This week, I had a whole lotta stuff I planned to write about Donald Trump, but decided it was a waste. Donny’s gone off the deep end with hair-dye-dripping nutty buddy, Rudy Giuliani, and others hanging on, claiming that the FBI, CIA, CDC, Poncho Villa, Cher, and Emperor Ming the Merciless from the planet Mongo conspired to steal the election by importing bands of wild dingoes to gnaw into mush the Trump ballots. Where is Flash Gordon when you need him?
In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, it still mystifies me that there are those (boneheads) who still believe the whole thing is a hoax and refuse to wear masks, many right here in our community, to prevent the spread of the virus. How can you explain it? Easy. They’re all smoking crack. You may have seen the tweet going around from a woman somewhere East who said she would not be denied attending Mass and, maskless, would exercise her constitutional right to raise her voice to the heavens in praise of the Lord and any other random deity who would listen. Two days later she posted another tweet saying she’d been diagnosed with COVID-19 and was asking for prayers because her husband is in bad health and in a high-risk group. She’s worried he could get infected with the virus and die. I guess exercising her rights trumped (ironic word choice here) affecting her husband’s health.
I believe the government should make mask-wearing mandatory until the virus is under control. Probably the majority of those grumbling about wearing one aren’t old enough to remember when using seat-belts was not a law. When the seat-belt law was passed, a lot of drivers grumbled. I was one of them. I figured I’d been menacing the highways and byways for more than 20 years and racked up a quarter-million miles, was never injured in an accident, so why do I need one? I felt it was my constitutional right to take a chance on pulverizing a windshield with my head if I so desired, and nobody was going to tell me different.
I stuck to my anti-seat-belt, cranium-crunching, guns right up to the day I got a $100 ticket for not wearing one (a seat-belt, not my cranium, although that’s open for debate). Nothing changes a made-up mind quicker than a left hook to the pocketbook. Now, nearly all of us buckle up without a second thought. I almost feel naked (not an especially nice image) without one.
Although I was never injured in an accident, other than being dropped on my head a few times as a baby, I did have my share of auto accidents. Once, three in a year. Not one was my fault, though. I was hit in the rear (the car’s, not mine) each time and my insurance company, MIC, dropped me. I complained because I was the victim not the cause, but the company said, and what follows is true, I was someone who attracted accidents. Was my new Caddy convertible a big crash-magnet that screamed “hit me”? Because I was dropped by MIC they sent me to, coincidentally, CIM where my rates doubled.
My friends and I did have a lot of teenage auto fun in those pre-seat-belt days. It was easy for someone in our group to find an old-beater car for $5. or $10. and drive it into the ground. One guy, Dale, bought and old junker 1951 Dodge. It didn’t have a front seat or a steering wheel but it ran, so he sat on a wooden crate and clamped a large vice- grip pliers on the steering column to drive it. A half-dozen of us piled in the back seat, with a couple of guys on the floor, and drove out to a rocky, hilly, area in the boonies. A volunteer followed in his car for our return trip.
The beater got beat on bumps and boulders until it would barely run. At that point, Dale drove to a high spot known as The Hill of Imminent Death, where the opposite side sloped down at about an 89 degree angle. As we hung on for dear life, Dale sent the Dodge and us cascading to the bottom, where it came to rest with the rusting remains of three or four of its predecessors. After a quick check to see if any of us required emergency-first aid other than a tourniquet, or two, Dale removed the plates, said a few words over the metal corpse, and we clambered up the hill to our waiting transportation. What a fun Summer night!
To sum up my illuminating dissertation on safety for this week: Always wear a face mask and, even though it may be fun, never drive a car without a steering wheel.