Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

Talking last night at work about how the time of day we drive home is when police are watching every car for that little indication a driver is drunk, the wavering in a lane, failure to dim lights, turn signal staying on forever, driving too slowly. We also came up with the idea that for us, most likely the same police officers are on duty every night and they might get to recognize our cars and after a while realize we are commuters and are regulars going home from work, so probably not drunk.

So, with that in mind: while driving home last night I had a battle with a piece of gum. Nicotine gum might just have saved my life. I quit smoking Jan. 10, 2004, but since have chewed the gum regularly. Every once in a while, I get a piece that seems softer than usual and those pieces tend to stick to teeth and almost anything else they touch. Such a piece exposed itself last night during the journey. I first noticed it when it clung to my teeth. Pretty soon it was stuck and stretching between upper and lower teeth and threatening to cement my mouth closed. It took forever digging to extract it from my mouth and it came out with long strings still attached to teeth. With some finger digging, I finally removed the whole piece, but then it was stuck to my fingers.

I kept rolling it between my thumb in forefinger trying to get a hard ball that I could dispose of but it wouldn’t harden. I finally produced something symmetrical and lowered the window but when I threw it, the gum adhered to my fingers. With several more rolls and wrist snaps I finally flung it overboard, I thought. Minutes later with my hand at the top of the wheel I noticed a lump on my thumbnail and on closer inspection realized it was the ball of gum.

Here we go again. I tried to lift it off with my other hand but only part of it came with me. Now I had a string of gum connecting both hands and the more I tried to pull it off one, the more stuck to the other and pretty soon I had something of a spider web of nicotine gum connecting both hands and the strings only lengthened when I tried to pull my hands apart. Eventually of course, some stuck to the steering wheel and it was at that point I realized all the time I had been wrestling this gum I had been kind of weaving back and forth in my lane,

Now I was doing the very thing I had worried a policeman would pull me over for. I felt like Br’er Rabbit and the tar baby if anyone remembers that reference (It is one movie that will probably never come out of the fabled Disney vault). And how would you explain to a cop who thought you were driving drunk that it was all about a piece of gum? I slowed down, got the gum under as much control as I could and because I was only about a mile from my exit, drove on without fighting it any more, both hands at the top of the wheel as close together as possible to prevent the web from spreading any more. Once off the main highway I pulled over to the side, found my roll of paper towel and stepped out. It took several minutes to get all the gum off my hands and then the steering wheel and then the gearshift. With most of it gone, I thought, I went on down the blue highway, of course chewing a new piece of gum. Who knows if I got it all, I will probably still find some when I get in it to go to work today. I know there was still some gum and paper towel on my fingers when I got home.

On the way, I passed three police cars stopped with their lights flashing. In their headlights I saw they had a woman standing and she had been handcuffed. I wanted to shout “blame it on the gum,” but chose the wiser course and went on home.

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

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Man caught driving stolen car filled with radioactive uranium, rattlesnake, whiskey

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GOP congressman opposes gun control because gay marriage leads to bestiality

Owner of killer bear chokes to death on sex toy

Support for legalizing pot hits all-time high

Give me all your money or my penguin will explode

How zombie worms have sex in whale bones

Crocodile steals zoo worker's lawn mower

Woman shot by oven while trying to cook waffles

Nude beach blowjob jet ski fight leads to wife's death

Woman stabs husband with squirrel for not buying beer Christmas Eve

GOPer files complaint against Democrat for telling the truth about Big Lie social posts

Man shot dead on Syracuse Street for 2nd time in 2 days

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