THANKS FOR THE KIND WORDS DOWN BELOW BUT THIS IS NOT ME.
Forgot to put that in last night.
Before I get started, I warn you now, there is no easy way for a man nearing 50 to impart wisdom learned onto the next generation. Still, as my father and grandfather did, I look at it as almost a duty, a carrying on of generations, if you will. As such, this story may be long, for there is no short way to teach.
About 2 months ago my nuts started hurting me. It wasn't a sudden pain, just a gradual idea that my nuts hurt. Not a sharp pain, just a dull, continuous, ache. Being a man who believes in the wonders of modern medicine, I needed a doctor.
Now, I don't know if you ever googled "nut pain" but, I can tell you now, only about half of the search is related to medicine and doctors. The rest, the best I can tell, is related to walnuts, or chesnuts, or crazy people.
It turns out that I needed a gastro doctor, because apparently your nuts are somehow connected to your stomach.....go figure.....this whole thing is becoming a learning experience.
In order to spare you the details of a man grabbing my sack, let me just skip to telling you that I was diagnosed with hernias, s being the most important letter of that particluar word in this specific case. Yes, hernias, one on each side, which has, the best I can tell when I cough, caused my balls to get sucked up into my stomach, which must be why I needed a gastro doctor to begin with. Again, the things a man can learn just by living long enough.
At this point, the story gets a bit personal, but it must be told. The doc asks me if I ever had any trouble with my "testicals". I hate that word, it's like calling poontang a vagina, and was probably invented for people who didn't want to talk about the subject to begin with, so they made up a word nobody wanted to say. Anyway, it turns out that I did, as a kid, have a problem with my left, uh.........nut. From what I can remember of a child of 8 or 9, that sucker didn't want to come down into the world with the right one. It stayed hid up wherever nuts come from.
Now, I can't remember the exact content of the conversation between my dad and the doc back then, but the jist of it was that the doc said that if they did not fix the hung up ball, I would most likely never have kids and was a great risk of.....uh......testicular cancer. The rest of the conversation surrounded the procedure, which included tying a string to my ball, and then pulling it down, and tying the other end of the string to my leg so that the unruly nut could be trained to stay with his partner.
Of course, being only 8 or 9, I didn't understand all of the terminology, but it was pretty damn clear, even at my tender age, that having one of your balls tied to your leg didn't seem like something a boy could just run around with without tearing his nut off, or at the very least, a chunk of his leg. I can vividly remember watching my dad mull the whole thing over in his mind, before he said something along the line of, "we'll go with no kids and cancer, thanks."
It turned out, my wayward ball found his way home, at least partially, but I never really gave it much thought. If you think about it, a fella don't begin scratching and adjusting his balls until he's a grown man. I can't say I ever missed that thing, and didn't even realize it worked things out on it's own until I was old enough to barely remember it not being there. Besides, I went on to father 5 children so it never became part of a discussion again, until this damn gastro doctor brought it up.
Now, I can't say I was really paying attention to the next thing the doc told me, because after a man grabs your nuts, makes you cough, and then puts his finger up next to those suckers until your eyes are about to pop out, your mind just shuts down. Apparently, your balls are connected to your stomach, but then they run straight into your eyeballs and into your brain. Who knew?
He said something about checking for cancer, and an ultrasound. I said, "huh?". He said, "I'll set you up for a testicular ultrasound before we talk about surgery, to make sure there are no issues we can't see." I can honestly say, without hestitation, that testicular ultrasound are two words I didn't even know you could put together. That's something you expect to read in a headline in the morning paper, something like, The Israeli's are massing troops on the border after learning that Iran has a secret testicular ultrasound plant. "Uh.........how's that go?" He explained that it was like an x-ray, only it gave a real time 3 dimensional picture of what your balls look like. Whatever.
The doc says, "you may want to shave your groin area, it'll save some time when you go in for the appointment with the ultrasound tech." Well hell, my day is just getting better and better. The Best I can figure when I leave there is that my nuts are in my stomach, they may be ate up with cancer, and now they need to suffer the indignation of being hairless. Yes, I've heard that some of you younger dudes shave your nuts.....that's great....you're stupid. I can prove you're stupid because I shaved mine 2 days before the ultrasound, and by day two it felt like a porcupine had taken up residence in my shorts. Why anyone would do that to themselves for the hell of it I don't know, and don't tell me that the women like it.....who gives a fork what they like. Which, unfortunately, brings me to the lesson part of this story.
