Zemblan Grammar

I have always preferred to be the passenger rather than the driver, especially at night, and though it may sound like one (a bad, bad one), that’s not meant to be a metaphor for anything.  If I’m traveling with someone else, I’ll try to finagle a way to get them to do the driving.  One of the things that worked well in the last serious relationship I had was that The Boyfriend gladly chauffeured me all around town, in my own vehicle, even.  He was so happy to do so that his mom used to joke that he was dating me for my car (a 1986 Corolla with over 200,000 miles, a broken air conditioner, and serious rear-end damage, which is also not a metaphor).

I like to sit in the passenger seat because there you really get to see the things you pass by — I’ve seen cities I had lived in forever in a completely new light the first time I was finally able to read the signs, peer into the gardens, and give the stinkeye to the roadside panhandlers.  That’s how I saw Schleswig Holstein and southern Jutland when I lived there — the times I wasn’t on a train, anyway — I was carelessly perched on the back of a boy’s motorscooter, letting him do the driving while I watched the sailboats and the cows (so, so many sailboats and cows!) pass on either side of me.  It’s a nice way to travel.

Since I, like Beyoncé and all the Destiny’s Child ladies, am busy being an Independent Woman these days, I had to drive myself to the airport this morning at 2:00 — it’s not something new to me, since when I lived in Zembla I was also two hours away from a decent airport and often had to leave town in the dark of night, all hauling my suitcases down the apartment stairs while everyone around was sleeping, like I was some kind of criminal or something.  I always drink as much caffeine as possible and find something to sing along to at top volume and make my way to the nearest Real City.  It’s always fine — a nuisance, but fine.

My trip this morning took me through a dark, dark, empty, depressed, and depressing part of the state.  Between where I live and the Airport-Having Real City, there’s a lot of emptiness: long flat fields; brown, rolling hills; one-stoplight towns with empty storefronts and and broken signs; the occasional farmers’ outpost with only a gas station and a tractor supply store, both built out of corrugated tin.  Driving through all this nothing, I thought about something that had just sort of fluttered vaguely around my head on my much longer road trip this Summer: driving like this, alone and at night, is the most solitary I ever feel.  It’s some kind of combination of independence and detachment and loneliness that I can’t quite put my finger on.

The urge to check my cell phone’s signal strength obsessively takes over, just so that, I suppose, I can note the exact moment when I pass from an area where I can make calls into an area where, if my car broke down and some retarded inbred redneck chowderhead decided to abduct me with a shotgun and take me home to become his kidnap victim / common-law wife, I would not be able to call 911 to stop it. Hell, in this comedic-yet-sick scenario, the kidnapper is probably the local sheriff or his brother, anyway.

Annnnd I think that last paragraph is a clue that I am letting the mind wander a bit too far. Better lighten up!  Clearly, I have been spending too much time worrying about the dissertation defense and/or distracting myself by watching too much Buffy and Angel.  Nothing to put a person in a dark place like television shows where there’s always the threat of an apocalypse and/or Boreanaz’s appalling Irish accent.  It could also be the airport decor getting me down: there is just no excuse for maroon and teal in the same room, people. No excuse.