When it rains...

... it not only pours, but I can hear a disembodied voice telling the neighbors to start collecting sets of male and female animals.

This is me at my wedding. I'm screaming because my wife is a half an hour later because she decided to go shoe shopping on that morning of all mornings.

But that's not what this is about.

Have you ever had something bad happen to you, and you just hang around waiting for the other shoe to drop? Except, not only does the other shoe drop, but your socks fall off as well. Then your pants fall down around your ankles, and lo, your boxers follow. Then you try to move around, but you have to take baby steps because your legs are bound by your pants, but you fall any way, face forward, and bang your head against the floor. Now you're unconcious, sprawled out on the floor, with your bare ass sticking straight up into the air.

Did I forget to mention that you're in prison?

Anyway, that was this weekend for me. What a nightmare. I started off by going to mountains to go camping for the weekend. I plan to go fishing with my wife. There's a four and a half hour drive up there, and already my blood is up because I'm leaving after work, and by the time I get there after a long drive, it's dark, and because it's the nature of all these woodsy campsites to have nice, cozy, unlit wooden signs, I'm wandering in the darkness forever.

But I get set up anyway and go to bed. Now, I've been camping before, but back in those days I used to sleep on a bunk bed, and the mattress was like fiberboard, so I had no idea what it was like to miss a good night's sleep on a decent mattress. But I felt the effects that morning as any sort of bending procedure quickly becomes a Pavlovian experiment in pain.

My wife and I begin to go fishing, when we realize that the river we're fishing in is about a foot deep, and while suitable for fly fishing if that's your thing -it's not our thing. That doesn't stop us from trying, and in the process, my wife drops part of her reel into the river. I go to fish it out for her, getting my shoes moderately wet in the process, and throw it up to her. She misses the catch and it rolls down the hill into the deeper part of the river, where I have to circumnavigate some sort of beaver dam, thoroughly soaking my shoes in the process. She insists my shoes are ruined and we go get some new ones. We hang out at the campsite the rest of the day. I wanted to read one of my books, but we had forgotten to pack them.

The rest of the trip pretty much goes smoothly, with the notable exception that as we are packing to leave, she finds one of the books I wanted to read. Damn. She wants to add a quart of oil to our tank, and asks of me and my freinds if someone strong can help her get the oil cap off of the engine. I manage to prove that I'm totally weaksauce and can't get the damn thing off when she reiterates that she meant someone strong. My freind Eric gets it off but I am convinced I loosened it for him. She also wants to stop at the state fair that we passed on the way, so after I have an argument I know I'm not going to win about getting back early so that we're not coming in late at night, we go to the fair. This is always a time of great stress for me, because I'm not only mildly phobic of crowds, but I am easily distressed (enraged, infuriated) by fair traffic and just what it takes to get a car into and out of a fair alive. We pass several happy hours at the fair, where I avoid riding all of the stomach churning rides that she wants to go on, because I know the last thing I need is to be nauseous for a 4 hour car trip.

Still, I have eaten one of those jumbo turkey legs with some Texas Pete on it, so it's not too far after we take off that a case of mudbutt starts to set in. We make a stop some 20 minutes into the trip, where I go to the bathroom and buy some chewable Rolaids, and it looks like I'm all set for the rest of the day, if I can just manage this car drive while my back is killing me (I ask my wife earlier, "Are you going to help me drive back?". She replies, "Did I drive for any part of the way up?". I responded, "No.". "Then you have your answer.").

This ends the amusing, whoa is me, funny-if-you-look-back-on-it portion of the trip. About 30 minutes after we pass Asheville begins the Nightmare Proper.

I hear a load rumbling on the road, the tell-tale sign of a flat tire. The motorists we are trying to pass gestures wildly and confirms, yes, we have a flat tire. We pull over, just before an exit. From the mile marker I can tell we are 200 miles from home. The front passenger tire has gone flat. Didn't we just buy new tires recently. Yes, we did. That was one tire of a set of two that we bought from Walmart one year and one month ago. Damn. We have a spare tire, but sadly, we left our jack in the other car. When then one got a flat. Thankfully, I have AAA. My wife's cell phone still has a charge, so we call them up and ask them for a tow. They suggest that they can come out and change the flat, which will work just as well, except that we are going to need to get a new tire anyway, because we can't ride home 200 miles on a spare, let alone avoiding exceeding 50 miles per hour on an interstate where the posted speed limit is 70 and most motorists are going close to 80.

The AAA guy shows up. While he's changing the tire, he informs us of two things. One, that the closest Walmart is likely in Hickory, 60 miles ahead of us, or in Asheville, 30 miles behind us. We could make it on a spare but we'd have to take it slow and a spare won't take us that far. The other thing is that we seem to be leaking some kind of fluid, probably radiator fluid, as evidenced by a puddle around the tire. We pop the hood, and find out that the oil cap is missing, and we've been losing engine oil.