I go to the "imaging center" with my shaved balls, which are not really shaved because they now reside in my stomach, just behind my eyeballs.
I go through registration and eventually get taken to the exam room, where I sit, waiting..........waiting.........waiting.....until , in walks Carla. Long dark hair and about 30 years old, not a knock out, but a fairly good looking gal. I figure she's gonna ask me some more questions and then the tech dude will come in and get this over with. But then Carla says, "I need you to lay down on the table. It's up to you, some men take all of their clothes off, some just their pants, and some just pull their pants down a ways. It's up to you, I'll leave the room, you can cover up with the sheet, and then I'll be back and we'll get started." I say, "WHAT? Who's doing this deal?" Carla says, "I am the tech, don't worry about it, it's painless." I refrain from saying, "yes, I know it's painless, in fact, I usually like to have some gal rubbing my nuts."
So Carla leaves and I sit there pondering my three options. I wonder for a bit why there ain't option 4, "just pull one of your balls through your zipper and we'll get some pictures", but there ain't. I opt for just taking my pants off, because laying there with my pants around my ankles seems dangerous if I decide I need to get out of there in a hurry.
So here comes Carla, and I'm laying there like a goof with a sheet over me....wondering just how this is supposed to work.....and then Carla gets a tube of jelly and starts rubbing it in her hands. She pulls the sheet down and begins to rub the jelly on my balls. In a near panic, I realize that I better think of something I hate, and fast. For the life of me, the only thing that comes to my head is califlower....I hate that crap!!! I don't know how anyone eats it. Carla is rubbing my nuts and I'm like an Arab chanting at the wailing wall.....califlower, califlower, califlower.....she's talking to me, but I got my hand over my eyes....califlower, califlower,califlower......she grabs a towel an puts it over my johnson, touching it a bit as she does....CALIFLOWER, CALIFLOWER, CALIFLOWER....this is gonna get ugly embarrasing.
Next thing I know, she says, "this may tickle a bit."
"WHOA......HOLD ON A MINUTE".
She ignores me and starts to run that damn vibrating ultrasonic pecker hardener on my balls.....OH GODDAMN, CALIFLOWER!!!!!!
I'm still hiding my eyes and now I'm trying not to laugh, and the chant must be comingout of me because Carla says, "what?".....I have no idea what to say, so I blurt out, "you like califlower?" She says, "not really, what brought that up?" I can't talk.......and then she says, "your right testical is a bit larger then your left testical"......how the hell do you respond to something like that when the person who says it is a gal with a vibrator in her hand? "uh, thanks." She laughs.....califlower, califlower, califlower....and I've about got tears in my eyes trying to figure out when this deal will end.
But no......more jelly, and on up toward the top of my balls.....I now envision entire fields of califlower, and people with califlower heads, and God help me, I can feel it coming. I says, "Uh"....and Carla says....I swear to God this mofo says, "don't worry if you get a bit aroused, it means all the parts are working."
You think???
I'm pretty sure at some point I just passed out......and when I woke up Carla was telling me I was clear.....no cancer......and I was thinking like my dad did 40 years ago, hell, I'd of just took the cancer if I'd have known where this whole deal was going.
The lesson?
There ain't one.....I lied....there is no lesson, just life.
Thursday Funny
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tuckerrnr1
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Thursday Funny
Last edited by tuckerrnr1 on Fri Oct 09, 2009 10:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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silentobsession
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tuckerrnr1
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steve7478
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Sorry could not make it past the whole string, nut, leg sentence. I'm good on not knowing the rest. I'm gonna go cry now.
There is an 11 to 17 minute response time to a 911 call. You can either choose to put effective rounds on target, neutralizing the threat, or try to find a telephone. The person who killed you while you were dialing 911 will have enough time to cook a frozen pizza before the "Badged Historians" show up to draw the chalk line.
