Fender-bender

Not long after I got my new wheels, I joked to my brother that I needed to christen them with a fender-bender. I don't know why I made this joke, because it wasn't all that funny.

And it was a joke.

But now it's not.

Tonight, on my way to work, I took a classic spare-myself-a-wait-at-the-light-and-get-to-work-on-time maneuver, turning right and making the so-called Michigan left to avoid the stop-light left. It went smoothly. Except. Except: after I completed it, I had to wait at the stop light. It turned green, and people started to go. So I looked down at my iPod, presumably to find Kenny Loggins or Elvis Costello or some other such artist too old for my own good. And once I looked up again, there was a rusty old pickup much closer than I had remembered, much more stationary than I had remembered. I slammed the brakes too late, christened the new Honda, and muttered a few choice words.

I haven't been in many accidents. Actually, I've never been at the wheel for a significant bumper-thumper. So, I told myself there probably wasn't much damage, even though I knew our collision was sound. I got out, checked everything over - I'd show you a picture if I had taken one - and saw the great big scrape on top of my bumper, and a big dent in the grill. Thankfully, the Honda H was in pristine condition - how else do you know it's a Honda? The other driver got out and looked it over. He seemed unmoved by it all. No damage at all to his pickup. He handed over his information and I wrote it down nervously.

He seemed cool, collected. But if life is anything like the movies - and I have no reason to believe it isn't, because the cinema is the fount from which I tap my whole reality - then this guy was probably on his way to a diamond heist. I bet that when I bumped him, he assumed I was from a rival faction, attempting to keep him from getting to the big exchange. He probably took a pistol from under his seat, loaded it, screwed on a silencer, and tucked it into the back of his slacks. He wouldn't have hesitated to take me out, get back into his truck, and get back on his way to a private jet to Liberia where there would have been a few a few shady characters in a limo with suitcases full of Benjamins and Euros, and the guy's girlfriend, taken hostage and tied up on the floor. This was never about the diamonds, it was about getting his woman back. He got sucked away from his career as a semi-professional softball player and into a complicated web of lies, deceit, and pretty diamonds. He would have handed over the diamonds and waited for them to unshackle her - did I mention she's shackled? - and when they finally unlocked her handcuffs, she PULLED A GUN ON HIM. SHE WAS IN ON IT THE WHOLE TIME, AND SHE NEVER LOVED HIM. But I digress.

The important thing is that he wasn't mad, and we didn't have a beef. There was no damage to his truck. And I'm not surprised, because it was made of metal and my car is made of, like, old laundry basket plastic. It folded right up.

Anyway. I got his info, let him leave, and filed a police report and a claim with my insurance. It was all my fault. So now Kenny Loggins has cost me, I can only assume, at least my $500 deductible.

I spent the rest of the night wondering why I didn't just do something differently to avoid the accident. If I had just waited at the light or gone straight or been five minutes faster or slower or left the iPod at home... But then I thought, How many times have I done it right and not realized it? The six years I had my car, not once did I have so much as a bump, or a scrape, or a busted mirror. You never know when or how often you've escaped danger or humiliation. How many times have I taken the right way and, say, serendipitously avoided mowing down a troupe of girl scouts helping elderly folks cross the street? Then I would certainly have spent the rest of my life in jail with that hanging over my head. But no... I just got into a fender-bender. And it's just kind of expensive. I'm going to drain my checking account, but if that's the worst thing that happens, I think I'll be alright.

By the way, I would name the movie something with a diamond pun. And it would star Nicholas Cage.

Tornado

I'm sitting here watching PBS after midnight. They're showing a BBC documentary about Tornadoes.

I have always, always, always wanted to see a tornado. I have a suspiciously large number of dreams about them, and in each one, I decide that I'm actually finally seeing a tornado in real life and I'm not dreaming anymore. And I always stand outside and gawk and marvel at their hugeness, soak up their sheer destructive power. And then I wake up and awkwardly realize that I still haven't seen a tornado in real life.

Whenever we get a really violent storm and I get the chance to watch it, I scan the sky in morbid curiosity, hoping to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud forming. They never do. They're rare in Michigan, where our weather is buffeted by Lake Michigan.

