Pepper of the Earth - The Home Office Record & Mostly Daily Gazette

You know those people who are free and easygoing, devil-may-care and happy-go-lucky? It’s my theory that being that breezy takes a lot of work. Whenever I try it, the main result is that the dishes don’t get washed and I forget to pick up the laundry; the rest of the world is still as wall-biting as ever.

This week our Pepper crew is heading off for Berlin on Wednesday. I’m pretty laid-back about European travel. I don’t go that much, but when I’ve gone I’ve stayed, so overall I have about five years of Continent in my books of days. Last year around this time we went to Amsterdam for a week. And, in an unsettling plot development, that’s about the last time I saw my passport.

If you know me, you already see this one coming.

Oh what a lovely boat trip we had on Friday; and how goofy and sexy and delightful Miss Saturn for her Hulapalooza that night. Oh how gloriously downtimed my Saturday, when to put it frankly I didn’t do shit all the livelong day. Oh how little I thought of my passport until Sunday afternoon when, back from the movies with the lovely Jess, it was clearly time to put together the basic travel kit and assess any where’d-that-go needs over the next few days.

Passport? AWOL. My old passport, O yes, that’s right over there. The new passport, not so much. Sunday night lingers long, until nearly 3:00 a.m., and involves taking everything on that side of the apartment <- and moving it over there ->, paging through to see if a little blue book is hiding there. I even check the bathroom cabinet. I even check the kitchen cabinets, like maybe one day I figured the passport would be happiest tucked in with my haphazard collection of beer glasses.

When it’s too late to stay up any more I make one of those quiet deals you make at times like these, the ones that start “Well hello, you know, I’m not much at asking for favors and all. I’m just a farmer” and end up a few years later with screaming rants about psychoanalysis on daytime television. And so to bed.

This morning bright and early I set to work on the new piles over there -> and begin moving them back there <- for reference. Sure enough, right in the stack in front of the table, there’s my passport, glossy and none the worse for sitting in cozy comfort for the past year. In the meantime, I discover via Google that there are companies that say they can replace your lost or stolen passport in 24 to 48 hours. Total cost, including government fees, is about $400. Do I have a spare $400 sitting around to get an emergency passport replacement? No, I do not. So I call and schedule a tentative delivery slot, because a guy’s gotta do. Happily I don’t need to start rustling documents, not today.

Now that’s a caffeinated way to start Monday. Swift kick to the butt, followed by a happy ending. Some people live for that sort of thing.

Incidentally, under the terms of my late-night bargain I do believe I’m bound more or less in perpetuity to the first deity who can show that he, she, or it is the one who produced my travel papers and put them right where I thought they were but where they weren’t when I looked for them. Disqualified if said deity lifted them in the first place. For obvious reasons I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out to be Allah. Push comes to shove, I’ve already got some favorites. Fingers crossed.

Also incidentally, and I don’t have time to get into it now, the Rob Zombie movie, The Devil’s Rejects? Stunning. It’s sick and wrong on many levels, and deeply disturbing, and twisted beyond further twisting. It’s also pretty visionary, and if nothing else it completely transforms the song “Freebird” in ways that beggar description. Go see it. You’ll probably regret it, you’ll never forget it. I was rapt.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2005 at 13:49 and is filed under General Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.