rattlesnake-o-mania!
The Badlands! Yeah man they're bad, they're real bad! Sorry, but I'm actually reading "On The Road" right now because I've never read any Kerouac and I feel like kind of a fraudulent traveling bum, so I'm trying to catch up. When I was driving through South Dakota today I saw a hand-painted billboard that said "Abortion: the choice that
kills." C'mon, I don't think you can say that abortion is "the" choice that kills, there are lots of choices that kill! Murder, drug overdose, take your pick! Silly Dakotans and your anti-choice ways.
So I just made it to the Badlands today, I ended up staying in Madison for longer than expected for kind of a crazy reason. My friend who I was staying with there was hired to do a mural outside of a restaurant on short notice, so she asked me to stay and help. So she came up with a great design on very quickly and then the next day we went to go start working on it. Now mind you, this mural was not to be placed on the restaurant itself but on a building next to the restaurant in an alley that the restaurant's windows looked out on. Basically the owner didn't want his patrons to be staring at a concrete wall through the windows in his main dining hall anymore, so he hired my friend to paint a lovely picture there. So we went to work! Only after a couple hours of working on it (when it was starting to look really good, believe you me) a man who worked in the building next door came over and told us to stop painting. It turns out that the restaurant owner had neglected to get permission from the building next door to paint on their property! The good news is that I made a couple of bucks and I didn't get arrested. The bad news is that we didn't get to finish our awesome mural. C'est la vie, what a week.
Now I'm in the Badlands National Park in SD, and I'm terrified that I'm going to see a rattlesnake. I don't know why I'm so scared of them, I've never encountered one before in my life. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that about every five feet in this park there's a sign that says "caution: rattlesnakes!" with an exclamation point, I sh*t you not, and then has a picture of a rattlesnake, poised to attack! That is a little disconcerting. So now every time I climb up a boulder here I'm stomping all over the place like Frankenstein, and singing because I think that that will scare them away before I get there. I think that only works for bears though. Oh and to complicate things a yellow jacket stung my ankle the other day at the Madison Arboretum, so my lower right leg has now swelled up to five times its normal size. I've got the ankle of a 400 lb woman right now, it's great. Maybe that's why I ate so many salty snacks today, to try and bloat up the rest of my body with sodium to match my ankle. I decided that I needed an ace bandage or something today, so I tied a neon pink bandanna that I bought at a thrift store in Madison around it today, which resulted in a Punky Brewster kind of look that I'm really enjoying. Fat ankle aside, I think I've started a new trend.
