Naomi died on me two days ago. I was driving along Route One, minding my own business, when I noticed that, for some reason, the accelerator wasn't, well...accelerating anymore. This bothered me. Greatly. I coasted to the side of the room, pulled in my emergency brake, and started saying goodbye to the car that trucked me through the spring. A sheriff pulled up behind me and had my car towed away. I had to pay the wrecker $35 to tow it, and I'm basically just leaving it with him because it's not worth paying to get it fixed. My little blue electron is grounded. Now, I need a name for a 1995 Geo Prizm, painted gold. --------------------------------------------- I saw a friend of mine last night at The Land of Social Irresponsibility (aka Wal-Mart). She's one of those flighty people; very much a person you either love to death or can't stand. I happen to stand in the middle. Shannon, however, despises her because I used to have a crush on her in high school, and to this day I have no idea why. She waved to us from another aisle as we were loading our stuff onto the conveyer belt on another aisle. As she's waving, she yells that she's totally hyper and flails about. Impressive. Right in the middle of Wally World. That's just great. So, Shannon and I aren't too impressed with that, but it serves as a strange insight. She's one of those people who hasn't grown up since I left high school, and never will. And all the time, I see small bits of that high school life toward which I used to gravitate. Now, I'm trying to stay away, since I've been back home for the fourth time. But, reading an email from another friend of mine has made me realize that that attitude has kept me out of touch with the people that I should stay in contact with: my good friends, who have grown to become conscientious, mature, exceptional people. There do exist people like that, I know, but I've lost them in the fray. A few of the good ones stay in touch, but that's all. It's frustrating, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that the past, despite my best efforts, is totally out of my grasp. --------------------------------------------- And before I leave, one bit of karma about my car. The day before the Fox broke down, I drove my father's Pontiac Fiero to work, and nearly got involved in a crash at a hard-to-navigate stop light. After Naomi bit the dust, I took from it a pendant that I had hanging from my turn signal lever. The pendant is a little souvenir that I bought from Universal Studios while I visited my friend Tammy in Florida. It has Saint Brendan's Cross on one side; I chose that because Saint Brendan is the patron saint of the traveler, and he is, after all, Brendan the Navigator. Look him up on Wikipedia. On the other side is the Chartres Labyrinth. Now, generally, labyrinths signify the search for ultimate knowledge. Not this one. Turns out, it's a symbol on a cathedral in France, that symbolizes the search for God. The interesting part of the Labyrinth is that a person that walks through it has to go through four different quadrants before getting to the middle. So, I used to think the Powers That Be were on my heels. Now I think they're stepping on them.