Fear the Crab

This morning I found some… thing, on my truck. It was on the hood, and it looked like some kind of raw hamburger, but not quite raw hamburger. It looked like it was chewed-up raw hamburger. It was a very startling sight to see first thing in the morning, but unfortunately I had no time to contemplate its universal significance because I was late for work.

So I simply shot it off my truck with the water hose. It came off easily enough, and broke apart into tiny little pieces, much like how raw hamburger would, I guess. Yet there was something else strange, for in addition to the little pieces that fell to the ground after I sprayed off my truck, was this dark, bumpy thing that looked like a link sausage. Or was it shit? I have no fuckin’ clue, and that made me stand there and stare at it.

I wasn’t about to touch it, no way. If it were a link sausage, it certainly looked strange, like it was a burnt, mutated link sausage. And what was it doing mixed in with the rest of the pink stuff? If it were a sewer log, what the fuck? And what the hell is the pink stuff?

Then I got to thinking, when and where did my truck mysteriously acquire the new hood ornament? I tried to think if it happened while I was at Maile’s house last night, but I don’t quite remember because I can’t recall if I looked at the hood of the truck when I left. The amount of.. matter.. that was on the hood seemed big enough that if I were driving I’d notice it, but I don’t remember that, either. It was dark, though, so perhaps I just couldn’t see it. So if it wasn’t last night, it must have been at my house, while I was sleeping.

How? The question of how it got there eludes me, though I have some hypotheses. One could be that it was a cat. A cat that.. maybe.. took a dump on my truck, then puked. Or puked then dumped. Or maybe the pink stuff was in the dump. Or some cat that was eating raw hamburger and a link sausage on my truck. Another hypothesis is that there’s a weirdo wandering around the neighborhood eating raw hamburger and link sausage on people’s automobiles. I don’t want to consider the hypothesis of a weirdo puking and dumping. If it happened at my house, that’s scary. If it happened at Maile’s house, that’s scary, although it’s Waipahu, so it’s not that strange. Scary, but not strange.

What disturbs me is not the question of when, where or how, but why. What possible reason could there be for some pink crap with some thing that looks like crap be on my truck? If I didn’t have to work today, I’d investigate further. But I won’t get home until later, and by then I think it will be gone. If it was food, at least.

I was playing left field for some baseball team, and I think I was back in little league. But it was a strange little league because we were using a ball that was about half the size of a regular softball, yet still larger than a regular baseball. I was wearing a white uniform with blue trim, and after our warm-ups on the field we had some kind of pre-game ceremony where they play the national anthem. They unfurled this huge fan-shaped flag and all of us on the field were required to hold our portion of it. So since the flag was shaped like a baseball field, I had to hold the left corner. I kept thinking this was probably the stupidest thing I had ever done on a baseball field.

When it (the pre-game show) was over, we all retired to the dugout, which was some kind of wooden shack, almost like a tool shed. Only now we weren’t in our uniforms, and everyone sat around in regular clothes. It was almost like we were done playing, the way we hung out, drank soda and juice (as is the wont of little leaguers).

I got bored, so I left the shed and walked around, and I saw my co-workers from The Lab. I was very surprised to see them, because they were probably the last people I expected to see at my baseball game. Then I figured that if they were there, Maile was there, too. So I started looking for her.

I ended up at an extravagant mansion that was actually right next door to the tool shed. And my extravagant I mean it was posh, with wide open spaces and impeccable taste. And it was clean. There were a lot of people there, and I felt that they were all involved in the baseball game somehow, but I couldn’t figure out what their involvement was. Perhaps the parents of one of the players owned the house. Perhaps it was the league. I don’t know.

I began to feel very uncomfortable at that house, so I left and tried to find my way back to the tool shed, to be with people of my own tax bracket. I heard someone call my name, and it was Maile. She was very happy, to the point of tears, and when I asked her why she gave me this small device that looked like a miniature shoe horn, but it was some kind of recording device. She played the message on there, and while I couldn’t make out all the words, she had apparently received a gift in the form of a brand new car. We had to drive out to the place to pick it up, so we hopped into her car and she drove.

The area was very unfamiliar to us, and we kept getting lost. At some point we both realized that we needed to bring along one of those rubbery fishing lures and.. something else. So we had to find a place that sold them. We kept driving, looking around for either the place we had to get to, or a store that sold bait.

What stood out to me was that I was getting very frustrated, because Maile was not following the rules of the road. Not staying in the lane, speeding around corners, stuff like that. We finally decided to park, and walk around. Except now I had to sit in a wheelchair, apparently I had some kind of injury. So Maile would push me around, and I’d try to help by wheeling myself at times, while we looked for fishing lures.

What was odd was that at several points I found myself standing next to her, and thinking that I probably shouldn’t leave my wheelchair out where someone could steal it. We had just been given directions to a store that sold what we needed, but when we left, Maile decided to stop searching and go home. It looked late, nighttime, and it would be a while before we got to the store and to wherever we were supposed to receive the car.

We never did find the car.