All posting, including tonight ’s Eyrie thang, will be pushed back until either later tonight or possibly even tomorrow. Heading out in just a bit for the BCHS football game to check out my daughter’s performance, then bringing her back home with me afterwards for the weekend. Big doin’s which I’m very much looking forward to, back with y’all soon as I can be.

Update! Well dammit, that did not go at ALL as planned. First, my friend Zach got hopelessly lost on the way down to pick me up; called me, tried to tell me where he was while the wife and young ‘un talked all over him in the background, and I couldn’t make heads nor tail of where the bleedin’ hell that boy might be, since I’m way out in the boonies and not just terribly familiar with the area my own self. So, he finally gets straightened out somehow, makes it to my dismal shack, and we proceed to hightail it with all due haste up to Bessemer.

On arrival at the high school after much tail-chasing, recrimination, and assignation of blame, we try to find an entrance to the football field (we could see from the road that the game was already well under way, just couldn’t see a way to get in and parked and all). No helpful signs or arrows or anything along those lines, mind, that would apparently have made this business entirely too easy.

We drove slowly through an open gate close behind the home-side bleachers where we could see several cars parked up. Some quasi-official dood hustles his fat ass out, flags us down, and informs us we ought to go back around to the main entrance. Which has a handicapped ramp, see. Which, in my current sad, crippled condition, is not optional. Which condition Official Dood had noted, bless him.

So we did that thing.

We drive to the main entrance, park up, unass the vehicle, and go up to the front doors as told. We try each of the four doors; all locked, natch. As we made our way back out to the car scratching our heads in befuddlement, a young feller opens one of the doors, bellows a hearty halloo, and waves us inside. We go in and he accompanies us down a long, wide hall, around a bend, and right over to the main office. Wherein a white-haired, security-guard looking fellow (no uniform, but sometimes you can just kinda tell, y’know?) says we should go back around the building to the parking lot we’d just left, wait by the line of parked buses for him to join us, and he would be out in a jiffy to personally guide us to exactly where we needed to be.

By then, Madeleine’s role in the evening’s festivities had concluded. She had arranged with her band director to duck out early with us so’s we might get her on back down to chez Hendrix at a reasonable hour. So as we were ambling over to the bus line wondering just what the fucking actual fuck, here comes my kid walking towards us from the far side of the parking lot. She caught our frazzled attention with a big smile and a wave, the four of us piled into the car, and we got the hell out of Dodge posthaste.

To tot up the results of this decidedly snakebit foray, then: No marching band halftime show. No marching band music. No Friday night high school football. Much confustication, aimlessness, and futility. Contradictory instructions from friendly folks who were just trying to be helpful. Lots of driving and milling around. Some time spent exploring the after-hours-vacant, dimly-lit corridors of a school building I have no particular fondness for or connection to, other than that my daughter will be attending classes there next year. Then, it was back home again safe and sound for this intrepid if hapless bunch, sadder perhaps but none the wiser for the experience.

All in all, NOT one of my more productive evenings. Ah well, whatchagonna do. Even so, on the trek back to South Cackalacky—chatting and laughing and rehashing events merrily as we rolled past quiescent farms, cheerily lit homes, and closed businesses—we all agreed that, despite none (0, not any) of our best-laid plans for the night having actually come to fruition, the whole rigmarole of a busted-play of a clusterfuck of a shit-circus had still been a lot of fun. We have no plans to do it all again next year.

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