Mind Your Own God Damn Business

How was everyone’s Thanksgiving?

Mine was probably the crappiest one I’ve ever had. As much as I would love to go into the gory details, part of my new strategy for maintaining a blog that doesn’t result in google searches for my name that A) yield negative newspaper articles and B) bitter, barely-coherent rants about what a cocksucker I am requires that I leave out delicate personal information that I wouldn’t want family members to see. Let’s just say that not only did I have to spend Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday hanging out with different parts of my family, everyone I’m related to that isn’t immediate family is having a crisis of some sort in their life that resulted in the kind of Holiday that had me thinking things like “I wonder if anyone will notice if I fill my water glass with Wild Turkey, because this glass of Wild Turkey I’ve been drinking just isn’t taking the edge off like I need it to” and “I really need to get a job as a line cook again before Christmas so I can tell everyone that I have to work over the holidays.”

It reminded me of something.

When I was, I’m going to say 19, maybe 20, I had a brown ’85 Audi. You know that already, because I mentioned it. I have a few very vivid memories about that car:

1. It had a cool smell. It wasn’t “old car” smell, or “car-that-10-years-of-my-Mom-leaving-banana-peels-and-rotten-apple-cores-in-now-smells-like-the-bottom-of-a-restaurant-dumpster” smell (a particularly popular scent with most of my family’s cars). I don’t know what it was. It just smelled cool.

2. I’m not a mechanic, but with 5 cylinders in it, whatever the fuck that means, it was, by far, the most powerful car that I’ve ever owned.

IF YOU'RE 555, I'M 666!!!

3. I had a Slipknot sticker that I put on the back window. This was back when I loved Slipknot the way that Tom Cruise loves Katy Holmes, which is to say that if you asked me about Slipknot, my subsequent reaction might lead you to believe that I was on PCP. My early 20′s were actually pretty much defined by  me picking a few things (this one girl, metal, the Internet, Starcraft, Tekken 3, inappropriate pictures of my roommate) and then developing a completely irrational level of enthusiasm for them that I will never be able to feel for anything again. You could throw me in Auschwitz for six months and then bail me out and give me some warm clothes and a sandwich and I still wouldn’t be as excited about it as I was about Slipknot when I was 20.

To be fair, Those first two albums still hit pretty hard. I should listen to one right now. Oh yeah, that’s nice. What were we talking about? Right. My old car.

4. It had a tape deck, and this was right at the tale end of cassette tape’s lives. I have very fond memories of cassette tapes.

My last memory is kind of strange. One Christmas when I owned that car, we celebrated the holidays at my Aunt and Uncle’s house, which was about three hours away from my place. Everyone was going down for a few days, but I had to work (see what I mean?), so I had to drive down after a shift on Christmas eve and then drive back home in the afternoon the next day so I could be back at work the day after Christmas.

And honestly, it was really fucking awesome. It was good to see everyone, we had a really good time, it was about the right amount of time to be there, and after 18 years of having to wait for Mom and Dad to be ready to leave for me to go home, hopping into my own car whenever I wanted to and driving down the highway listening to all of my sweet mix tapes made me feel like a man in a way that very few things have since. It was a pretty great Christmas, and I’ve always associated it with that Audi, probably because I spent a lot of time in it driving to and from the celebration.

You can't hear it because it's a picture, but "Sabotage" is blasting and that car is about to go off a cliff.

Now, things are different. That car is sitting in a junkyard somewhere. My aunt died in a car accident the following year, my Uncle is recently divorced, my Grandma is 89 going on crazy, my cousins are dealing with monumental ADHD and depression, and my brother is isolated and lonely which is slowly turning him into kind of an asshole (apparently all it takes to get me to break my “Don’t air personal dirty laundry” rule is about 500 words).

And I think that’s partly why I have such good memories of that car. It was pretty badass in and of itself, but it also kind of reminds me of my family back before they started falling apart. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it seems to be the case.

Here’s a song that I’m pretty sure that I was listening to back then too. It reminds me of the same period. I’ll tell you something about the kids, too: they don’t like techno. At all.

Anyway, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Christmas is only a few weeks away, and I have to start drinking now.