[Journal] My 5-Car Pileup

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Note: This is a non-fiction entry in my personal journal.

It was after an exceedingly stressful day that I was in a 5-car pileup on the Interstate. A pickup truck in front of me hit the brakes suddenly, and then I hit mine. And then, the lady behind me hit me, and the two cars behind her hit each other and then her, pushing me into the truck in front of me. 5 cars, stuck in a domino effect. Every one of us unable to prevent the accident from occurring.

My description makes it sound a lot worse than it really was, of course — no one was hurt, do real damage was done, and the whole thing wound up being a big inconvenience to everyone involved. One of the guys was even annoyed that I called the cops since it was going to take a chunk out of his evening. But isn’t it wonderful that we could all be in a 5-car pileup and be annoyed that the paperwork was taking too long?

Here are some of the many things that could have made the accident much more serious, and potentially fatal to some of us.
1) A semi could have been involved.
2) Someone could have hit their accelerator instead of their brakes out of panic.
3) The roads could have been icy or wet, resulting in less traction.
4) The accident could have spilled over into another lane.
5) It could have happened at a much greater speed.
6) It could have happened a quarter mile earlier while we were still on the curve of a bridge.
7) Someone could have not been wearing a seatbelt and been more seriously injured.

And so on, and so on.

But nope. Hardly any damage, either to ourselves or collaterally. We all lived to be annoyed. I’d call that the best car accident I could ever hope to be in.

Let’s hope the next one is just as easy.

-SJJ

Air Travel

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6:45 AM. I’m leaving Dallas Fort-Worth. It’s colder than I expected, but that happens in the winter. My suit isn’t really made for keeping out the cool air, but my leather jacket more than compensates. I’m actually sweating as I walk through the airport. But if I take my jacket off, they’ll count it as a carry-on item. Airports are insane.

5:00 PM. Boston is cold, and covered in snow. I can’t believe how much snow I’m seeing. This isn’t even fresh snow; it happened three days ago, and all it’s been doing is blowing around from one place to the other. They had a foot; it looks like hardly any of it has melted. Sure, the roads and runways are clear, but there’s snow on every sidewalk and driveway. It’s a good thing I’m not staying overnight; I like to talk a walk at night, and I don’t think I’d be able to do it here. Even if it weren’t for the snow, the wind chill is so bad that I’d have to wear three layers of clothes just to stay warm. And I’d never think to pack for that.

9:30 PM. I’ve arrived in Chicago. It’s got snow and wind, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Boston. But the people here seem less comfortable with it; in Boston, they went about their lives. Here, they’re driving slow and wearing the wrong sorts of clothes for the weather. That’s funny. I always thought Chicago people were used to the winter weather. I’ve been there in June before and had to wear a jacket because it was so cold. But this is fresh snow, and the cab driver told me that this all just blew in after some unseasonable warmth. I guess they got caught off-guard.

6:00 PM. It was a short jaunt down to St. Louis; maybe an hour flight. But it’s amazing how much different it is down here. They got hit by the same snowstorm Chicago and Boston saw, but only got a light dusting. The people here don’t know how to drive, but in my experience, they never know how to drive in this town. My cab passed a five-car pileup on the way to my hotel downtown. I’d swear it was five fender benders in a row. That’s hardly worth calling the police about.

3:00 PM. You sort of expect snow in Denver. But there isn’t much. I’m surprised. I guess it got warm enough and dry enough that the snow started melting. It’s still cold, if you ask me, but it is currently above freezing, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. At least people here are used to this stuff. Down in Texas, we get snow occasionally, but never for very long. My mom moved down to Tampa, Florida a couple of years ago. She hasn’t seen snow since she got there.

10:00 AM. Finally home in Dallas. These back-to-back speaking engagements are going to kill me. I’ve got another round of them next week. It’s weird to think that over the course of a few days, I’ve been flying cross-country. Honestly, you get so used to it after awhile it feels like you’re just a few hours from home at any given moment. Everything’s pretty much the same. You never stop to think how far away you really are… just how much better home really is.