My dad has seen them, I think. I've asked him before. He grew up in Iowa. I'm not sure he ever wants to see another one. Iowa is in the tornado alley where, I learned via PBS - and stowed away somewhere in the section of my brain allotted to fifth grade science class - warm winds from the south rise up over cold winds from the north, drifting up into the jet stream where they begin to rotate. The supercells spin and funnel downward toward the ground, and berth the twisters, and throw train cars around like toys and destroy trailer parks. It's a classic joke to make fun of the people who get on the news and stand in front of where their trailer used to be.

This documentary is showing the destruction. You always see it on the news in the spring when a particularly bad one levels a neighborhood somewhere in Kansas. A particularly bad storm occurred in Oklahoma in 1999, and they showed a lingering shot of block after block after block of skeletal remains of houses, acres and acres of garbage and debris and walls and bricks and sinks and typewriters, and trucks where living rooms used to be. A team of storm chasers from England arrive late. They miss the spectacle, and see only the aftermath of entire neighborhoods and towns left completely destroyed. They leave feeling a little... depressed.

And I think... I don't really want to see a tornado all that badly.

The first days of the Honda Civic

A few weeks ago, sensing the beginning of the end of the Escort, I began to look for a new car. I didn't find anything.

Bethany did.

About five minutes after I told her I was looking, she pointed me to an ad on Craigslist for a Honda Civic. I looked up a few reviews, did a little research. People say Honda Civics run forever. I saw a story about one that made it to 900,000 miles. A friend told me yesterday he knew someone that just bought one with 400,000 miles on it. A guy at work bought one from 1997, and said you can expect them to reach 300,000. So since this one was almost in my price range, I emailed the owner and asked to check it out.

I went out to her house a few days ago and took the car for a test drive out on the freeway. It handled well, had a sunroof and A/C and cruise control and a CD player, veritable luxuries in my book, but I didn't necessarily feel love at first sight. I didn't know for sure. I thought... I want it, but I haven't driven anything else.

But another couple was driving down from Mount Pleasant that night to check it out, so I had to make a decision. I asked my brother if I should pull the trigger and he told me to go for it if it seemed right.

After I test drove it, I stopped and applied for a loan. When they called and told me I was approved, I called the owner and told her I wanted her car. She was happy, and called... the others... and told them not to bother with the trip. Meanwhile, I had another friend run a Carfax report. He called me and gave it a really positive endorsement.

So... I bought the Civic.

I've been driving it for a few days, watching the miles tick up, permanently away from the 64,000 mark at which I bought it. We're getting to know each other. I still reach down for the shifter when I'm slowing down. There's nothing there... My hand doesn't know what to do while I drive. And my left foot gets bored looking for the clutch. But I'm sure they'll get over it soon. It's road-trip worthy. It's in good shape... It's nice.

It's an adjustment. With the Escort, it was paid off. It outlived my expectations. There was no pretense, no pressure for upkeep. That car was supposed to die with me. And I have to baby this one.

Picture for you:

The final days of ZX2

Thursday. I'm driving on a busy street when I begin to feel a shake from the front of my car. It feels like a flat tire. I stop to check it out. All tires are present and full of air, nothing is dragging underneath, nothing is awry under the hood. I return to the car and pray that I make it back to the store.

It does not make it back to the store.

The vibration begins immediately. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking: Is this the end? Since I'm not well-versed in vehicular snafus, I grip the steering wheel and beg the car to survive two more miles. But soon, the shaking intensifies, and quickly, and suddenly I come to a dragging, grinding, screeching halt, leaning forward and to the left. Cars lean forward and to the left when a wheel comes off.

And sure enough, I see the emancipated wheel, keeping all of its momentum upon liberation from the weighty car, rolling and bouncing across the street, through a suspiciously large gap in traffic. It jumps the curb, rolls up a driveway, and barges through some poor homeowner's screen door.

I will have to deal with that later. For now, I'm sitting in traffic, near rush hour, at a busy intersection. On three wheels. I get out, inspect the damage, and pop a squat in the grass by the street.

Huh.

