Fire and Prestone

Q. How are women like blog comments?

A. I like them. I want them. But I'm not really sure how to get them.

The following story is true, to the best of my recollection. Names have not been changed, since no one is really innocent. I always thought it was a good story. Hopefully, you'll find it amusing as well. Think of it as kind of a Friday Flashback, except on Thursday :-)

Stardate: Ummm, probably around 1994-95...
We had gone to Huntsville to some discount all-night bowling thing. I had ridden with Matt (he of the frequent car wrecks), for some reason. It is here that our story begins...

We were only a couple of minutes from my house, when I smelled something burning. It was an electrical smell, like wires burning or something. I mentioned it. Matt smelled it, too. Didn't think much else about it since we were almost home. He dropped me off I would guess around 3:00 or 4:00 AM. As you might imagine, the fun was just about to ensue.

A short time later, I would say about five or ten minutes, there was a knock at my door. Let me interrupt our story right here to say that this was years ago, and I still lived with my parents. My bedroom had an outside entrance to it, which was cool for a variety of reasons, though I'm not really sure what any of those would have been. Anyhow, back to our story. I open the door and there stands Matt, entirely out of breath and looking quite frazzled. He looks as if he's just run a marathon, and on top of that, like he's been running for his life. I'm like, "What's the matter?" I can barely even understand him because he's so out of breath. He says, "My... huuuuuuh.. car's... huuuuuh.. on... huuuuh.. fire...." I reply, "What?!" Well, it was both incredibly funny and bad at the same time, but it was mostly just funny.

Well, here's the other thing. My parents house was like just around the corner and less than two blocks from the fire station. Matt had run about four blocks to get me, instead of running another couple of blocks and going directly to the fire department. I never quite understood that. I guess when your car is on fire, logic goes out the window. So anyhow, we hopped in my Jeep, which had the top off (which was cool on a whole other level, and I miss it very much badly), and I shot over to the fire department.

Now, here's the next thing. A fire department is not really set up for walk-ins or drive-thrus, you know? It's not like a fast food place or a barber shop. Anyhow, I knocked on the door of the fire station, which was odd in itself. A guy, presumably a fireman, came to the door and I told him what had happened. Well, at first, he didn't believe me. He thought we were playing a practical joke. I'm thinking, yeah, dude, we were sitting around watching infomercials at 4 in the morning and figured we'd drive down to the local fire department to see if we could stir up some excitement. Yeah. This is what we do.

Well, anyway, they eventually got a truck over there, but by that time, the fire had nearly burned out, and the formerly white hood (could that be construed as racist?) was almost completely black. So we just kinda stood there and watched the end of Matt's car. It was a little bit like a funeral.

I, of course, was reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George's car catches on fire and he's just standing there and says, "The Jon Voight car is no more."

- The End -

"Oh my love, my darling, I've hungered for your touch, a long lonely time. Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?"