Would This Happen If I Were Driving A Mini-Van?

Someday I'm going to man-up and buy a new car-- most likely a mini-van-- and although it will be convenient and wonderful to have sliding doors, a cup-holder, heat, A/C, doors that lock, and other modern features, I'll miss the things you can't buy in a car: case in point, the other day I was walking out of the public library with my new books, and I was thinking about a million things and not paying very close attention to my surroundings and when I pulled on the door handle of my Jeep, I was surprised to find it locked-- and I rarely lock it because I don't have power locks-- so I pulled a bit harder, and then I was even more surprised when a face appeared in the window; after a moment it dawned on me-- this wasn't my Jeep! it was an identical 1993 forest green Jeep Cherokee with the same rust marks and peeling plastic trim, and so I shrugged my shoulders and gave my best "I'm not a lunatic smile" and pointed to my Jeep, which was parked next to the doppelganger Jeep and the guy inside, an older African American gent, followed my muted logic and laughed as well . . . two days later, I parked next to him again, and he rolled down his window and introduced himself to me-- his name is Bill and his Jeep has 187,000 miles on it and his wife had one that got 380,000 miles before she got into an accident on Industrial Avenue and since the mistaken identity incident we've talked several times as he's always reading in his car in the library parking lot (which is a bit odd, but maybe he's so attached to his Jeep that he prefers to sit inside his car rather than sit inside the library) and I doubt that anything like this will happen once I purchase a Toyota Sienna.

A Good Trade

Last Saturday morning-- like clockwork-- the cold weather worked its black magic on the driver-side door of my Jeep, and so once again-- if you want to drive-- you have to get into the car through the passenger side and then crawl across the center console to the driver's side (and, of course, Saturday morning, was the rare occasion when my wife was driving the Jeep because she had a work-shop for school and I had to cart the kids around all day to their various activities, but even though I offered the Subaru-- which has four working doors-- she gamely agreed to crawl across the console and drive the Jeep, because she didn't want me doing that nonsense all day with the kids in the car) and then-- miraculously-- ten minutes after she gamely got into the Jeep on the passenger side and crawled across the center console and drove away, she called me and yelled "Listen!" over the sound of music-- music!-- from the Jeep stereo! . . . which hadn't worked since before the summer, but I guess the cold weather taketh and the cold weather giveth, and I'll trade a driver side door for music any day of the week (and the fact of the matter is that Catherine might have actually fixed the stereo, because she took the face off the receiver and then put it back on, which I never did, and then it started working again).

Music Cures The Existential Blues

As I sit here grading papers and listening to Grant Green, I realize that my Jeep's broken car stereo-- which has not worked for several months now-- may be having severe implications on my mood . . . every morning, on my drive to work, I am alone with my shitty thoughts, my raspy voice, my tuneless whistling, and my lame drumming on the steering wheel-- which is no way to start the day-- but then, of course, this is how people spent most of their time before the technological revolution: listening to the sounds around them, or perhaps grunting and banging to break the silence, but usually alone with their shitty thoughts . . .  so it's no wonder Hobbes described the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" . . . he needed an iPod.

My Big Chance To Earn A Darwin Award!

I can't wait for the cold weather to arrive-- and not just for my usual reasons-- I also have some evidence there might be a wasp's nest in my Jeep because 1) my son Ian found a wasp hiding in the floor trash and 2) while I was driving to work on Monday, in silence because my stereo no longer works, I distinctly heard buzzing coming from the back of the car . . . and the back of the car is full of coaching equipment, trash, and-- most significantly-- debris from when I ripped out a rotting wood fence and used my Jeep to transport load after load of wood and ivy and brush to the park dumpster (so lots of sticks and leaves and organic material like that) and there certainly could have been a few wasp eggs in that mess and now it's covered by coolers, a med-kit, cones, balls, and other soccer related stuff, and there's no way I'm cleaning all this out, so my only hope is that we get an early frost that kills them before they decide to swarm me . . . otherwise, you might read about my horrific wasp induced car wreck on this site.

Arachnophobes Beware!

