Battery light, motherfucker!

So, remember a couple weeks ago when I talked about how impossibly weird shit always happens to my car? Yeah, that. Times forever.

A couple months ago, my car started playing this game called Battery Light, Motherfucker! where it decided it would be hilarious to do all kinds of crazy shit with the electronics while flashing the eponymous light like a motherfucking rave. I took it to one of those Car Shit Emporium stores where they plugged my battery into an Etch-a-Sketch and told me that it was toast, but they'd be happy to sell me a new one. Hell, they'd even install it for a fee that's already built into the price of the battery free!

Ten minutes and a little over a hundred dollars later, I got into my car, backed up six feet, and started playing BLM! again. When I dragged them back outside again, they started running random diagnostics, none of  which could apparently be completed. Then they just started guessing. "I'm pretty sure that'll be a bad diode. Or, y'know, something else with your alternator. It's probably not charging. Or maybe charging too much. Whatever. Either way, it's totally not your battery. Anymore."

"Ziggy says your flux capacitor's out of dilithium crystals, Sam."

Then I took it to a real mechanic, who replaced the alternator, but also locked the (only) keys inside it when he was done, so that when I went to pick it up, I had to call AAA to send someone to help me break into my own fucking car at 11pm. Literally thirty seconds after I got off the phone with them, a random tow truck driver happens to be walking by after parking his truck there for the night, so he gets me into the car while I call AAA to cancel. Everybody wins! Except for the tow truck driver that AAA sent after they didn't fucking cancel. He lost like an hour and a half of his life. But he did get to hear me apologize my ass off for something that was so not my fault, so that's...something.

Anyway, last week, I went to start my car and...nothing. Brand fucking new battery, dead. Car Shit Emporium told me it was "charging weakly," and that it was totally a diode again, or maybe something else that wasn't their fault. That actually did turn out to be true—I got it fixed for free. After the mechanic worked on literally 25 other cars that came in after I dropped mine off. Priorities, FTW!

I'm *exactly* like Anthony Bourdain. Except with Red Baron pizza instead of sheep testicles.

Me, on Twitter over the past month or so:

• Joe T's is like the TARDIS of restaurants. #biggerontheinside
• Also, If Jack in the Box starts sounding like a good idea, you've had enough.
• Have just invented Naan Pockets. You're welcome, people who want to eat Indian food on the go. #NaanPockets
• That is full of win! And also wine, probably.
• "Pour some peas on my plate...in the name of lunch!"
• My 21st: "All the beers, please." "Yes, sir." "And my free dessert." "I'll need to see some ID for that." picardfacepalm.jpg
• Went to Mellow Mushroom and had Philosopher's Pie. Or, as it's called in America, Sorcerer's Pie.
• Gave myself hipster mouth eating pizza for lunch today. #beforeitwascool

Klout, this morning: I believe you are influential about food.

Your move, Food Network.

I'm not sure you've grasped the concept.

This conversation just happened:

Guy Calling Library: Do you take community service there?
Me: We do accept volunteers, but you have to apply through the City, and they won't allow anything court-ordered at the library. For that, they're going to make you do roadside cleanup or janitorial shit. You can find all that information on the City website.
GCL: Ah. It's just that it would be really convenient for me to do it at the library because I live in the apartments just across the parking lot. Actually, I'm looking at your building right now.

First of all, this is in no way fucking creepy, Dude Who Has Already Been Convicted Of Doing Something Illegal. Would you like me to go to the window and wave my arms or describe what I'm wearing so you can tell me that you can see what I'm doing?

Secondly, I do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of your fucking sentence. I know that it's meant to be a pleasant and rewarding experience, and this is clearly in stark contrast to the section of the Penal Code that states:

§ When an individual is convicted of an offence against the Community, the sentence shall consist of a reasonably low number of hours of pleasurable service to the Community in a comfortable location convenient to the individual's place of residence.

Had you called even an hour sooner, the City may still have had a community service opening in the Getting A Blowjob From A Supermodel department. Again, I'm very sorry. Asshat.

Infinite Improbability Drive.

So, last weekend my wife and I were out running some errands, and we hit a pothole just after turning the corner into a Shopping Clusterfuck Area. Translation: we hit a relatively small bump at about ten miles an hour on a road that was barely more than the leftover pavement between like eight parking lots.

