24 July 2006

July 16, 11:50 am, Marion, VA

1) Good food in heaven above! Why is it this hot? Hasn't anyone watched An Inconvenient Truth?

I am hiding in a sliver of shadow next to a Marathon foodmart. The shadow keeps moving, and I just don't have the stamina to move with it. I think I'll just shrivel up here for a little bit. There's a coke machine right around the corner, but I don't wanna risk the sunlight.

Oh, and by the way - there is a special motorcyclist/scooter greeting. It's the left-handed wave! you see, the throttle (that's the gas, for all you four-wheeled lamoes out there) is controlled by the right hand. So to greet a passing cyclist, you do something with the left hand. Some flex their wrist and stick their left hand outwards (imagine a king, eating his leg of mutton, blithely waving away a starving peasant), others stick their whole left arm down at a 45 degree angle (these tend to be anime-looking all-black-clad visored-helmet badassess). The coolest Hell's Angels bikers just unfurl their fingers a bit.

Me? I have settled on the sideways point. It seems to do the trick.

Really, I'm superenamored of the lefty greet. I feel like a Freemason or something.

The only other time I've given and gotten a lefty greet was the time I met Bob Dole and gave him the ol' Reverso (because his right hand does not work).


2) Scooty isn't doing so well. He huffs and chuggles lately, a whole lot more than he used to. I hope it's just the heat. Really, he's hard to get started, and has no pick-up. Why is that so familiar?

Oh, right. That sounds like my smoove game.

OH! Snap!

3) I think I've gotten to the bottom of Ddogg's crankiness. He said yesterday that before we set off, he made a conscious decision not to annoy me. And then so I guess I'm annoying him. And since he's annoyed, and feels that he's gone out of his way not to be annoying, well- let's do the math.

(annoyed-annoying)^2 = annoyed^2 - 2(annoyed*annoying) + annoying^2. Or something. I can't remember.

(What a crappy dork am I! I can't even remember the quadratic formula.)

anyway, I now have three missions - ride the scooter across the country, get the Cookie Lady some buffalo, and annoy Ddogg less.

2 comments:

Aaron Weber said...

The left-handed wave is crucial. Sometimes they'll show two fingers, meaning "keep it two wheels down" (the equivalent of "shiny side up" and "rubber side down" both of which are the general rules, as you have already figured out, for bikering.)

Yeah, I'm Joel's brother, by the way. Great blog, great concept. Good luck!

3way said...

I thought you were Joel's brother.

or his Star-Trek-alternate-dimension version.