Today was one of those cloudy light rain days that brings out the best in Oklahoma. Everything takes on the consistency of dark wet oak, the smell in the air is cold, and you pick up mud on your shoes. It was jacket weather, and when I came back from buying dog food at Wal Mart I saw two men a half a mile apart from each other wearing the same jacket. Glitch in the simulation, maybe.
Did you know that people yell at each other in the bright aisles and push their carts into racks of wine? They do that and then some. Main Street ends near my house by the gas station with the broken shutter, speed bumps on the way to the road’s terminus. What are you going to do? Run into the trees?
A man visited my house today so tall his head almost touched the ceiling. I talked to him about his Christian clothing company and how he once played basketball in the Memphis pyramid that became a Bass Pro Shop. He brought me some Dairy Queen and I’d never even met him before.
I picked up a prescription for my wife at Walgreens. I had no idea you could do that without proper identification. I thought about how you never really see your face the way other people can, only representations of it, fragments of it, until you have a child and you can see yourself reflected in them, and suddenly I’m in the shower frowning at myself, thinking about how it looks when my son does it. I scrubbed up with aloe vera and willed myself through the cold part, my morning ritual of 30 seconds before I make an excuse to not brush my teeth.
There are late nights and then in the morning I wake up and drink Accelerator, an energy drink by the inventors of Adrenaline Shoc, except this one has thermogenic plant power in it or some shit. I don’t know about all that except the Island Guava flavor is the absolute best energy drink taste out there, dethroning Zero Sugar Watermelon Monster. Outside the gas station where I buy them, a red-head kid maybe sixteen asks me to buy beer for him and I say no, and then I wish him luck, and he looks at me like a guy who just told him I wouldn’t buy him booze. They have a freezer in there that you can walk back to in order to grab a case of something, but those same cases are in the front-facing freezers anyway, so there’s probably some marketing tactic behind the walk-ins that I’ll never know about.
This is the same gas station where a man with a pirate ship tattooed on his face asked me if I wanted had an Xbox, and that he’d trade me some bread for it. Actual bread, a loaf of bread on his arm. I wrote about that in Black Gum, which people are buying again. Grateful for that. Maybe these blogs are doing some good?
I do love rainy cold days.
Broken River Blog 