't feel powerful anymore. But I still had my sweet hat on, so I was still cool. Then I went outside and did hackey sack by two sidewalk lights for half an hour until I could barely lift my foot any more. I didn't get 20, but I got 18 once, 17 several times, and 15 a bunch. It felt really cool to hack again, and I felt light on my feet like I was defying gravity with my sweet moves. Probably how dancers feel when they're in the groove.

On a different note, I just came upstairs from playing guitar for 30 minutes in the pitch black in the basement with my eyes closed. Closing your eyes is a great way to practice soloing because it makes you learn stuff by feel, strengthening your tactile awareness for playing rather than going from sight alone. I'm playing two solos for the concert coming up, and some pitiful results at past attempts are driving me to work on it so as not to be ashamed before the crowd :-) Apostle Paul's lingo is in my head from listening through his epistles for the last week or so. He sounds like quite an interesting guy, no-holds-barred, sorta like me in that way. Hearing his letters read out loud (on CD) makes them seem much more like letters, and I'm thinking of them less and less like "Booksss in the hooollly scripturrrzz of the Lorrrrd" (spoken in the pious drone of the preacher from the Simpsons). By hey diddly ho they're just letters, I say (Ned Flanders there). Also, all that electric guitar was played quietly through my big Fender amp, meaning there was no distotion and not much extra gain or sustain beyond the natural vibrational life of the strings. That's a great great way to work on solos because it forces you to play and hear and USE the notes, not get lazy with a bunch of wacky cover-up sounds from some crazy distortion. I think hearing a bunch of BTO and CCR and Doobie Brothers on random shuffle the last two days has helped, too. I got up to about 160 songs today, out of like 2936 or so. 10 hours down, 7 days 14 hours to go!

This whole post has been written in the lyrical style of Mike Quinlisk because I read his blog last night and it made me laugh because it was funny. I was bored going so slow on the highway, too, so I took all those pictures. It was really pretty and warm and I had my windows open and played Switchfoot, and enjoyed everything except when I hit that one pothole with the spare tire. Ouch for skinny tires.

I have the screw that was in my tire sitting on the passenger seat. It's more than an inch long, and it's a really sharp wood screw. I'm trying to think of what to do to it or with it, since it's probably going to cost me about a hundred dollars to fix what it caused.

Mountain Dew Live Wire is very good. Buy some today at your local Wal-Mart for only 97 cents plus tax! $1.04 for 20 ounces of orange happiness!

Night y'all. Time to pray for Palestine and CoG and take a shower and sleep. I should shave off my goatee, and BTO is sweet.

--CA