Okay, as you already know, I suspected that I wouldn’t be able to post regularly whilst I was here down at the beach.  Well, it turns out that I was right, and our cottage doesn’t have internet access, yet the fact that I’m able to post this, would suggest that either I have at last attained a Keanu-like mastery of computers or I finally managed to find a place with web service.  Upon that of course, hangs the tale which here follows.  Come with me then, good reader, and hear the tale of how I came to be sitting in a random parking lot in the middle of the night here on some beach or another.

            It all started normally enough, as I set out from home with my sister (the rest of our clan having already headed South to blaze a trail through the wilds of Smithfield).  And since Hitler had messed up my van and my grandmother’s car hates me, we set out in my sister’s Civic of Fury.  As we traveled down the road, we passed all the traditional landmarks on the way out of Richmond; most notably Johnson’s Concrete Lawn Menagerie Emporium, where you can get anything from a big naked Greek deity to Confucius riding that Eddie Murphy dragon from Mulan, to more different kinds of yard gnomes than any decent person could possibly have need of (if you’re ever trying to do all your Christmas/Kwanzaa shopping done in one place though, it’s hard to beat).

            After I got my new totally sweet Lenin hat (that hat was totally sweet, not Lenin; he was a tool), the tale of which shall be related in a blog yet to come, and we passed through the Dismal Swamp (where, if you recall, Scooby Doo once helped Cass Eliot and the Harlem Globetrotters to defeat a Taffy Monster that turned out to really be Richard Milhous Nixon) night fell, and we made out way to the endless wastelands of North Carolina.  There, we saw a thing altogether unprecedented in my experience: the lost souls of a soybean field.

            Honestly, it was dusk, and we were driving through this forsaken expanse of soybeans, and there was this weird, eerie mist slowly rising up from amongst them and hanging like a pall of evil o’er all the land.  At first, I though it was just humidity or something, but it started getting really intense and evil looking and we decided that it was probably some kind of legion of soy-demons.  You know, like where there’s that part in the Bible where Jesus is whomping on that gang of demons that were totally possessing that one dude, and Jesus was like, “Dag, yo, all you cracker demons get out of that dude!”  And the demons were all like, “Dude, that’s not cool, send us into that herd of evil non-kosher soybeans over yonder!”  And then Jesus was like, “Foo’ whatever.”  And then all the demons went into the soybeans and they went all evil and people freaked out and stuff.  I forget which book it is, I think it’s in the Gospel of, um, Dave or something.  Anyway, all these soybeans were bathed in some kind of stench of evil and it was totally creepy driving through it, and you should never trust soybeans, cause they’ll just punch you in the face if they ever get the chance.

            So we finally got down to the beach, and lo and behold, there was no internet in our cottage.  However, I was able to pick up this really weak wireless signal from somewhere in the neighborhood,  so I ended up like, wandering all over the place, holding my sister’s laptop out in front of me like some kind of really geeky Diogenes, but it was all to naught.  Last night, however, my sister and I finally decided we needed to go on an ill-conceived quest in search of web access.  So, we got in the Civic of Fury (which I have tentatively decided to name Josh) and slowly drove off down the road, in search of someone with a wireless network we could mooch off of.  It was really kind of ridiculous; we’d be creeping down the road, and all of a sudden I’d be like “Wait, I think I got one!” And we’d have to throw the car into reverse and pull off of the road while I tried to get it to work right, like we were out trying to hack into a government satellite or something (in fact, I only hack into government satellites when I’m in Richmond, it being generally acknowledged as the Hackable Satellite Capital of Central Virginia for good reason).  Finally, we find a decent unsecured network near this abandoned playground.

            So there we are, hunched over a laptop in Josh the Civic of Fury, in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night, listening to Abby Road and looking incredibly sketchy.  Like, every now and then, someone would walk by and be all like, “Oh crap, I’ll bet they’re hacking into a government satellite, which is a lot easier to do in Richmond!”  It was totally cool.  I felt like a spy.  Like, if a midget with metal teeth or some Korean guy with a battle hat had jumped out of the bushes and tried to attack us, I would have been completely cool and in command of my awesome kung fu skillz, as I freaked out and drove away as fast as I could.  But that didn’t happen, to my knowledge, and so here I am tonight posting this blog, which you happen to be reading right now.  Unless you’re asleep and this is all coming to you in a dream, in which case you’re so totally gonna freak out tomorrow when you check my site and see everything you already dreamed.  But that would be kind of cool, and if it happens, you so totally have to leave me a comment about it, so I’ll know teacupmammoths has become a psychic phenomenon, like spoon bending or mariachi bands.  Meanwhile, be sure to come back tomorrow, when I write in great detail concerning all the local sights and smells to be found here in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (where, if you get an OBX license plate even if you’re not from the actual Outer Banks, children and small furry animals will bite you in the face with the full protection of the law behind them).