The Joys of Car Ownership, part 1

Ah, internet, hello, and good morning. I've just arrived to work 45 minutes late, after riding the dreaded CTA, which if you refer to earlier posts:

http://sparkithdark.blogspot.com/2009/01/public-transit-and-titties.html

I'm not a great fan of.

That, in addition to a slew of back problems that can only be medically described as God's revenge on me for all my wrongdoings, prompted me, about a year ago, to buy a car.

As I have not, until fairly recently, been actively blogging, I'll have to bring you up to speed, in my new, what I'm sure will be multi-part series:

THE JOYS OF CAR OWNERSHIP

Part One:

So, last night I was at my friend Beau's house, brewing a milk and outmeal stout, flavored with earl grey tea and a hint of vanilla extract. See, that's the best part about brewing beer- I can write a sentence like that, include all the subtleties and flavors, and it still sounds very manly, because we're making beer. If I'd be making an earl grey tea cake with a hint of vanilla extract, let's be honest, would have very gay. But it's not gay! Because its BEER! And Beer is poisonous to gay people, or something, because the two things are somehow culturally antithetical, but, I digress.

I drove there, because we had to go pick up supplies first, and there's no reason why we'd ride the L and play the russian-roulette-of-sitting-in-someone-else's-pee game if we could avoid it.

I parked behind his apartment in one of two parking spaces there, through a short alleyway that, in terms of width, can only be likened to the birth canal of a particularly pious Nun.

There was barely enough room for one car to fit through, and behind it, there were two spaces, one of which was already occupied by a black honda civic. Fine.

I pull in to the spot breathlessly, mere inches from brick on all sides but one, and on that side mere inches from a honda civic that looks quite a bit like a brick, and immediately dread pulling out in reverse.

But, Beau assures me that if it can be done forwards, it can likewise be done backwards. I remember having a similar arguement with a girlfriend about "cowgirl," just on the other side of it, but once again, I digress.

So, we gather our supplies, brew some beer, and good times are generally had. Great.

Now, i arrived at around 7pm, and am attempting to leave around 10:30 or so. I step outside into the brisk night air, feeling as though I've accomplished something, having both brewed some beer and fully enjoyed a previous batch that turned out particularly well, when I see this:

http://www.boatshoes.com/images/0799023large.jpg

That may be an approximation, but that's about what the car looked like that was blocking my means of escape from the Nun-Uterous (utyrous? youtearus?) parking lot.

Fuck.

Uh. Oh.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Now we have a problem. I work 45 minutes away from where I live by car, and have to be there at 8 AM the next morning.

At this point Beau has come out onto the back porch as well, and recognized the problem at hand.

"Ooh," he says, "guess you gotta knock on some doors."

I sit in stunned silence.

"I'll knock with you," he offers graciously, the proceeds indoors to clean the kitchen. He did emerge a few minutes later, and help me knock, I just thought the juxtaposition of "I'll help" then immediately leaving was pretty funny. We also discovered that Beau has not one, but two pretty hot neighbors, so that's pretty good.

Anyway, the knocking proved fruitless. We only knocked on doors with lit windows, Beau not wanting to anger his neighbors, and me not wanting to get shot because we were in Roger's Park. We discovered the aforementioned hot chicks, as well as really pissed off either a small dog or a large rat, could have really gone either way on that one, really, but no one would claim the large shoe blocking my exit. Not even the rat.

Now, internet, I just want to tell you that I decided at that point not to get mad. I'm still not really mad. I mean, to block the exit of two cars as apposed to just, I don't know, finding street parking, would at first glance, seem a bit of a dick move. Normally, this would have garnered a my knee-jerk "FUCK YOU" response, but, shoe car had a couple of things working in its favor.

1) It was late. Finding street parking by the lake after 9pm is about as likely as finding unbiased journalism on Fox.

2) It's not a great area, so if you were to park, you'd have to walk a ways.

3) The plates read "Michigan." which means the owner of the car was from Michigan, and that's hard enough as it is.

4) This is the clincher, really, that validates 1 through 3. The plates looked like this:

http://stores.platedog.com/catalog/2010-01-23-1432-47_thumb.jpg

Which, based on the pictoral on the left, leads me to one of two conclusions:

A) The owner is handicapped, and me, being a giant (unaware, to be fair) asshole, stole their spot late at night in a bad neighborhood, so out of a survival impulse, they parked their car in the love canal so as to avoid the aforementoined issues 1 and 2.

or:

B) The owner of the vehicle has a HUGE butt. Look again:

http://stores.platedog.com/catalog/2010-01-23-1432-47_thumb.jpg

In which case, I'd like to avoid angering them, lest they decide to use it as a weapon against me.


