"the adrenaline is always a bit of a treat."
LOL quoting one's own fic in subject lines for the fail.
Today I had a Very Big Adventure.
Well, no. Not really. What I actually had was a very brief interlude with one of the dill pickles on the reuben sandwich of life, i.e. Horny Men in Cars, but it unnerved me for a variety of reasons, so I am achieving catharsis by posting about it on LiveJournal.
My mom is laid up with a bum leg (some kind of muscle injury of dubious origin) so she's working from home for the forseeable future. I am emphatically not allowing myself to resent this, because that would make me a very bad person, but I have a rule, which is that when my mother is home during the day time I am not. So around 11 this morning I packed a bookbag with water, smokes, books, and a number of notebooks, and set off with iPod in hand to explore bucolic, insular Wendell, NC, for a place to sit down and veg in relative comfort for the next several hours.
I did find an ideal place---a little gully surrounded by water and trees, quite out of sight of everything---but that's not the point. The point is that as I was walking there, a car started following me: a large, dilapidated, dirty off-white sedan with a very noisy engine, carrying at least three men, who yelled greetings and imprecations at me out the window. I do a lot of walking around town, and this never, ever fails to happen, and while it irritates the snot out of me, I am largely resigned to it being the way of the world. So I did what I always do, namely ignored them, and turned immediately into the parking lot of the apartment complex that stands uphill from said gully. The gully is reached by walking to the end of the parking lot and climbing down a very steep drop-off through the trees until you reach a large, flat expanse of rock and a stream---very shady, cool, just out of sight of all the neighboring houses, and probably an ideal place to dispose of a dead body, but that didn't occur to me until well after what happened next.
A few seconds after I had left the main road where the car had been following me (I say "following" but it had actually passed me at that point and was driving slowly ahead of me as the men continued to yell) the driver seemed to realize that I had dropped out of sight. His response was to slow the car down to a crawl---and then stop in the middle of the road.
I confess it was at that point that my heart started beating a little faster. Being hollered at from a moving vehicle is one thing, and aside from the fact that I hate the necessity of never ever looking passersby in the eye or looking too long at approaching vehicles for fear of encouraging that behavior---even aside from the fact that it makes me painfully self-conscious and curious whether I'd still get cat-called if I happened to be carrying a large baseball bat instead of a Terry Pratchett novel---it's not actually frightening. When the car actually stopped, however, I started getting a very bad feeling about the situation. I didn't actually do anything, though, aside from walking faster toward the end of the parking lot.
Then I heard the car start to back up.
That was when I started to freak out. In a quiet way, because that's how I freak out.
I got to the edge of the...cliff? Drop off? Whatever. I nearly broke my neck climbing down it, as it was covered in pine straw and large rocks, but I got down to flatrock below and sort of sighed and thought, "well, that's the last of them."
Until---I mentioned that this was a very noisy car, yes?---I heard the car pull into the parking lot behind me.
I have frequent nightmares, and an almost universal event in my nightmares is Being Chased. Always by someone different---last night, for instance, it was by Alan Rickman, who'd grown his hair long like Snape's and was about to kill me with his magic wand. No, that's not a dirty metaphor. I usually wake up just as I've been caught and the person chasing me is about to strangle me or cut my throat (they always go for my throat). The thing is, I've been thinking heavily about those dreams all this week, mostly to wonder how accurate my emotional impressions of them are. I've always believed that there's more emotional immediacy in dreaming, that if I ever found myself in a real life situation like something from one of my dreams I would be too caught up in the necessity for action to feel the same kind of fear (or happiness or whatever) until after the events were over and I was looking back on it all. Think/act first, feel later has always been my modus operandi, after all.
Imagine, then, how interested I was to discover that being chased in real life is every bit as scary as being chased in dreams. Not only is there just as much fear, it's the exact same kind of fear---like you can never run fast or far enough.
