09/18/2009

I remembered something I meant to mention from our trip,  While we were at the motel, we wanted to look at the phone book, since there’s always a restaurant guide in the Yellow Pages.  Motel rooms always have phone books in them, often in the same drawer as the ubiquitous Gideon’s Bible, but for whatever reason the phone was on a desk by the bathroom instead of on the nightstand like they usually are.  Anyway, the desk drawer had at least three phone books– a large one for the greater Birmingham area, a regular sized one for the surrounding areas (like Leeds) and a thin one just for Leeds itself.  This is common.  However, there was something in the drawer that wasn’t so common, and neither I nor Minnie (who was standing behind the chair I was in as I looked) recognized it for what it was immediately, probably due to the fact that we didn’t expect it to be there.  That, and possibly because Minnie had never seen such a thing.  About the size of a Reader’s Digest, it was a book of erotica, in this case all incest-oriented. (!) I have no clue what it was doing there.  It looked about 20 years old judging by the photo on the cover, but turned out to be dated 2009, with a cover price of $7.99. (! again.)  I doubt the motel was aware of its presence, the way they likely are with the Gideons, but I couldn’t figure out why somebody would leave an $8.00 magazine of any variety in a drawer in a motel room.  That’s a pretty expensive practical joke.  We had a laugh over the whole thing and decided to put it back where we found it for the next guest(s) to find.  Then the next morning before we checked out, for some reason I was looking through the little rack of travel brochures and maps and such on the same desk, and I found another, completely different yet still incest-related book.  The only real difference was that this one was a little thicker, contained photos instead of bad drawings (not kidding), and was a dollar more expensive.  At that point I decided that they had definitely been left as a joke, since one was under the phone books in a drawer and the other was nestled behind a bunch of brochures that I’m sure the average motel guest usually doesn’t care enough about to shuffle through.  But since Minnie loves brochures, I found it. I put it back as well.  Have fun, next guests of room 115 of the Super 8 Motel in Moody, Alabama.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’d like to mention the rain.  We’ve had lots of rain this week.  The underpass that always floods in town (I know at least one person who’ll read this that probably knows exactly the one- over by Pizza Grocery) has done just that.  I’d guess it’s probably four or five feet deep in the deepest part, and they’ve got it blocked off.  Good thing too, because somebody drives in there and kills their car almost every single time it happens.