I love my new girlfriend, but I’m not crazy about the road she lives on. It’s a tough call as to whether the relationship will work, considering the shape of the road, but I’m hopeful.
She’s real cute, and she seems willing to put up with all the nonsense that seems to accompany me regardless of the efforts I put forth to stem the nonsense tide.
But … that road.
Calling it a road is actually a bit on the kind side. What it is, is a field with a couple trenches run through it. Trenches laid down long, long ago. Seriously. Her place makes the Little House on the Prairie look like downtown Manhattan.
As Susan Sarandon said in “Thelma and Louise,” it’s not the middle of nowhere, but I can see it from here. It is about as close to life on Mars as you can get without actually running out of usable oxygen.
Her house is nice and reasonably civilized. The toilets flush, the water runs; when you flick a switch, lights come on.
But there’s that road.
It looks like something German tanks rolled over on a wet day on their way to invading Poland.
It’s bad.
I wouldn’t mind so much were I still driving the Death Van. The Death Van was (so I assumed) indestructible. It had been through nearly 300,000 miles of inept brake work (my own), oil changes that came only five or six-thousand miles after the little sticker on the windshield said they should come, and tune ups that … well, I’m kidding, it never had a tune up.
It was a piece of junk, but a piece of junk I honestly imagined would last me for several more years.
But it didn’t. It died. In part, because of my new girlfriend’s dark side of the moon road.
The strut broke. For those of you non-mechanical types out there (like myself) the strut is (apparently) that big springy thing behind your tires that looks like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. If it breaks, driving your car (or the Death Van) is (apparently, again) unsafe. It can literally kill you.
So I sold the Death Van. Which was, as I mentioned, a piece of junk before so no great loss.
No problem there.
The problem is, my new car is really kinda kewellll (I spelled it that way on purpose). It’s red and shiny. The tires actually have a little tread on them, which I am not used to. It doesn’t make embarrassing noises when you accelerate on the highway. Parts don’t fall off on bumpy country roads.
Except for Lori’s road. My girlfriend’s road would cause parts to fall off a Russian tank. It’s that terrible.
I’m not sure if it’s a county road, a city road, a township road, or just one of those roads from an old “Twilight Zone” episode where you get on it and never get off again. But it is terrible, and it’s doing terrible things to my new, shiny, red car.
I would say it’s a dirt road, but most of the dirt has splattered all over the side of my shiny, red car; there can’t, at this point, be much dirt left.
Still, I’m really fond of Lori and the only way to see her (without seeming like a complete wuss) is to drive to her house in my new, shiny, red car.
I don’t know why love needs to be this complicated. Lori could just as easily own a townhouse in Manhattan.
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