Yesterday I was remarking to Marty that one would never know it was an election year looking at the cars. The cars, at least, seem to be undecided on who’ll get their vote, there being a dearth of bumper stickers. The cars aren’t lauding the Republican choice, or the Democrat choice for that matter. The cars go quietly down the road making no statements.
The cars are so low profile on their druthers (or lack thereof) that the McCalin-Palin bumper sticker on a car to the front-left of us painfully stood out.
I don’t even believe in American politics yet credit me with good impulse control that I didn’t end up on the news as the freak story of the day, because I had an overwhelming urge to step out of our car (we were sitting in traffic) and go over and start jumping up and down on the hood of he who fancied a McCain-Palin future yelling, “Here, here, here is one of the unrepentant walking dead.”
In a red state. Not one of my better ideas.
The impulse was so surprisingly strong, I had to tell myself that H.o.p. really didn’t need to see the blue lights coming to get his mom as a lone news helicopter hungry for an event circled buzzard-like above.
Later, having made a deal with George (who had been out putting a screen up on one of the apartments) that whoever made it first down to the Just Loaf’n down by the airport would bring back a muffaletta for the other, Marty, H.o.p. and I called in a take-out order for two muffaletta baskets and spent 30 minutes worth of gas dollars driving down to Old National Highway, only to pull into the parking lot and have the cell ring and be told that they were out of the muffaletta baskets.
For three months I’ve wanted one of those muffaletta baskets, but we didn’t want to invest that much gas money in a sandwich we weren’t confident would turn out to be the real deal.
We’ve kind of had it with Just Loaf’n on not-so-far-away Boulevard (which is a small off-shoot and doesn’t have muffalettas on the menu). Usually they serve up a great chicken po’boy but pretty much all else left us disappointed and sometimes even the chicken po’boy now seems more kin to a McPo’Boy, all the juicy drippy flavor gone.
The fact we drove an hour for non-existent muffalettas at the Old National Highway main restaurant pissed Marty off no end. “I’m never coming back,” he said. “Never. They’ve lost my business.”
On our way back home the billboard in the above photo caught my eye in contrast to, again, the lack of bumper stickers on cars. The majority of the autos around here used to be all colorful red-white-and-blue Bush proud and flag flying. But they don’t seem to want to talk about it much right now.
Georgia is still a solidly red state, I don’t kid myself. The billboard echoes a confounding no-peripheral-vision, single issue determination.
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