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pneumagger
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long, but good, sorry for huge ass post
[quote]
Lost in the Desert
(Author unknown)
So, there’s a man crawling through the desert.
He’d decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a big rock, and then he couldn’t get it started again. There were no cell phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family, his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few friends had no idea he was out here.
He stayed with the car for a day or so, but his one bottle of water ran out and he was getting thirsty. He thought maybe he knew the direction back, now that he’d paid attention to the sun and thought he’d figured out which way was north, so he decided to start walking. He figured he only had to go about 30 miles or so and he’d be back to the small town he’d gotten gas in last.
He thinks about walking at night to avoid the heat and sun, but based upon how dark it actually was the night before, and given that he has no flashlight, he’s afraid that he’ll break a leg or step on a rattlesnake. So, he puts on some sun block, puts the rest in his pocket for reapplication later, brings an umbrella he’d had in the back of the SUV with him to give him a little shade, pours the windshield wiper fluid into his water bottle in case he gets that desperate, brings his pocket knife in case he finds a cactus that looks like it might have water in it, and heads out in the direction he thinks is right.
He walks for the entire day. By the end of the day he’s really thirsty. He’s been sweating all day, and his lips are starting to crack. He’s reapplied the sunblock twice, and tried to stay under the umbrella, but he still feels sunburned. The windshield wiper fluid sloshing in the bottle in his pocket
is really getting tempting now. He knows that it’s mainly water and some ethanol and coloring, but he also knows that they add some kind of poison to
it to keep people from drinking it. He wonders what the poison is, and whether the poison would be worse than dying of thirst.
He pushes on, trying to get to that small town before dark.
By the end of the day he starts getting worried. He figures he’s been walking at least 3 miles an hour, according to his watch for over 10 hours. That means that if his estimate was right that he should be close to the town. But he doesn’t recognize any of this. He had to cross a dry creek bed a mile or two back, and he doesn’t remember coming through it in the SUV. He figures that maybe he got his direction off just a little and that the dry creek bed was just off to one side of his path. He tells himself that he’s close, and that after dark he’ll start seeing the town lights over one of these hills, and that’ll be all he needs.
As it gets dim enough that he starts stumbling over small rocks and things, he finds a spot and sits down to wait for full dark and the town lights.
Full dark comes before he knows it. He must have dozed off. He stands back up and turns all the way around. He sees nothing but stars.
He wakes up the next morning feeling absolutely lousy. His eyes are gummy and his mouth and nose feel like they’re full of sand. He so thirsty that he can’t even swallow. He barely got any sleep because it was so cold. He’d forgotten how cold it got at night in the desert and hadn’t noticed it the night before because he’d been in his car.
He knows the Rule of Threes – three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food – then you die. Some people can make it a little longer, in the best situations. But the desert heat and having to walk and sweat isn’t the best situation to be without water. He figures, unless he finds water, this is his last day.
He rinses his mouth out with a little of the windshield wiper fluid. He waits a while after spitting that little bit out, to see if his mouth goes numb, or he feels dizzy or something. Has his mouth gone numb? Is it just in his mind? He’s not sure. He’ll go a little farther, and if he still doesn’t find water, he’ll try drinking some of the fluid.
Then he has to face his next, harder question – which way does he go from here? Does he keep walking the same way he was yesterday (assuming that he still knows which way that is), or does he try a new direction? He has no idea what to do.
Looking at the hills and dunes around him, he thinks he knows the direction he was heading before. Just going by a feeling, he points himself somewhat to the left of that, and starts walking.
As he walks, the day starts heating up. The desert, too cold just a couple of hours before, soon becomes an oven again. He sweats a little at first, and then stops. He starts getting worried at that – when you stop sweating he knows that means you’re in trouble – usually right before heat stroke.
He decides that it’s time to try the windshield wiper fluid. He can’t wait any longer – if he passes out, he’s dead. He stops in the shade of a large rock, takes the bottle out, opens it, and takes a mouthful. He slowly swallows it, making it last as long as he can. It feels so good in his dry and cracked throat that he doesn’t even care about the nasty taste. He takes another mouthful, and makes it last too. Slowly, he drinks half the bottle.
