My poor, poor autocar.

    State Farm Insurance company’s claims adjuster did one quick lap around the corpse and pronounced it “99.9%” totaled. Which is wierd, because the seats seemed fine and they account for more than 0.1%, right? Splitting hairs, I suppose, and I take his point.
    My brother-in-law, Scott, is the manager of the auto shop where the little yellow car spent its last days in repose and he retrieved my personal affects from the poor thing. In so doing he tells me that he found the dashboard was split down the middle and even the back doors are now crooked. This means the entire structure of the car is twisted, and not feasibly repairable. State Farm and Ford Motor Credit had a little talk and, subsequently, my lease agreement–and the underlying vehicle leased thereby–have both now evaporated into the ether from which all credit comes and goes.
    So now I have no car. And, according to my insurance company, I’m darn-near uninsurable because of two tickets I already had on my record prior to the accident. I’m a menace, apparently, and for once I’m not talking about my seditious perversity. In Michigan you are not allowed to drive without car insurance, so I’m not quite sure what to do next. I’ll keep you posted as I figure it out.
    Here’s some more pictures of the Focus. Click them to go visit Flickr, where you can see them enlarged if you should so desire.

    Here’s one last picture, and its my favorite. Look closely; can you see the car battery? How about the driver’s side windshield wiper?

    Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, too.

* A “beater” denotes a very inexpensive car, normally aged and with high mileage, which usually would represent no great loss if destroyed. Typically you would put minimal insurance on such a thing, making it affordable for dangerous people like me to continue terrorizing the public grid.

** The saddest part of this accident is that I’d always assumed my car would last a long while. My lease was only two years, but I had some solace in knowing it would be sold to someone else and continue its life without me. By wrecking the thing in its prime I not only lose its use to me, but I also lose it for all the people who would’ve owned it after me. Plus I put several thousand pounds of metal and plastic into a junk yard, which is not ecologically the best place for it.

    Here’s a bar joke you can tell the next time such things become conversationally appropriate in your life-style:

    A one legged man walks into a bar and sits down. The bartender approaches him, and the one-legged man asks him to serve him a double-shot of whiskey.
    The bartender ignores him in favor of an attractive young lady sitting next to him who orders a “Bay Breese”.
    The one legged man waits a while and then leaves. A few minutes later the young lady excuses herself to go to the bathroom. A third fellow of no importance then sits down on her recently vacated stool and fidgets nervously.
    The bartender accidentally breaks a bottle of expensive vodka.

    I half-heard the radio tell me,
“Fertility and Agility: Pontiac”

There’s a transparency to this sort of advertising campaign; I find it refreshing.

    I know, all of the car companies like to imply that my automobile purchase/lease will have a direct and pronounced effect on my sex life. They never stop to consider the contents of the glove-box when making these bold and hasty claims.

    One gander at my collection of Unspeakable Decay, auto maintenance schedule booklet and tire-pressure gauge is enough to throw my potential mate into rabid, frenzied fury as she tramples the crowd in a mad rush towards my waiting and rubbery arms–slick as they are with both wet sweat and dry sweat in my fertile and agile car. Both she and I are augmented agilitudinally and that’s what Pontiac intended.

    Do you think it would work on my wife as well, or is a divorce necessary? If the latter, I’ll stick with Fords. Staid reliability and endurance is more useful in a monogomists bedroom after all.

