Roads, Mills, Laps

I picked the title for this posting randomly from my vast collection of David Bowie tunes–tunes like this one. (Can you find it?) Everything’s Bowie again for me. I get the most out of Bowie. I especially like his androgynous period. He goes well with borderline lunatics–with long-distance runners. Just put on Bowie at the Beeb, the two-disc set, load that sucker on your ipod and you are good to go. Run. Run. Run. When you do that, when you’ve listened to it through a few 15-milers in horse farm country (out where Hitchcock’s Marnie was filmed), you’ll start to enjoy the BBC announcer’s voice-overs as much as you’ll enjoy the music itself–all the pauses, all the British formality. Listen! Ain’t it great?

You see, I was on the way to my date with death when I put on Bowie; I put on this song.

I was on my way to take part in my semi-monthly 11-mile slog up escarpments that used to be hillocks. Everything’s a damn mountain these days. Everything takes more time. What was once the equivalent of a British officer, swagger stick in hand, walking seemingly through the hailstorm of lactic acid bullets, is now just one big mess, one fattened, slow-slapping toiling blight of humanity–one chalk-white, long-haired man with an inch of fat encasing his mid-section, keeping him warm, making his cordorouy pants harder to button.

I have no more patience.

But I do enjoy my ride in my car. I slip and slide around the roads–rubbing elbows with street blimps and trucks; with nosehair-picking bald men on bluetooth headsets; with soccer moms and landscape trucks filled to the brim with Mexicans.

Hot damn, do I love the roads around here! I love my public transportation options; I love streetblimps; I love 20 miles of angry steel.

My car is BAD ASS. Convinced that I was the ultimate hypocrite and seeking to fit into some semblance of a liberal stereotype, I rid myself of my truck (a truck, imagine that!). For a pittance, I bought a 1992 Volvo 240 with, get this, 240,000 miles. Since I have nothing to write about running besides noting how all the trails are buried in 6 inch piles of leaves that make for treacherous running on weak, injury-prone ankles, I’ll tell you about it.

1. It’s horn sounds like a rubber duckie; it’s as loud as a rubber duckie. I honked it today; nobody heard me out there in angryland.

2. The passenger door handle (made of plastic) came off in my hands the other day.

3. My heater fan sounds like a turkey; it gobbles. It’s so bad, it’s so loud, my daughter has named the fowl Bob. When I drive her to school, she has me turn on the fan so that she can say hi to Bob. If I turn the fan on at various speeds, I can mimic a conversation between us and the turkey; it’s kind of like a puppet show.

4. I bought a new stereo that plays mp3s (like Bowie and the Beeb). The catch: it won’t work if the lights are off.

5. At Pep Boyz, they had an antenna that supposedly fits my car. It didn’t. When I asked about the antenna at the Volvo dealership, the guy said no one has 1992 cars around here (remember, it’s horse farm country). But he said he could sell me one for $75. I know NPR (bing-bong liberal stereotype alert!) is good, but is it worth $75?

6. The driver’s side door, when opened drops down. So to close it, you have to lift it up. The guy who inspected my car (”You got lucky this year,” he said.) told me that my door will fall off–sometime soon. The other day a guy drove up alongside me and made a panic-looking face. “YOU’RE DOOR IS OPEN!” he mouthed. I mouthed back: “I KNOW!” and then took out my wallet and opened it, showing him that there’s nothing in there other than a cafeteria punchcard for free coffees.

7. The plastic cool things–the map holder, the compartments, the nooks and crannies for gloves and assorted circa ‘92 rich man possessions–are sun faded and crumbling. So when I get out of my car, kicking the door open while exiting, I kick out pieces of plastic (jagged shards) that fall to the ground.

8. On Volvo sticks, you have to pull up on the gearshift to go in reverse. Not so my little red cool car: you just pop that sucker into reverse (which happens to be very close to first gear). So a lot of times this happens: I’m at a stoplight. I pop it into reverse, thinking it’s first and then all the good times happen! “DAD STOP! STOP!” my daughter screams. I do this at her school when I drop her off. The soccer PTO moms now give me about 40 feet of room when they see the coolcar headed their way.

Everybody loves a beater! If you’ve never owned a beater, it’s time you got one. You trade car payments for embarassing situations, children’s theater, and near-death experiences. I highly recommend one.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.