He figures that since he’s drinking it, he might as well drink enough to make some difference and keep himself from passing out.
He’s quit worrying about the denaturing of the wiper fluid. If it kills him, it kills him – if he didn’t drink it, he’d die anyway. Besides, he’s pretty sure that whatever substance they denature the fluid with is just designed to make you sick – their way of keeping winos from buying cheap wiper fluid for the ethanol content. He can handle throwing up, if it comes to that.
He walks. He walks in the hot, dry, windless desert. Sand, rocks, hills, dunes, the occasional scrawny cactus or dried bush. No sign of water. Sometimes he’ll see a little movement to one side or the other, but whatever moved is usually gone before he can focus his eyes on it. Probably birds, lizards, or mice. Maybe snakes, though they usually move more at night. He’s careful to stay away from the movements.
After a while, he begins to stagger. He’s not sure if it’s fatigue, heat stroke finally catching him, or maybe he was wrong and the denaturing of the wiper fluid was worse than he thought. He tries to steady himself, and keep going.
After more walking, he comes to a large stretch of sand. This is good! He knows he passed over a stretch of sand in the SUV – he remembers doing donuts in it. Or at least he thinks he remembers it – he’s getting woozy enough and tired enough that he’s not sure what he remembers any more or if he’s hallucinating. But he thinks he remembers it. So he heads off into it, trying to get to the other side, hoping that it gets him closer to the town.
He was heading for a town, wasn’t he? He thinks he was. He isn’t sure any more. He’s not even sure how long he’s been walking any more. Is it still morning? Or has it moved into afternoon and the sun is going down again? It must be afternoon – it seems like it’s been too long since he started out.
He walks through the sand.
After a while, he comes to a big dune in the sand. This is bad. He doesn’t remember any dunes when driving over the sand in his SUV. Or at least he doesn’t think he remembers any. This is bad.
But, he has no other direction to go. Too late to turn back now. He figures that he’ll get to the top of the dune and see if he can see anything from there that helps him find the town. He keeps going up the dune.
Halfway up, he slips in the bad footing of the sand for the second or third time, and falls to his knees. He doesn’t feel like getting back up – he’ll just fall down again. So, he keeps going up the dune on his hand and knees.
While crawling, if his throat weren’t so dry, he’d laugh. He’s finally gotten to the hackneyed image of a man lost in the desert – crawling through the sand on his hands and knees. If would be the perfect image, he imagines, if only his clothes were more ragged. The people crawling through the desert in the cartoons always had ragged clothes. But his have lasted without any rips so far. Somebody will probably find his dessicated corpse half buried in the sand years from now, and his clothes will still be in fine shape -shake the sand out, and a good wash, and they’d be wearable again. He wishes his throat were wet enough to laugh. He coughs a little instead, and it hurts.
He finally makes it to the top of the sand dune. Now that he’s at the top, he struggles a little, but manages to stand up and look around. All he sees is sand. Sand, and more sand. Behind him, about a mile away, he thinks he sees the rocky ground he left to head into this sand. Ahead of him, more dunes, more sand. This isn’t where he drove his SUV. This is Hell. Or close enough.
Again, he doesn’t know what to do. He decides to drink the rest of the wiper fluid while figuring it out. He takes out the bottle, and is removing the cap, when he glances to the side and sees something. Something in the sand. At the bottom of the dune, off to the side, he sees something strange. It’s a flat area, in the sand. He stops taking the cap of the bottle off, and tries to look closer. The area seems to be circular. And it’s dark – darker than the sand. And, there seems to be something in the middle of it, but he can’t tell what it is. He looks as hard as he can, and still can tell from here. He’s going to have to go down there and look.
He puts the bottle back in his pocket, and starts to stumble down the dune. After a few steps, he realizes that he’s in trouble – he’s not going to be able to keep his balance. After a couple of more sliding, tottering steps, he falls and starts to roll down the dune. The sand it so hot when his body hits it that for a minute he thinks he’s caught fire on the way down – like a movie car wreck flashing into flames as it goes over the cliff, before it ever even hits the ground. He closes his eyes and mouth, covers his face with his hands, and waits to stop rolling.