Now I'm not laying blame here, but I seem to recall that the oil cap was there that morning when my wife emasculated me for not being able to unscrew it. She swears to me that she put it on, but it may not have been tight enough.

Now I really need a tow. The tow truck driver doesn't seem particularly happy about it, but we're covered and AAA compensates him for the tow, so we decide to take the car back to Asheville to go get a new tire for it. The new plan has us rolling home somewhere about 11:00 to midnight or so, but it can't be helped. However, after we are towed to Asheville, one thing becomes very clear. There is no tire place that's actuially open that we can use to get new tires. We're going to need to spend the night in Asheville and work on it in the morning.

The tow truck drivers drops us off at the Walmart. We can still drive, as long as we're careful to drive real slow (<50>

I also don't know how to get to a hotel, or to an auto parts store to get an oil cap. I ask the locals for directions, but they all see, to be in reference to some landmarks or roads that I don't know, and I'm not doing a very good job of conveying that I've practically been dropped into Asheville and I don't have any bearings. Thankfully, my wife remembers enough of the area from the trip in to guide us to a Days Inn, where we check in for a room for the night. At this point, a headache that has been brewing for most of the day is hitting me full force, to the point that I'm actually sick to my stomach and have to vomit. I'm not sure what brought it about, maybe the fair food, but if I were to wager a guess I'd have to say... oh, stress.

My wife orders a pizza for dinner, but I can only manage about half a slice, and I go to sleep, weak, nauseous, and drained with a headache. The next morning, my wife makes some calls and finds an AutoZone, and gets directions from the hotel staff on how to get there. It involves getting on a freeway, and driving real slow while other angry motorists pass us by, but that can't be helped, and we make our way to AutoZone, where we finally get our prized oil cap, and seal that fucker on tight. Then, we wander around Asheville for a while, trying to find the Walmart again, check in, and get our tires repaired. I remember that I'm supposed to be on an important conference call at work that morning, and after a fruitless effort in getting the cell phone charger to work, I have to make a credit card purchase for a set of pencils so I can get cash back so that I can use the pay phone to call someone at work to get them to cover my call. After wasting the first set of change calling someone's cell phone that went straight to voicemail, I get a hold of a coworker about 5 minutes before the call so he can get that straightened out.

The tire is done, and thankfully, Walmart gives us a discount on the tire, prorating the cost of the tire against the considerable amount of tread left so that we get the tire for a fraction of the price. In our excitement to get going again, we neglected to take any further preventative measure, say, buying a jack or checking out the condition of the other tires.

So I drive the rest of the way home. My wife sleeps most of the way, but the trip isn't bad. The sun is shining, and I'm just listening to my music as the hours while by. Normally, I'd be working now, so this is a change of pace and a time to reflect on my life. At the rate I'm at, I'll be able to go back into work in the early afternoon. I feel like a dick for having to take advantage of the good graces my boss has shown me in working with my missed work hours, but I can make up the hours through the rest of the week, and all will be well before long.

If you remember the tale of Odysseus, you'll know that even after he returned home from his fucked up voyage around the Mediterranean on his return home from the Trojan War, he still had shit to deal with at home when he had to battle it out with his wife's suitors. Or so I remember.

So about 3 miles from the exit that I'm supposed to take, I hear a farmiliar rumbling sound. Do you recall that the tire that went flat was one of a set of two that I bought from Walmart a year and a month ago? Can you guess which fucking tire went flat now? Well, if you can't you must be one of those sunny, happy-go-lucky assholes for whom everything goes right. You've never even heard of Murphy's laws because they don't apply to you. Well you can can choke on a fucking beam of sunshine and die, you asshole, because you exist to balance out the spectrum for me.

Now we have to pull over kind of close to an exit, but it's a big ramp. This is important because if you recall, both cell phones are dead, so I've got to get out and walk to the nearest gas station to call AAA. Thankfully this time I've got some cash with which to get some quarters, so when I walk out to the pay phone, sweating like a pig, I call AAA, and then I call one of my friends from work to come pick me up and take me back to the car. As soon as I hang up, I wonder why I did it, when I could probably just as quickly have walked back. I think some part of me wanted a witness. I didn't think anybody would believe me that I've got another damn flat. I know I wouldn't believe me. I would think I was trying to get out of work.

I have to guide my friend the long way around, since we got stopped before the exit, and he needs to come at it from the other side. When we pull up, there's already someone else helping us changing the tire (IMAP - different from the mail protocol I know, they're the Incident Management Assistance Patrol. These guys rock). I call AAA from my friend's phone to cancel the call, and after we get the spare back on, it's back to Walmart, but this time the local one. This time, they argue that the alignment's bad, and they won't cover as much of the tire, but I don't want to argue.

My wife drops me off at work with about 30 minutes left in the work day, and I give her my card so she can go get the car aligned. Another $70 later, she relays something from the mechanics to server as a fitting footnote to this sad, fucked-up affair.

I need new rear tires.