driving

Drove with lovely Miss M to Tucson and then on to Deming, New Mexico over the weekend. The trip was a Visite Finale to see M's ailing grandfather for what may possibly be one last time. At 94 years, every minute seems like it is on borrowed time.

We left Santa Barbara at around 11 AM Friday, and arrived in Phoenix around midnight that evening. 13 hours on the road, and we still had further to travel. The drive back was nearly as grueling - the clincher is getting around the I-10 linchpin in San Bernardino without getting mired in traffic. The trouble is, there's only one real route through to Arizona, and it's through there. Everyone must take it; I see mothers and puppies alike packed tightly into dull colored, bug-spattered compact cars.

While on holiday in the decadent town of Deming, I was able to imbibe the marvelous variety of Coca-Cola that is made not with corn syrup, but with real cane sugar. On that day, I ascended to gates hewn of pearl thrown wide open for me.






These pictures are an accurate view of the weekend from my perspective.

Yeah, so it's 4 AM. So what in tarnation am I doing awake and in front of the computer? Welcome to the world of Zyrtec-D. When these late-onset seasonal allergies (that's what I'll call them, because it makes me sound like a doctor, it does) began a couple of years back, my crack squad of attack allergists cycled through prescriptions of every available allergy drug in the Western world, and even some from beyond (black centipede meat I am looking at you).

Zyrtec-D is the big failure. I have a metric ton of it sitting around unused, as I wound up taking it for about 6 months before giving up. It gave me insomnia and a host of other nasty side effects, and it raised my blood pressure, too. You see, the "D" in Zyrtec-D stands for, I am told, Decongestant, however it may as well be a totem of the Darkest evil which lurks in the hearts of humankind for all its Dicking around it did with my health. I only tolerated it for as long as I did because, out of all the allergy drugs I had taken, it was the only one to put even a slight dent in my prime symptom of discord - the nasty post-nasal accoutrements I had to put up with daily. If you happened to find yourself in the same room as I in the last two years, the frequency with which I have had to cough and grind my throat in a most guttural attempt to clear it is likely enough to send you out the window onto the waiting asphalt below.

I now pay the price of my foolishness as I try to cajole myself back to sleep.

Water

Each time I flush a toilet I fear that my callous action has brought our society one step closer to a post-apocaytic future in which water is the rarest commodity and gangs of heavily-armed, leather-clad thugs battle one another for control of the world's remaining resources.