Spent the weekend with my shoulders stuck out of the roof of my roommate’s Range Rover. Up and down the backroads of two parks, my back slamming against the bar behind me everytime we hit a big bump. Sitting inside a car you’re just waiting to get somewhere. Head out the window or the escape hatch on top? You are sucking in the air and the bugs and you feel things viscerally.
I decided this young, watching my my older brothers enjoy window space on my family's was tri-annual 10+hour drives to Wherever, Midwest. But if I snagged a window seat—perhaps by denying that I had to use the bathroom—then I could just roll down the window, let the wind blow straight into my face, watch teh grass go by, and enter my own little dead zone.
I was ten or eleven, having the time of my life but still half in the aforementioned dead zone, when I fell off the back of a jeep in the woods of Upper Michigan. My arm slapped a rock real hard, and the car behind almost crunched me. Then Dad came over and started waving my wrist back and forth: Does this hurt? Yes, Father. Oh my god. It hurts like nothing I’ve felt in my ten years. Why do you shake my broken part?
At Naivasha I saw wart hog, giraffes, zebras from the top of roommate's Land Rover. In Lake Boringo: about two million flamingos next to a tiny herd of kudu, next to zebras. On the road between the two parks I saw trees twice as big as anything in Central Park and curvy banzai-like trees with all the foliage in a broad pancake of leaves on top. And at our Lake Baringo campsite: baboons running around. Wonderful, right?
Wrong, assbag.
We’d seen baboons licking picnic tables Naivasha on Saturday. Yes, they were filthy, but when baboons eat they're creepily humanlike. They stare off and think while the chew. When they swallow they snap back to reality, grab another strip of food, then go back to thinking.
But as soon as we got to our campsite, about an hour before sun down, about a dozen of them started screaming at us or each other. When we went to sleep, one started heaving low. Hoooooe huh. Hoooooe huh. He sounded about twenty feet away. Then an obnoxious baboon brother starts yelling at him from above. Ah! Ah! Ah! Then hell broke loose as the entire damn forest started screaming at each other. It went from fascinating to hellishly annoying in ten minutes.
And then mosquitos dropped by. The baboons out there screaming, me in here slapping my head every time one flew into my ear. I miss him, he comes back in fifteen seconds, I slap myself again. Repeat until 5 AM. Good African God.
One just flew across my computer screen here at home. I told him “Oh yeah bring it” and then I clapped him. I then queried the other insects in the living room if they wanted some. They said No. I told them that was what I thought.
