How Revolting!

I don't drive the pickup truck much these days, but I did today. I wanted to go into town and buy a pallet of pavestones so I could make a walkway. I find the process of building walkways almost Romanesque - when I'm done, there is a walkway where there once was nothing. It gives me the same sense of accomplishment I imagine Roman engineers felt when the finished the Via Appia, just before the tax collectors arrived.

I went to my local purveyor of fine home improvement materials and bought a pallet of 90 pavestones. That's right at the edge of what my truck can haul without screaming in pain and breaking a spring shackle, which would be a very bad thing - I have nightmare visions of losing the axle on the highway and ending up in the CAP canal...

So the forklift operator brings the pallet out, and just as he was hoisting it to the level of my truck, the pallet disintegrated and the pavestones, they went a-tumbling. All of them broke on impact. Every last one of them. We dug through this unhappy heap of fractured masonry and I thought I found one that was intact, but it had a crack all the way across it and it came apart in my hands like large Cheez-it with a built-in structural flaw.

So now I'm down to 56 pavestones, which was all that they had in stock. Fine and dandy - I only needed about 42 for what I wanted to accomplish, and hauling 56 pavestones makes my truck scream a good deal less than 90. With 56 on board, it's almost sprightly; with 90 on board, the suspension is bottomed out and the only give is when Important Stuff flexes in ways Important Stuff aint supposed to flex.

But no mind. I got home safety and built my walkway, which happened to include a good deal of shoveling, raking, pitchforking of rocks, hammering, growling, snarling and whimpering. My soil comes in two forms: it's either deep bottomless sandy gravel, which is a joy to shovel, or it's bitterly hard baked clay that they could build Saturn V boosters out of. Fortunately that part of the yard was mostly gravel, but buried in the gravel are occasional rocks about the size of one's head, and the easiest way to shift them it with a pitchfork, oddly enough.

But I digress. Normally I do the earthmoving for walkways before I buy the pavestones, spreading the work out over two days (or weeks, or months...) But this time I did it all in one day, and as I was moving the truck, I grasped the shifter and slammed it into park and fluid suddenly squirted out of the steering column.

Those are words you really don't want to ever have to say. "Sorry, I can't go to dinner tonight, fluid squirted out of my steering column." It sounds at least as shameful as it actually feels.

I believe odd things from time to time. For example, I believe that airlines don't actually put my luggage in the cargo hold of the airplane. I believe they photocopy my luggage and load the photocopy onto the plane, then through some secret airline process they reconstitute my luggage from random molecules when I reach my destination. But I have a hard time believing that fluid would suddenly squirt out of my steering column.

And of course, it didn't. I had developed an immense blister during the day's festivities and the fluids didn't squirt out of the steering column, they squirted out of me. I didn't know whether to be impressed or revolted, and it wasn't until much later when I got soap into the hitherto painless void in my flesh that I decided it was revolting.