What the Fuck Is Up With All the Roadkill Already?

I don't know what it is-- but I see a lot of roadkill.

Eviscerated rodentia.

Flattened squirrels.

Twitching chipmunks.

Smashed up canines, and other carcasses, torn up beyond recognition. A ribcage here. Some red, stringy detritus there. Bowels and bones and brains, strewn all over the otherwise unmarred motoring surface.

Deer, fucking split open like a cranium at an autopsy.

Today, it was a goddamn cat, turned upside-down, its rigor-mortised legs standing straight up in the air like it was standing in an upsidedown photograph.

And let me tell you something, this cat definitely cannot, in any way, shape, or form, haz cheeseburger.

My wife doesn't like to drive. I don't particularly know why, but I don't really care, because I love to drive. So, when she and I are in a car together, 99.17% of the time, she's in the passenger seat, and I'm turning the wheel. And speeding. Yes, even in the nine-year-old PT Cruiser, I manage to speed, flogging the underpowered, technologically-retarded four-cylinder engine as necessary. And, as I meander at a somewhat fleet pace through the streets of our little burbia, it seems like every time we're in the car together I'll wince and go,

"Aaauugh! Did you see that fucking otter by the curb? It looks like Shrek sat on it!"

or

"Jesus Christ! Look at that fucking deer-- decapitated like an Al Qaeida hostage!"

or

"Oh my God, I'm gonna fucking vom if I see one more steamrolled squirrel with brains leaking out of its ears."

And she'll say,

"What squirrel?"

Maybe I'm driving too fast for her to catch all of the roadside action, or, I suppose "inaction" would be a better word. Maybe she's just not as observant as I am. Maybe, because I'm driving, my eyes are supposed to be constantly scanning the road, my scattered brain obsessively taking in and processing relevant information so that I can make lightning-quick decisions about how to turn the wheel or when to slam on the brakes. Maybe she has inhereted her father's knack for glazing over the terrority ahead in favor of a gaggle of higher thoughts, not understood by or observable to the rest of us mental plebians.

I don't know. She's my wife, and she's pretty cool. Who knows what's going on in that beautiful brain of hers?

What I do know is: she doesn't see 3/4ths of the roadkill that I see, and it's made me start to question myself.

Am I imagining it?

No.

But-- could it be?

Come on-- the fucking cat-- it was... its legs were.... I swear.

Truly. I do.

You believe me..... don't you?

And, trust me, it's not like I'm avidly searching for it. I think by now you know that I'm not the kind of guy who would scoop up a three-week-old marmoset with the letters "GOODYEAR" plomped onto its belly and take it home and fry it up with a side of chipmunk ball cous-cous. But I see carrion all the time and my wife, my only other consistent car companion just doesn't.

Kind of makes you suspicious of me, I guess. And I can't say I necessarily blame you. I want to think you believe I'm sane but, if you've been with me for a while or have sifted through the archive of this blog there's copious evidence that I'm probably not.

I just wish I really were crazy so my brain could turn the roadkill that my eyes seem so fixated on into other things like, oh, I don't know-- Vietnamese lingerie models, or funny little toadstools with happy smiley faces.... or cupcakes. Maybe easy-to-solve math problems. Or even a non-vivisected otter.

That would be just ducky!