Cool stuff:
Hitting the road feels like freedom
Cranking up the tunes and feeling the breeze in your hair
Checking out the ‘Big’ everythings along the way (Banana, Prawn, Pineapple etc)
Keeping an eye out for antique vehicles that have shows on over Easter
Anticipation of good company and good times ahead
Snakes and Chupa Chups have no calories on road trips
The longer you drive the crazier the conversations get
Cheap motels and even cheaper red wine!

Crap stuff:
Packing, and unpacking, then packing and unpacking for the trip
Getting stuck behind slow moving vehicles
Junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner (but at least clean toilets are guaranteed)Feeling the squeeze at the petrol bowser
Road works slowing you down
Sitting too long in the car gives you a numb bum
Google Maps getting you lost (inevitable)
Being pried out with a crowbar because my back is totally cactus by the time I reach my destination!

Coming home this afternoon from the shops on the Gateway (to fucking hell!!) Motorway, we happen to see on the northbound lanes a horrific mass of twisted cars and trucks.  I saw two semi-trailers and two smashed cars… one of them a 4WD that was well and truly windscreen deep into the back of one of the trucks and I’ve since heard that there was three semi-trailers and four motor vehicles involved in the crash.  Luckily, and amazingly everyone appears to have walked away from the incident.

It put chills up my spine and made me want to burst into tears, throw up and run away, though not necessarily in that order.  And yet here I am preparing to head off to Rowany Festival which is a not insignificant drive away down our nations highways.  Driving past that I was ready to pull the pin and I’m holding it together but another incident on the way down and I don’t think they’ll be able to get me back into the car.

You’ll probably find me stranded in bumfuck nowhere south of Coffs Harbour rhythmically rocking myself from side to side on the shoulder of the road somewhere saying "there’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…"

Aren’t I just a happy little bundle of emotional baggage lately.  Oh snap!  That’s why I stopped writing in this thing  🙁

PS – Happy Easter…..

Over dinner tonight I thought I’d share a wee annecdote about my day.  I’ve been running more errands today to buy stuff for the Hutti-Putti Room… this time a small fuckton of speaker wires and electrical plates etc.  So I’ve been to Dickie Smith, VideoPro, Hardly Normal and Jaycar. Which is where I eventually found everything I needed so I’m not sure why I bothered with the other stops – though I did accidentally find a lovely rug in Hardly Normal that would go lovely with the new couches when they turn up and I’m already finding it hard to resist going back to buy it tomorrow even though I really don’t need it.

Anyway dinner conversation…

Borys:  I have spent a goodly portion of my day today enveloped in a warm and fuzzy happiness of harmony for my fellow human beings.
Yale:  What?  Did you kill someone’s puppy?
Borys:  What??  Oh that’s nice!  Mr K??  Did you hear that?
Mr K:  What’s that?
Borys:  I just told Yale that I have spent a goodly portion of my day today wrapped in the warm and fuzzy happiness of harmony with my fellow human beings and he asked me if I killed someone’s puppy!   😐
Yale:  Or maybe it was a kitten?
Mr K:   Was it a chihuahua? did you use a fork?
Borys:  What the hell?
Mr K:  Someone in the US had a chihuahua with a BBQ fork stuck through it’s head… it was in the news today.
Yale:  Oh yeah.. I saw that on news.com
Borys:   No!!!  Fuck what sort of weirdo do you people think I am? 
Yale:  Okay, okay… back to your story.
Borys:  Right.  I was driving along Vulture St in Wooloongabba coming back from Jaycar and was just coming up to the lights past the stadium which were red so I was slowing right down and moved into the right hand lane so that I wouldn’t be stuck behind a truck that was already stopped.  Anyway the lights turned green just as I was getting to the intersection so I stomped on the accelerator only I was in third gear and hardly went anywhere.  So as I’m chuffing along in third gear this woman in a silver car comes flying up behind me and I changed down to second and sped up so I could pull back in front of the truck to get out of her way.  She went speeding past me even though I was probably doing about 65kpm by then.  Then as we came over the little rise past the next lights I saw her jam on her brakes really hard… just as she saw the little policeman with his little radar gun and his bright yellow high-vis vest step out to direct her to the side of the road.  I wound down my window and gave her a little wave as I drove past doing the speed limit and I tell you… it left me with a warm happy glow for the rest of the day.  🙂

I may be guilty of a little schadenfreude every now and then… but I’m not going to delight in dead puppies you sick bastards!!!