Either way, there's not really a culprit here. Or if there is, it's me, and I was an unwitting one. There were several victims though- Me, again. The black brick car man, who the neighbors say is a dick, and I'm hoping isn't having my car towed as I type. That poor, large-butted person whose spot I stole.

Owning a car is a humbling experience, in that God, if he exists (yes, he. God isn't a woman. Sorry, nothing against women, but in my defense: Periods, childbirth, glass ceilings, breast cancer. If she's a woman, she's a bitch) because God finds ways to constantly remind you that you're just not that special when you have one.

I think it's because owning a car is a luxury, and we wouldn't want us feeling to smug now, would we? And I suppose that's fair enough.

Another example: Whenever you spend more than 40 minutes looking for parking, walking back to your apartment, you will invariably see a closer spot than the one you found.

It sure as hell seemed like that, at least, so I started keeping count. And I can honestly report that the ratio of times I've parked and seen a closer spot to times I've parked total is actually 6/10.

6 out of 10

MORE THAN FUCKING HALF.

That defies some sort of statistical probability, I'm sure.

I think, very good arguement for God, and that he is trying to remind me that the universe does not, in fact, revolve around me, nor does it cater to my wants / needs / hopes and dreams and that I should be lucky to have a parking spot, or really, a car at all.

Now the car is currently sitting behind my friends' apartment. Beau has been in 77 car accidents to date (conservative estimate) so I left the keys with a slightly less accident prone friend and roommate, in hopes I won't return tonight to find a smoking crater where my car had been.

Ah, the Joys of Car Ownership.


##UPDATE##

Because # means important, and four of them means quadrupley so.

So, I rode the dreaded "L" train back to my friends' house, and lo and behold, shoe car was gloriously moved.

I retrieved my key from Neal, another roomie and all-around good guy who happened to be home when I got there, and backed my way out of Nun-birth-canal alley. NBC alley. I like it. Gives the whole peacock thing a couple of levels.

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/nbc-peacock-logo.jpg

Anyway, my car is back in my hands, thank God.

More CTA

Alright. I'd just like to say something: I was right.

Now, I say this in all humility and fairness, and with an honest attempt to simply report the truth, and only the truth, so help me God (?- so HELP me, God! maybe?)

Today, the line of the CTA I use to get home from work closed at 10pm, citing the weather conditions.

These are the weather conditions as of 10pm today in Chicago, according to www.chicagotribune.com:

Mostly cloudy. Scattered flurries in the evening. Lows 10 to 14. Northwest winds around 10 mph in the evening becoming light and variable after midnight.

Where I was, we got about, oh, say, 4 inches of snow in about 6 or so hours.

Now, if I couldn't build trains that could deal with that kind of weather, I doubt I'd build trains that ran in say, Chicago, or really any city that experiences any type of winter at all. Because that might happen, and then many thousands of my residents would be stuck riding in cabs. Which is great for the cabs, but not so good for the residents.

So, I was right. The CTA can go FUCK itself with a long, spiky stick.

I will however, re-neg a previous comment- that CTA didn't stand for Chicago Transit Authority but rather Cunts Torturing Americans, etc.... because CTA obviously does stand for Chicago Transit Authority. They certainly have authority over the transit in Chicago, in that they can decide to take it away and we all can do fuck all about it. That, in a sort of Stalin-esque way, does make them the Authority. Congratulations CTA, you've finally beaten me.

The thing that bothers me most is that I've BEEN on trains in worse weather conditions than the ones we're experiencing, making me believe that they shut down for another reason- such as maybe all their employees, who suspiciously all own cars, had to be able to drive home safely that night, therefor no trains, or even better yet, my other theory, that they needed all the coppertop batteries that normally power the trains to go into all the vintage Sega Game Gears they bought everybody with the extra 50 cents entrance fees they've been charging since the new year.

Game on, CTA employees. Game on.

Public Transit

Hello, internet. We meet again, in a dark alley, somewhere in the heart of a city that breathes like a great beast from the smoking sewer holes that pimple its skin, for the now almost ritual exchange humor for free porn, both wearing trench coats, maybe to share a breathless laugh, and a quiet goodbye, following a tearful mutual masturbation session.

Wow, that got weird fast. Okay. Well, I was going to write a piece/article/tearful mutual masturbation session on what it was like to be a waiter, because for all you waiters out there, you need to hear it said funny to lighten the soul-crushing sense of personal failure, and for all you other people you need to know why waiters act the way they do, and also how terrible of a person you are for paying someone else to walk your food to you, you fat lazy fuck.

