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I once cracked up the entire QA lab the first time I lived here when I exclaimed very excitedly, "Guys, it's really dark at night!!"
Not like they really wanted to hear my explanation of how light pollution in Chicago was so pervasive that the place was in perpetual daylight, orange sodium streetlights dovetailing right into the sunrise, and so on. Heh heh.
But tonight, I felt like exclaiming it again - it's just so dark, once you get any significant distance from Raleigh. The moon is pretty full, so it wasn't as dramatic as it could have been, but this was the moment handed to me on a silver platter:
I am in my car, and I have the air running because it was just humid enough to be cloying, and I am popping Lemonheads into my mouth and letting them dissolve slowly, bright sour lemon and sweet gritty sugar on my tongue. And my hair smells sweetly of a Black Phoenix perfume called Sticky Pillowcase, which is basically self-descriptive - it's the trick or treat bag, smelling of clean linen with crumbs of sugary candies of all flavors stuck all inside it. The car is humming along in a lovely sort of way (thanks,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pencat!), and the Swell Season's "Strict Joy" playing loudly, and it's not making me sad at all.
There is a book my friend Darryl from high school was really into in high school or college, called Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon - this guy basically sets out to travel along the local and back roads in America, marked on old road maps in blue. But I always remembered it more like the roads themselves in reality were sort of a blue color, when you were mostly traveling by yourself, in the wee hours, when the road is not lit up with sunlight or other cars' headlamps. Ribbons of slate blue, gunmetal and flat, winding in and out of the trees.
And here, there are a lot of trees. (That was a nod to Dasro, there. Move along.)
So, to recap, sour lemon candy and almost-too-cold air and a car that works and music flowing out from the speakers that is just this side of raw from over-produced, moving along at a good speed, continuing to move forward through my days with much less hideousness than before.
Yes.
Not like they really wanted to hear my explanation of how light pollution in Chicago was so pervasive that the place was in perpetual daylight, orange sodium streetlights dovetailing right into the sunrise, and so on. Heh heh.
But tonight, I felt like exclaiming it again - it's just so dark, once you get any significant distance from Raleigh. The moon is pretty full, so it wasn't as dramatic as it could have been, but this was the moment handed to me on a silver platter:
I am in my car, and I have the air running because it was just humid enough to be cloying, and I am popping Lemonheads into my mouth and letting them dissolve slowly, bright sour lemon and sweet gritty sugar on my tongue. And my hair smells sweetly of a Black Phoenix perfume called Sticky Pillowcase, which is basically self-descriptive - it's the trick or treat bag, smelling of clean linen with crumbs of sugary candies of all flavors stuck all inside it. The car is humming along in a lovely sort of way (thanks,
pencat!), and the Swell Season's "Strict Joy" playing loudly, and it's not making me sad at all.There is a book my friend Darryl from high school was really into in high school or college, called Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon - this guy basically sets out to travel along the local and back roads in America, marked on old road maps in blue. But I always remembered it more like the roads themselves in reality were sort of a blue color, when you were mostly traveling by yourself, in the wee hours, when the road is not lit up with sunlight or other cars' headlamps. Ribbons of slate blue, gunmetal and flat, winding in and out of the trees.
And here, there are a lot of trees. (That was a nod to Dasro, there. Move along.)
So, to recap, sour lemon candy and almost-too-cold air and a car that works and music flowing out from the speakers that is just this side of raw from over-produced, moving along at a good speed, continuing to move forward through my days with much less hideousness than before.
Yes.
