The Manliest Day of the Year

March 23, 2014.Reading time 5 minutes.

Cue the Led Zep, let loose some fragrant belches, drag your nose across your sleeve, and get ready to scratch something! It’s Car Day, YES! The manliness day of the year that doesn’t involve a chainsaw. YES! Line ‘em up – three cars, three oil changes and a brake job. YES! Can you just feel the testosterone surging?

I felt it yesterday – a perfect Saturday for Car Day. I drove to the auto parts store to get my supplies and surround myself with other manly men. I didn’t shower, I wanted some manstink. I plopped brake supplies and three jugs of motor oil on the counter, grunted a few times, and swapped tales of bravado with the snaggle-toothed clerk. Yes, a day for men, indeed.

I love working on cars but there are only about four things left I can do on today’s automobiles. If anything else is wrong, I can only raise the hood and say, “hmmmm” before calling a tow truck. But on Car Day, I get to use my limited knowledge (aided by YouTube) to be a master mechanic. I refuse wash my hands after. Even though Car Day plus one is Sunday, I leave the black gunk under my nails. When I shake the preacher’s hand, he’ll know: ‘That’s a car guy.’ Oh yeah.

I started with my truck, affectionately called the Blue Pearl. After I drained it and changed the filter, I checked three times to make sure the plug was re-installed. I’m very diligent to check ever since the unfortunate day I poured ten quarts straight through the engine and onto the pavement. Yes, the plug was in this time. Car one complete.

Our van, Russell’s oil change went quickly. Next was Kevin, our oldest daughter’s car. I don’t like to drive Kevin, mostly because of the frilly, purple monogram on the back. Not so masculine. This would be my inaugural oil change on Kev. I surveyed the little white car, noticing just how narrow the gap between it and the ground. Man, it was low. All of the sudden, I remembered ramps! I have ramps and rarely get to use them. Car Day just got better.

I set the ramps at the edge of the concrete, inched Kevin up to them, checked their position, and proceeded to roll right over top of them. Uh-oh. Now the ramps lay wedged between Kevin and the ground with his front wheels dangling in the air. That’s bad.

I’ve heard of superhuman strength caused by adrenaline rushes in life-or-death situations. Maybe that would work here. I spit on my hands and rubbed them together before lifting just because it looks tough when they do it in old movies. Abject humiliation must not qualify as a life-or-death situation because I couldn’t make it budge. I gave up and let it sit there a few hours while I pondered. A neighbor’s garage jack came to the rescue.

My machismo waned mightily. Don’t tell the guys at the auto parts store, but I decided to bag it and go to Quicklube where a young man with a tattoo of Charlie Brown shooting himself in the head changed my oil.

“Nice decal,” he chuckled as he wrote down the license plate number.

“Just change the oil,” I replied gruffly, hoping to salvage a slice of manhood.

He complied and descended to the pit underneath me. “Dude, where’d the yellow come from?” he asked when he discovered scratches left by my ramps.

“Crap,” I mumbled. I hadn’t noticed.

“No, it ain’t crap,” replied Charlie Brown’s killer, wiping at the marks. “That’s like, paint. It ain’t coming off. But how’d it get down here?”

“Just change the oil, Dude…”

Man, I’m sick of cars.

Save the Speakers!

February 4, 2014.Reading time 4 minutes.

My first car was a 1969 Orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. It was wonderful! Well, to a 16 year-old boy it was wonderful. Truth is, the floorboard had so many holes rusted in it that I could see the road I was travelling on. The heat was non-existent, the windows often came off track (and sometimes fell out), and I could hear a mocking laugh from the windshield wipers when I turned them on. But I loved it. I first saw it as I pedaled past a used car lot in my hometown in Kentucky. Every town has that cheesy lot – with all the ropes of ugly plastic flags hanging from pole to pole and a small building housing a used-car salesman who looked and dresses exactly like Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati. When it came time to buy, my father took me to the lot to confront Herb with the admonition to let him do the talking. Yeah, sure Dad, I’ll be quiet. That guy saw me coming. Maybe he’d seen me ride my back past him, lusting after the orange beauty. Anyway, he wouldn’t budge off the asking price of $900, so my father staged the fake walk-out – a negotiating tactic he should have warned his naive son about. Of course, being an idiot, my immediate response was to yell, “But I want that car!” I don’t think I grabbed onto his leg and rode him while he stormed away, but I might as well have. Guess what we paid for the car…$900.

It lasted 9 months. $100 per month, which was a lot of money to a kid in the mid-80’s. I had just picked up my friend Will on a Friday night when it breathed its last. Like its inconspicuous color, it died in grand style. The engine threw a rod and caught on fire. My response to the flames was to yell, “Save the speakers!!!!” I had just bought them for a considerable sum and installed them myself. So with the back of the car on fire and a crowd gathering, two 16 year-old morons dove into the miniscule back seat to rescue the speakers. I honestly don’t know if we saved them, but I do remember trading the piece of junk in on a white Oldsmobile that my classmates dubbed “The Egg.” Quite a step down from my orange glory.

I tell that story for one reason – my laptop died a few weeks ago and I wanted to offer a piece of advice to would-be writers like myself. My advice is to buy several external hard drives and flash drives and save everything often OUTSIDE of your laptop. If you are savvier than me, use a cloud. Save often. Daily. You never know when something you love is going to die.

I got everything off of it except for a couple of my most recent edits and ideas. Of course, the lost files were literary genius, I’m sure – the most witty and superb crafting of verbiage ever formed in the English language. Whatever they were, they were destined to be my breakthrough pieces. And now they are lost.

I’m very happy with my shiny, new, green laptop, named Shrek by my kids. A far better name than my second automobile.

Save, Save, Save… Don’t trust one drive, save and oversave. Save early and often.

Oh, and don’t go back into a burning car for speakers. That’s a bad plan.