    SafeTinspector has completely wrecked his 2007 Ford Focus hatch-back and, apparently, sprained his sternum.
    Driving home from a friend’s house on Thursday evening, I came upon a mid-nineties model Pontiac Sundance stalled out at the corner of 18 Mile Road and Mound Road in the right-most northbound lane of Mound Road.
    As this sort of Pontiac is wont to do, it had been spewing thick clouds of black smoke prior to expiring, so the tail-lights were preternaturally dim and unviewable even with the hazard lights activated. A nice lady in a mini-van therefore didn’t notice the stalled car until it was almost too late for her to stop.
    She did, however, stop in time. The four cars behind her, mine included, didn’t do so well. I actually had no idea there was ANY stoppage in traffic and piled into the last car while driving about 45mph (about 70kmph). As the car I struck was not the car I remembered driving behind, I suspect the car in front of me swerved at the last moment, leaving me to my fate. I’m not ABSOLUTELY certain, as it happened very fast and I was in a slightly confused state after the accident.
    One second I was driving along, moving with traffic, and the next cacophonous second I was looking at the back windows of a Jeep Cherokee which was somehow WAY too close to my smashed windshield. Did I scream in terror? Did I wag my head? No. As the stinky airbag slowly deflated in my lap, burping sulfurously, I yelled–in anger!–to the world at large:
    ”OH! I HAVE BEEN IN A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT!!”
    After making this declaration I pried my door open and staggered out, taking stock of my physical integrity (mental and/or social integrity not withstanding) and determined that I probably had no broken bones. I also noted the number of cars involved in the accident (four!) and the weather (dark, damp, chilly and windy). No one was seriously hurt, although one girl claimed that her shoulder was hurting and had a friend drive her to a doctors office, eschewing the offers of the attending paramedics to ride in their pretty, flashing ambulance.
    I received a citation from the responding police officer (failure to stop within assured clear distance) which can put two points on my driving record and may ruin the current relative affordability of my automobile insurance.
    My brother-in-law, Scott, manages the paint line at a local automobile body shop so I had my wreck taken there where insurance adjusters will examine it on Monday or Tuesday. Chances are that the little Focus will be consigned to the ghoulish predations of a scrap yard attendant and I will be left with no car. No car payment either, but that is a temporary condition as I must have a car for work purposes.
    In the day since the accident I’ve discovered that I have some very colorful bruises upon the upper left side of my chest and on both hips. These are most likely the result of my seat-belt handling me roughly in its single-minded determination to keep me from exiting the car via the windshield–a task it performed quite well. The patch of bruises on my upper chest is lumpy and by this morning had become peppered with little pimples, most of which broke in an tiny orgy of pustulation as I toweled myself off after my shower. As I gazed into the bathroom mirror I noted that the slanted, eye-shaped welts on my hips make it look like my naked pelvis is a large cat with a worm hanging from its furry nose*.
    The bruises are nothing. A little tender, but I’m used to bruising. My sternum, however, is more disquieting. If I sneeze, sniffle, cough or blow my nose I get a painful reminder of the accident. Through judicious probing of my ribs and surrounding musculature I know there is nothing broken, so I assume my sternum is merely sprained or slightly torn. There really is nothing to be done, so I’ve not gone to see a doctor yet.
    I mean, if I went to the doctor’s office the most that would happen is that he’d give me Motrin, which I already have. There’s no medical intervention that can help with this sort of thing, just time and careful restraint. I don’t need to pay for an office visit and a chest X-ray just to be told to do what I’m already doing.
    I’ve asked Scott to take pictures of the wrecked Ford for me, and as soon as I have them, I’ll post them here. In the meantime, rest assured that regardless of the dismal fate of the SafeTmobile the SafeTinspector is still Safe.

* insert “eww!” here

    One Friday a while back Heather dragged me to a country music concert. It was Brooks & Dunn with “special guests” Big & Rich.
    There are, perhaps, two songs from Brooks & Dunn that I like, and one of them is a cover tune (My Maria). Hated it. Wanted to leave the moment the “music” started to play.

    It wasn’t helped by the fact that the sold-out crowd of mouth-breathers knew every friggin’ word to every gimmicky, boring, predictable song and acted as if they were all recitations of divine revelation. (“Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” makes a nice bumper sticker, but if you repeat it twenty to thirty times it becomes a hit country song! Same thing with “Weee-oooo! Play Somethin’ Country!”)

    Big and Rich, however, were quite entertaining in ways they certainly didn’t intend. Their touring carnival side-show was complete with multi-ethnic backup singers, what appeared to be a 13-year-old guitar player, a miniscule dwarf with crutches named “Two Foot Freddy” and a large black rappin’ cowboy named “Cowboy Troy”.