He stops, at the bottom of the dune. After a minute or two, he finds enough energy to try to sit up and get the sand out of his face and clothes. When he clears his eyes enough, he looks around to make sure that the dark spot in the sand it still there and he hadn’t just imagined it.
So, seeing the large, flat, dark spot on the sand is still there, he begins to crawl towards it. He’d get up and walk towards it, but he doesn’t seem to have the energy to get up and walk right now. He must be in the final stages of dehydration he figures, as he crawls. If this place in the sand doesn’t have water, he’ll likely never make it anywhere else. This is his last chance.
He gets closer and closer, but still can’t see what’s in the middle of the dark area. His eyes won’t quite focus any more for some reason. And lifting his head up to look takes so much effort that he gives up trying. He just keeps crawling.
Finally, he reaches the area he’d seen from the dune. It takes him a minute of crawling on it before he realizes that he’s no longer on sand – he’s now crawling on some kind of dark stone. Stone with some kind of marking on it -a pattern cut into the stone. He’s too tired to stand up and try to see what the pattern is – so he just keeps crawling. He crawls towards the center, where his blurry eyes still see something in the middle of the dark stone area.
His mind, detached in a strange way, notes that either his hands and knees are so burnt by the sand that they no longer feel pain, or that this dark stone, in the middle of a burning desert with a pounding, punishing sun overhead, doesn’t seem to be hot. It almost feels cool. He considers lying down on the nice cool surface.
Cool, dark stone. Not a good sign. He must be hallucinating this. He’s probably in the middle of a patch of sand, already lying face down and dying, and just imagining this whole thing. A desert mirage. Soon the beautiful women carrying pitchers of water will come up and start giving him a drink. Then he’ll know he’s gone.
He decides against laying down on the cool stone. If he’s going to die here in the middle of this hallucination, he at least wants to see what’s in the center before he goes. He keeps crawling.
It’s the third time that he hears the voice before he realizes what he’s hearing. He would swear that someone just said, “Greetings, traveler. You do not look well. Do you hear me?â€
[quote]
Lost in the Desert
(Author unknown)
So, there’s a man crawling through the desert.
He’d decided to try his SUV in a little bit of cross-country travel, had great fun zooming over the badlands and through the sand, got lost, hit a big rock, and then he couldn’t get it started again. There were no cell phone towers anywhere near, so his cell phone was useless. He had no family, his parents had died a few years before in an auto accident, and his few friends had no idea he was out here.
He stayed with the car for a day or so, but his one bottle of water ran out and he was getting thirsty. He thought maybe he knew the direction back, now that he’d paid attention to the sun and thought he’d figured out which way was north, so he decided to start walking. He figured he only had to go about 30 miles or so and he’d be back to the small town he’d gotten gas in last.
He thinks about walking at night to avoid the heat and sun, but based upon how dark it actually was the night before, and given that he has no flashlight, he’s afraid that he’ll break a leg or step on a rattlesnake. So, he puts on some sun block, puts the rest in his pocket for reapplication later, brings an umbrella he’d had in the back of the SUV with him to give him a little shade, pours the windshield wiper fluid into his water bottle in case he gets that desperate, brings his pocket knife in case he finds a cactus that looks like it might have water in it, and heads out in the direction he thinks is right.
He walks for the entire day. By the end of the day he’s really thirsty. He’s been sweating all day, and his lips are starting to crack. He’s reapplied the sunblock twice, and tried to stay under the umbrella, but he still feels sunburned. The windshield wiper fluid sloshing in the bottle in his pocket
is really getting tempting now. He knows that it’s mainly water and some ethanol and coloring, but he also knows that they add some kind of poison to
it to keep people from drinking it. He wonders what the poison is, and whether the poison would be worse than dying of thirst.
He pushes on, trying to get to that small town before dark.
By the end of the day he starts getting worried. He figures he’s been walking at least 3 miles an hour, according to his watch for over 10 hours. That means that if his estimate was right that he should be close to the town. But he doesn’t recognize any of this. He had to cross a dry creek bed a mile or two back, and he doesn’t remember coming through it in the SUV. He figures that maybe he got his direction off just a little and that the dry creek bed was just off to one side of his path. He tells himself that he’s close, and that after dark he’ll start seeing the town lights over one of these hills, and that’ll be all he needs.