The Long Drive Home

Photo Credit: K2D2vaca (Flickr.com)

George hated his commute. Especially on days like today.

“Will… you… MOVE?!” he shouted at the Cadillac in front of him, which had decided to stop and let three cars in front of it instead of advancing his lane any further. He didn’t mind it when people were polite, but this was ridiculous. There was a hill ahead, and a curve beyond that, so it was hard to see how far the traffic was backed up. But from where Carl was sitting, things were practically at a standstill, and it didn’t look like they’d be getting better soon.

It was upsetting. He’d had big plans for tonight — he was going to grill up some steaks he’d left marinating, make himself a bloody mary, and sit on the back porch and relax and unwind a little bit. Work had been awful today — well, it was always awful, but today had been especially horrifying. He’d been dealing with a client who he just couldn’t please, and he felt like garbage when it was all said and done.

And now… this. There was no easy way off the interstate for at least another mile, and the off-ramp was likely to be just as backed up as the interstate itself. It was going to be awhile. George shifted in his seat. He had to pee, badly. He’d considered going before he’d left the office, but nope, he’d figured that his measly 30-minute commute wouldn’t be a problem today.

He turned up the radio, and found himself getting irritated with the chattering DJ. He flipped through a few stations, trying to ignore the pressure between his legs. But it wasn’t going away.

The Cadillac inched forward, finally. George inched with it, and slammed on his brakes as he saw brake lights again. Another car pulled in front of the Cadillac. George cursed, and contemplated getting out of his car and pissing all over the side of the Cadillac in defiance.

The pressure seemed to swell at the thought, and George undid his seatbelt so he could shift again. What were you supposed to do in these situations? There was no civilized way to deal with this. He couldn’t just get out of his car and go on the side of the road. People got arrested for things like that, especially when they were wearing suits. A bum could probably get away with it. But the police didn’t like it when obviously sane people violated the law.

George shifted again. He was going to have to do something, soon. The Cadillac inched forward a little more, and he followed it before he once again came to a stop. He started groping around in his back seat, and eventually came up with a halfway-full bottle of water. Perfect. He rolled down his window, dumped the water out, and held it down near his pants. Looking to his right quickly, he made sure the car next to him didn’t have anyone watching, then unzipped his pants and tried to position things so he could take care of his problem.

It was awkward, and very nearly messy, with a lot of stopping and starting. It seemed to take forever, and he was worried he was going to have to stop mid-stream, dump out the bottle, and then continue. But fortunately, the pressure eased, and he was able to stop before long. He put the cap on the bottle and sighed in relief.

The car behind him honked.

The Cadillac had pulled forward, and someone in an SUV from the next lane over was trying to pull in. George floored it, and had to brake almost as suddenly before he slammed into the Cadillac. The woman trying to inch over honked and shot him a nasty gesture. And then, just as suddenly, she had a horrified expression on her face. She quickly turned her head.

George considered this for a moment, and then realized he’d forgotten something. Cursing silently, he rearranged himself and zipped up his pants. It required him to shift a little bit, which was even more awkward. He glanced sheepishly over at the woman when he was done. She was looking down at his car, talking into a cell phone. George had a sinking feeling that she was calling the police … something that was confirmed when he saw her turn her camera and take a picture of his car.

It was going to be a long night…

Sick Day

Photo Credit: Randy Son of Robert (Flickr.com)

I never realized how much my dogs must annoy my neighbors.

My husband and I got a beagle puppy for my birthday last year. He was cute and cuddly and completely dependent on me, which I loved. But then Sam got bigger, and more independent. And he also got lonely. It was sad to leave him behind in the morning and hear his yelping cries. I knew I wouldn’t want to be left alone all day, and I was sure that he didn’t either.

