It’s hard to be nice when, by nature, I’m a jerk

I try to be a nice guy. I really do. I’ve made enough mistakes in my life that I try to forgive the mistakes of others. Also, my murky cosmic worldview includes a vague belief in Karma, so I’m nice for purely selfish reasons; namely, because I want others to be nice to me.

Usually, I manage to at least keep up the pretense of niceness. But the guy who ran into my car the other day was lucky to escape with his life.

It was one of those days when everything goes wrong, y’know? We’ve all had them.

I was supposed to meet my sons for lunch; nothing fancy, just tacos out of a cardboard box. I was running late because, while leaving the house, I discovered one of my Beetle’s tires was soft. One of my Beetle’s new tires, that I’d just dropped $700 on a week earlier.

Now, ordinarily, there’s nothing I love more than dealing with a flat when the outside temperature is minus-two. Oh, sure, there are root canals and reruns of American Idol, but other than these, sub-zero flats are definitely my favorite thing.

Being the kind of guy I am, I dealt with the flat by re-inflating the tire and rattling off a quick prayer to Ba’lial, the imaginary god of punctured rubber. He must have been listening, because so far, the tire hasn’t gone soft again. We true believers have a distinct advantage when dealing with this sort of thing.

To show Ba’lial my gratitude, I took Ruby (my Bug) through the car wash. It’s easier than sacrificing a goat.

I arrived late at Taco Bueno (not the real name; you know the place I’m talking about). My sons never really expect me to be on time, so they hadn’t called out the National Guard or pinged my Life Alert bracelet.

Over a gigantic box of food that only cost five bucks, my eldest son informed me he was moving to Detroit. I wasn’t happy about this, since it means I’ll be seeing less of him.

That wasn’t the end of the bad news, though. My youngest son told me his schedule – he’s a semi driver – was going to be super busy for the next couple months, so I’d also see less of him.

I don’t have enough friends that I can afford to lose the two guys I love best. I tried to mask my disappointment, but I didn’t try too hard. I was raised Catholic, and if Catholic guilt was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kids. I wanted them to feel a bad about deserting me.

It may have worked a on Jordan, but James knows no shame and obviously feels that making a living and providing for his children is more important than eating tacos with the old man. Kids. What are ya gonna do?

At any rate, we ate and left. I was feeling grumpy. But I lied and told both boys I was happy with their decisions to a) move to Detroit, and b) spend the next three months on the road. They drove off in Jim Bob’s pickup, the one with the balloon tires; the one that looks like it should be jumping through hoops of fire at the DeltaPlex.

I would have driven off as well, but Ruby’s doors were frozen shut. (Here’s a helpful automotive hint: don’t go through the car wash when it’s minus-two outside.)

Now, I was wearing only slacks, a T-shirt and a sports jacket. Because I’d rather look cool than be warm. Five minutes of trying to de-ice the seal around Ruby’s door with nothing but a credit card put me firmly into the early stages of hypothermia, but eventually the frost relented and I was able to get in and out of the wind.

And that’s when the guy backed into me. To be fair, he was barely moving. I saw him coming and laid on my horn, but he didn’t realize all the tooting and wild gesticulating was for his benefit.

 We both exited our vehicles. He was an old guy, by which I mean at least ten years older than me. But probably not 12. His first words were, “Are you all right?”

It’s hard for me to be mad at someone who’s worried about my well-being, but I tried anyway. “How it’s supposed to work, pal, is that you look, and then you back up!” I said. Considering how angry I was, I thought this was a fairly measured response.

But being Catholic, I immediately felt guilty for being a jerk. It got easier from there. The guy apologized, I apologized for yelling at him, we surveyed the damage, figured out there was none, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

I’m sure I racked up at least a little bad Karma though, because of the yelling thing. It’ll come back to me, I just know it. Ba’lial or no Ba’lial, I expect that tire will start going soft again any day now.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

MTRealityCheck@Blogspot.com

(616) 745-9530

fLF is driving away with my masculinity

I may as well get myself a pink bicycle with glitter handlebar streamers and a Barbie decal on the front fork. I mean, why not? Any latent masculinity I still possess in these, my waning years, is being rapidly scraped away by Mrs. Taylor (formerly Lori Frankforter).

She’s not doing it to be mean or because she wants to emasculate me. At least, I don’t think that’s why she’s doing it. But it’s happening and I feel powerless to stop it.

See, she doesn’t get that a man (I used to consider myself one) defines himself in large part by what he drives. During my 30s, I drove, whenever possible, little red sports cars. I always felt cool, hip and – dare I say it – sexy. I was, in actuality, none of these things, but the car helped me fool myself into thinking I was.

By the time I hit 40 I had moved out into the sticks. I bought a pickup truck to reflect this geographical change. My big, ol’ Ford made me feel like a real man, someone who could maybe rope a cow or brand a chicken or whatever the hell it is cowboys do when they’re not filming cigarette commercials.

Again, I couldn’t actually do any cowboy stuff, but the truck made me feel that, in a pinch, I could at least give it a try.

Then I turned 50 and the midlife crises hit pretty hard, even though my wife at the time was around 20 years my junior. This should have been enough to ease me over the midlife “hump,” but apparently, I needed more. I bought another red sports car. Then a grey sports car. Then a black sports car. Then another red one.

Eventually, I figured out I was gonna be old no matter what (or how many) sports cars I drove. I gave up and bought a van because by this time I was married to a woman closer to my own age and figured I no longer needed to pretend to be cool.

The van felt tragically nerdy, but, being a geezer, I didn’t really care all that much.

If the van made a statement at all, that statement was, “Eh. Could be worse.”

When the van finally died, I got another red “sporty” car, but nothing that could by the furthest reaches of the imagination be mistaken for a “chick magnet.” Just sort of a pathetic old guy’s attempt at maintaining some thin veneer of cool. It was thin indeed, though by this time I was not.

I drove that up until a year ago or so. That’s when Mrs. T (fLF) decided she no longer wanted to drive the white VW Bug she’d purchased just a few months earlier. She wanted me to take it so she could buy something bigger. She has a little shop where she sells art and stuff and she needed something she could use to haul stuff in.

Now, I don’t want to be any more sexist than absolutely necessary here, but a Bug – particularly a white one – is a pretty girly car. But I love Mrs. T (fLF) and want her to be happy. I took the Bug and she bought some SUV-ish monstrosity.

This bloated road-yacht she drove for about two months. Then she decided it was too big. So she traded it in and bought another Bug, this time a convertible. She also bought a little trailer so she could still move stuff to and from her shop.

Last week she mentioned how much she missed her old white Bug, the one I’ve been driving for the past year or so.

“I’ll trade with you, I guess,” I said. “If you want.” I figured one girly car is pretty much like any other.

I was wrong. I hadn’t previously noticed, but Mrs. T (fLF) has for the past year or so been “customizing” her convertible Bug. When we traded, I took possession of a car with a built-in flower vase, floral pattern seat covers, a big flower decal over the gas tank cover, and a window sticker of Tweetie-Pie of Looney Tunes fame delivering the warning, “I’m no angel!” on the rear window.

This car could not be girlier if it were wearing a hula skirt, frosted pink lipstick and had a gas tank filled with estrogen.

Given a few days of warm weather (not likely for another few months) I could probably turn this Fem-mobile into a slightly less girly version of itself. But for now, it’s too cold to do anything about it.

I just hope I have enough manliness left to last me until spring.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 730-1414