Awesome.

So, here we go... I was making my way from Evansville, Indiana to Lafayette, Louisiana. I cruised along the highways for about six hours, with maybe four hours of travel left ahead of me. The gas tank started to get a little low, so I decided to get off the highway, fuel up, and grab something to eat. As I pulled in to the gas station there was a loud crash, and suddenly the vehicle wouldn't move. I assumed that I must have hit something pulling in to the gas station, but when I got out, there wasn't anything there. So some local kid with yellow teeth and tobacco spit on his shirt walked up to me, shook my hand (which I'm still trying to scrub clean), and proceeded to check the vehicle. He tells me how there is a bolt that should be holding that tire in place, and how it makes absolutely no sense that the bolt is nowhere to be found. OK, I think, well... whatever.

A few moments after this guy crawled out from under my car and crawled back under whatever rock he was living under, a police officer showed up. This guy was legitimately Carl Winslow, the guy from "Family Matters." So Carl looks at me, and I look at him, and he asks me what's wrong. Now, I'm no mechanic, but if the tire is separated from the vehicle, I think it's fair to say that I can tell you what's wrong. So I proceed to tell numb-nuts what the deal is, and I decide to call 'AAA' to fill them in on my predicament. 'AAA' asks me the name of the town I'm in, so I look at Carl and ask him the name of the town and how to spell it. I'll be damned if officer buttplug has no idea how to spell the name of the town. Seriously. So, I walk over and read the name of the town off the side of his car, "Oh yeah, it's right there on the side of my car," is what he says to me. Oh, really? Really? Anyways, 'AAA' agrees to send the tow truck to help me out. Now, I don't consider myself to be racist or prejudiced to black people, but I do get a little nervous when I'm the only white person, I'm in a town I don't know, and there are about fifty people hovered around me. I don't care if they're white, black, brown, yellow, or green, I'm going to be a little itchy. A few of them start eyeing me, and staring at some of my jewelry. Call me crazy, but I don't like when people stare at me. So I sat inside this hole-in-the-wall gas station, and I stared right back at them. Fun stuff.

I sat in the gas station for almost an hour and waited for the tow truck. Eventually the guy pulls in and he's the biggest redneck I think I've ever seen. Big red truck, dirty ass trucker cap, grey hairs poking out from under it, and a collective sum of five teeth in his skull. I'm going to call this guy Farmer Brown for the rest of the story. So, Farmer Brown looks at the vehicle and goes, "You got a problem." Yeah. That's what he said. Seriously. I look inside his clueless eyes and I say, "Uhh... no shit, but what do we do about it?" FB has no idea what to do, other than that to tow it, and he eventually suggests a Jeep dealership up the road in Laurel, Mississippi. I had to share a fifteen minute drive with this guy, which was a great time. Anyways, he starts talking, "In thirty years of towing cars and working on cars, I've never seen that happen." Interesting. "So what do you think it was? Did that bolt just pop out when I was driving?" He looks over at me and he says, "You don't got any enemies, do ya?" Right away I'm thinking Old Man River is crazy, but I decide to see where he's going with it. "None that I know of anyway," I said. "Well, those things don't just pop off, and even if the nut was missing from the bolt, there's so much pressure down there from driving that it wouldn't just pop out like that. You're lucky you weren't on the highway going seventy, eighty miles-an-hour, because you would be down in them trees, and son, you would be dead." Awesome. Farmer Brown thinks somebody tried to sabotage me. Then he goes on about how if somebody removed the bolt that I would still probably be able to drive the six hours that I had done without something happening, and there's no telling when it would have popped off, etc.

After my life lesson from FB, and dropping off my vehicle (let me remind you that it is packed to the ceiling with my life) at the dealership, he decided to hit me up with a $60 bill for the towing. Terrific. So I pay the $60, quickly followed by another $55 to spend the night in a Super 8 in beautiful Laurel, Mississippi.

This morning, I went to the dealership, and learned that the part I need has to be overnighted, because I'm in the middle of East Bumhole, and they can't seem to find it anywhere. The guy at the dealership proceeded to tell me what a shitty town this is, and how much he wants to leave, and how badly he feels for me being stuck here, etc. All the while, I just want to fix the damn thing as soon as possible, and get my ass back on the road. Well, it's about 10:30 in the morning, and I have no idea what the rest of the day has in store for me. Looks like another $55 is due to the Super 8.

To top it all off, I got a phone call yesterday, from my mother, to tell me that my cat, Sandis, had suffered a stroke, and is gone. My parents returned home late Monday night to find him curled up in the corner, unable to move his body, only his eyes. They rushed him to a late-night veterinary clinic, but they said there wasn't much they could do for him. They gave him an IV, and tried to revive him, but my parents eventually decided that they didn't want him to be a vegetable. So they hung out with him for the last twenty minutes, and they talked to him, and held him, and eventually the doctor put the injection into the IV, and Sandis went to sleep for the last time. I barely got to see him over the last year, and I only spent a brief part of June with him this summer. He was my buddy, and was really more of a dog than a cat. He would come to you when you called him, jump up on the bed, play, fight, and do all of it. He hated other cats and even though he was a baby inside the house, he could more than hold his own in a scrap. Which he did on more than one occasion. He was my buddy, and now he's gone.

It's been a difficult past twenty-four hours, an even more difficult past four months, and all I want is for everything to slow down. One step at a time, I guess.