Getting From A To B

I am guessing that most of us, when we were small humans, heard one or both of our parents tell us this: “Be careful what you wish for.”  In truth, I did hear “Hold out your hands, wish into one, shit in the other, and tell me which fills up first,” far more often, but I was cautioned to beware my wishes.

The relevance of this attention-grabbing opener is that I’m sitting here bemoaning something I’ve wished for.  Let’s review a bit first.  We know I live on an Army installation somewhere near the Bellybutton of America.  We know the Army budgets things a bit differently than other organizations, mainly because it’s funded on two-year Congressional (fuckers) cycles that in turn demand use of allocated funds or loss of them past a certain point.  Maybe you didn’t know that but now you do.  Sorry.

At some point within the past two years, my little slice of Army heaven received some fundage to fix the roads here on post.  You out there who know and understand Snow (sorry, Jamie) will also know how quickly asphalt degrades under ice, freezing and salt.  Tanks, too, but sadly I have no tanks here.  I digress… suffice it to say that my daily around-post driving had degraded into a tooth-jarring and shock absorber-killing experience that made me want to get my jihad on.

Now, having wished my rattly jihadi wish for smooth roads, I’m being bent over with that wish.  I came home from Afghanistan to be greeted with my street blocked off to traffic and the sidewalks gone.  Gone!  No concrete, just two long blank strips of dirt.  Welcome the fuck home, Rants, are you feeling it?  At least it makes edging the grass there easier, I guess, were my mower not gummed up from a year of inactivity.

Anyway, this apparently was only the first step of somebody’s sinister plot to fuck with my head.  After forcing me to drive in loops in and out of my carport (thank Bacon for seniority), the Post Office became blocked off next.  After that, they expanded past my own personal street and got its cross-street and several small side ones I and many others use to quickly get to and from work.  Then the coup de grace this morning, because nothing is worse than having a situation described best in French.

The road – singular noun here, mind you: road – to my office is now blocked for construction as well.  So I can’t park near my house, can barely get out of my allocated parking spot, and to add insult to sodomy, I can’t get to work.  I don’t know whether to cry or laugh.

Is this a cosmic hint?  Do the Powers That Be here in Armyland believe we’re all too fat and need to walk more?  I don’t know.  I may steal my neighbor kid’s little pink Huffy with the Barbie motif tomorrow.  Rank hath its privileges, you know, and if I’m going to be forced to exercise I might as well make someone laugh while I endure it.

Laugh all you want, because the entire time I spend zipping past you I’ll hear Mama Rants saying, “Be careful what you wish for.”

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