Tuesday

I woke up this morning and thought I had died in the most metaphorical way possible. The oversized clock in my room ticks with a strange, anthropomorphic melody--a TOCK tick…TOCK tick--and this ambient heartbeat just stopped at 6:15 right when I had come out of a lighter stage of sleep.

While I laid there contemplating the odd sensation I had briefly felt, I wondered, as if by some final stroke of morbid mortal curiosity, why there are never seats on bidets. It seems like there should be.

As I hit the on-ramp now, I can't help thinking about the way that felt--a strange and momentarily empty wave going through me--as the clock stopped. It's depressing to fixate on death, but on a road like this, which employs a front-end loader to remove deer and other woodland animal carcasses from the pavement every day, it becomes difficult not to. You do get numb to it though. By the time you see the sixth set of anlers or hooves hanging out of that metal mouth, you just hope that the meat is fresh enough to butcher and give to the homeless. As long as it's clean, a little highway chili might do them some good while the mornings are still cold enough to leave a layer of scrapable frost on the windshield.

As I've mentioned before, this road is dangerous. One of the most dangerous in the country, actually. I think it's been in the top ten for a while now. There are no lights, no shoulders, the lanes are thin and slightly winding, everyone drives like Mario Andretti (if he was blind, tired, and slightly intoxicated), and since it slithers through some seriously wooded areas, the animals become a problem for any driver. One time, a moose was spotted wandering down from a northern part of the state. Animal control and police had been searching for it, but couldn't track it effectively. About a week later, the evening news was reporting about the runaway animal and an anchor said something to the effect of, "God help everyone on the road if it makes it to the Merritt Parkway." The next day, he made it, and met his end when a Chevy Malibu tried to put its thousands of pounds up against the moose's hulking 1400. Neither the car or the moose came away from the incident. The driver was hospitalized with some broken bones, I think. They were very lucky.

Moose aren't common at all in this area, but deer have become highway assassins on the Merritt. It seems to me that they take pleasure in running out on the road in front of you. Like moths drawn to the eerily-hypnotic blue glow of the bug zapper, deer are thus drawn, by instinct, to the sound of spinning rubber, the blinding blaze of sealed projector headlights, and the soothing, near eardrum-caressing noise of car horns. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

They've become IEDs on this wooded highway; popping out with no prior notice. Their terror tactics have drivers planning contingency situations. "If you're going to hit a deer, let up on the brakes before impact so they don't roll up on the hood," is what my parents always said. They held back the "...so the coroner doesn't have to pry the horns from your face," to avoid emotionally scarring me.

I've never hit a deer and I expect my perfect record to continue through this morning drive as well. I've seen seven dead deer so far, so I think the road has claimed its daily quota. I had a dream that the road would actually coax the deer onto it so that an unsuspecting car could make the kill. Once the accident was cleared, the pavement folded up around the animal, like a venus flytrap, and consumed its meal.

Then my clock stopped and I had to start my day.