As it gets dim enough that he starts stumbling over small rocks and things, he finds a spot and sits down to wait for full dark and the town lights.
Full dark comes before he knows it. He must have dozed off. He stands back up and turns all the way around. He sees nothing but stars.
He wakes up the next morning feeling absolutely lousy. His eyes are gummy and his mouth and nose feel like they’re full of sand. He so thirsty that he can’t even swallow. He barely got any sleep because it was so cold. He’d forgotten how cold it got at night in the desert and hadn’t noticed it the night before because he’d been in his car.
He knows the Rule of Threes – three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food – then you die. Some people can make it a little longer, in the best situations. But the desert heat and having to walk and sweat isn’t the best situation to be without water. He figures, unless he finds water, this is his last day.
He rinses his mouth out with a little of the windshield wiper fluid. He waits a while after spitting that little bit out, to see if his mouth goes numb, or he feels dizzy or something. Has his mouth gone numb? Is it just in his mind? He’s not sure. He’ll go a little farther, and if he still doesn’t find water, he’ll try drinking some of the fluid.
Then he has to face his next, harder question – which way does he go from here? Does he keep walking the same way he was yesterday (assuming that he still knows which way that is), or does he try a new direction? He has no idea what to do.
Looking at the hills and dunes around him, he thinks he knows the direction he was heading before. Just going by a feeling, he points himself somewhat to the left of that, and starts walking.
As he walks, the day starts heating up. The desert, too cold just a couple of hours before, soon becomes an oven again. He sweats a little at first, and then stops. He starts getting worried at that – when you stop sweating he knows that means you’re in trouble – usually right before heat stroke.
He decides that it’s time to try the windshield wiper fluid. He can’t wait any longer – if he passes out, he’s dead. He stops in the shade of a large rock, takes the bottle out, opens it, and takes a mouthful. He slowly swallows it, making it last as long as he can. It feels so good in his dry and cracked throat that he doesn’t even care about the nasty taste. He takes another mouthful, and makes it last too. Slowly, he drinks half the bottle.
He figures that since he’s drinking it, he might as well drink enough to make some difference and keep himself from passing out.
He’s quit worrying about the denaturing of the wiper fluid. If it kills him, it kills him – if he didn’t drink it, he’d die anyway. Besides, he’s pretty sure that whatever substance they denature the fluid with is just designed to make you sick – their way of keeping winos from buying cheap wiper fluid for the ethanol content. He can handle throwing up, if it comes to that.
He walks. He walks in the hot, dry, windless desert. Sand, rocks, hills, dunes, the occasional scrawny cactus or dried bush. No sign of water. Sometimes he’ll see a little movement to one side or the other, but whatever moved is usually gone before he can focus his eyes on it. Probably birds, lizards, or mice. Maybe snakes, though they usually move more at night. He’s careful to stay away from the movements.
After a while, he begins to stagger. He’s not sure if it’s fatigue, heat stroke finally catching him, or maybe he was wrong and the denaturing of the wiper fluid was worse than he thought. He tries to steady himself, and keep going.
After more walking, he comes to a large stretch of sand. This is good! He knows he passed over a stretch of sand in the SUV – he remembers doing donuts in it. Or at least he thinks he remembers it – he’s getting woozy enough and tired enough that he’s not sure what he remembers any more or if he’s hallucinating. But he thinks he remembers it. So he heads off into it, trying to get to the other side, hoping that it gets him closer to the town.
He was heading for a town, wasn’t he? He thinks he was. He isn’t sure any more. He’s not even sure how long he’s been walking any more. Is it still morning? Or has it moved into afternoon and the sun is going down again? It must be afternoon – it seems like it’s been too long since he started out.
He walks through the sand.
After a while, he comes to a big dune in the sand. This is bad. He doesn’t remember any dunes when driving over the sand in his SUV. Or at least he doesn’t think he remembers any. This is bad.
But, he has no other direction to go. Too late to turn back now. He figures that he’ll get to the top of the dune and see if he can see anything from there that helps him find the town. He keeps going up the dune.