I call work. I'm outta commission for... at least an hour, I say. I call dad and hurriedly, anxiously explain the scenario as best I understand it. Soon, an old friend rolls up and helps find the lug nuts. A cop pulls up behind me and we fill out an accident report. We inspect the damage at the house and retrieve the wheel. No one lives there, the cop tells me. Abandoned. Foreclosed. Thank God.

A wrecker comes, dad comes, the boss comes, and we agree that all of this came about because the lug nuts weren't tight enough after the new tires I got on Saturday. The wrecker charges $20 to put the wheel back on. The car is good enough to drive back home, so dad takes it and I finish the shift in his truck.

Saturday, I drive the car again, the wheels polished and brushed up by the tire dealer. They did their best to make things right. But by 11, a strange noise is coming from under the hood, and the bitter smell of burning rubber. My AC compressor, I later discover, is seizing up and has an appetite for serpentine belts. When I drive it home later, tense because it's loud, I hear the belt snap in the driveway, and rubber-smelling smoke pours from under the hood when I get out.

Sigh.

Sunday morning when I get up, I look for a new car.

Sunday afternoon, Dad and I replace the belt. When we go to buy a new belt, an old friend is there who offers to look at the car later in the week. It takes four hours for dad and I to replace the belt because we can't get to the darn thing and we don't have hands the size of a three-year-old girl. Another friend stops by to help us, and this is when I discover it's the AC compressor, and it's hungry for another belt, at least until it's replaced.

Monday, the old friend we saw when we were buying the belt offers to buy the car for $700. I'm not sure what I could get for a maybe-running car with some real issues, but he knows how to fix cars and I agree to the price, because it'll be in good hands. A few days later, he comes to get it, and swaps out the AC compressor with one from the junkyard. He slips on the new belt in five minutes, roughly three hours and 55 minutes faster than Dad and I did it.

I sign over the title, find the keys, and drive it to his house and say a strange, brief good-bye.

It patiently taught me to drive it's stick shift, suffered through that long drive to Florida after its air conditioning gave out, rolled over the 200,000 milestone a few weeks ago.

It's weird to get attached to something. You ascribe a personality to it. I never named it, nothing seemed right, but I did like it. When I paid it off, it was mine, and I had pride in it even though it never really fit me. Little red car, no head room... just didn't seem right for me.

But it was. Every time I drove, and that was often, it was there with me. Everywhere that I would go, the Escort would surely follow. It felt so wrong leaving it in Florida when I flew home for a week. We adapted to each other, conformed to each other. It was truly my space.

And now it's not my car anymore.

But I've got a new one.

short - really short - fiction

(Not my style I know. But I wrote it, and there's not sense in writing it unless someone reads it. So here you go... Thoughts?)

Baby Grand

She lies in bed each night and drifts into sleep, under personal symphonies from the room above. Each night, same time, when the news has finished with the important stuff and switched to sports and weather, the pianist sits down to his instrument, anchored firmly to the wooden floor, and plays dreamy melodies, unknowingly serenading the girl below, the one with the tired feet. She’s come to expect it, to miss it if it’s gone, because the tones resonate through the floorboards and down the walls, into her ears and pull her slowly from the waking day into the soft, short night. It’s a fine way to end a stressful day, full of books and classes then dishes, trays and glasses full of beer, and customers who demand more, so much more, than she can deliver. And as she drifts, she forgets them.

Tonight, it’s the woman with the Prada sunglasses who visits every Wednesday to sit silently with her husband and reveal nothing, only that she and he hardly talk, and that she lives in Cicero, and always keeps the glasses where she can see them.

And she forgets the man in the tux, with his bowtie hanging limp over his lapels, who asked for drinks she’d never heard of, and had it in for her and let her do nothing right and made her fill the break room with awkwardness when she cried to the cooks. And when he left, he signed his name on the credit slip and drew a line through the tip and went home to watch the news and practice his baby grand.

The 2009 Tea Parties

Do you know about the Tea Parties? You probably heard about them. I didn't go. There was one in Grand Rapids, and I thought about it... I'm frustrated with my government, and if this is a way to show it, you could probably count me in. But I like to be sure. I don't want to half-heartedly protest anything. In case, you know, some counter-protesting occurs and someone hunts me down, gets me into an argument and finds me ill-prepared to defend my presence and inherent support, and converts me to a communist. And I do not want to become a communist. So I didn't go to the Tea Parties.

