(image searches like this is how we fix our broke shit in 2015)
Saturday morning, rode an hour away w/ 16 year old daughter to do some DMV shit on a new *used* ride we just bought, and to set up bank account for the kid as she's in community college & got mad money from her various hustles. My shitty '94 Toyota truck did fine, despite some strange behavior this past week, but then when we left the bank, nothing - no click, no RUHRUHRUH, nothing. I figured battery, so took it out and walked A FUCKING MILE carrying the battery to the Advance, with my daughter walking along too. It gave us a chance to vibe on Main Street Farmville, Virginia, and in situations like this I usually think to myself, "What would I do if I was in Nigeria?" You walk the fuckin' fucked-up battery and find a new one.
Well, the battery tested fine, so we walked it back, with me figuring, "It has to be the starter." My wife was on her way, and after I partially *jacked* the front end up enough to squeeze underneath with the tire jack resting on a brick I keep in the back of the truck because you never know when you'll need a random brick (like now), I got the starter off, eventually. Years ago I would have cussed and broke things and beaten the vehicle with my boot, but I am proud to say I am in a calm enough place in life that I can, with some finagling, get the starter off a shitty old truck in a small parking lot beside the fucking bank on a Saturday when necessary. The starter tested both good and bad at the store (I don't know man) so I figured it had to be the culprit. Got it back on way quicker than taking it off, but it still didn't start. So I gave up. Wife was there & I left the fuckin' truck there, mad at it, but got it towed later this weekend.
Today in fact, after finding a chill ass tow truck dude who took $20 cash to tow it, and he talked shit about the other tow truck guy in town, who usually would've towed my shit for being left in that bank parking lot overnight, but I got lucky because that dude had to go to Raleigh or some shit. But got the truck to a shop, where I will be American and not Nigerian, and let some other dude figure the shit out (which makes me feel like a cuckold tbh).
Of course you can figure out I am driving the new *used* car to do all this, which is a 2001 Volvo S80, with shitty factory stereo, or at least you have to use a cassette adapter to run the ipod which makes the ipod sound like a thousand mosquitoes are angry at any treble sound. I let my 16 yo daughter do some driving as she has learner's, and she didn't wreck into a thing or go off the road too far, although she gunned it turning into our driveway and got pine needles all in my open window all over me but we had a good laugh. But it was also first local pool day, so the family went up there, and all the hoochie mamas were out overfilling their bikinis, and kids were being kids including dickhead redneck teen boys throwing girls into the deep end, but I did some diving with the little ones so that the dickhead teens wouldn't begrudge the little ones diving instead of the older kids doing their stupid fucking rover game.
And yet I just wanted to come home, as it had been a long weekend full of broken shit trifles and also responsible crap like bank accounts and DMVs, so I just wanted to chill the fuck out. My 16 yo rode home with me, and the treble mosquito ipod adapter was too much. But luckily it was baseball game time, so I flipped it to the FM station and listened the Nats and Cubs on actual radio - a slow, mundane, meandering linguistic experience like codeine molasses but drug-free entirely. My daughter was like "ugh, hashtag boring" because she is 16 and actually says "hashtag" before other things, and I briefly thought about explaining the perfect American-ness of riding slowly down the hill into our town while the radio played a baseball game, windows down, just being people living lives, similar to how I was explaining that type of shit when we were carrying the battery down some shit town's Main Street two days earlier. But you can't explain everything all the time, and sometimes you just have to let shit soak in and maybe it leaves a stain and maybe it doesn't, but you did what you could without forcing it. So I didn't force it.
Apparently I had just missed Wilson Ramos' go-ahead homer, and the Cubs briefly threatened while we were driving home as slow as I could go, so slow the honeysuckle smell made you think it was growing into the car as we crept at 30 mph (20 in these Blue Ridge foothill curves), but the Nats held. I came home and sliced up zucchini and yellow squash for cooking in the oven, along with some asparagus I had forgotten we bought last week, and heard the rest of the game out inside, and of course the Nats won and of course my truck is still broke and of course I go back to work after a three-day weekend tomorrow and of course my kid could give half a fuck about baseball but it is life man, we all are living it, and that's all you can fucking ask from any day because without that, you are dead. Literally, dead.
Nats are 27-18.
