The longer you’re out, the more you tend to block the blatantly strange things going on around you. This is a wild and weird country. Even the most straight-laced little places seem to have one spectacle, and it always seems to be right in the middle of town, or backed up to the highway – so everyone traveling by can see.
“Cassandra’s Crabs” is located six hundred miles inland, with a hand painted purple and green plywood sign advertising, ‘Fresh Crabs’. In case you needed any more proof that the crabs are indeed fresh, there’s a wrecked speedboat with a goat tied to it in the yard. Because it makes perfect sense to buy your fresh crabs where they keep wrecked boats and goats, six hundred miles inland. Cassandra is a marketing genius.
My husband climbed into the truck other day shaking his head.
“Not. Even. Close.”
“What’s up?”
“See that?”
He pointed across the lot to a biker chick in a black leather mini and boots.
“Yeah. Biker chick. So what?”
“No. Biker dude. She has a Sam Elliot mustache and hairier legs than me.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Did you hear me? I said she had a Sam Elliot mustache. Or he had a mustache. Whatever. No. It wasn’t pretty.”
Later, we’re traveling around Atlanta in six lanes of ass-hauling traffic. It’s seriously bumper to bumper, screaming rocket ships. We came around a curve and cars started swerving wide, around the far left emergency strip, in between the wall and the highway. Standing in the strip was a guy in a full-on clown outfit – face paint and everything, screaming at another guy who had a giant, live snake around his neck. What the hell was going on there? We saw it for about ten seconds, like everyone else who was trying to avoid killing both of them. We didn’t even talk about it until later, like a UFO sighting, or something.
It’s crazy out there, and I love it. Nothing is ever the same, there’s always something to look at. I think it keeps a lot of people on the road, the idea that in between all those Ruby Tuesdays and strip malls there are Cassandra’s Crab Shacks and Sam Elliot transvestites. Okay, maybe not so much the Sam Elliot transvestites, but the angry clown is definitely worth looking out for.