I am pleased to report, however, that I did not, in fact, run. Not just after hearing the car pull into the parking lot behind me, anyway. I stood quite still there on the rock, listening and looking up over the edge of the culvert. At this point, I was thinking I might have imagined or misinterpreted the whole thing---maybe the men in the car actually lived in the apartments, maybe they just stopped the car because they missed their turn, and the whole yelling at me thing was just a coincidence, ha ha, silly Branwyn.
I thought that until I looked up and saw that the car had driven all the way up to the edge of the culvert where the pavement gives way and the drop-off begins---where it stopped, and a car door opened.
I swear to God, at that moment I thought I was living out a scene from Duel. And I tell you with no shame whatsoever, ladies and gentlemen: I legged it.
The primary virtue of that gully is that it is heavily wooded, which is ideal not just for shade but also, as it turns out, for hiding oneself from dirty rednecks in big cars who don't know when to give the hell up. Guided, I am sure, by what I had heretofore assumed was a primarily latent survival instinct, I immediately located a vantage point that hid me entirely from view, allowed me to see the car, and was close enough to a nearby house that I could, if necessary, leg it once more, this time for help.
Did I mention that I'd left my cell phone at home with my mother so she wouldn't have to hobble across the room for hers? Yeah, I haven't got an IQ of 175 for nothing.
I am sure I wasn't more than a minute hiding there. It felt like longer, but that's how near-panic works. Unfortunately for my blood pressure, the moment the car pulled away from the edge of the culvert and disappeared from view, I realized that in my current position I was completely visible from the back, and that if Redneck Hood and His Merrye Men were to circle the block, I'd be wide open. So I waited another few seconds and doubled back to the rock, where I was completely invisible to anyone not actually standing at the edge of the gully and looking down.
And then I spent the next two and a half hours sitting there, unable to do much of anything other than smoke. I would have left a lot sooner, as I was starving and running out of water, but there was a man mowing grass at the apartment complex above me, and I didn't want to walk out past him.
I seriously need to learn kung foo or some shit.
Anyway, object lessons derived from today's adventures: listen to your instincts, invest in a Louisville Slugger, and feeling vulnerable is massively inconvenient when there are no attractive, chivalrous males around. (They must be both: chivalry in an unattractive male is only useful in the short term.)
Today I had a Very Big Adventure.
Well, no. Not really. What I actually had was a very brief interlude with one of the dill pickles on the reuben sandwich of life, i.e. Horny Men in Cars, but it unnerved me for a variety of reasons, so I am achieving catharsis by posting about it on LiveJournal.
My mom is laid up with a bum leg (some kind of muscle injury of dubious origin) so she's working from home for the forseeable future. I am emphatically not allowing myself to resent this, because that would make me a very bad person, but I have a rule, which is that when my mother is home during the day time I am not. So around 11 this morning I packed a bookbag with water, smokes, books, and a number of notebooks, and set off with iPod in hand to explore bucolic, insular Wendell, NC, for a place to sit down and veg in relative comfort for the next several hours.
I did find an ideal place---a little gully surrounded by water and trees, quite out of sight of everything---but that's not the point. The point is that as I was walking there, a car started following me: a large, dilapidated, dirty off-white sedan with a very noisy engine, carrying at least three men, who yelled greetings and imprecations at me out the window. I do a lot of walking around town, and this never, ever fails to happen, and while it irritates the snot out of me, I am largely resigned to it being the way of the world. So I did what I always do, namely ignored them, and turned immediately into the parking lot of the apartment complex that stands uphill from said gully. The gully is reached by walking to the end of the parking lot and climbing down a very steep drop-off through the trees until you reach a large, flat expanse of rock and a stream---very shady, cool, just out of sight of all the neighboring houses, and probably an ideal place to dispose of a dead body, but that didn't occur to me until well after what happened next.
A few seconds after I had left the main road where the car had been following me (I say "following" but it had actually passed me at that point and was driving slowly ahead of me as the men continued to yell) the driver seemed to realize that I had dropped out of sight. His response was to slow the car down to a crawl---and then stop in the middle of the road.