As it happened, a friend of ours had to find a home for Missy, his West Highland Terrier. She was a cute little dog, about five years old, but spirited, and friendly. Sam and Missy had played together at the dog park, and they got along well. And since both of them were fixed, we wouldn’t have to worry about puppies. Sam seemed less lonely now that Missy was around, and once she got over missing her old master, she seemed happy with the new arrangement.

Our condo is pet-friendly, and a lot of people have dogs or cats. But I don’t know if anyone has dogs who bark quite as much as mine. As I’ve stayed home sick today, I’ve been woken up every hour by Sam or Missy getting all upset about something. First, it was the guy upstairs walking very heavily across the floor. Next, it was the squirrel outside the window. After that, it was the mailman dropping off a package. They seem to go crazy at least once an hour. I’m wondering if they do this every day when I’m gone. It’s never occurred to me before that my dogs might be, well, you know, bad, and that our neighbors might despise us for letting them bark all the time.

It’s strange to think that other people might judge us by our pets. There might even be people in our condo who think of us as “the owners of that annoying beagle and yappy westie” but who have no idea who we are or what we do. It’s sort of like when I go to the dog park, and I get to know people by their dogs. It’s a frame of reference that’s easier, I suppose, than making a personal connection.

I wish I knew how to make my dogs be quiet and behave. I always thought that we were nice and quiet neighbors. But taking a sick day has made me think twice.

Cleaning House

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“You’re supposed to be cleaning,” my wife said.

I looked up from the binder of baseball cards I’d found. “I know,” I said. “I just wanted to look through this stuff for a minute.”

She sat down next to me and started rummaging through the box I’d found. She pulled out one of my little league trophies. “I didn’t know you were into baseball,” she said, and read the plate on the base. “Most Improved Player,” she said. “Huh.”

“I’m not into baseball,” I said. “I mean, I was when I was a kid, but I outgrew it, I guess.”

“What position did you play?” she asked.

“Outfield,” I said. “It was the safest place to put me. Most of the kids couldn’t hit very far.”

She laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you play a sport that wasn’t a video game,” she said. “I’ve never thought of you as an athlete.” She pulled out my old glove. “No offense, of course.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It was one of those things I did because my parents made me. I wouldn’t have chosen to do it.”

“They made you?” she asked. “Did they make you buy all those baseball cards, too?”

I grinned. “My mom said I was wasting my money,” I said. “I tried to convince her that these were an investment.”

“Are they worth anything?” my wife asked.

“These? Nah. Probably not,” I said. “Every kid in the country was collecting baseball cards at the time, hoping to strike it rich one day. And they probably kept theirs in better condition than I’ve kept mine.”

I flipped a page as my wife continued looking through the box. “You know,” I said. “There was a time when I spent hours organizing these cards in this book. I probably switched them around five or six times until I was happy with the way they were arranged. It was all a huge waste of time, of course, because I lost interest and never touched these again. But what makes us do that? Why do we spend so much time interested in things that don’t matter in the long run?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said my wife. “But maybe sometimes, what seems like a waste of time is good practice for something else in life.” She stood up, and threw a dustrag at me. I caught it. “See?” she said. “Your baseball skills came in handy. And your organization skills are about to.”

I closed the binder of cards and shook my head with a smile.

An Old Pair of Underwear

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“But they’re comfortable!” Louis protested.

“I don’t care. They’re full of holes,” said Joan. She held the boxer briefs up with both hands and made a face as she looked at them. “How can this even be comfortable for you?”

Louis took them from her and poked his fingers through the holes. They were at the seam of the crotch, where the fabric that went over the leg met the bottom of the brief. “I get hot down there,” he explained. “Friction, you know? My thighs rubbing together, things swinging around…”

Joan stood up. “If you’re not going to take this seriously, you can fold the laundry yourself,” she said, and huffed out of the room. Louis followed her into the dining room, where she had already sat down and pretended to be interested in the newspaper.

“Why does it matter to you what my underwear looks like?” he asked. “I mean, nobody sees them, and besides, it’s not like anyone has to deal with them but me.”

“You care about what mine looks like,” she replied with a caustic tone.

