Week of Silence '05: Day 5
okay, so where are my glasses.
seriously, where are my glasses?
i was wearing them last night; i went to sleep in my car, wool coat all blanket-like and warm with the car heater buzzing away into the oily hours. so i wake up, right? right. i look around, smack my lips and get out of the car to stretch.
so really, where are my glasses? come on, i left them right here. look in the front, look in the back, look in the coat pocket.
okay this totally isn't funny. where the hell are they. look in the other pocket, look in the first.
second, third, fourth and tenth (lots of pockets, if you've ever met me). front seat, back seat, other seat other seat.
trunk. I LOOKED IN THE TRUNK. this is totally not cool.
a thousand miles from home, no glasses, a rental car, no glasses no glasses no glasses where the hell are my glasses this is so not cool.
okay this is messed up. where the hell are my glasses. under the front seat, behind the front seat, glove compartment cushion spaces.
on top of the car. underneath the car. this totally is not cool at all.
okay, seriously, seriously, really this is just what the hell. where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses?
front seat back seat front seat under over behind inside outside. tenth pocket fourth pocket seventh pocket.
...first pocket.
oh hell no. hell no. the fact that i find my glasses in the first and last place i look...i'm surprised i don't get free stamps in the mail with LOSER embossed in red rubber on the front, $12.99 for ink. free shipping.
i need food. coffee and food. but not too much, i'm not dying or anything. so get out of the car (for the eleventh time, but now with glasses secured to my face as they should be) and get back in (after realizing i wasn't parked as close to the gas station as i thought) drive about fifteen feet (because sometimes it's okay to be lazy in colorado or wherever the hell i am at this point).
utah, right. utah. anyway, i get out and go into the gas station/diner (how in the world can you not just burst into awesomeness over such a little amalgam). first, peruse the menu. second, wait about half an hour for a waitress to actually look at me for more than five seconds before heading back into the rear of the kitchen. third, think 'to hell with this' and go buy cheap coffee and powerbars inside the gas station half of the gas station slash diner.
fourthly, the coffee was alright. so now, awake and with a proper ability to actually see things (20/20, suckas, in your face) i mosey on down the block to the
MUSEUM OF WESTERN COLORADO'S DINOSAUR JOURNEY
and then think 'crap' for not even knowing what state i'm freaking in. seriously, what's up with that.
but to be brief and summarize the museum: friggin awesome. scratch that, i want to be brief-ier: awesome.
there is a T-Rex {short for Tyrannosaurus Rex for those not in the know [Tyrannosaurus Rex meaning "tyrant lizard king" for those further not in the know ('terrible' being a word meaning "awful: causing fear or dread or terror" for those of you who never graduated...oh, let's say third grade)]} leg standing by the southern wall of the place, just sitting there upright and with a cross sectioned musculature.
seriously, friggin awesome.
moving on we go past the velociraptor info, the stegosaurus mockup that moves and gyrates his hips like a sugar-doped five year old elvis presley with a nervous disorder. moving on, and this is the best part, a utahraptor RIPPING THE HEAD OFF A SMALLER VELOCIRAPTOR! i'm talking bloody little veins and muscles, ribbons of red and weird sounds, the full effect just there on display, easily seen by any two year old who happens to waddle on by. i'm talking bloody teeth, tearing out organs with visceral splunges of destruction. f-r-i-g-g-i-n a-w-e-s-o-m-e.
oh and the people, reader. the people were the best. a few choice quotes from the trio that tailed me:
"it's creepy."
"really, those eyes and the way it looks at you, it's creepy."
"what do you call those things? the ones with the beaks, the flying ones? oh, they didn't fly? but they have wings. but maybe they did fly. well how do you know, are you an ornitheologon?"
"that one is still so creepy, no matter how many times i keep going back to it. it's the eyes."
