I am rarely hungry around lunch time so I generally spend my lunches either writing for the blog or at a truck stop down the street. Today I was tired of sitting in front of the computer so I stopped by the 'stop. Right as I was about to leave, a frequenter of the 'stop named Larry was bumming around for a ride. I didn't offer up because I don't know Larry all that well, but I like the guy if for no other reason that he embodies the modern concept of a rugged cowboy. I am working on an ad campaign for a fictional cigarette company that needs a cowboy and if I had my druthers he would be cast for it. Everything from his cowboy had to his full moustache amid a sea of stubble. Perfect. Until he opens his mouth with a squeaky voice that even the slur of his perpetual drunkenness cannot compensate for. In fact, it only amplifies it and lately he's been amplified a lot.

Everyone else there either had walked or driven a bigrig that they obviously wouldn't want to take just a couple miles down the road, so I agreed to go ahead and take him. The combination of the smells of alcohol, burping gas, and dirt never smell so putrid as when they are in your car. It was only a couple blocks to the trailer park where he "works" (he's been unemployed for over a month now). I took him to the end of the park and dropped him off right by the colorful plastic swingset by the "office next door." In the meantime, I was regaled of how he was living with his ex-wife a couple months ago and how they *shudder* "made love" every night. Actually, all he said was "I used to live with my ex-wife. We made love every night" with periodic repetitions of "every night" and "made love" thrown in at periodic intervals, just in case the smell alone wasn't making me feel sick.

I make my way back to the truck stop and Stan is still hanging around. "Did he take you to his trailer?" he asks me. I tell him that I did. He then asked, "Did you see the blue trailer across the road? That one's mine. Biggest in the lot. Painted it myself!" To which I replied with a hardy congratulations.

Several months back I was telling my former roommate about one of my adventures at the 'stop when an angry wife threatened to drive-by shoot us all. He asked why in the world I keep going down there.

"You meet the most interesting people there," I replied.

So does anyone out there have any idea how to fumigate a car?