Protected: wreck another man
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Archive for August, 2007
Protected: i’ve been broken (i’ve been fixed)
Monday, August 6th, 2007There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
dear diary, i miss you
Saturday, August 4th, 2007I should tell you about my car. You already know that it’s basically as old as I am, and that I love it as best one can love a 2500-pound combustion-powered metal contraption. We’ve had some good times, and we’ve had a lot of tough times. A lot. Like every five months or so.
Lately, the car (which I am never going to get around to naming, or even sexing (but maybe it’s a girl?)) hasn’t been accelerating so smoothly. It’s/she’s sluggish, and then suddenly it/she jerks forward. It’s not much fun. But the other night we were driving Uptown, and the car, it/she told me, “Tom, I think I’d like to idle and reverse at 20 mph. Hope that’s OK!” It was not OK. I had to fight it/her to stay stopped at the red lights. The next step was the mechanic, and he says he has fixed everything.
For a while, though, I was worried. I called my dad and started discussing the possible reality of needing a new[er] car, and how maybe I could find one for $10,000 and not have to worry about taking out a loan.
But it reminded me of my situation with Bling a few weeks ago. You see, parts of him were starting to turn pink — his tail and back legs, mostly. So on our birthday (I’m exactly 19 years older), we braved the Dallas North Tollway and went to the turtle doctor. Dr. Julie said he had an infection and would need a round of antibiotics.
Bling was not pleased.
Giving a turtle a shot is a three-person job, amazingly. One person uses both hands to hold him in just the right place so he can’t claw his way free. Another uses one hand to pull a front leg out and another to work the needle. And the third (me, usually) holds some sort of solid object, like a toothpaste tube, between the turtle’s head and his leg so he can’t bite the person giving him the shot. Because that’s the thing he really wants to do once he realizes there’s a two-inch needle in his arm.
We did this every other day for two weeks.
The first one was the worst, though. Once back in his aquarium, Bling start throwing up. It was awful. You could tell he was not having fun. I freaked out, of course, and rushed him back to the animal hospital. But he was back to normal by the time we got there; the vomiting was just from the stress of getting a shot and going on a car ride on a lovely 95-degree Texas afternoon.
These two situations are really the same thing. In both cases, something I really, really care about is suddenly in danger of breaking down entirely. I know a little about how to take care of these things, but far from enough to fix them. And so I have to entrust someone who fixes them for a living. But that doesn’t make it much easier; I worry, I mope, I sob. And then everything’s OK again.
Thing is, I don’t know for how long.