"okay that one is too creepy, let's go to the next one."
and like any red-blooded whosits, the final stop was the giftshop. the giftshop where i ponder and pine and pour over all the gifts that can be bought. all the little googaws and giggitygacks that i was never able to gawk and giggity over as a kid.
which little piece of re-plasticised bone fragment should i buy, i ask myself. which fiberglass claw or paw or fossil or dropping should i pay up for and throw into some hidden corner of my new apartment? not only that, where are the patches? seriously, where are the patches?
right, so i'm not going to do all that again. needless to say there was much patches-searching and many fossil-pokings until after about an hour (bite me, yeah it was an hour. so what.) i picked out a fiberglass allosaur claw and a pterosaur pin. there were no patches, i'm afraid, so it was about all i could manage just to get a pin. it'll still be able to stick into my canvas bag, though.
gifts pour moi in tow, it's back to the car. funny thing, seeing clearly what with having your glasses and gifts and all: you tend to not want to drive and junk. call me crazy, but it took me, like, almost a whole minute to get over wanting to stare at fake dinosaur parts and not oggle the researchers who're working in the back of the museum on their day off. those researchers, honestly. why do they wear white coats? no clue. why do they seem incredibly cool when we all know that they really really really really really really really really really aren't? even less of a clue. but still, the dreams of oggling are hard to fade. so very hard.
driving. listening to the last vestige of comedy-on-cd. some nameless pieces of work that don't deserve repeating. well actually they do, if only to describe how only i can manage to find awesome stuff that isn't awesome. laurel and hardy, abbott and costello. the greats, the bestests, the legends. radio sitcoms, suspense and drama packed into a voice. everything you could hope for in a car, right? well, maybe? come on, not even a little? well fine then, who asked you. sheesh.
laurel and hardy? a cd of interviews with them. badly recorded interviews. abbott and costello? not actually on the cd, more promo material, the way steven segal was plugged for Executive Decision and who, we all know, had so little to do with the film that it makes you want to protest if only because everybody deserves a chance in the movies. even a less-than-popular steven segal. (no offense, stevo; big fan, honestly. honestly, big fan. huge. just huge.) so after the whithered attempts at comedy i sigh and put in the inevitable...
physics. on cd. brian greene's latest, if you are familiar with the man's prior publishing gems. mostly because i can't actually finish a broad-audience physics book these days without wanting to see the math and scratching my head then buying a math book then reading all of that without understanding what i just did just so i can go back to the physics book and read it again and realize that he was using said-maths in an illustrative context only and that it didn't really apply to the problem of that particular chapter. so, book on tape. cd. whatever.
the final verdict? brace yourselves...i liked it. finished it and everything. didn't actually learn anything new, mind you, just kind of filled in a few historical holes (progress of string theory, the whole hour spent over the fact that nobody knows what the M in 'M-THEORY' stands for, etc.) the important part, though, is that i had ideas. oh sweet sassy molassy does it feel good to roll around in the mud of theoretical physics again. college does nothing for the dreamer; it sucks away all life from the starry-eyed physicist. it takes questions and points them to actual numbers rather than outcomes. it throws you at a problem and says
'how many degrees/inches/seconds/kilograms/ergs/newtons/milespersecondpersecond/square meters/cubic centimeters/watts/ohms/coulombs/barns will such-and-such particle
rotate/drop/live/obtain/push/pull/accelerate/span/cloud/discharge/cause/encounter/take up?
rather than just ask
'what will happen?'
for the next few hours, i asked 'what would happen' and it was good. i pumped gas while factoring equations over general relativity, turned on the wipers while i contemplated the importance of virtual pair production in an 'intense' metric. i wondered about the lifetime of the sun but then got distracted and almost got pulled over because i kept trying to write down an equation on the windshield of my car instead of just letting the heat take over and evaporate it away.
more thinking. more gas. the last gas station i went to had, get this...a little pizza place inside. and i mean like little-little. the kind of fast-food mini-pie fare that you'd find at college campuses or mall food courts, with the little hotdog rollers filled with cardboard boxes housing ready-to-go lunch personal panned pizzas. but since when do i settle for personal pan, i ask myself. instead, i point to the "ultimate-everything-on-it-monstrosity-of-grease-and-cheese" 15inch on the menu behind the counter.
the girl looks at me, realizes i'm not going to say anything, and tells me it'll be about half an hour. here. in a gas station. in boo-bumk-town-village. half an hour now in a gas station with nothing to do (saving the cd for the road, you see). right. so after darting into the back to go through "mute boy's adventure in scary bathroom land" and walking back and forth between said bathroom and the car to get my brush and brush my teeth and junk, time passed just as easily as it should have. and i got my pizza. and bolted.