I confess it was at that point that my heart started beating a little faster. Being hollered at from a moving vehicle is one thing, and aside from the fact that I hate the necessity of never ever looking passersby in the eye or looking too long at approaching vehicles for fear of encouraging that behavior---even aside from the fact that it makes me painfully self-conscious and curious whether I'd still get cat-called if I happened to be carrying a large baseball bat instead of a Terry Pratchett novel---it's not actually frightening. When the car actually stopped, however, I started getting a very bad feeling about the situation. I didn't actually do anything, though, aside from walking faster toward the end of the parking lot.
Then I heard the car start to back up.
That was when I started to freak out. In a quiet way, because that's how I freak out.
I got to the edge of the...cliff? Drop off? Whatever. I nearly broke my neck climbing down it, as it was covered in pine straw and large rocks, but I got down to flatrock below and sort of sighed and thought, "well, that's the last of them."
Until---I mentioned that this was a very noisy car, yes?---I heard the car pull into the parking lot behind me.
I have frequent nightmares, and an almost universal event in my nightmares is Being Chased. Always by someone different---last night, for instance, it was by Alan Rickman, who'd grown his hair long like Snape's and was about to kill me with his magic wand. No, that's not a dirty metaphor. I usually wake up just as I've been caught and the person chasing me is about to strangle me or cut my throat (they always go for my throat). The thing is, I've been thinking heavily about those dreams all this week, mostly to wonder how accurate my emotional impressions of them are. I've always believed that there's more emotional immediacy in dreaming, that if I ever found myself in a real life situation like something from one of my dreams I would be too caught up in the necessity for action to feel the same kind of fear (or happiness or whatever) until after the events were over and I was looking back on it all. Think/act first, feel later has always been my modus operandi, after all.
Imagine, then, how interested I was to discover that being chased in real life is every bit as scary as being chased in dreams. Not only is there just as much fear, it's the exact same kind of fear---like you can never run fast or far enough.
I am pleased to report, however, that I did not, in fact, run. Not just after hearing the car pull into the parking lot behind me, anyway. I stood quite still there on the rock, listening and looking up over the edge of the culvert. At this point, I was thinking I might have imagined or misinterpreted the whole thing---maybe the men in the car actually lived in the apartments, maybe they just stopped the car because they missed their turn, and the whole yelling at me thing was just a coincidence, ha ha, silly Branwyn.
I thought that until I looked up and saw that the car had driven all the way up to the edge of the culvert where the pavement gives way and the drop-off begins---where it stopped, and a car door opened.
I swear to God, at that moment I thought I was living out a scene from Duel. And I tell you with no shame whatsoever, ladies and gentlemen: I legged it.
The primary virtue of that gully is that it is heavily wooded, which is ideal not just for shade but also, as it turns out, for hiding oneself from dirty rednecks in big cars who don't know when to give the hell up. Guided, I am sure, by what I had heretofore assumed was a primarily latent survival instinct, I immediately located a vantage point that hid me entirely from view, allowed me to see the car, and was close enough to a nearby house that I could, if necessary, leg it once more, this time for help.
Did I mention that I'd left my cell phone at home with my mother so she wouldn't have to hobble across the room for hers? Yeah, I haven't got an IQ of 175 for nothing.
I am sure I wasn't more than a minute hiding there. It felt like longer, but that's how near-panic works. Unfortunately for my blood pressure, the moment the car pulled away from the edge of the culvert and disappeared from view, I realized that in my current position I was completely visible from the back, and that if Redneck Hood and His Merrye Men were to circle the block, I'd be wide open. So I waited another few seconds and doubled back to the rock, where I was completely invisible to anyone not actually standing at the edge of the gully and looking down.
And then I spent the next two and a half hours sitting there, unable to do much of anything other than smoke. I would have left a lot sooner, as I was starving and running out of water, but there was a man mowing grass at the apartment complex above me, and I didn't want to walk out past him.
I seriously need to learn kung foo or some shit.
Anyway, object lessons derived from today's adventures: listen to your instincts, invest in a Louisville Slugger, and feeling vulnerable is massively inconvenient when there are no attractive, chivalrous males around. (They must be both: chivalry in an unattractive male is only useful in the short term.)