We were not alone. The banks were open. I had to make a small deposit and during the wait, I picked up the blurb for Washington Mutual’s Money Market Savings account. First you give them your life history, because how else can your identity be stolen? (Or you can pay them extra to keep it a secret like they promised.) It says here if you deposit $10,000, they will pay you a whopping 0.1% APY. A tenth of 1%. That’s a whole $10 per year. You’ll double your money in by the year 74,008 A.D. That’s 720 centuries, 72,000 years. Still, I cannot accept that WAMU would be so generous. Better read the fine print. And their fee schedule. Blustery weather kept me indoors, so you get mostly irrelevant tidbits. For instance, my temperature measured exactly 98.6 for the first time in over ten years. My normal is 97.7. And what’s with food prices? I didn’t go shopping for one week and they double on me. Four dollars for a can of peaches. On the other hand, regular gas was down to $2.35 a gallon. My transmission bands are slipping which means an overhaul is due.
Then, I get a flat tire on the 21-speed. When all else failed, Wallace and I inverted the tire, not the tube, and felt around the interior. Sure enough, there was a metal tine embedded only on the inside. There was no visible entry hole. Agreeing we’d never seen anything like this before and failing to get it out with vice grips, I simply cut the piece out. What are the chances of another wire hitting the same spot? I’ll find out.
Around a third of the jungle has been hacked back and we can see the west street again. They can see us too, but they have to keep fifteen feet back. The whole area to the east is populated by Canadians again. Our place is the first on the block, so everybody who lives here has to drive past. Before long you get to know who is supposed to be nosing around. Cooler times bring on all kinds of activity. That strange dude up the lane is back in business, whatever he is up to.
That’s the one who lives in the only single-wide trailer parked between the permanent mobile homes, but he drives a brand new $40,000 car. And comes and goes every half hour or so all day and all night. I know because my private office opens out onto the lane and his car sounds so much like Wallace’s, I always look up. How do I just know one day I’m going to hear the Channel 7 chopper overhead and police dogs in the distance.
It finally happened, a head-on collision in the casino parking lot. You know how they’ve barricaded and roped off all the natural traffic patterns and set up all those idiotic valet parking sections. To cross the unused part of the lot, nobody wants to drive up and down every lane to get to an exit that’s fifty feet away. So everybody cuts across the lanes. The problem is when two people do the same thing in opposite directions. When they see each other, both will try to swing back into the painted lanes. Screech. Ker-bang. And those blithering ass-hats at the casino can swear they had nothing to do with it. You will not believe the effort they plow into soaking patrons for parking on a lot just not designed for that brand of extortion.
On my birthday, Wallace wants to treat at the Hard Rock. They have a famous smorgasbord, surely a loss leader. I rarely miss an opportunity to point out that I don’t gamble, but I sure enjoy going there. The snag is, the way our diets have improved since Wallace arrived, I’m never that hungry in the afternoon. If I go to a smorg, I want to be famished.
