First a gentle reminder. If you experience any of the following:
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.
If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.
If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.
Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.
Easily hurt and/or compromised feelings
Extreme religious and/or political opinions and mentality
Diarrhea of the mouth while suffering the above afflictions
Please do not read my blog.
If you have an aversion to cursing, violence, sex, destruction of property, having a sense of humor, or Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights please do not read my blog.
If you dislike or have difficulty understanding satire/sarcasm, just don't even bother. Nobody likes you anyway.
Awesome blog reading discretion has been advised. Don't be mad, Boo.
Vacation Day 2:
Irma went to work that morning and Dad and I got packed up for the trip back to Kingsville, where he has an auto shop that's always overloaded with work. We ran a few errands and stopped by the original Iwo Jima memorial which was relocated to Harlingen (God only knows why) after the much larger one in Arlington was built.
Dad's checkin' it out.
Once we got to Kingsville, I'd be leaving with the Frontier to go see my good friend Laura, her husband Roger and all the children they've had since the last time I saw them in 2006. She lives in Livingston, a little town about an hour north of Houston, so it's about a 6 hour drive from Kingsville, depending on Houston traffic, so it was important that I leave as early as possible to avoid Satan's rush hour.
So after a brief explanation on how to operate the Frontier, Dad let me go. Once again, if you know mechanics, they never have a completely functional automobile. The Frontier had a problem with the A/C where I'd have to open the hood and hit the clutch plate on the front of the compressor with a long stick Larry had specifically for that purpose, because the magnets were so worn and old that the plate got stuck in the off position every time you turned off the engine.........which led to him not turning off the engine even when it was appropriate:
"Aren't you going to turn off the engine before I pump the gas, Dad?"
"What for?"
"Uh......so I don't die. Isn't it dangerous to have the engine running when you do that?"
"Naaaaaaah." Which is "Larry" for "Just fucking do it, shithead. I know what I'm doing.".......needless to say, I've heard that A LOT.
Anyway, I get going a little later in the day. I miss an exit about an hour north of Kingsville and have to double back to get on the right track. The A/C goes out because I was probably pushing the truck too hard in my frustration, so I pull off on the shoulder so I can whack the plate to get it to go back on. I pop the hood and get out, whack the thing 2 or 3 times and it won't catch. So, like the mechanically impaired moron I am, I turn off the engine and wait for a couple of minutes to see if it just needed a "rest". Hit the key again and the bastard won't turn over.
Now, because of the understanding I have that bad shit happens to me on vacation, I'm much calmer and accepting of this situation than I thought possible. I calmly call Larry and field a bunch of questions that annihilate that patience:
"Well, what the fuck did you do?"
"I turned the engine off and it wouldn't turn back on."
"Why did you turn it off in the first place?"
"I thought it would help."
"The only thing I think it helped is your understanding about why you should not have done that."
"JUSTCOMEGETMEGODDAMNIT!!"
So there I sat. It was only 96 degrees at the time, but according to the heat index, it felt like it was 104. As I stewed in my ball soup, I realized something very odd: I go into the sauna at my gym in Oregon a couple of times a month and I am sweating more profusely sitting in a broken down Nissan Frontier on the shoulder of a Texas highway than I do in a place that is specifically designed to make me sweat. I laughed at this which served to briefly elevate my mood.
Dad showed up quickly with the car dolly and we got loaded up and went back to the shop in Kingsville. During the ride back we had this argument:
"Heat index is supposed to be 104 today."
"What a load of shit. If it's 96 degrees, then that's what it is."
"What? You don't believe in the heat index? It's fucking science, Dad. You lived in Wisconsin until you were 20. You're trying to tell me you don't believe in wind chill factor either?"
"Oh, hell no."
"Oh, what the fu--.....ok, so you don't think that if it's 20 degrees below zero outside with the wind blowing and you go outside without enough clothes on that it's not going to feel like it's about 15 degrees colder than it actually is?"
"Just listen to that sentence......first of all it's your own goddamn fault for going outside without proper clothing. Second, if you go outside and it's cold enough to freeze your spit before it hits the ground, I guaran-fucking-tee you, you're not going to give a shit what the 'wind chill factor' is."
I'm sorry, Reader. Curse words are mandatory when making a point in my family.
Anyway, back in Kingsville, Dad gets busy fixing the truck. He figured out that the alternator was the main problem, after he explained something about the break mechanics of that vehicle and how that somehow tied in to helping the truck not start. Clearly I'm not mentally equipped to tell you exactly what that is, because even though I try to understand what the hell he's saying, it still sounds like a Charlie Brown teacher's conference in my head, but here is the dialouge anyway (bear with me on this):
"Almost all newer vehicles are equipped with a safety feature that makes it so you have to push on the brake before you can start your car, so that means there is a little button at the base of the brake pedal that's engaged when you push it down. Now that's nice and all, but the Japanese, in their infinite fucking wisdom, decided that on the opposite end of that button, there needed to be a "pad" so that the button didn't get worn out as fast.......but the material used to make the fucking pad is kind of like the rubber that a pencil eraser is made out of, so it gets old and it dries up and falls apart."
"Well that's pretty damn stupid. What the hell did they do that for?"
"Hold on.......the engineers down at Nissan didn't call you when they were designing this model? Why didn't they call you, Danny? Obviously you have a lot of insight that can be brought to the table when these highly educated motherfuckers get together to build a new---"
"WAIT, WAIT, WAIT!!! You mean to tell me that the alternator and this pad thingy failed at the SAME TIME when I was driving this piece of shit?!"
"Well, son, you're 6'4", sitting in a truck designed by a small Asian man, and your goddamn leg probably weighs 70 pounds. I don't imagine you were being gentle with the pedals."
".......well, shit."
The Briggs' are simple folk; that piece of cardboard he's laying on is known as a "Mexican Creeper" in the Auto biz.
But you want to know the really funny thing, Reader? That truck has been servicing my Dad's trips back and forth to San Antonio to see his doctors for two and a half years. That truck has over 225 thousand miles on it's original engine. That truck has never broken down during that time. I get in the thing alone and it suddenly has a change of heart? I hope you're starting to understand the underlying theme here: I am seriously cursed.
Next time on Vacation Hard!: Been makin' a fool out of folks just like you.....and helping white people dance.....
".........HOLY SHIT, READER!! You look totally fucked up!! Told you that shit is ah-ma-za-zing!"
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