Plus, I was working.

So I started to look into them. I followed a little bit of the media coverage, and sure enough: There's some counter-protesting going on. And plenty of mockery. On the surface, the tea parties are a bunch of people who are angry about tax increases, many of whom haven't seen a tax increase, probably won't for a while, and maybe never will. People at the bottom end of the tax bracket pay only a small part of the federal income tax - I've mentioned this before. So I'll admit the protesting seems a little ironic.

But I think there's more to it than tax increases. You see, there's a small chunk of people left who actually want the government to take less money and do less stuff. I count myself among them. We're fiscal conservatives who want to take care of ourselves, and we want the government to do less. But we see the government getting bigger. Yeah, I know, it started under George W. Bush. We're mad at him too.

We're mad about - I shudder at the word - bailouts. Remember when GM got too big to fail? Remember how Bank of America got too big to fail? What happens if our government gets too big to fail? The more the government does, the bigger it gets, the closer it gets to that line. People see their freedoms shrinking, and the government growing, and that's why they're getting upset.

I'm not going to sound the Socialism alarm. Maybe we're there, maybe we're not, maybe it's the worst thing ever, maybe no one's really going to care or notice in fifty years. That evaluation is far beyond me and the B I got in three credit-hours of undergraduate macroeconomics. I can't begin to tell you the basic merits and demerits of socialism, but I'm pretty sure they don't entirely jive with this wacky but unshakable idea I have that the government should do less and take less money.

My financial life is okay in this system. But it's the trajectory that bugs me. If the government is getting a little bigger today, where will it be tomorrow? In a year? In ten years? If I'm a little annoyed and curious about it, imagine how many more people are scared and angry and marginalized enough to get organized and to raise a ruckus and dump tea in the Grand River. And all over the rest of the country.

There's a significant number of people who don't feel well-represented by their government, and they have every right to protest. You can protest whatever you want. You protest when your rights erode, hopefully you start doing it before they're gone. It makes sense for people to protest a tax increase.

Naturally, they got mocked. And of course, the easiest way to make fun of tea-parties is to make a tea-bagging joke. If you don't know what that is, and you really want to know, go ask the Urban Dictionary. Suffice it to say it's an innuendo that would draw snickers from frat boys. And some of the rest of us, but only in our weaker moments. I swear. And apparently, Anderson Cooper, too. Dubbing a tea-involving protest as tea-bagging is an easy joke, a comparison expected from anonymous, edgy political bloggers and humorists like Jon Stewart. Likening a movement to a sex-act is a convenient way to devalue it. It bugs me to see otherwise professional journalists slough off a widespread, reasonable protest.

I'm amazed at the ease with which some people are laughing it off. A bunch of white, rich tea-baggers want to keep their money and they're finally raising a stink about it, right? Is someone out of touch here, though? Is it the people protesting out of concern for a government growing too big to fail? The same legion of people who choose Fox News over CNN, the ones who built the conservative talk radio audience? The wealthy ones who bear the load of the tax burden, who feel underrepresented and have reached a tipping point and are taking their frustration to the streets? Or is it the people making teabagging jokes?




From the movie Network

The ATL

When the Braves game ended on Saturday night, we took the bus to the MARTA station at Five Points, and waited to take it south to where we'd parked. On our side, waiting for the southbound train toward the airport, were me, Joel, and his wife Katie, along with a handful of black people. On the other side, waiting for the northbound train, was a huge crowd, mostly white, decked out in Braves paraphernalia. The MARTA tracks divided us.

As I understand it, this situation sums up Atlanta fairly well. The city has one of the fastest growing white populations in the country, and they mostly live on the north side, while the south side is predominantly black. In the few days I spent in the city, I didn't see enough to be able to make such a claim. Joel told me it was so, and Google helped me find a few other sources to confirm it.

I don't know if you've been to Atlanta, or what it conjures up in your brain when you think of it, but I got off the plane there thinking it would be a pretty modern, progressive, cosmopolitan city, without really knowing for sure. And it is. But it's still decidedly southern. Within a few minutes in the airport, I was inundated with southern drawl, and I knew I was the one who talked funny.