“Yeah, but that’s different,” he said. “Yours are, you know, sexy. You don’t care about mine as much.”

“I care that they don’t have holes in them,” she said.

“Why?”

“I just do!” she shouted. “Is it too much to ask that you buy some new underwear when they’re falling apart?”

“So I can spend more money on things I don’t need?” he asked. “Think about how much I’m saving on underwear by not replacing them every time they get a little hole in the seam.”

She slammed her book down. “It’s like six bucks for a three-pack!” she shouted. “I think we can afford it!”

“Yeah, but if I spend that every month, that adds up,” Louis said. “I’m saving us like a hundred dollars a year in unneeded underwear.”

She glared at him now as she stood up. “You know what? Fine,” she said. “If you want to dress like a bum, you do that. Do whatever makes you happy, because that’s always what you do anyway.”

She stormed out of the room and slammed the bedroom door. Louis laughed, and walked over to the doorway.

“What are we even fighting about?” he asked her through the door.

There was no answer. Louis shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, and, clutching his underwear, returned to the living room to finish folding the laundry.

Real Life at the Office (After a Recession)

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Somewhere in the office, a phone is ringing. But no one is answering it.

I stare at my computer screen and sigh. Last year, there were twenty five of us. We voluntarily put a freeze on raises and bonuses so that we wouldn’t be forced to let three of those people go. At the time, spirits were high. We were going to get through this thing together.

But in March, Joe in Customer Support and Fawn in Marketing both vanished. No one knew why. Neither of them had been doing that great of work lately; we’d all suspected they were having an affair together. The rumor was that they had been fired for having sex in the office and getting caught by the building custodians. Nobody knew, of course, if it was true.

One Friday in June, Bill and Jack and Chloe from sales got called into a meeting. They never came back. Our office manager, JoAnne, packed up their belongings in copy paper boxes and took them out. The sales team was getting nervous. Chloe and Bill were the most recent additions to the team, and it made sense to let them go, but Jack had been with the company for seventeen years. If he could get fired, no one was safe.

In August, department managers met with senior management from the home office and were asked to consider who else we could lose. It was a bad year for our company, and we had to slash overhead to keep our shareholders from turning on us. They asked us to prioritize our departments and to rank our employees from most essential to least essential. It was a given that department managers were the most essential, so our own names stayed off the lists. We handed them in, and they excused us. One by one, seven employees were called in. Four did not return. JoAnne, once again, gathered up their belongings.

When the news broke that raises and bonuses would be on freeze again, Fred in Accounts Receivable left not long after. Word was that he’d found a better job for a small business as their in-house accountant. We wished him well.

And so I sit here now in this bleak and cold January, looking out at the sea of empty desks, listening as another phone that no one will answer begins to ring. Our skeleton crew has clung to this sinking ship, hoping that we will weather the storm and escape with our lives. They have told us that a sale of the company is pending, and that if we’re acquired, our money troubles will be over, and raises and bonuses will come back. We have toiled for months under these promises, but we have learned that when we begin to hear the phrase, “business as usual,” it means that something even more drastic is about to happen.

We all used to watch that sitcom about the people at the paper company, and we found it funny at first because it reflected our lives so closely. But the people on the show still have jobs, even though they’re incompetent and barely do any actual work. The show has turned into a cruel parody of what we’re enduring. The slacker salesman gets promoted and gets to marry the redhead and start a family. In our office, our best salesman is losing accounts as companies go under. His wife has already left him, and he’s come to work drunk twice in the last month. Everyone’s talking about him behind his back, because we’ve all painted a target there for the upper management to see — when they’re ready to trim again, we want them to take him, and not us, even though we all know that losing his job will completely destroy him.

I hate myself for what I’ve become. But I rationalize it by reminding myself that at least I have a job. Camaraderie is a luxury for good times. Survival is the name of the game during a recession.

Looking at the Snakes at the Zoo

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“He could kill you, you know.”