What Happens When Most People Hit A Pothole:
Option A: Absolutely fucking nothing of any consequence. Maybe somebody in the car spills a drink or something.
Option B: They get a flat tire. It gets changed. They continue on, maybe fifteen minutes later than they'd expected to be.

What Happened When We Hit A Pothole:
The car instantly died and rolled to a halt. Several of the Impending Doom lights on the dash came on, and the odometer went blank. Not only did the car refuse to start again, it wouldn't even pretend like it was fucking trying.

After I pushed the car around the corner all by myself like a total badass with the help of a couple other people who had to stop behind us when the car died, I used my brilliant powers of observation and deduction to see if anything under the hood looked like it had fucking blown up or fallen off. Also, I mashed down all the fuses and checked the battery to see if it had come loose. Then I called AAA, who said they'd never even heard of that happening before.

We began to detect a theme in our interactions that afternoon when the tow truck showed up and the driver did exactly the same shit I had just done, then told me he'd never seen anything like this before. He also had some kind of weird Tourette's where he kept saying "GPS" all the time, but didn't actually use it. Or listen when we tried to tell him where to go.

Driver: I have GPS. I'll just use my GPS. Do you know where you're going? Because I have GPS.
Us: Turn here.
Driver: [keeps going]
Us: Um...
Driver: GPS.

After a brief tour of one of the least interesting parts of Denton, he finally dropped my car off vaguely near the shop, as it would apparently have been impossible for him to get it to the actual garage door due to the slight incline that he insisted somehow canceled out his truck's Giant Extending Ramp. Instead, a mechanic had to push it the rest of the way. When he had accomplished that, he called us back and showed us this:

"Have you had any work done recently?"
"Um, an oil change and an alignment."
""That doesn't make any damn sense. It didn't fall up."

It turned out that the bolt wasn't even from my car, so apparently what happened was this:

Somehow, a random bolt fell into my engine and probably got lodged in there somewhere. Then we hit a pothole, which caused the bolt to bounce around in exactly the right way that it connected the starter to something else metal, creating a short circuit that temporarily fried the computer and pissed off the anti-theft system so much that the whole thing refused to function until it was reprogrammed. At an improbability factor, I might add, of 2²⁶⁷⁷⁰⁹ to 1 against.

Except, if you're me, probability is a fucked-up algorithm that takes the normal laws of math and science and twists them into some hideous perversion that almost guarantees that the weirdest shit in the universe will always happen to me, while the probability that anything else will happen is often inversely proportional to how much I want or need it to.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a mechanic say "I've never seen this happen before,"
I could probably buy a new car. Two weeks later, it would burn up in the driveway because it
was landed on by a bald eagle that was on fire after being struck by lightning in midair.

Like the time that what I swear must have been an albatross bombed my windshield while I was driving down the road at 55 mph, perfectly illustrating the week I had been having.

Or the time someone decided to back out of a parking spot without looking and didn't even stop when I laid on the horn, so I threw my car into reverse and peeled out backwards, and somehow they only hit my front license plate. From the side.

Or the time my gas pedal got stuck at about 20 mph a few months after I bought my car.

Or the time my gas gauge got stuck at half a tank, and suddenly dropped down to empty at the exact moment I got too far into the middle of nowhere to make it to a gas station.

Or the time it was so fucking cold that I had half a tank of gas, but most of it actually fucking froze, and I got stuck in the middle of nowhere and my brother had to bring me some HEET to fucking thaw the rest of it out.

Or the time I got the oil changed in my wife's car and a few days later the oil filter fell the fuck off while she was driving.

Seriously, this is my life, all the time. I can't even make this kind of shit up.

America, fuck yeah!

So, Amazon's appstore has just offered me a spectacular deal in honor of America's independence:

What better way to celebrate America than by playing a bastardization of the national game of China?

I've also learned that patriotism is inherently tied to buying any of the following items, plus many more:

• New or used cars
• Appliances
• Furniture
• Shitty, shitty beer

Meanwhile, in Texas, today is the one day out of the whole fucking year that it's OK to admit we're part of America. Mostly, it's an excuse to mix alcohol and blowing shit up in the back yard, which is actually just regularly scheduled programming about 10 months out of the year here.

Anyway, Happy Independence Day, Americans! Remember to count your fingers before and after.

To Canada, specifically: I apologize for the noise. We'll try to keep it down. Also, your planning this year was much better than ours. At least you put your holiday on a weekend and not a fucking Wednesday.

