Val's Butt Has Been Chewed to Mincemeat, What With Karma Biting Her There So Frequently...OR...The Pot Calling the Kettle Sleepy

So...here's a little something I haven't shared with Genius yet. Maybe I'll put it in his weekly letter next time.

Genius knew not to text ME when he had his high-speed collision. He knew that Val is the excitable type, and would freak out. In fact, he used to tell me that all the time, annoying me severely. "Calm down. Stop freaking out." So I would wave my arms around my head and act all crazy. "I'm freaking out! I'm freaking out!" Which earned me a scathing stare from Genius. Let's face it. His teen years were turbulent. Due in no small part to Val's provocations.

Genius DID call me later the night of his accident. Just to chat, I would assume. A near-death experience might make a person want to talk to Mommy. Of course I told him how thankful I was that he was okay. That we could have lost him.

"What if you were just a little bit ahead of that semi, and veered into his lane, and he RAN OVER YOU!"

"Calm down. At the very worst, he would have pushed me along sideways on the front of his truck for 30 miles." Said the engineering student allegedly well-versed in the ways of physics. "You need to stop with these elaborate scenarios. You're only upsetting yourself."

"You need to get more rest. If you think you're going to fall asleep, pull off the road at an exit and take a 10-minute nap. Don't go to a park, though. You might get arrested like your dad, heh, heh."

"I get plenty of rest. I'm fine."

"You have to be really careful. I've been that tired before. I put the window down. Turn up the radio. Sing really loud. Slap myself in the face."

"Yeah, yeah. I know how to drive."

So...I let it go. He doesn't call often. Especially when he doesn't want money. But apparently my good friends Karma and Even Steven were listening in on the party line. Because Wednesday evening, THE VERY NEXT DAY, when The Pony stayed for a meeting after school and was not sitting behind me to talk to...I grew so tired on the way home that I could hardly keep my eyes open! It was like I was walking through a field of poppies with Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow.

It all started at the stoplight by Walmart, when I made a left turn. I was behind a blue subcompact that was behind a gray subcompact that drove r e a l l y  s  l  o  w  l  y . I felt like I was hypnotized. Nothing would snap me out of it. I put the window down. I turned off my seat heater. I turned up the radio. I sang loudly. I slapped myself in the face. By this time, I had gone past the cemetery where my mom is buried, down the new section of road behind the high school in the district where we live, through the roundabout, past the bowling alley, past the prison, onto my county road (still following that blue subcompact), and across the first low water bridge. Dang. I couldn't wait to get home to take a recliner nap.

I was just tooling past the Best Compound (home of fast-driving tailgaters), where the road makes a slight right by their mailbox condominium, when my head snapped up, and I looked through my windshield at this:

Yeah! That's the view out my side window, over my side mirror, from Saturday when I was awake enough to take a picture. No rail, no shoulder, no bumpy-bumps to warn a drifter. Just a thin strip of grass, then some rip-rap the county road department put in because when flooded, that creek kept undercutting the roadway. The creek which, like on this day, is only about 10 inches deep.

Like son, like mother...I suppose.

I really need to get more sleep. Pity I don't have anybody to tell me that.