    I once wrote a piece on how today’s country fulfills the same cultural niche as the hair-band rock of the late-1980′s. Big and Rich validated my claims by wearing Tom Petty style head-wear, and with far more electric guitar than twang. I’m all for fusion, if it has some merit, but this stuff was little better than Poison or Bon Jovi at its most vapid.

    Meh.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon I took Samantha to a coin-operated car wash, ostensibly to help wash the Triple-B*. In actuality it was really part of a transparent ploy to prevent my wife from murdering us both in self defense.     At the car wash I found that Samantha was incapable of staying by the car or even in the wash-bay we were using so I resorted to tossing her into the car with an Armor-All** soaked sponge and directing her to immediately begin rubbing anything that isn’t metal or glass. This worked about as well as you’d expect, and I squinted through a smudgy windshield the whole way home.     It was about half-way home when she lifted the unused center-passenger seat belt and began talking into it.     ”Breaker-breaker,” she said, “we need backup!”     I looked over at her serious expression, “What’s going on, Sam?”     Wide, faux-worried eyes looked up at me. “We’re surrounded by police!”     ”Oh, no!” says I, considering that perhaps we were fugitives on the run, “but then who were you calling for backup?”     ”The good cops to save us from the bad cops,” she chirped. Of course!     Gripping my steering wheel a little tighter, I asked, “Should I drive faster?”     She looked around and then, evidently satisfied, nodded definitively. “We lost them. Don’t worry.”     ”Oh, good,” I said, relaxing back into my seat in relief. We drove on in silence for a minute or so, Samantha singing quietly to herself. Suddenly, she sat bolt upright and pointed in front of us.     ”Look out,” she cried, “there’s a dinosaur!”     ”A dinosaur, Sam?” a worrying development, to be sure, “what should we do?” Sam doubled over in laughter at this point and patted me on the arm.     ”I got you good, Daddy! That’s just a fake dinosaur!”     ”The pretend dinosaur is a fake?” I sort-of felt the rube for having been taken in by the obvious fakery. After all, that imaginary dinosaur hardly looked convincing at second glance.     ”Yes! Its fake!” she continued, laughing at my foolishness.     ”Yeah, you got me good, Sam. That dinosaur-”     ”Look!” she interrupted, excitedly pointing out the windshield again, “It’s Mickey Mouse!” The mouse had made an unexpected appearance.     ”Yay,” I gamely enthused, “I love Mickey Mouse.”     ”OH NO! He’s got a gun!” dramatic concern was writ broadly across her angelic features, and rightly so; we were obviously in trouble if the Mouse was bearing firearms.     ”A gun?!? What should we do, Sam?”     ”Ah…Its OK,” she said reassuringly, “Minnie Mouse blocked his shot.”     I considered this for a second or two, mumbling, “well… that was nice of her.”     ”Yup! And she gave me this,” she said, holding up a closed fist for my inspection.     ”What is that, Sam?”     ”Lolly-pop!” she then mimed licking the invisible treat with slurpy gusto.     ”Minnie Mouse gave you a lolly-pop after getting shot by Mickey?”     ”No,” she said, raising her fist in triumph, “she gave me six lollypops! And,” she continued, motioning towards her torso, “this MInnie Mouse costume!”     ”That’s a very nice costume Sam,” I told her appreciatively, “I imagine Minnie carries those around for just such an occasion?”     ”Yeah! But, you know,” she began, tilting her head quizzically, “that was the first time I ever heard her talk in person. Her voice was a lot different than I thought it’d be.”     ”Its like that with a lot of celebrities, Sam.” Well, what else can you say to that?

