Yet Lagged

Our cheap little motel room in Durham sat right above the window where late-night guests (who talk loud because they're talking to hotel clerks behind a plexiglass divider, despite the fact that they could be heard all through the whole motor court) got rooms - or didn't get rooms, as the case may be. One fellow walked back & forth to his car muttering about "eight lousy bucks" until he finally relented (paying with a credit card!), & another yelled on a cell phone about the cost then walked over to another nearby motel, as if the person on the other line was William Shatner trying to get him a better deal. I heard all this over the weird watery gurgle of the air conditioner because I am prone to listen to the night as I sleep.

I went out last night to find the late-night clerk playing with a radio-operated car in the parking lot, & that same fellow freaked me out when we were coming home that evening because he was apparently escorting some visitor to a room a few doors down from ours. They went in, they came out, the visitor went away. You bet I thought it was drugs!

But Magda & I drove through the blackness of the Durham highway to the airport at four this morning &, a little over fourteen hours later, I am back at home in my lovely little house feeling it had been nothing more than a dream. A dream with trees. During the three days we were in Durham, I struggled to get some sense of where everything was - you know that weird feeling when you see a street that you know you were on some part of, but it seems to you that this one is perpendicular to the one you were on earlier - I consulted a map afterwards to show up my failed human sensors - & I wonder now if it'll come back to me when next I'm there. Durham is rather small, you know. & in a forest. Forests are made to be lost in.

Big decisions were made there but I woke up from a nap just now & want to return to some more sleeping while my dogs & cats are still a little sluggish from sleep too. Plus there's a storm brewing! I'm sure I'll talk more about things of overdramatic import at another time. I have a postscript for this which ties it to this week's Self Help Radio: the night clerk? His name was Billy!*

* I don't really know if this is true. But it seemed a nice ending for an otherwise meaningless ramble.