Anyone with a boat knows that boat maintenance can make time stand still, if not run backwards. I had just such a day last week. A quick meeting with the mechanic at the slip exploded into 14 hours of hellish exhaustion. And it felt much longer.
This got me thinking about the longest days of my life.
#5 Spending my 30th birthday driving to Vancouver and back with Allie, who spoke with great granularity about What My Problem Is the e-n-t-i-r-e time. Including customs.
#4 Boat day. The trailer alone had a defective trailer hitch, faulty lights, a flat tire, and frozen wheels. Imagine the clusterfuck the boat was.
#3 Being tricked into accompanying my ex (who, post-me, slept around quite a bit) to a public STD clinic for her free AIDS test. I spent the entire day there among life's cruddiest dregs, listening to execrable white-people-rap on the closed-circuit TV, wishing I could dump her ass all over again. Did I mention I was on vacation? The lowlight came when I found myself flirting with a pretty girl sitting under the "STD TEST WAITING AREA" sign.
#2 The day my dad died, the Jeep's clutch failed right next to a mechanic. I whipped into his parking lot and promptly fell for the old "it'll just be two hours" schtick. My judgement was doubtless impaired by the most debilitating flu I've ever had. So there I lied on the mechanic's office floor, misery personified, taking call after call from Columbus as siblings tried to guilt me into flying home for the funeral. For 10 hours.
#1 Chauffeuring the boorish Miss Ohio to Toledo and listening to how bad beautiful women have it in America. (Full post)
The STD rap was on infinite repeat, so I have it memorized. Imagine, oh, let's say Alan Alda turning his baseball cap sideways, folding his arms, and rapping.
We are he-reI've always admired the way they rhymed "you" with "you."
To talk to you (yes you!)
'Bout the type of things that can happen to you if you
Doooon't
Be careful (be careful!)
And put a condom on
Be carefulIt could happen to you! (who me?)
It could happen to you! (yes you)
It could happen to you, to you, to you!
It could happen to you!