hours and hours, listening to the last of my cd. watching the mountains go by, slowly and steady and looking at all the restaurants that i didn't hit before and that had no hopes of seeing me now. more and more, mountains and mountains, highway highway rails and rails and dark and dark and cars and cars and mountains and mountains.
then, no mountains. what happens when you're going east in colorado with mountains and mountains and mountains and then BOOM! there's no more?
denver happens.
after about fifteen minutes into denver-seeing range i take a turn at the first recognizable franchise: barnes and noble. good 'ole bookstore, like that aunt that will always cook waaaaayyyyy too much food whenever you stop by in the middle of nowhere. good 'ole barnes and noble. good 'ole bookstore.
so i go in, peruse, stretch my legs. look around but still don't want anything to eat, don't even want coffee. but i'm tired, it's around 4 in the afternoon, and the light outside is beginning to go away. so what's the best course of action? sleep in the parking lot of a huge mini-mall, of course.
i get out of the store and try to find my poor self back to the rental. being a rental, i have no idea what the plates say, let alone remember anything more than whatever vague shade of color it is (on the road you only see blue, yellow, and red. green is a figment of your imagination.) so needless to say it takes me awhile to find it again. but the minutes slowed some, because there is a very very peculiar thing about all the cars in denver parking lots:
they all have colorado license plates. now hold your horses, there's even more...they're all DIFFERENT. i spot about 3 different designs so far, fifteen feet out of the store. is it a yearly change, do they offer different flavors of plate?
5 different designs. there's a lot more driving to do, but denver is a bit of a way station, a 'go any more west and you're, like, west and junk' kind of town. 7 different designs. sure, i'm probably not in the heart of denver right now, 8 different designs, but i feel like i fit in a little. suburban, still kinda midwest.
10 different designs. honestly, what's up with that. and where the hell is my car? seriously, this isn't cool.
oh, there it is. wedged between the identical buicks, one with a blue denver plate and the other with a yellow. more driving to be done, but it's all the midwest from here on out right? so i away to sleep in the parking lot and rise with the setting of the sun.
lesson for day 5: there's nothing wrong with physics, there's nothing wrong with pizza, and where there's a mini-mall, there's a nap.
seriously, where are my glasses?
i was wearing them last night; i went to sleep in my car, wool coat all blanket-like and warm with the car heater buzzing away into the oily hours. so i wake up, right? right. i look around, smack my lips and get out of the car to stretch.
so really, where are my glasses? come on, i left them right here. look in the front, look in the back, look in the coat pocket.
okay this totally isn't funny. where the hell are they. look in the other pocket, look in the first.
second, third, fourth and tenth (lots of pockets, if you've ever met me). front seat, back seat, other seat other seat.
trunk. I LOOKED IN THE TRUNK. this is totally not cool.
a thousand miles from home, no glasses, a rental car, no glasses no glasses no glasses where the hell are my glasses this is so not cool.
okay this is messed up. where the hell are my glasses. under the front seat, behind the front seat, glove compartment cushion spaces.
on top of the car. underneath the car. this totally is not cool at all.
okay, seriously, seriously, really this is just what the hell. where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses?
where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses? where are my glasses?
front seat back seat front seat under over behind inside outside. tenth pocket fourth pocket seventh pocket.
...first pocket.
oh hell no. hell no. the fact that i find my glasses in the first and last place i look...i'm surprised i don't get free stamps in the mail with LOSER embossed in red rubber on the front, $12.99 for ink. free shipping.
i need food. coffee and food. but not too much, i'm not dying or anything. so get out of the car (for the eleventh time, but now with glasses secured to my face as they should be) and get back in (after realizing i wasn't parked as close to the gas station as i thought) drive about fifteen feet (because sometimes it's okay to be lazy in colorado or wherever the hell i am at this point).
utah, right. utah. anyway, i get out and go into the gas station/diner (how in the world can you not just burst into awesomeness over such a little amalgam). first, peruse the menu. second, wait about half an hour for a waitress to actually look at me for more than five seconds before heading back into the rear of the kitchen. third, think 'to hell with this' and go buy cheap coffee and powerbars inside the gas station half of the gas station slash diner.
fourthly, the coffee was alright. so now, awake and with a proper ability to actually see things (20/20, suckas, in your face) i mosey on down the block to the
MUSEUM OF WESTERN COLORADO'S DINOSAUR JOURNEY
and then think 'crap' for not even knowing what state i'm freaking in. seriously, what's up with that.
