Skip to main content

What Happens When You Love Your Pickup and Country Too Much

Lordy, Lordy!  All my parts are failing me!


Some guy down I-35 replaced my hip joint without telling me that it involved taking apart all my leg muscles and braiding them together in a creative new way.  A dentist over on Penn jackhammered an old bridge, pretty much filling the channel with the debris.  Then the cruise control in my pickup disappeared, probably on vacation with my eye doctor who has made my right eye into a career, and an Italian cruise.  While they were explaining to me why my truck needed a computer capable of controlling protons aimed at God particles, they also casually mentioned that the truck battery cranking power was down to one crank, so I cranked to Costco for a new battery.  Costco doesn't install batteries, so I did battle with the acid and corrosion in the garage.  


As you recognize, a man and his pickup are not easily separated, or distinguished.  I still do not have a new computer, nor a cruise control mode, since the cost of the critter is pretty much what a new bridge costs.  Driving a truck that cannot control its own speed is pretty iffy, on snow.  Not a lot of snow.  Just enough to remind me that I need four new truck tires, too.  


Congress says it is hard to balance the national budget.  That is not our problem!  Wrong budget!  Wrong solution!  What is hard to balance are Michelin tires with a social security income.  And a battery and a computer and a tooth.   It makes my hip hurt.  


I know what drove Newt Gingrich to leaving his first wife, and his second wife, and Congress:  he loved his country too much, and was working too hard to buy new tires and a new truck computer.  


I have asked Mari whether she would mind if I bought new Michelins, and she suggested something used, or retreaded, but that she was not going to go shopping with me.  So far, all I have is a line of credit at Al's Good As New Previously Driven Tires.  Al suggested a $500,000 line of credit, but I said I could buy a blond whitewall for that.  He said he had sold the last one.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more