Molly rolled her eyes as she stared at the green tree python. He (she? it? The snake seemed to be a male, or at least, Molly preferred him to be) was sitting very still, his slender, long, emerald green body wrapped around a branch of the small tree in his habitat. But his eyes were staring right at her — yellow eyes, with black vertical slits for pupils.

“I think he can see me,” she said to Frank, who had moved on to look at a much less impressive display of Vietnamese mossy frogs.

“It’s mirrored glass,” said Frank. “Like I said. If these animals knew you were here, they’d be trying to kill you.”

He walked back over towards her. “And besides,” he said, pointing his finger at the snake. “Look, his tongue isn’t even out. That’s how snakes sense what’s going on around them. If he knew you were there, he’d either be watching you with all of his senses or striking at the glass.”

Frank tapped on the glass roughly. The snake didn’t seem to notice. “See?” Frank said. “Completely unaware of his environment.”

Frank glided over to the komodo dragon exhibit as Molly continued to stare at the python. Frank was right, of course — the python couldn’t see her. But she still felt a strange connection with this creature. There was a certain beauty to his form, and to his color; a monstrous nature concealed by an exotic exterior. Molly pulled out her camera, and tried to snap a few pictures, but she knew that none of them would remind her of the wonder of seeing it before her, safely tucked away in its own little world, keeping them both blissfully ignorant of the relationship they might have if she had stumbled upon him in the wild.

A Walk Through The Snow

Photo credit: Sean J. Jordan

Wet white crystals crunched underneath my feet as I trudged along behind my dogs.

My Scottish Terrier’s paw prints showed me the path I was supposed to be taking. The impression he made on the pavement was big. I realized his feet, which had served him so well as shovels in the summertime as he dug up my backyard, were also wonderful snowshoes. My other dog left prints about half the size, revealing his smaller, daintier feet. It was odd to think that he was the taller and heavier of the two dogs, since his crisscrossing path put some of his prints neatly inside those left by the Scottie.

We stopped at a hydrant so my Scottie could pee. The contrast was wonderful, and I pulled out my phone to take a picture. A white, snowy ground with a black dog and  yellow hydrant – you really couldn’t ask for a more vivid contrast of color. Unfortunately, my cell phone camera wasn’t up to the task, and I cursed myself for leaving the good camera inside. Not that it would have mattered; my Scottie was far too curious to stand still and pose anyhow.

We turned the corner and walked past the familiar pee-and-poop spot at the vacant lot, today covered by still-unspoiled snow. That wasn’t to last for long, and my dogs bounded across the lot, sniffing around eagerly before eventually stopping to drop their steaming brown calling cards. I sighed and knelt down, pulling a plastic bag out of my pocket. My dogs were already up and pulling on their leashes, eager to continue their adventure, kicking powdery tufts of purity into the air as they waited for me to once again follow.

Change is Coming…

Once again, I find myself looking at my Web site and asking myself, “Why do I have this again?” My dream of keeping daily articles on this site continues to fall through the moment I lose interest in whatever new scheme I’ve set up for updating, and I honestly am too busy with my upcoming marketing blog (for my new job) to keep this updated with fresh content that interests me.

I have, however, decided that I need to start “scrap writing” every day as an exercise. Scrap writing is a lot like flash fiction — you just sit down for a few minutes, write a story of less than 1,000 words, and go with it. You don’t spend a lot of time editing or developing it – you just write what you are feeling at the moment. I don’t know if anyone else does this, but it doesn’t really bug me if they don’t; I came up with this idea, as I come up with so many other good ideas, when I was taking a shower.

So, starting January 1st, I’m going to alter the design of this site a bit, take down most of the links to old articles, and begin posting writing scraps every day. I will occasionally intersperse these with journal articles or items of interest, but fiction (or occasionally, non-fiction!)  is going to be what I put up from here on out.

So, to those who have enjoyed my articles, thanks, and to those who are simply friends with me and who wonder what I’m up to, send me an e-mail or find me on Facebook.

Happy New Year!

-SJJ