To the rest of the world: Um, it's Wednesday, so I guess the week's about half over.

ASSHAT.

Dear Facebook:

You are an asshat. In fact, having attained Asshat Level 9, you have cracked into the Hipsters-Would-Loudly-Sigh-And-Recall-Your-Early-Days-If-They-Weren't-All-Still-Using-Myspace Tier of Social Media Asshattery. Roughly 80% of your interface is a failure pile of shit I don't want, but can't move, hide, or otherwise get rid of. I get that you can't control what other people post, so there will always be some amount of wankery, but for the love of God, please just give me the option to add myself to some kind of "No Wankery" list for all of the following bullshit:

Ask a Question: I thought that this was just a dipshit fad to go along with "hit 'share' if you agree/remember/are an asshat," but apparently it's a Real Fucking Thing. There's only one question that needs to be here: "Who gives a shit?" And only one answer to choose: "Not me." Please change this into a button that borks your entire computer.

A Million Fucking Ads: This is a whole pile of bullshit I don't care about. Over the course of several years, you've managed to show me a grand total of one fucking thing I actually cared about, and then I couldn't even go, so even that kind of makes you an asshole. Every time you show me one of these, I mark it as offensive.

Ad Manager: I don't have any fucking ads. I don't want any fucking ads. But apparently I need a fucking ad manager to remind me that I could always change my mind and choose to give you a pile of money to irritate other people with all my shit that they don't fucking care about.

Apps and Games: Apparently it was somewhat misleading when the only option that appeared when you clicked "remove" was "add to favorites," so I guess you changed that to "edit," but somehow "add to favorites" is still the only thing I can do. It's incredibly important and convenient to me that I be given no option other than to make something that I don't want to see in the first place even more visible.

Fucking App Requests: I've blocked literally 200 different fucking apps and games I've gotten requests for. What in the name of fuck makes you think I want this here?

Pokes: Seriously, why the fuck does this still exist? Fuck this forever.

Stalker Timeline: I thought the regular timeline was supposed to be a feed of all the shit my friends were doing. Apparently I also need a separate feed so I can follow Every. Single. Click. It's like the asshole who gets Twitter and posts about literally everything they do, from washing the dishes to taking a shit. NO ONE FUCKING CARES. At least I can hide this bullshit.

Top Stories vs. Most Recent: Who the fuck are you to decide what's most important to me? Why is it all stupid shit like "I put something in the microwave for dinner" that goes to the top of this list? For all the personal information you collect about everybody, you don't seem to know shit about what any of us actually care about.

Trending Videos/Articles: First of all, fuck you and every news site that forces me to "like" an article in order to read past the jump. This is an unholy cross between journalistic whoring and chain statuses. It's like a Ponzi scheme, but for news. Secondly, you tell me every fucking time somebody I know reads an article or watches a video. Why in the name of fuck would I need you to also tell me that a lot of people had read that article or watch that video? This is the online equivalent of someone saying "oh, wow, you're really sunburned!" And then slapping it.

Asshat Level: 9

Dear Twitter:

You're only a little bit of an asshat. Your Asshat Level is just 3—a mere third of the colossal wankery Facebook is putting up. It's like you're not even trying. Here's what you have managed:

Promoted Trends: If you have to pay to get it on there, it's not fucking trending; it's a goddamn commercial. It's like if my friends and I just saw The Avengers, and we're all talking about it, and then all of a sudden one of us screams "KOTEX!" for no fucking reason. Actually, no, because that would be hilarious. It's like if we were all talking about The Avengers, and then one of us tried to sell everybody else car insurance.

Promoted Tweets: Same fucking thing. This is the same kind of dickery you find scrawled inside bathroom stalls, except it's like you kicked in the door to my house and spray-painted "← FAG" next to a picture of me, and then when I called the police, they just said "well, you can either clean it off, if you're sure that's what you want to do, or you can take a picture and share it with all your friends!" Fuck that. I want you to make it fucking stop. Now.

Who to Follow: "Remember that one time when it was 107° out and you said "seriously, fuck this heat?" Well LeBron James plays for the Miami Heat, and we think you would totally give a shit about whatever asinine bullshit he has to say. Also, a friend of a friend of a friend is following one of their friends, so we're sure you care about that, too. Also, Kevin Bacon." Stop telling me what to do, you presumptuous prick.

Asshat Level: 3