Halfway up, he slips in the bad footing of the sand for the second or third time, and falls to his knees. He doesn’t feel like getting back up – he’ll just fall down again. So, he keeps going up the dune on his hand and knees.
While crawling, if his throat weren’t so dry, he’d laugh. He’s finally gotten to the hackneyed image of a man lost in the desert – crawling through the sand on his hands and knees. If would be the perfect image, he imagines, if only his clothes were more ragged. The people crawling through the desert in the cartoons always had ragged clothes. But his have lasted without any rips so far. Somebody will probably find his dessicated corpse half buried in the sand years from now, and his clothes will still be in fine shape -shake the sand out, and a good wash, and they’d be wearable again. He wishes his throat were wet enough to laugh. He coughs a little instead, and it hurts.
He finally makes it to the top of the sand dune. Now that he’s at the top, he struggles a little, but manages to stand up and look around. All he sees is sand. Sand, and more sand. Behind him, about a mile away, he thinks he sees the rocky ground he left to head into this sand. Ahead of him, more dunes, more sand. This isn’t where he drove his SUV. This is Hell. Or close enough.
Again, he doesn’t know what to do. He decides to drink the rest of the wiper fluid while figuring it out. He takes out the bottle, and is removing the cap, when he glances to the side and sees something. Something in the sand. At the bottom of the dune, off to the side, he sees something strange. It’s a flat area, in the sand. He stops taking the cap of the bottle off, and tries to look closer. The area seems to be circular. And it’s dark – darker than the sand. And, there seems to be something in the middle of it, but he can’t tell what it is. He looks as hard as he can, and still can tell from here. He’s going to have to go down there and look.
He puts the bottle back in his pocket, and starts to stumble down the dune. After a few steps, he realizes that he’s in trouble – he’s not going to be able to keep his balance. After a couple of more sliding, tottering steps, he falls and starts to roll down the dune. The sand it so hot when his body hits it that for a minute he thinks he’s caught fire on the way down – like a movie car wreck flashing into flames as it goes over the cliff, before it ever even hits the ground. He closes his eyes and mouth, covers his face with his hands, and waits to stop rolling.
He stops, at the bottom of the dune. After a minute or two, he finds enough energy to try to sit up and get the sand out of his face and clothes. When he clears his eyes enough, he looks around to make sure that the dark spot in the sand it still there and he hadn’t just imagined it.
So, seeing the large, flat, dark spot on the sand is still there, he begins to crawl towards it. He’d get up and walk towards it, but he doesn’t seem to have the energy to get up and walk right now. He must be in the final stages of dehydration he figures, as he crawls. If this place in the sand doesn’t have water, he’ll likely never make it anywhere else. This is his last chance.
He gets closer and closer, but still can’t see what’s in the middle of the dark area. His eyes won’t quite focus any more for some reason. And lifting his head up to look takes so much effort that he gives up trying. He just keeps crawling.
Finally, he reaches the area he’d seen from the dune. It takes him a minute of crawling on it before he realizes that he’s no longer on sand – he’s now crawling on some kind of dark stone. Stone with some kind of marking on it -a pattern cut into the stone. He’s too tired to stand up and try to see what the pattern is – so he just keeps crawling. He crawls towards the center, where his blurry eyes still see something in the middle of the dark stone area.
His mind, detached in a strange way, notes that either his hands and knees are so burnt by the sand that they no longer feel pain, or that this dark stone, in the middle of a burning desert with a pounding, punishing sun overhead, doesn’t seem to be hot. It almost feels cool. He considers lying down on the nice cool surface.
Cool, dark stone. Not a good sign. He must be hallucinating this. He’s probably in the middle of a patch of sand, already lying face down and dying, and just imagining this whole thing. A desert mirage. Soon the beautiful women carrying pitchers of water will come up and start giving him a drink. Then he’ll know he’s gone.
He decides against laying down on the cool stone. If he’s going to die here in the middle of this hallucination, he at least wants to see what’s in the center before he goes. He keeps crawling.
It’s the third time that he hears the voice before he realizes what he’s hearing. He would swear that someone just said, “Greetings, traveler. You do not look well. Do you hear me?â€