but to be brief and summarize the museum: friggin awesome. scratch that, i want to be brief-ier: awesome.
there is a T-Rex {short for Tyrannosaurus Rex for those not in the know [Tyrannosaurus Rex meaning "tyrant lizard king" for those further not in the know ('terrible' being a word meaning "awful: causing fear or dread or terror" for those of you who never graduated...oh, let's say third grade)]} leg standing by the southern wall of the place, just sitting there upright and with a cross sectioned musculature.
seriously, friggin awesome.
moving on we go past the velociraptor info, the stegosaurus mockup that moves and gyrates his hips like a sugar-doped five year old elvis presley with a nervous disorder. moving on, and this is the best part, a utahraptor RIPPING THE HEAD OFF A SMALLER VELOCIRAPTOR! i'm talking bloody little veins and muscles, ribbons of red and weird sounds, the full effect just there on display, easily seen by any two year old who happens to waddle on by. i'm talking bloody teeth, tearing out organs with visceral splunges of destruction. f-r-i-g-g-i-n a-w-e-s-o-m-e.
oh and the people, reader. the people were the best. a few choice quotes from the trio that tailed me:
"it's creepy."
"really, those eyes and the way it looks at you, it's creepy."
"what do you call those things? the ones with the beaks, the flying ones? oh, they didn't fly? but they have wings. but maybe they did fly. well how do you know, are you an ornitheologon?"
"that one is still so creepy, no matter how many times i keep going back to it. it's the eyes."
"okay that one is too creepy, let's go to the next one."
and like any red-blooded whosits, the final stop was the giftshop. the giftshop where i ponder and pine and pour over all the gifts that can be bought. all the little googaws and giggitygacks that i was never able to gawk and giggity over as a kid.
which little piece of re-plasticised bone fragment should i buy, i ask myself. which fiberglass claw or paw or fossil or dropping should i pay up for and throw into some hidden corner of my new apartment? not only that, where are the patches? seriously, where are the patches?
right, so i'm not going to do all that again. needless to say there was much patches-searching and many fossil-pokings until after about an hour (bite me, yeah it was an hour. so what.) i picked out a fiberglass allosaur claw and a pterosaur pin. there were no patches, i'm afraid, so it was about all i could manage just to get a pin. it'll still be able to stick into my canvas bag, though.
gifts pour moi in tow, it's back to the car. funny thing, seeing clearly what with having your glasses and gifts and all: you tend to not want to drive and junk. call me crazy, but it took me, like, almost a whole minute to get over wanting to stare at fake dinosaur parts and not oggle the researchers who're working in the back of the museum on their day off. those researchers, honestly. why do they wear white coats? no clue. why do they seem incredibly cool when we all know that they really really really really really really really really really aren't? even less of a clue. but still, the dreams of oggling are hard to fade. so very hard.
driving. listening to the last vestige of comedy-on-cd. some nameless pieces of work that don't deserve repeating. well actually they do, if only to describe how only i can manage to find awesome stuff that isn't awesome. laurel and hardy, abbott and costello. the greats, the bestests, the legends. radio sitcoms, suspense and drama packed into a voice. everything you could hope for in a car, right? well, maybe? come on, not even a little? well fine then, who asked you. sheesh.
laurel and hardy? a cd of interviews with them. badly recorded interviews. abbott and costello? not actually on the cd, more promo material, the way steven segal was plugged for Executive Decision and who, we all know, had so little to do with the film that it makes you want to protest if only because everybody deserves a chance in the movies. even a less-than-popular steven segal. (no offense, stevo; big fan, honestly. honestly, big fan. huge. just huge.) so after the whithered attempts at comedy i sigh and put in the inevitable...
physics. on cd. brian greene's latest, if you are familiar with the man's prior publishing gems. mostly because i can't actually finish a broad-audience physics book these days without wanting to see the math and scratching my head then buying a math book then reading all of that without understanding what i just did just so i can go back to the physics book and read it again and realize that he was using said-maths in an illustrative context only and that it didn't really apply to the problem of that particular chapter. so, book on tape. cd. whatever.
