Good at Being Good

I don’t want to be good at everything but I am. Well, I’m only really good at boasting/bravado but when you think about it that cancels out the need for being good at everything else. I am good at darts but I am not good at many things like algebra and checking tire pressure. I haven’t checked my tire pressure since I bought my car. I expect the kind sirs at the oil change place to do it for me every 3,000 miles. I found out yesterday that is not nearly often enough. I’m glad my brothers don’t read this blog.

I would rather my parents find out that I let t-dog and three disgusting dudes from Lansing do lines of coke off their coffee table while my ten year old sister slept in the playroom four feet away than let my brothers know that I disrespected an automobile. I found out about the back bald tires when my sister, who is now 23 and remembers nothing from the aforementioned evening, and I jetted out to grab some fresh fallen country snow movie footage. We got ten feet out of the driveway-straightaway when my car slides against my steering wheel-will, directly, forcefully, hysterically into the neighbors ditch. Country ditch mind you, the kind that people get left for dead in. It doesn’t matter if you are five feet from your house, you could be left hanging upside down in your seatbelt trying to drink melting water from a roof icicle, unfound for ten days, if you hit that country ditch business at the right angle.

So we hit the death trench hard enough that the car skips off and slides toward a tree toward a house and I turn to my 23 year old sister and ask her what to do because I don’t want to be responsible for anything that is about to happen and she tells me to steer toward the road and gun it. I do and it works. Sprayed up about two tons of ice, mud, and perennials into the side wall of a 1960 ranch home, but it did work and I was able to drive again and I even made it to see JCVD with my rad movie date in the nick of time. My sister is very calm in a crisis situation. She is naturally good at that kind of thing. It runs in the family this being good at stuff, stuff.

I’m surprisingly happy to be in Michigan for this weather. I am mostly pleased to have my days filled with weather talk again. While out in LA, when I would mention 80 and Sunny people would just turn silent, it was like bringing up sexism. In just the past two days I have heard Michiganders talking about weather and trash-talking other people about weather wussiness and weather tolerance like this: “I saw Jan after mass and asked her how she was doing and she said, get this, not good, look at this the weather is already bad. What a sour puss! And coming out of church no less!” and I heard, “You like this snow? You are CRAZY” “How do you like this weather?” “It’s starting already, last year it didn’t snow until ______” Everybody talks like it's seventy and mild at least eleven months out of the year in Michigan. I wonder why that is. Like middle age crisis belly fat people trying to squeeze into skinny jeans that never fit in the first wishuponasalesrackstar place. NO I did not say skinny jeans. I don't even have a pair and I hate that phrase almost as much as I hate girls night out but today is radical inclusion Monday and I have to leave that part in. I need to get some cross-country skis.