Thursday May 22, 2003
It begins at noon with a disturbingly familiar whirring to dead silence of my car?s engine. My first thoughts are that my alternator is bad. Great, another $100 spent on a 97 Escort to fix a faulty Ford fuck up. Of course it?s all cool because I?m made of money.
Damn, one hundred dollars gone.
So I get Sean to jumpstart Maura (my car?s newly found name thanks to LAWoman73) and all is temporary goodness.
Maura means dark or rebellious. That?s my car alright.
The Plan
After getting on my way for a half lunch of errands in partly sunny skies, I enlist DT?s (Sean?s brother) help in finding a new alternator for Maura. A few hours later, work is done and she starts up without a hitch. Damn. Cars are finicky. While waiting for DT I get in a quick call home to mechanic dad to try and pinpoint the problem. We finally agree that it must be the alternator. DT and I get to work.
Shit.
It takes damn near an hour to pull the bastard out of Maura. Once it is out, all is good because we?re going to spend my hard earned money to replace the thing. Then the Auto Zone guy says that the alternator is fine and runs down a list of others things I should check.
Shitfuck.
We take the valuable hunk of metal home and it slides back into Maura slicker than snot. WTF is that about? Maura works as well as before.
I thank DT and send him on his way.
Fuel
I?m a machine,
You?re a machine.
Everybody that you know,
You know they are machines
Machines need fuel to work. Which leads to the conclusion that I have to eat. I call up sevendaggers (7D) and we bounce, not literally, to Cheeburger Cheeburger. We eat. Our bellies are full now and we chat up the waitress. She hands 7D a pen and proclaims that it smells of blueberries. 7D takes a whiff and grimaces. I proclaim that it must smell like ass. The waitress admits that I?m right and laughs ?til her cheeks hurt. Our waitress is silly.
I hear the siren?s song of beer needing to be swilled so we?re off to Hump?s. Humphrey?s used to be called Bubba?s and Mixmanjmg, a friend of mine who works there, calls it Hump?s. Somehow explicably it has retained it?s Preppy Hell clientele but we enter anyway. As I order a beer, I detect a foul odor hanging over the bar. I look around for our Cheeburger waitress. She?s nowhere to be found. I slink outside to see what band is playing.
The End
They wander off the streets. The same people from the same town in the same bar which has a new name. But wait, there?s something different. Cast Iron Filter is here and I?ve never heard of them. Their sound is familiar. They?re like Dave Matthews meets Nickel Creek meets bluegrass. They?re good.
We listen to their groove for a bit. Then a party girl slides between us and we all talk the usual bar talk crap. Eventually the conversation dies and she saunters off. What a minute. She looked pretty hot.
Damnit.
I never notice these things in the moment. Anyway the hour is late for us working kids, so we eventually meander away from the band and party girl to pay our tab. Not exactly a glorious ending for this story but there ya go.
-Groonk
