Entry 195: Shoulders and Birdseed

In my last post I forgot to talk about something weird that happened on the drive from Rockport to Boston.  The first major leg of the trip is along U.S. 1, a windy highway with two lanes, one in each direction.  In my younger days when I'd find myself on such a road I'd be passing people whenever I saw breaks in the yellow line, but these days I'm mellower, and if I get behind a slowpoke I just ride it out.*  Since 1 is the only north-south thoroughfare in the area, and major junctions are miles apart, I ended up driving behind the same guy for a very long stretch.

At first there was nothing noteworthy about this, but then after a few miles, he suddenly starts driving on the shoulder.  Not all the way on the shoulder; he's half-on-half-off, like the line delineating the shoulder is perfectly in the middle of his car.  I have no idea why.  I was using the lane properly and can report there was nothing wrong with the left half of it.  And it's not like he just wasn't paying attention and drifting a little.  He was steering his car like it was on rails, just not on rails that are in the actual lane designated for automobile travel.

It really bothered me, not because it was particularly unsafe or anything, but because -- Why the eff would you intentionally drive your car half on the shoulder?!  He did it for a long time too, more than 10 miles, and even when there were bumps or debris on the shoulder he'd just drive right through it instead of coming into the lane to avoid it.  Like I said, weird.  I really wanted to pull up next to him and ask him why he was doing this, but, alas, I never got the chance.  I guess I'll never know.

Something else weird happened to me Saturday, although it was weird in a very different kind of way.  I was waiting in line at our local hardware store.  (I was just replacing the Soda Stream canisters not actually buying tools or anything.  C'mon, now.)  It was momentarily stopped because some guy was doing a return or something that required the cashier to check a bunch of receipts and look up a bunch of stuff, and a woman came up to me and started asking me about Lil' S who was sleeping in the stroller.  Her accent made me think she was from Africa, so after she left I started thinking about countries in Africa.  In particular, I thought of the country Niger, and how in first grade, in an attempt to show off my reading skills, I pointed to it on a map and proudly pronounced it N-word.  (As a six-year old I was stronger in phonics, than I was in racial sensitivities.)  Then I started thinking about the baseball player Nyjer Morgan and wondering if his parents just made the name up or if it came from somewhere.  Are there other Nyjers?  As I was finishing this thought I looked to my right and saw this.

What.  The.   Hell.  This might be the craziest, most useless coincidence that's ever happened to me.  It's not like I was thinking of the name Phillip and then saw a Phillips screwdriver.  I was thinking of Nyjer.  How many times in the average life does Nyjer cross one's mind?  And then to immediately see nyjer seed after that, which I didn't even know was a thing -- that's some Twilight Zone shit right there.  (Granted it would be a pretty boring episode.)

I even thought that maybe I saw the seed earlier and was unconsciously remembering it, but that doesn't make sense because it didn't just pop into my head randomly.  I took a very linear path to get to Nyjer, and the instant I arrived there I saw the nyjer seed.  Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.  (That's The Twilight Zone theme, by the way.)     



Until next time...

*Actually it's probably more passenger related than it is age related.  You can't be blowing by people in the opposite lane with a baby (or a disapproving wife) in the car.