Friday, 15 February 2002 | The shop

Steve let me off work early so that I could ride with Stephanie so that I could pick up my car (5 days and $630 later) so that I could stand there for an hour-and-a-half in the cold, so that I could watch my car move up and down on the lift, people crawling underneath it and inside of it and leaning over its hood, covering it like ants on a crumb. Meanwhile, the sky slowly turned pink and orange on rippled clouds, and I stood among gutted out vehicles and machinery, watching cars fly by on the highway and studying the barbed wire fence and contemplating digging pennies out of the dirt. I heard an angry-sounding voice blaring from megaphones on top of a van with John 3:16 painted on the side, its volume surging and waning relative to its distance. I only caught a glimpse of it as it made its rounds throughout the neighborhood, its location as elusive as that of an ice cream truck.