Believe in the Flowers.

Carol of the Zombie Jesus!

The dreams I have anymore are odd, to say the least. I dream that I'm sitting at home in the dark, watching TV and playing with Gabe, when a truck pulls up in the driveway and repossesses the car - again. I run out crying - "We just got it back and we didn't do anything wrong!" I scream, even though in real life it's still just as gone today as it was yesterday - and beg with the man who is chaining the car up to please not take it, just give us one more day. It's some big black guy, burly and rough and dressed in mobster's clothing, and he pulls out a gun and tells me that the financier just found out that we were children, that we weren't really adults at all, and that children can't buy or own cars. So they have to take ours away. Again. It always seems, throughout the dream, that this same thing had happened the previous night in the dream-world, that it was always a different person who had some to pick the car up before, because in my dream I'm surprised to see this huge killing machine. "Back off," he tells me as he chains up the car. And then he starts to regale me with unrelated war stories, telling me about how in the Korean War his grandfather fought for his right to be an adult and own a car, and those damn people, didn't they know better? Than to fight a real man, an adult, about whether or not he could own something? He points, he laughs, and suddenly my stomach starts twisting and knotting into itself, like some horrible creature has infested me and is tearing through my intestines to try to escape. Finally, it does, and as I'm laying there bleeding to death, the mobster is laughing and waving his gun and I'm watching our car, our beautiful blue Cobalt, crawl out of my stomach and roll back into its parking space as though nothing had ever happened.

We turned the head on the other day, after deciding that, even though we haven't taken out the air conditioners, it's just too damn cold to keep the heat off. The nights are dipping down into the 30s and the days aren't getting above 65 or so. If it were March, I'd be rejoicing for this temperature change, but instead it's October and I'm dreading it. When I was in grade school, the first day the temperature passed 65, I would always beg Mom to let me wear shorts to school. I never liked shorts, never particularly thought that they looked good on me or felt good to wear - you can only burn the backs of your thighs on a sun-heated slide so many times before it gets old - but to me, wearing shorts signified that the days of wearing coats and snowboots to school were finally ending and summer break would be coming up around the corner. I miss summer break, mostly because it was something to look forward. Now that I'm not in school anymore, summer holds no more significance than winter did, except perhaps that spring and summer mean more violent storms and the potential of tornadoes.

To explain the events of the last couple of days, I'll say that yes, we have Mom's car right now. Calling this an inconvenience is an understatement, but at the moment we know there isn't anything we can do to fix it. I had been dreading this occurrence for a while and knew in the back of my head that it was going to happen; having the cell phones turned off at exactly the wrong time hardly made the whole ordeal easier. I looked out of the window by my computer, at one point, and noticed a large vehicle - somewhat like a flatbed tow truck - back into our parking lot. I think it was a combination of premonition and common sense that led me to know that it was going to happen on Thursday night, and after I took Colin to work, leaving me at home with the car, I had that sensation that I really should have gone to Mom's (looking back, I know that they had stopped by the night before and would have continued coming by, likely charging us for each trip to do so, until the police had to be brought into it). I used the man's phone to call Colin at work, and one of our mutual friends and one of Colin's co-workers, Anthony, brought him home. Now we are sans a car and have been informed that there's nothing we can do about it until Monday, because after a car is repossessed there is a 24 hour period in which the paperwork is filed, etc. From what I can tell, we will have approximately 21 days after the date of repossession (so, Thursday) to try to get our car back - this may or may not include having to pay several thousand dollars worth of fees and back payments to catch us up. I can only hope that with any luck we can manage to work this out and get our car back before that 21 days is up...

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