My Jeep does not have power windows nor does it have air-conditioning, and I am not very tall, so it's quite a reach for me to roll down the passenger side window while I am driving, but in the summer this is often necessary in order to get a cross breeze and a bit of ventilation, and so the other morning I took the time to do this safely before I began to drive; a moment later, I saw-- out of the corner of my eye, something move in the center of that space where the window was; I turned my head and observed an obscenely large and fat banded garden spider suspended on a web in the space between the side mirror and the roof . . . floating in the center of that open window, and so-- with an effort worthy of Patrick "Eel" O'Brian-- I leaned over while driving and rolled that window up so the spider wouldn't blow into the car (not that there aren't spiders living in my car) and continued driving, glancing over every so often to see if the spider was still hanging on . . . and every time I turned my head, it was still there . . . it hung there all the way through Highland Park, and onto Woodbridge Avenue, and was still holding tight when I got on Route 1 South, and so I sped up as I crossed the Donald Goodkind Bridge, I sped up to forty-five then fifty then sixty, but still the spider held on, so I drove faster (as any police officer would understand, if they had the slightest empathy for an arachnophobe) until , finally, at nearly eighty miles an hour, the spider was dislodged and disappeared, like Vin Makazian, over the side of the bridge . . . and this is disturbing to me, because that means when you walk into a spider web and try to shake the spider and the web off your face and hands, you need to generate a lot of speed to get that thing off of you.

I Had My Reasons (They Just Don't Make Sense)

I was nervous all day Tuesday, my mind turning over the possibility that my 1993 Jeep Cherokee would not pass inspection and I would finally have to spring for a new car, and so on the way to the inspection station, I alternately drove really fast, in order to blow out the catalytic converter, and very slow-- to test the brakes-- which might be a bit suspect, and I occasionally beeped my horn, which has been known to stick, and only beeps if you punch the upper lip of the device-- and I'm sure I was an odd sight, accelerating and braking down Fresh Ponds Road, occasionally tooting my horn, but luckily I didn't pass any police, and then when I got to the inspection station I learned that-- possibly due to budget cuts-- they don't employ very many people there . . . it's a ghost town and the only thing they inspect now are emissions (most cars have a chip, so they just plug a cord into the chip, but my car is so old that they had to hook up all these EKG monitor type devices to the outside and inside of the engine) and the gas cap for leaking fumes . . . they don't test the brakes or the doors or the blinkers and they don't even beep the horn,  and so the positive thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 but the negative thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 (and God knows what other barely serviceable vehicles are passing inspection with flying colors, so be careful out there!)

An Unexpected (And Possibly Rude) Request

While I was handing cash to the gas station attendant at Raceway, he made a strange request . . . he said, "Do you have any extra?" and I was confused-- it was very early in the morning-- until I saw that he was looking into the back of my Jeep, where I still had a bag of soccer balls from the fall season, and it took me a second to realize he was asking if I could spare a ball for him, because obviously I had too many balls for one man (despite the fact that a cheap soccer ball costs one quarter the price of a tank of gas) and once I understood his request, I answered: "They're not mine, they're the school's soccer balls," and this seemed to satisfy him . . . but I think this a breach of etiquette . . . when you are paying money for something, the person you are paying shouldn't ask you for some of your stuff, right?

Do Me A Favor

I wouldn't mind if two particular possessions of mine were stolen: 1) my snowboard . . . which I got at a Burton factory sale for fifty dollars eight years ago; the board features now defunct strap-less bindings and I hate them because I never know if I'm completely locked in and sometimes I find out that I'm not locked in while I am hurtling headlong down an icy mountain 2) my 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport, which features no A/C, no cup-holder, self-hiding seat belt buckles, a driver side door that does not open when the temperature drops below freezing, a ripe smell, several colonies of spiders, no driver side sun visor, a burned out differential which creates a lack of Quadra-Trac four wheel drive, and a foam ceiling that is peeling away in strips.

Sometimes It Pays Not To Put Your Balls Back in Their Proper Place

Stacy needed my crate of assorted balls for a philosophy class activity, and she came to my classroom to remind me (but she could not bring herself to say "I need your balls" in front of my senior composition class, instead she said: "I need that box of sports equipment") and though she also called me over the weekend to remind me, I still forgot to put them in my car; so, on Monday morning, when she asked me for my balls, the only solution that came to mind was that I had a couple of flat soccer balls she could use in my Jeep (which is STUFFED with soccer equipment: cones, bags of balls, pug goals, discs, bags of pinneys, etc.) but when we went out to get the ersatz balls, we found what I was supposed to bring in the first place . . . the crate of assorted balls . . . it had been in my car since the last time she needed them: last year . . . and so the moral of the story is that sometimes it is best NOT to put your balls back where they belong.