I’ve been rather quiet lately… quietly going mad I thought.  Until this morning when I discovered something rather interesting.  It’s not me who’s mad after all … it’s everyone else! 

You see, I went to the psych this morning and in particular wanted to discuss why I’m still suffering so much anxiety in the car, on the road, in traffic… what have you.  And after picking away at the horrible car related experiences I’ve somehow managed to live through (most of which can be found under my carz tags) she made a rather interesting observation.

Everyone – and that means you too – labours under the misapprehension that when they get into their cars to go about their day, they inherently think ‘everything will be okay’.  In honesty, statistically speaking, the odds are that – yes… most of your journeys will be uneventful and everything WILL be okay. 

But I know better.

When I get in my car I am fully aware that this is not the case… that things can go wrong when you get behind the wheel, and quite frequently do.  Additionally lots of those things that can go wrong are totally beyond your control.  Every time I get in my car I am literally waiting for the hammer to fall… again.  My experience tells me that these things don’t just ‘happen to other people’ – they can happen to me.  They HAVE happened to me.  They have happened to me FOUR fucking times in fact. 

My experiences have caused me to see through the delusion that the rest of you are sharing ‘that everything will be okay’ when you go for a drive.  Most of you are suffering under the same fallacious impression that ‘you’ll be alright’.  So none of you are anticipating any accidents or traffic or road dramas but it’s not true.  Getting in your car and driving is very dangerous but collectively, you choose not to acknowledge it and you’re doing it quite willfully apparently.  

So I ask – How do you recover the delusion once it’s been shattered by empirical fact? 
.

Twice this week I’ve gone out to get the Small Child from school only to be confronted by horrible car accidents.  Is it a full moon?  Has half of Brisbane gone off their meds?  Or is there some sort of comphrehensive and co-ordinated attack against car insurers going on and we didn’t get a copy of the memo?

Whatever it is I am so tired of driving along (hypervigilantly) minding my own business only to be confronted by mashed up cars.  Today wasn’t as bad as the incident on Monday but still… just going to get the Small Child from school shouldn’t be emotionally traumatizing.  I got to the top of the street to turn onto Belmont Rd and first thing I noticed was four tow truck drivers (fucking vultures) hanging around picking over the bones of a white Commodore station wagon that had somehow t-boned into a silver Rav4.  I tried to just ignore it, I deliberately tried not to look for the drivers to see if they were okay and I drove around it…..

… only to go around the corner onto Meadowlands Road and glance down onto the Gateway.  Indeed it was hard not to as there were more flashing lights down there than you could poke a stick at.  There were police and ambulance on the scene (which I had heard about an hour ago from our backyard where my cousin is doing the concrete) and they were attempting to sort out what looked like two semi-trailers and about four vehicles that had somehow come to grief.  I didn’t look too close.  I don’t want to know how it happened.  I don’t want to be confronted by accidents and cars smashed together EVERY TIME I LEAVE THE DAMN HOUSE! 

Maybe I shouldn’t be living in the city.  It’s just too bloddy stressful… and living within earshot of a highway is probably not helping at all.  Every time I hear the trucks going hard on their compression brakes, or the squeal of tyres or a car backfiring or the loud bang from a tyre blowing out… I cringe waiting to hear the sounds of crunching metal.  And then there’s the eventually wailing of the emergency services vehicles sirens. 

I’m finding myself being frightened / upset / alarmed / pissed off / scared / and basically assaulted by these horrible accidents and idiot traffice incidents almost every day…  and it feels like it’s getting worse not better.  🙁