But, that's another, longer article, and I just finished giving my girlfriend an impromptu good-solid-boinking, and time is short, for I have shit to do tomorrow.

So for all you tearfully masturbating waiters out there, if you die tonight, asphyxiated under the weight of your own meaninglessness, you can come back and haunt her. Or more specifically, her vagina. (Love you honey!)

Something else pissed me off today, and in light of that, I want to rag on something that has forever been the thorn in my side, the corn kernel on my pallet, the insert-joke-about-something-in-my-butt-here.

That thing being this: The CTA.

More specifically, the trains run by the CTA. And as I sit here, drinking orange juice straight from the jug and burning incense to cover the smell of the suspicious chicken nuggets I just bought from a late night diner and ate, I will tell you a story, internet, so rest awhile upon your hairy laurels and hear me.

I had just gotten off work, and if you've picked up anything at this point, internet, it should be that I don't like my current work, and if you haven't picked that up yet, I can only assume you either haven't been reading as carefully as you should, or have problems with pattern recognition and should probably see someone about it because it could be holding you back in countless other ways that you're probably not even currently aware of, but, I digress.

And I'd like to point out at this point that I was not having a very good day at already not-very-good workplace to begin with, in that I was assigned to a sidework station (sidework, by the way, is what a waiter has to do when not bringing more food to people more likely doughy than himself, because the restaurant is paying you 4.65 an hour for tax reasons dammit, and they're going to make you roll silverware/polish spoons/ eat and shit your own soul to make sure they get their money's worth, dammit (2X)) And I happened to be assigned to work next to...a 35 year old insane gay man-child whose attention-withdrawl symptoms could send most recovering meth addicts screaming for their mothers and who, in my book, is about a class-action hate-crime lawsuit away from a good swift kick in the balls to shut him the fuck up for God's sake.

But I dammit was unfortunately dammit (2X) (get it?) assigned to work closely with him for five dammit (3X) fucking dammit (4X. do these count?) hours, dammit (4.5X. compromise) which didn't really put me in the best mood.

On top of that a friend from college who I thought was going to call did the douchey thing and didn't, however that's something else entirely.

So now my options, after a frustrating friday night's work and other events, boil down to meeting up with my girlfriend for a good stiff dicking, which I promptly (Whoa! tense shift!), and with the utmost determination, set out to do.

And I'm back where I began. The CTA. I boarded my first train without incident, a little bit of a wait in the cold, nothing out of the ordinary, and rode to something of a junction. This is where I need to get off this "color" train and board a differently "colored" (not a racial thing) train to get farther in the direction I needed to go.

Now, keep in mind, it's January in Chicago. And one train comes, but not one heading in that direction, and then another one comes, not heading in that direction, and another, and the number of people on the platform is steadily moving from the I-can-see-other-people density to the I-can-smell-other-people density.

At this point, after about half an hour in the cold, the complimentary heat lamps started acting all funny.

And by all funny, I mean not very funny at all, in fact, quite the opposite of funny at the time. You see, having exhausted supply of coppertop batteries they'd bought for the evening, the good people at the CTA decided to shut off the heat in order so they could continue to play their vintage gameboys behind their bulletproof glass, is my theory, and leave us out in the cold.

A tinny voice came on over the loudspeaker, which said something that sounded like some sort of explanation for the lack of heat and/or the delay, but could have easily have been directions on how to huddle together (for warmth) and a suggestion as to exactly where we could put our thumbs (for warmth).

Another 15 minutes pass. At this point, I'm grumbling incoherently though fairly melodically under my breath, and (FICTION SPRINGING FROM BOREDOM ALERT) the insane and clearly drunken homeless man next to me is doing the same thing, and at one point we started hitting major fifths and minor thirds and it all sounded very nice and in fact we probably could have made some money between us if someone had had the presence of mind to put a hat down or something, but once again I digress (deep breath)

And I began to think, no, seriously consider that maybe CTA didn't stand for Chicago Transit Authority at all, but rather maybe Can't Transport Anyone, or maybe Cunts Torturing Americans, or even probably Cat Tattoo Anachronism or anything other than something that might suggest I'd actually be wanting to GO anywhere for the money I'd paid them, but rather desired the privilege of contemplating my poverty in the cold while automobiles of the socially luckier zoomed by in the night, while (FICTION SPRINGING FROM BOREDOM ALERT) attempting to shift collective weight to play the penguins-on-the-iceberg game with the other patrons and find out if one of the rails below really was electrified.

It was. (Kidding. Kind of. Check the papers.)