* “Triple-B” stands for Big, Bad, Buick. It is a 1973 Buick Centurion convertible which was passed down to me by my grandfather.
** Armor-All is a vinyl and plastic rejuvenator/protectant. It stinks badly, makes any surface feel and look greasy, but it prevents old vinyl and plastic from drying out and splitting. My thirty-four year old car has exchanged most of its original molecular structure for complicated strings of Armor-All compound over the last few decades.
*** My daughter is very ADHD, a trait that she inherited from me despite the fact that it is much less likely to occur in girls. During the school week and on Saturday she takes a mild dose of Concerta to allow her to perform normally in school and scheduled activities. On Sundays we give her none, a practice known as a “medicine holiday”. Those days are maddening because of her lack of impulse control, manic activity levels and uncontrollable distractibility. If anyone tells you that ADHD is a bogus illness dreamed up by lazy parents they have never really tried to deal with a truly ADHD-addled person. No punishment regimen, discipline strategy or feel-good empathetic parenting trick can help. Ask me how once, when I was 10, I forgot to take my medicine and got paddled THREE times in one day by the principal at my parochial school.

    A few weeks ago my brother married. As best man, I was expected to give a speech, and I performed admirably. At first, I had composed a speech which was full of lies, exaggerations, and anecdotes that struck me as funny.
    After consulting with people more experienced than I, and watching “Wedding Crashers” several times, I retooled my efforts to create a speech which was tailored to be short and sweet, to highlight the bride and groom without humiliating them unduly and–most importantly–without stealing the spotlight which should remain upon them throughout their special day.
    The result has almost no teeth, is gently humorous and doesn’t seem very SafeTinspector. But perhaps you’ll enjoy it nonetheless.
    Before you read, you might be interested to know that my brother and his new wife are both notoriously shy, quiet and very reticent to show affection in public. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen them hug…. Anyway, scroll down and read!

I’m Joe Whited, and I’m honored to be speaking to you not only as Gerald’s step brother of 29 years, but also as his proud best man and as the newly minted brother-in-law of Irene.     Now, you may all know Jerry as a quiet, patient, trustworthy man of great intelligence. But I grew up with Gerald and think I might know a little bit more about him than you do; so believe me when I tell you that in all actuality Gerald is a quiet, patient and trustworthy man of great intelligence.     So when my wife Heather and I finally met Irene, months after we’d heard rumors of her existence, the phrase ‘opposites attract’ came immediately to mind.     Yes, after talking with her a while and watching her play with Samantha, our extremely energetic daughter and also today’s lovely flower girl, Heather and I turned to one another and said, in unison, ‘wow!’     This was because we realized at once that, unlike Gerald, she seemed like a very quiet woman, patient and trustworthy and with what I can only describe as a great intelligence.     They were so cute together, with a shy courtliness that brought out the best in the both of them, and a love so strong that it needed no crude public displays of affection to shine through for all to see. And so their engagement was a shock to me; how two so very different people could recognize their soulmate in one another’s eyes is just one of life’s wonderful mysteries.     We found out about their engagement at one of our family gatherings. Every member of my family, including myself, is perfect, charming and completely normal* so it came as a surprise to me that, after meeting us all on more than one occasion, she was still willing to marry him.**     But what better way to bring two families together than through these two? Today, Mr and Mrs Bittas have welcomed Gerald into their family with open arms just as our parents, Mr and Mrs Respondek, welcome Irene into ours.     (to the bride and groom) With a love like yours I know that you will weather any storm, master any challenge the two of you face together, overcome any difficulty… even Thanksgiving dinner with the whole family.     So… To Gerald and Irene: may your life together be interesting, and full of love, hope and understanding. Congratulations again to the both of you and to you, Irene, good luck.

* Originally this part read: not crazy in ANY way, but was advised against it.
** At first, this paragraph ended with, “Irene, on behalf of all of us on the groom’s side of the family, I would like to apologize in advance for all the painful, embarrassing and awkward moments yet to come.” Upon sober reflection I realized that this was a bit too pointed and true for the room.

    Bless his heart, this man is a student of “Order Where Order FIts”. He carefully leveled his licenseplate in relationship to the Earth, where his truck is woefully incapable of doing so.