Strike that last question from the record. You're here, still reading, so you either care enough to care or care enough to humor me. I'm good with either. Without further ado:
The Four Seasons of Bill
New Car (Spring):
Some men find love, others are happy to stop at lust. I, being the happily married cheerfully monogamous type turn my fancy to cars. Oh how I scour the ads, online, free trader papers, stopping along the road to look at random cars parked there. Sometimes these random cars are even for sale!
My dreams jump from car to car. One day a pickup, the next a subcompact… ooh, station wagons are cool. How about an old Rolls?
Emily gets very, very nervous each New Car. For most, it's the season of beginnings, of possibilities. For Em, it's the dread of sitting across from the finance guy at a dealership signing 300 documents that essentially mean we will have to work until two weeks after we are dead to afford another depreciating "investment".
Emily spend much of the time putting ads on Craigslist and standing on the street corner beseeching people to ask me to help them buy a new car, thus providing me my fix without any real financial burden.
This past year, my own Father came to our rescue, allowing me to have a significant say in the choice of and negotiation for his new car. What better way for father and son to bond?
New Car is my favorite of all the seasons.
Old Car (Summer):
Being the steward of an old car is almost as fun as buying a new car and nearly as financially ruinous. Old Car begins with a plan and ends with tennis elbow. Why tennis elbow? It's caused by the continuous 'swipe' action of the credit card, of course. Old Car means the purchase of new parts to keep the old car on the road.
This is my second favorite season. Emily likes it better, too, because for some reason, she doesn't find spending too much money on and old car to be as onerous as doing the same on a new one.
I guess it's the same logic that makes it unacceptable in her eyes for me to smoke cigarettes, but perfectly OK to smoke cigars. Girls are funny.
Grumpy and Sick (Autumn):
Fall. What can you say about a season named after something you desperately spend most of your life to not do? Even if you call it by its bourgeois name, Autumn, it's still the association of the end of activity and the beginning of death and stasis.
You know when people say, "He lived to the fullest, even in the autumn of his life?" They say that at funerals. The autumn of things is near the end.
"But what of the colors, Bill", you ask? Yeah, our payoff for accepting death is two minutes of pretty colors that I can only see through squinted allergy eyes which inevitably lead to back breaking raking and picking up sticks. It's like Publishers' Clearinghouse coming to your door with the prize patrol and the balloons and the cameras just to deliver your first issue of Ladies' Home Journal.
The days are shorter. The nights are colder. The only redeeming quality of Grumpy and Sick is football. And that's almost, but not, worth it.
Death (Winter):
Winter is literally unbearable. This is why bears hibernate in the winter. Why bother? What is there to do? Snowball fights? Way more fun in theory than in practice. You know snow is just ice that didn't apply itself! Why would you want to have that thrown at you?
There is no amount of pot roast to make up for the menace of pot holes! There is no warmth of human compassion equal to the cold of the frozen tundra… of Lambeau Field or any other place.
And shoveling? Makes raking look like a day at the zoo!
Speaking of a day at the zoo, you know what that looks like in winter? A tableau of post apocalyptic Chernobyl… a place made the subject of many, many horror movies… for a reason! I guess you can still see the owls. They might ask "Who, who, who comes to the zoo in the middle of winter? This sucks!"
People who are merely annoyingly bad at driving become real threats to your existence. Your furnace runs constantly, making that sucking and whooshing sound which signifies all your money, which as we all know is supposed to be saved up for New Car, is going out of your 90 + year old windows. And still you are cold. And you always will be.
Football, a solace, eventually goes away in early February and we here in the cold north still have 90 full days of dark and cold to endure before New Car rolls around again.
So I'm checking out for Death. I'll see you all next New Car.
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