Saturday, November 25, 2006

go west, young woman

Most of you who know me may already have heard this story, but it warrants repeating. And if you don't know me, honestly what the hell are you doing here anyway?

This is possibly the only post I'll do in "Gator orange", because it's in honor of a girl that at one time (and, at last report) lived in Gainesville, FL. I dubbed her Sleeping Beauty, for reasons that made sense at the time but aren't really worth the time to explain.

Anyway, freshman year at Florida State, so October 1997. One of my friends (and someone I had a borderline obsessive crush on) decided she was going to drive down from Tallahassee to Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights. For some reason that has been lost to history, I couldn't go along, but I chatted with her pretty soon after her return.

Seems this gal had headed off in the wrong direction. Just a skosh. On her way from Tallahassee to Orlando, she ended up in ALABAMA.



Now, I should provide a visual aid for those of you not intimately familiar with the layout of the Viagra-wantin' dangler that is FL. Suffice it to say, for someone from Gainesville, heading from Tallahassee to Orlando (southeast) and ending up in Alabama (due west) is a neat trick.



courtesy of yahoo maps http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-577612-map_of_florida-i

What makes this story great though, I think, is that it wasn't even that she saw the giant sign that said "Welcome to Alabama" and said 'oh crap I'd better turn around!'... uhh no, this collegian got pulled over by an Alabama State Trooper... she was SPEEDING in the wrong direction!

Offhand I'm guessing that guy had a good story to tell when he got back to the station. Knowing her she probably turned on the waterworks and that got her out of any ticket.

Asbestos I can figure, she meant to get on I-10 East and instead got on I-10 West... and stayed on it for about 200 miles... passed signs for Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, over several rivers... into another time zone... passed the Welcome to Alabama sign... my first question to her was "Uhhh, hon... didn't you notice the SUN was on the wrong side?" No, apparently it had already gotten dark while she was driving.

There was something about this girl though... there were things I wanted to do with her, and most of them did NOT involve chatting over capuccino about contrasting the systemic perpetuations the electoral college system makes necessary to maintain a sense of political efficacy permeated on a nationwide scale for sufficient adoption and participation, while still including inherent safeguards to both placate smaller regions and protect against the same mass endorsements the system itself requires. No, when it came to this particular filly, my search was more of Van Halen's 9th album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

And yet, while the tale of going just a weeeeee bit off course will forever live on in infamy (and now for what I believe to tbe the first time is committed to "print")... at the same time, I still check MySpace and Google every few months to see if she's on the grid anywhere. And I haven't seen hide nor hair (both of which were quite nice) in, what, 7 years now.

So, as Obi Wan said to Han, "Who's the more foolish, the fool --- or the fool who follows her?"


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