The Ditch Dug

In that time as I assiduously but haphazardly engaged in moving the car to avoid the Repo Man, I also was heavily drugged and already by nature haphazard and vivacious in my habits. Imagine the feeling when you walk out of the Stop N Gorge only to find your vehicle isn’t where you remembered putting it.

But when did you put it not there?

Is that memory from yesterday? Last week? This morning. And the amorphous glut of useless memories from parking that you put in the trash folder because they bored you now must be excavated. You’ll have to sort through every car parking memory you’ve ever had.

Like all those memories of where you slipped the keys or what you thought the best place to toss a lighter. Near flame? Near water? Near gasoline? Or there with your toothbrush beside the mail. The car could be behind the 711 or next to the Little League field (there are five times in my life I’ve lived adjacent to a playground or ballfield). Or up the hill where the bigger houses are? The constant changing of the car location is a necessity because of your enemy the Repo Man. You don’t know if he’s really on the prowl or if he even really cares about a banged up minivan that was on the low end of car worth anyway. But he could be and that’s enough. The weight of this possibility required then energy of devising new hiding places (though rotating through a regular series of four spots seems to be as much as you can handle) and this engendered the constant uncertainty of sorting through drug misted memories of days that were all the same except for walking the dogs, Jezebel’s noisy rattling road towards death and hiding the car.

Going through the carparking memory files is clearly not more than an exercise in retrofitted bureaucracy and bureaucracy in it’s very nature must be an ongoing and regular habit.

You’d can’t reverse engineer an entire mindset.