Go west, young man

Assuming your Toyota doesn't break down...

After giving it far too little thought I promised my mother I would be there for her 97th birthday this August because I figured the odds were pretty good she wouldn’t be and I could just stay home and watch baseball and drink beer while simultaneously mourning her loss, but she continues to confound the rest of us and disrupt our lives with her annoying insistence on living.

I’ve told this one before, but just in case you missed it, here it is again:

One of my brothers made the mistake of asking my mom who really wants to live to be 100 and she said:

“A 99-year-old.”

After I made my promise to be there on her birthday, she said that would be great, but she didn’t want a birthday party. To which I replied, who said anything about a party and after I travel halfway across the country just to see you, it seems kinda self-centered on your part to think I’m also giving you a party and now, just to piss you off, we’re going to have a party and not invite you.

To which she said:

“That would be great.”

Apparently, if you live long enough, at some point pretty much everything seems like a pain in the ass and you don’t want to go anywhere or do anything or have any fun that might use up what little energy you have left and that reminds me of a line from Timothy Hallinan’s Nighttown – which I just finished reading – in which the book’s hero, Junior Bender, has a meeting with a dislikeable lawyer and after he leaves, Junior says:

“I always think it’s kind of touching to see someone cling to a life he’s obviously not enjoying.”

BTW: Hallinan’s terrific and just in case you’re looking for something to read, he has at least three series and the one I like best is about Junior Bender, a burglar, because it has lines like:

• “Bunny’s hot as Palm Springs.”

• He had a voice created to say, “Fuck you,” the kind of voice Tom Waits probably has when he’s just woken up and he’s got the flu.

And described a dog trying to take a chunk out of Junior’s ass as having:

• A black muzzle, richly furnished with teeth.

Hallinan’s fun to read and I firmly believe that as long as you have to go somewhere you might as well have some laughs along the way, which is probably why I did not do well in algebra: the textbook did not have nearly enough jokes.

I have not yet reached the age where I find life boring and when Mitch Maier – one of my all-time favorite Kansas City Royals – found out just how old I was, he said that was impossible and I told Mitch I only seemed young because I was so immature.

As Dylan Thomas famously wrote:

“Do not go gentle into that good night, take a 92-MPH slider in the left kidney and make everybody laugh their ass off.”

So where were we?

OK, so this time I’m going to California and plan to stay a while and that means driving because I need to bring art supplies, plus airlines are currently charging an arm and a leg and your firstborn male child if you want to get on an airplane and if I’m going to be ripped off, apparently I’d rather be ripped off by the oil companies because by now, I’m kinda used to it.

BTW:

I just checked flying to Sacramento and depending on the flights and whether you’re willing to connect through Belgrade, Yugoslavia or Bangor, Maine, they’re charging over $600 each way and once I got there I’d have to rent a car and doing that for the amount of time I plan to be there is so expensive I might as well buy a car, although I’d have to start dealing drugs to afford the fill ups.

Bottom line: as you read this I should be driving West on I-70.

Enter the Matrix

I am the proud owner (if by “proud” you actually mean “faintly embarrassed, but drive it anyway”) of a 2011 Toyota Matrix, a car made so cheaply that parts of it are snapped together and in the winter I sometimes catch my coat sleeve on the plastic bit that covers the driver’s side door post and that part will pop off and land in the street and I have to pick it up and snap it back into place like an oversized Lego piece.

Nothing says “luxury automobile” like having to occasionally reassemble your car on short notice.

It also has paint streaks on the fender where I miscalculated the precise location of my garage, which was built for cars the size of Model Ts and has a narrow entrance guarded by what used to be chest-high bushes and are now house-high trees (which have also scraped the driver’s side paint) and I also cracked the front skirt (the part that hangs down beneath the bumper) when I first bought the car and assumed I could roll forward and wait for a front tire to hit the concrete curb, but the car’s skirt arrived first.

Also…

It has a decent-sized dent that was put there while parked in the media lot at Royals Stadium which means somebody I know and knows me, whacked the shit out of my car and decided to skedaddle and not leave a note. (No wonder players don’t trust the media…I don’t either.)

And the piece of resistance:

I lost a hubcap after hitting a pothole and made the decision that I’d rather drive around with no hubcaps at all than pay for another one (if you buy them online, a single hubcap can cost as much $129.95 and for that much I’d also expect a lap dance from the Federal Express driver when she or he delivers it) and if you live in KC and hit a pothole, it’s definitely not the last pothole you’re ever going to hit, so at $130 a pothole I decided to take off all the hubcaps and the end result is I now drive a car that looks like it finished ninth in a 10-car demolition derby.

But it’s a Toyota, so just like my mother, it just keeps running.

What’s the Matter with Kansas?

So you leave Kansas City and take I-70 straight West to Denver and if you ever have trouble falling asleep, try driving I-70 through Kansas.  

The first time I drove through the Flint Hills (which are a very big deal around here) I asked when are we getting to the Flint Hills and was told we’d been in them for the last 20 minutes which I had somehow failed to notice.

These are the Flint Hills:

These are the hills from where I grew up:

I felt like Crocodile Dundee debating the requirements for a knife:

Next I Googled directions from Kansas City, Missouri to Salt Lake City, Utah and Google suggested a route that would (and I’m not making this up) according to them, take 357 hours, while covering 1,086 miles and had more twists and turns than a Telemundo soap opera.

Do the math (and I did) and you would be averaging a whopping 3.04 miles an hour so I’m guessing these directions apply to covered wagons, assuming one of the mules pulled a hamstring and two more lacked motivation.

(OK, I told that story to my son and he said I probably had Google Maps set on “walking” and it turns out he was right and thank god I had kids or my VCR would continue to flash “12:00” (or maybe it’s “00:00”…you’d have to ask one of my kids) for the rest of eternity.

Anyway…

I assume some interesting things will happen along the way and when they do I’ll tell you about them and if you don’t hear from me for a few days, don’t worry, but if you don’t hear from me for a few weeks, send out a search party.

You’ll probably find me somewhere along I-70, barbequing a dead mule.

Wish me luck. 

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