Then the train came, and we all piled on, mourning the loss of that one guy on the tracks in the name of scientific inquiry (Haha....RIP....ha), and lo and behold, insane 35-year old man-child, scheduled to get off later than I, happened to be catching the same train as I since I'd WAITED FOR OVER A FUCKING HOUR, and as it happens the only two available seats were next to him, or alternately a homeless man who looked like he might be dead, so I stood the rest of the way home, trying not to attract the attention of either party.

So DAMN YOU cta DAMN YOU (2X) for making me wait over an HOUR to give my girlfriend the good, swift dicking that both she and I deserved at the time. DAMN YOU.

So to sum up: Here are some of my primary problems with the CTA, as well as some suggestions for improvement.

1. The Trains don't run on time (or sometimes at all).

Now, as friends, teachers, and previous employers over the years will tell you, I'm okay being between 10 and 15 minutes late to pretty much anything, however my problem is when I wait 45 minutes for a train without warning. If I can walk to my destination just as quickly as I can ride there, then you've kind of de-legitimized yourselves as "mass transit" and started to be something a little more akin to a comparatively inexpensive form of the fat-people scooters at Disneyland.

So maybe some sort of warning system, as in some kind of Magic changing sign that said "Next Train in X minutes" or something, visible BEFORE I entered the happiest place on earth would be usefully, because the other day, while waiting for a train I actually had the thought that Oh God, maybe the Mormons are right, there is a purgatory and I've stumbled upon it accidentally.

And any enterprise that causes a normally sane and rational person to ever think: "Oh God, maybe the Mormons are right" needs to be put to a swift and definitive end immediately.

WARN US WHEN IT'S RUNNING LATE.

I know it's somewhere between mildy-annoying to as-challenging-as-counting to space the trains out according to how crowded the trains are, but you might want to try that as well.


2. The loudspeakers make announcements sound like the teacher from the peanuts cartoon.

Aparently, after spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a reliable (cough cough) elevated train system for Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority spent the rest of it's money on handjobs for all the members of the Daley family who weren't too busy giving one another an unfair legs up at the time, and had to improvise a Public Address system out of some coffee tins and string.

To the point where, I when a train stops mid-track and I hear something over the PA system, it could just as easily be "Due to delays, the train as slowed up" (you'd be surprised) to "Hop off you fuckers, we're gonna blow up!" or "I'd like some candy, labrador pup" or anything else, and then we get to play the game where I look around in dismay, worried for my safety or the safety of some innocent young dog out there, while everyone else pretends they heard whatever was announced perfectly clearly and understood the situtaion so well it was physically pleasurable for them.

INVEST IN DECENT SPEAKERS

Alternately, you could just pay the homeless guys to yell announcements at patrons, because you'd be doing them some good, we'd understand you just as clearly, and they're kind of doing a sort of less focused version of that anyway.


I suppose that's pretty much it...oh yes. One more thing. The recent fare raises.

Okay, so when you board the CTA, if you pay in cash, last year it cost you two dollars. You could also buy this nifty little cardy thing that was linked to your bank account/ credit card / tearful mutual masturbation (HA! Full circle!) that reduced the price to 1.75 as a sort of reward for continuing your abusive relationship with the CTA (NO MOM! I FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. weeps. mastu...alright, enough).

It was sort of rewards program, of sorts. On Jan 1st, 2009, everything went to a general faire (fare? fair? no-not that) of 2.25 per trip, cardy thing or no cardy thing.

This means a couple of things. First of all, if you're used to using a cardy thing, and usually go back whenever you go somewhere, it costs you an EXTRA FUCKING DOLLAR TO TRAVEL. But it makes sense to make the poorest working class people in Chicago pay for their own transit, dammit. No rewards for habituality.

Also, if you don't use a card, you have to carry FUCKING QUARTERS EVERYWHERE. Do they KNOW how annoying that is? So unless your planning on mugging someone with a whole bunch of them in the end of a sock, it's fairly impractical. You can also put on 5 dollars for a round trip, but then you have the stupid 50 cents that you can never get back. Unless you magically have nine dollars on you and want to travel four times somewhere for some reason, they're literally nickel and dime-ing you.

The reason for this, is, of course, to keep the train system afloat in these rough economic times. However, the bullshit PLUS the increased fair/fare/carvinal bullshit might just make me and some other people stop being so belligerently anti-social and carpool or something. And it's alot easier to keep a train system afloat on 1.75 or 2.00 of money than 2.25 of FUCK YOU.

So CTA, I have this to say to you: I know you're a government organization and thereby, in legal terms, are designed to be as effective as the hamburgler is sexy (just wanted to use the joke), however times are a-changing with this here gumm't, and it'd be nice if you hopped on the bandwagon/train pun/ fuck it before we decide to walk / drive / go FUCK yourself CTA.