The south is interesting, and I'd like to spend more time there someday. After all, I was born in Alabama, not far from the Gulf. (And I can't help but think this is why I like Bluegrass.) But I was whisked away before I was old enough to convince my parents to stay away from the snow. I can't fathom how different it would have been to grow up there, missing out on real winters, eating breakfast at Waffle House, and hearing an entirely different perspective on the Civil War and General Lee and Jefferson Davis. They're still heroes down there.

There's a giant carving of them, along with Stonewall Jackson, on Stone Mountain. It's like the Mount Rushmore of the south. Stone Mountain is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the state, just 20 miles east of Atlanta, and you can climb it in about a half hour if you're good. We did that on Sunday, when it was perfectly clear and 70 degrees. From the top we could see all of Metro Atlanta, including the downtown and midtown skylines and Buckhead.

Of course I did all of the other touristy stuff, too. I visited the World of Coca-Cola, the CNN Center, and the Georgia Aquarium. They're all worth checking out, but go on a weekday morning if you can because they'll be crowded on the weekends. We hung out in Piedmont Park and went to a Braves game on Saturday night. We went to the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site, in the east shadow of the skyline. Since it's a national park, it's all free. Also worth a look: A trip up the Westin hotel to its rotating restaurant, the sorta-cleverly titled SunDial. If you eat there - I can't afford to - it's free to go up. If you don't, you have to bribe them five bucks. Or, you have to pay five bucks for a ticket. I paid for my ticket and got a good view. If you want to get your bearings, do this first. Or just go up in the Marriott Marquis around the corner. It's not as tall, but it's free. We visited the Starbucks inside on Saturday and killed a few hours playing cards in their lobby. Probably the coolest lobby/atrium I've ever been in.

I don't usually think of Atlanta as a big tourist draw. It's just another big city, right? I went because I know people there. Back when I was in Tanzania, salivating at the thought of touring my country, I told my friend Joel I might want to visit. He invited me down, and when I got cabin fever in March, I decided to buy the ticket and go. It was worth it - there's plenty to do in Atlanta. It wasn't the most restful vacation ever, and there was no beach, but it was a change of pace. And I guess that's what I needed.

Pichafoyou:

Top to bottom:
Carvings on Stone Mountain
Inside the CNN Center
Looking South from the Westin toward Turner Field
Olympic Park, from the Westin
MLKJr's house
Stoney Tangawizi, on tap at the World of Coca-Cola
Inside Turner Field
A "H8BAMA" license plate. They must really hate Alabama.
Looking north toward Midtown from the Westin

Adventures in Pizza Delivery, Episode 37c

Tonight was a historically bad night for tips, one that shattered a sad record that has stood across hundreds of nights of work. The specifics: Twelve customers combined to compensate me $18. It was an uttermost void of consumer benevolence. Epic weakness. So as all down-on-their-luck pizza men do, I got melodramatic and drew comparisons between myself and the Israelites. I stood there on the freshly-mopped floor, defeated and broken, wondering if somehow God was angry with me for my disobedience, or my lack of justice. And I realized I was blaming God, as I believe men are prone to do, when in reality I live in a broken world where the work is not always fair, nor the tippers generous, nor... nor my heart always thankful.

In a strange way, I felt better.

Michigan (State)

This is why I watch basketball. From the beginning of each season in November, I invest my time into watching and listening to the Spartans play basketball in the anticipation that maybe this year they'll go to the Final Four to play for a championship in front of the whole country.

And now they're there - just like my bracket predicted - and I have to watch. I have to see them play their final game of the season, whether it's Saturday night against Connecticut, the overdog, riding out a recruiting scandal, or Monday night against Villanova, another underdog, or UNC, the juggernaut with the national fanbase, the team of players who could easily have walked into the NBA but came back to win the national championship they missed last year, the team that drubbed us in the same building in December. I'll watch with as much enthusiasm as anyone, glued to the TV to see if my Spartans will get the glory I hoped they would when the season began.

And they get to do it all in Detroit.

