Good day, ghostlings! Look at me, I’m on the beach!

Virginia Beach to be exact. A locale I picked almost completely at random. There’s little to do except chill out and imbibe the touristy coastal atmosphere and that’s exactly what I’m going to do for the next day or two.

Two nights ago I stayed with my friend and former boss Judy at her home in Raleigh, North Carolina. When I got there I realized that she’d been avidly following my blog, and I was presented with this delightful surprise:

It’s actually kind of surreal to look at this map. Did I really do all of that? My whole life feels like a timeless oblivion at this point. The days go by fast and yet I feel like I’ve been at this forever. I look at photos I took just a couple weeks ago and recall the moments I took them with a nostalgia more appropriate for a years-old vacation. This is my 30th post. How am I ever going to re-adjust to normal life?

Judy and her husband live in a posh little suburb of Raleigh. Their driveway is long and slopes downward and when I backed up out of there the morning after my stay I swung my car too far to the left and got stuck in this little brick-inlaid ditch behind their mailbox. It was one of those moments where you briefly think to yourself it would be better to die immediately than live for one second longer in that particular situation. With her husband’s help I managed to extricate the car, but not without denting their mailbox in the process. So I owe them both a new mailbox, which I’ll pay for as soon as I get a sponsor for this blog (laugh along with me, folks).

Anyway, today’s post is the second in my series of “Ghostly Oddities”; the images, sounds and stories that are too quirky to fit into any particular narrative. It’s really one of my favorite aspects of this Tour; all the little oddball moments that can’t be googled, sought out or paid for, they just happen. So…. here we go!

In an Atlanta public park, I passed by a guy sitting on a bench, earbuds in his ear, calling to no one in particular, “Nineteen seventy six, Parliament Funkadelic! You don’t know nothin’ ’bout dat… when he land dat muthafuckin’ SPACE-ship!” 

Somewhere in Western North Carolina I saw a sign marking the distance to Asheville in both miles and kilometers. My guess is that this is a holdover from the late 1970s, when the U.S. government made a half-assed attempt to convert the entire nation to the Metric system. 

When I first drove into Virginia I saw a highway sign reading “Radar Detection Devices are Illegal.” I had yet to see a sign targeting that particular crime, why is it a big priority in Virginia?

That’s all for now. You’ll get more updates on my day(s) at the beach tomorrow!