Banded Ironically

Also face reveal ig

Skirt go spin! <3

the next day i ended up punching someone in the face with a doughnut in my fist because she thought i was being a big fucking buzzkill who tattled to teacher about a harmless game, and, guess what, grabbed my butt. i got icing all over her hair. she complained to teacher...who let everyone know that this was why they weren’t supposed to be playing grabass in the fucking shop.

You see, there's a major shortage in skilled trades in this country. No, I don't mean like electricians or deck builders or roofers. You can do all of that shit yourself if you try hard enough, that's why you own a completely useless pickup truck to shuttle your 1.62 kids around. What I'm talking about here is critically needed. It is insanely important. I speak, of course, about: rust repair.

Of course, if you go somewhere where things rust a lot, you can get a new section of metal pop-riveted and tek-screwed onto your shitbox for cheap. My cousins in Quebec do it all the time, turning chunks of washing machine into vehicles that nominally pass a roadworthiness inspection. That skill set doesn't come to where I am, mostly because their vehicles won't make it this far on the ol' TCH. That's why we need to train new kids to do what they do, and that training starts with making children skilled with an angle grinder.

Now, I hear a lot of you complaining that power tools are dangerous. So are hammers, and you wouldn't argue that your wayward teen shouldn't learn how to swing a hammer into a nail without hitting their thumb clean off. Same goes for angle grinders. If they're gonna make a mistake, it's better that it's under the watchful eye of a trusted educator, with access to first aid kits and trauma care, than to do so for the first time underneath a Sunfire wedged in a ditch in rural Saskatchewan.

Worse yet, when you become a car person, you will usually make friends who are also car people. And there's nothing car people like more than diagnosing a weird sound on someone else's car: because it's helpful, sure, but mostly because they aren't required to fix it. Feeling smug because you correctly named the left-front wheel bearing as being shot on your buddy's Acura will carry you through an entire week of cussing at frozen subframe bolts.

Dealing with this garbage constantly is fatiguing, and boring, so the human mind rebels. Everyone goes through a phase where they begin to treat the car with contempt. You figure that you know which sounds are "fix me right now" and which ones can be safely ignored. That is, until you find yourself on the side of the highway with an exploded brake caliper and a sheepish expression on your face. The car was not just complaining and whining, as it usually does, but legitimately in trouble. The resulting paranoia will carry you for a few more weeks of expensive repairs in the garage as you fix both the exploded caliper and everything else that was making anything close to a horrifying noise.

It's only later, when you look back at a workshop full of the detritus of partially-abandoned dreams, that you feel guilty. This is a lot of shit to clean up, you think. I should build something to help me clean it up. And the guilt abates, for awhile. Bad feeling go away, replaced by exciting new feeling.

There's no real solution for this, or at least not one that I've found. Religion doesn't help: it just makes sure you don't trade in your spouse, which you wouldn't have any time to do anyway, because you're too busy researching how to burnish model railroad tracks. You can't find a book, because writers are famous for dying after grudgingly finishing three books, leaving just 600 half-written books lying around their hard drives. The only thing you can do is trick yourself.

I came across this idea when I read about this thing scientists were doing. When people lose a limb, their brains still think the limb is there, and that causes all kinds of problems. What the doctors do is stick a mirror in front of them, on the missing-limb side, and make the patient do stuff in the mirror with their there-limb. That fools the brain into unwiring all that stuff, and it makes life a bit easier. All I had to do was fool my brain into thinking an old project was actually a new project.

Perhaps you've seen one, on your jaunts in the country. Super-rich folks leave the city, looking for an opportunity to get a whole bunch of land for cheap, upon which they can do super-rich things. You can usually tell the difference between those buildings and actual farmers, because the rich people's properties aren't covered in old shitbox cars. That's what really gets my goat about the whole thing.

For centuries, when a city-dweller no longer wanted a car, it would gradually migrate out to the country. Maybe it would get used as a paddock basher, chasing sheep for the rest of its existence, or simply raced around in circles until the engine explodes or it rolls over and dumps all of its Buderick Light®. Occasionally, that car would be used in a crime and dumped in a sluice or similar body of water. No matter how it gets there, the country is always the place to go for last-ditch automobiles and the parts therein. Or at least it was.

There's a lot of reasons for this preference. One is that a worn-in piece of work equipment is simply pleasurable to be in. This truck has its little quirks, it's got a weird ass-wear pattern on the seat, and it smells of childhood memories when the heater turns on. Two is that keeping a truck working this long is indicative of it being "a good one," and therefore will be inherently reliable. Never has any problems, you say, even as you're busy trying to replace the transmission cooler for the sixth time in your five year ownership. Parts these days just suck, is why.

In the interest of balance, I have to point out some bad things about old trucks. They can be less comfortable, due to the lack of modern creature comforts like "air conditioning" and "seats that don't constantly squeak." Safety is sort of lacking. If you get hit by a modern, larger truck, you will be instantly obliterated. And there's no denying the power isn't there. Nowadays, every truck has to have a bajillion horsepower and reach Mach Five on demand, but back then, only degenerate perverts knew how much horsepower their truck made. That last downside can be seen as a sort of perk on its own, too: nowadays, folks are rushing around too much. Why be in such a hurry to get on the highway? Just enjoy the sound of the valve float.

If you ask the average uninitiated suburban voter, they'll express a level of fear when it comes to motorcycles. Oh no, they claim, those things will kill you instantly thirty million ways and they'll never find all of your body. That's not particularly relevant to me, mostly because I routinely drive cars with even less safety equipment than your average motorcycle. What is a concern? The lack of a trunk.

Friends, the trunk is one of the greatest inventions of all of humankind. To be able to put your shit in a box, lock it, and bring that shit with you across your travels? Delightful. Although many "touring" motorcycles have little boxes in which you can place your underwear, sidearms, and next-of-kin identification, space is still quite limited. You can't do what I do, which is leave a bunch of crap in the trunk that you're too lazy to bring into your house. Look back there. Yeah, that's a Commodore 128. It's the deluxe model. Won't even fit on a Goldwing.

To my surprise, when I brought this up to my biker-gang friends, I was rebuffed. Not only do larger touring bags exist, but certain ridiculous individuals have even developed a little trailer that you can tow behind your motorcycle. It's teeny-weeny, sure, but certainly bigger than the trunk in, say, a Fiat 500. And that's before we even get to sidecars.

This safety noodle is the foreman for a construction site.

Me: I am literally just doing my job. Everyone else is slacking off.

invisible

never explained

always a different size

you have to guess the size