Naturally, that's a story line for the national media. I knew, before MSU beat Louisville, that we were going to see stories about this being "a ray of sunshine" in a dark state (in the words of our governor in an ESPN interview today). I'm not surprised to see stories like this one and this one. They're good articles, and I don't deny the reality that seeing our guys play for a national championship will be a nice distraction for some people. But they still bug me a little.

I should tell you that I hate strongly dislike every article, story, anecdote, commercial, idea, sentence, paragraph, essay, joke, poem, eulogy, sermon and musical that starts with "In this economy..." We don't need any more reminders what it's like to live "in this economy." Michigan has been in our recession for almost ten years, and it isn't news anymore. The angle is tired and old and no one should be using it to sell newspapers, let alone siding and fried chicken.

But what really bothers me is that our fine state has been rebranded to align with Detroit's continuing decay. I can't speak from an outsiders perspective, but when every good thing to come out of Michigan becomes "a ray of sunshine" for us, I get the feeling people think we're all kicking empty bean cans around our doldrums, looking for jobs and sewing patches on our trousers while we wait for things to get better. So when this basketball game comes along, we all get to forget about how abysmal and unbearably awful our little unemployed lives are for a minute. Of course, on Tuesday reality will sink in and we'll go off to find our bean cans again.

All I know is that we're all going to rally around the home-town pride. Well, most of us are, save for a few proud Wolverine fans. But the rest of us are going to sports bars and ordering pizzas and buying t-shirts, like we always would, because we want to see our guys win, because we waited for it all season, because we want it anyway. Not because we need a distraction "in this economy."

So props to my Spartans. I've waited all year for this weekend, and I couldn't be more pleased to see them still playing. Besides, all of the other storylines are better. Playing 80 miles from home is good. The 30-year anniversary of their first championship is good. Seeing a team of mostly Michigan guys beat a team that unfairly recruited players using an agent is good. A potential rematch against UNC in the same building is good. Whatever happens, it has been a good season.

Google: trusted advisor, all-knowing confidant, magic 8-ball

I don't know when it started, but Google added a prompt/dropdown thing a while ago that offers suggestions for what you might be looking for, based on what you've typed, before you click search or "I'm feeling lucky." Such tech-related knowledge is beyond me, as is explaining why anything comes up when you search. Google is too big, too far away, too complicated, too anonymous for me to understand it.

Which is probably why so many people trust it with big, important life-questions.

The prompt/dropdown thing clues us in to just what people are Googling. Go to Google and type, "should I..." and you'll see some options come up.

Should I call him?
Should I refinance?
Should I get a divorce?
Should I go to law school?

Type "how should I," and you'll see stuff ranging from the mundane to the intensely personal.

How should I get my haircut?
How should I do my makeup?
How should I ask her out?
How should I propose?

"Why do I..."

...love him?
...sweat so much?
...have so much gas?

How do I know...

...If a guy or girl likes you?
...If you're pregnant?
...If your in love? (This one has 91,300,000 results. "if you're in love" has about half that many.)

When should I...

...get married?
...divorce?
...take creatine?

And, of course, google isn't immune to the deeper religious and philosophical questions.

Why does God...

...allow children to suffer?
...love me?
...exist?

Why doesn't God...

...show himself?
...heal amputees?
...exist?

I've done this before. (Maybe not with the deeper religious stuff. Yet.) And you probably have, too. The question is on your mind, and Google is right there, why not ask? For example, I know very little about cars. If I hear a noise, see an oil spot where I parked, smell something burning, see something burning, the first thing I do is... call dad. Then maybe I Google it later. Google is great for those of us who are automotively handicapped.

I guess what makes me feel a little ocky is that Google seems to be a go-to resource for relationship questions. People want definite, concrete answers; they want to follow the formula. And if that formula is out there, Google probably has it. So people take their intensely personal questions, from their unique individual situations, and bring them before the vast, anonymous space of the internet.

"Should I get a divorce?" (2,430,000 results.)

Really? You want Google to be your magic 8-ball on that one? Did you talk to your husband/wife before you googled it? I hope so. Or maybe you talked to your family and friends about it? If their advice was, "I dunno. Why dontcha Google it?" then I wouldn't blame you for seeking help elsewhere.