Sweet Sweet Cup Holder

I'm proud of the fact that I've been driving the same car since 1994 (a Jeep Cherokee Sport-- solid V6 engine and no power windows or locks or anything to break) but sometimes I dream of when the chassis will finally rust out and die because then I'll get a car with doors that always open, a car with an iPod dock . . . a car with a cup holder (that's right, I don't have a cup-holder-- there is a designated sneaker for holding hot coffee if there's no passenger-- otherwise the passenger is the cup-holder . . . but I am wondering: why is this? had the cup been yet invented in 1994? or was there once a cup-holder and I can't remember?)

If You're Dave, You Need to Know This Shit

Just in case there's some kind of Freaky Friday type incident, and your mind suddenly inhabits my body, here is my mnemonic for remembering which side of each car the fuel tank valve is on: Subaru has an "R" in it and the tank valve is on the right (which also has an "R" in it) and JEEP is spelled with four letters and so is the word "left," and this mnemonic also works with the nautical direction "port," which also has four letters and also means left (so if my JEEP were an amphibious vehicle when it was in the water and I was pulling up to a dockside gas station, I would pull up with the port-side facing the dock).

1/21/10

While driving home from Monroe yesterday after a Craigslist purchase of a desk for Alex (which filled the back of my Jeep because there was also a hutch, which I balanced on top of the desk) I came one car away from being smashed: it was just before the Hilton towers on Route 18, where the road divides, and a white four door car raced by me on the right, rolled onto two wheels, spun out to the left, parallel to the oncoming traffic, smacked the side of a pick-up and then crashed into the divider . . . and by the time I stopped my car and took a breath, the lunatic driver extricated himself from the airbag, leaped from car, ran back across Route 18 and jumped off the edge of the bridge to whatever lay below, and, in the meantime, a police car pulled beside me on the right and a cop jumped out and pursued the insane driver/bridge leaper, and the guy who was clipped by him in the pick-up also pursued him, but when they reached the edge of the bridge they just stood there and looked down, so I'm assuming it must have been a steep, rocky, impenetrable drop that only someone who was wanted by the law would chance; I took the scene in for a moment and then slowly rolled past, feeling sorry for the people farther behind, who would be stuck on the exitless stretch of 18 for the long time it would take to sort out the mess.

11/13/2009

Jim Haner's book Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey into the American Game further reinforces what I have wholeheartedly come to believe: there is no better sport than soccer-- and although I can't and probably wouldn't take back the time I spent experimenting with other sports-- golf, football, rugby, mountain biking, road biking, tennis, ping-pong, pong-ping, track, swimming, marathon running, rock climbing, snow-boarding, fly fishing, wrestling, hiking, kayaking, surfing, basketball, skim boarding, and yes, even roller-blading (insert gay joke here)-- I sort of wish that I had just focused on the beautiful game alone . . . I certainly would have saved a lot of money on gear; but the book also presages my future and it might be monotonous and bleak-- in between coaching the eighth grade boys I'll be coaching my own kids on their travel teams, and my '92 Jeep, which is already full of soccer equipment for half the year, will become a full time soccer storage facility for PUGS and corner flags and balls and cones and ripe smelling pinneys, we won't be able to go on vacation or do anything else because the kids will always have games and tournaments and practice and eventually soccer will replace life, and so part of me wonders if my future would be more relaxing, fun, and enjoyable if my kids join the chess club instead (but this doesn't seem likely-- now that my school season is over, my backyard is full of cones and balls and I run a short fun soccer clinic for Alex and Ian every day).

6/16/2009

The day after Ian's chaotic, rainy birthday party, I got the award for worst neighbor on the block-- but what could I do?-- I had to return the bouncy castle to the sketchy amusement place I rented it from so I could get my 100 dollar deposit back, and it was soaking wet from the rain: so I inflated it at seven in the morning (and the generator makes quite a bit of noise) and then tried to dry it with the leaf blower (which makes even more noise) and then the boys got inside and bounced around with some towels, but it was still wet, heavy, and really hard roll up and get back into the Jeep . . . I'm sure my neighbors were quite pleased when I drove away.

2/8/2009

Whenever it's under fifteen degrees, the driver side door of my 1994 Jeep Cherokee Sport freezes, and everyone in the school parking lot is treated to the sight of me sliding my butt onto the glove compartment, spinning my torso, and then ejecting myself out the passenger side door.

Hard Habit to Break

I commuted to work twice today; Catherine actually made me recite "take the Jeep, take the Jeep" because she needed to clean and pack the Subaru for out trip, but still, I took the Subaru . . . and I didn't realize it until I was half-way down Route 18, playing with the satellite radio (that's what clued me in, I remembered that the Jeep doesn't have satellite radio)-- so I had to turn around and do it again.