the final verdict? brace yourselves...i liked it. finished it and everything. didn't actually learn anything new, mind you, just kind of filled in a few historical holes (progress of string theory, the whole hour spent over the fact that nobody knows what the M in 'M-THEORY' stands for, etc.) the important part, though, is that i had ideas. oh sweet sassy molassy does it feel good to roll around in the mud of theoretical physics again. college does nothing for the dreamer; it sucks away all life from the starry-eyed physicist. it takes questions and points them to actual numbers rather than outcomes. it throws you at a problem and says
'how many degrees/inches/seconds/kilograms/ergs/newtons/milespersecondpersecond/square meters/cubic centimeters/watts/ohms/coulombs/barns will such-and-such particle
rotate/drop/live/obtain/push/pull/accelerate/span/cloud/discharge/cause/encounter/take up?
rather than just ask
'what will happen?'
for the next few hours, i asked 'what would happen' and it was good. i pumped gas while factoring equations over general relativity, turned on the wipers while i contemplated the importance of virtual pair production in an 'intense' metric. i wondered about the lifetime of the sun but then got distracted and almost got pulled over because i kept trying to write down an equation on the windshield of my car instead of just letting the heat take over and evaporate it away.
more thinking. more gas. the last gas station i went to had, get this...a little pizza place inside. and i mean like little-little. the kind of fast-food mini-pie fare that you'd find at college campuses or mall food courts, with the little hotdog rollers filled with cardboard boxes housing ready-to-go lunch personal panned pizzas. but since when do i settle for personal pan, i ask myself. instead, i point to the "ultimate-everything-on-it-monstrosity-of-grease-and-cheese" 15inch on the menu behind the counter.
the girl looks at me, realizes i'm not going to say anything, and tells me it'll be about half an hour. here. in a gas station. in boo-bumk-town-village. half an hour now in a gas station with nothing to do (saving the cd for the road, you see). right. so after darting into the back to go through "mute boy's adventure in scary bathroom land" and walking back and forth between said bathroom and the car to get my brush and brush my teeth and junk, time passed just as easily as it should have. and i got my pizza. and bolted.
hours and hours, listening to the last of my cd. watching the mountains go by, slowly and steady and looking at all the restaurants that i didn't hit before and that had no hopes of seeing me now. more and more, mountains and mountains, highway highway rails and rails and dark and dark and cars and cars and mountains and mountains.
then, no mountains. what happens when you're going east in colorado with mountains and mountains and mountains and then BOOM! there's no more?
denver happens.
after about fifteen minutes into denver-seeing range i take a turn at the first recognizable franchise: barnes and noble. good 'ole bookstore, like that aunt that will always cook waaaaayyyyy too much food whenever you stop by in the middle of nowhere. good 'ole barnes and noble. good 'ole bookstore.
so i go in, peruse, stretch my legs. look around but still don't want anything to eat, don't even want coffee. but i'm tired, it's around 4 in the afternoon, and the light outside is beginning to go away. so what's the best course of action? sleep in the parking lot of a huge mini-mall, of course.
i get out of the store and try to find my poor self back to the rental. being a rental, i have no idea what the plates say, let alone remember anything more than whatever vague shade of color it is (on the road you only see blue, yellow, and red. green is a figment of your imagination.) so needless to say it takes me awhile to find it again. but the minutes slowed some, because there is a very very peculiar thing about all the cars in denver parking lots:
they all have colorado license plates. now hold your horses, there's even more...they're all DIFFERENT. i spot about 3 different designs so far, fifteen feet out of the store. is it a yearly change, do they offer different flavors of plate?
5 different designs. there's a lot more driving to do, but denver is a bit of a way station, a 'go any more west and you're, like, west and junk' kind of town. 7 different designs. sure, i'm probably not in the heart of denver right now, 8 different designs, but i feel like i fit in a little. suburban, still kinda midwest.
10 different designs. honestly, what's up with that. and where the hell is my car? seriously, this isn't cool.
oh, there it is. wedged between the identical buicks, one with a blue denver plate and the other with a yellow. more driving to be done, but it's all the midwest from here on out right? so i away to sleep in the parking lot and rise with the setting of the sun.
lesson for day 5: there's nothing wrong with physics, there's nothing wrong with pizza, and where there's a mini-mall, there's a nap.
posted by Mister Vikas at 11:30 PM
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