The Salem Orientalist Society

So there I was, seven eights of the way through my run and just about a half mile from home this afternoon while the sun was setting, the wind picking up, everything getting cold, when at the intersection right in front of me, a young woman in a silver Impala who'd been stopped and watching the traffic to her left pulled out right in front of a gold Explorer (coming from her right) which slammed on its breaks but couldn't stop in time. It was weird to realize just a second before it happened that the cars were going to collide, kind of like the feeling I got watching the ice creak and then crack and then break under a friend some years ago...
The Impala spun around almost a full circle, but the Explorer got smashed up a lot more. Both of the drivers got right out and looked equally stunned - the girl got out her cellular telephone and indicated that she was calling her parents, who lived right down the street, and then, looking like it was becoming rapidly very taxing to stay collected, asked the guy if she should move her car out of the road. He thought so, she did, and then he pulled his car onto the shoulder, too. He got out, asked me if I wouldn't mind staying around, because, glancing over his shoulder at the girl who was still on her phone, lowering his voice, and smiling, "I know she's going to say she didn't pull out in front of me." I tried to look sympathetic and agreed, and then started getting really cold while he walked around his car, kicked the left rear tire a couple times inexplicably, and made a couple calls on his phone. Before I knew it, the girl's father had arrived in his own SUV, they wrote down each other's insurance information, and the older guy came over and talked to me for a second - "gettin' a little chilly?" he asked, smiling at my shorts and t-shirt, which I explained... He waited for the other guy to go back over and start kicking his tire again, and then kind of leaned in close and asked, "so, she just pulled out right in front?" By now, she was warming up in his SUV. I smiled and nodded. "Yep." "Ohh," he said, half frustrated and half amused, "I have warned her and I have warned her..." He went back to sit with his daughter while we waited for the police to arrive, and I tried to be amiable while standing around with the other guy as we watched the coolant from his car run out in a steady stream and collect in a flourescent green puddle at our feet. I started wondering if I should just leave him with my telephone number so I could go home and get out of the cold, and, in a moment that, though subtly so, still probably contends for one of the strangest in my life to this point, a man pulled up next to us, broken plastic and large pieces of the front of an Explorer all around, got out of his car, and asked us, whom one could only take as the two participants in the accident (since the girl and her father were parked around the corner, the periodic sobbing that might otherwise have betrayed her presence having dissipated by then) if we could help him find 9600 Annapolis Road. The other guy, whom he approached first, and who was in an unaccountably chirpy mood, told him that he wasn't really from around this area and asked me if I knew, and I explained that he'd need to keep going four blocks, make a right, then watch for the signs and go left. He thanked us both and was on his way. It was at least another twenty minutes before the policeman finally arrived, a thrill because a) I could no longer feel my ears or nose, b) more people were slowing down to look at the white boy shivering in running shorts than at the wrecked cars, and c) the guy with the Explorer was trying to talk to me and I was having difficulty both understanding his contemporary urban accent (which is saying something, cause I've had an awful lot of practice) and responding coherently through my chattering teeth. The cop pulled up and explained that all they needed to do was exchange information (which they'd done forty minutes ago) and talk to their insurance companies, and he turned and looked at me as he was getting in his patrol car, and I figured it best to just nod and say, "hey" rather than try to explain... he nodded back and took off, I gave my telephone number to the guy who I'd been waiting with, whose name I couldn't understand, and then came home and endured/enjoyed the strange burning/itching feeling of my extremities warming back up.

Here's a photo that I took in October of 2004 which I'm fairly certain demonstrates something very important, but I'm not entirely sure just what:

Here's a blurry picture of Jesse Jackson with diamonds for eyes:

Nice....

Genevieve,
You're too kind, whoever you are.

Ashley,
A) That's how to stay cool in a place like Cyprus. How many Bedouins have you seen wearing shorts?
B) I hope that you realize that the line "free with your body" was really fantastic.
C) Who says my shorts reach mid-thigh? These shorts don't reach anywhere near that low.

Cheers to all,
N. R.

Elderly lover? My elderly lover is Thomas Pynchon. He has a new book out you should read.
Marian was actually one of the couple of people that I had hoped to see that I did actually get to see over Christmas, so I'm already planning on meeting her here, as a matter of fact. Too bad you won't be there. You only have three semesters to go until you're a master, though, right?

Champagne to my real friends and real pain to my sham friends,
W. P. Tiger

You've got to tell me what those letters stand for. I've come up with at least twenty answers, but I don't think any quite fit. It's sad that I don't know, come to think of it, but what kind of art exactly are you studying? And you're sure you want to keep going? I've got at least two and a half years left, so it's really too early to think about where I'll be next.

Also, I was reading some of the comments that I made in the distant past and I have decided that I used to be awfully clever. What happened?

If I am allowed to break into this 2-people conversation, I think that we all used to be a whole lot more clever when we had the luxury of time and the conceptual novelty of The Blog.

Let us all Carpe Diem, and do something worth-while with ours lives. Maybe get our degrees and then form a scholarly superhero squad.
Saving the world, one thesis at a time!
(sounds catchy)

There's nothing I wish more (or not very many things, anyway) than to be able to do something that would change the world for the better or at least have some effect, however insignificant, but I'm convinced that the things I'm preparing to do are utterly worthless to anyone but myself. So, instead of finishing my degree, I'm going to go back to Utah to warn the people of their impending destruction.

Yours with all due warning,
W. Purple