The Hitchhiker's Guide to Minnesota.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Midwestern United States lies a largely unregarded purple state whose Scandinavian-descended life forms are so amazingly nice that they still think helping every potentially-axe-wielding stranger they encounter on the side of the road is a pretty neat idea.

One Thursday, a boy driving on his own in the dead of winter suddenly realized that something was going wrong with the very large—and very borrowed—vehicle he was driving. Sadly, before he could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and he was nearly lost for ever.

This is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

***

It was a long time ago. Ancient history. It was so long ago that, when it happened, I didn't tweet about it or post anything on Facebook or tumblr because they didn't exist. Even if I had wanted to blog about it, I would have had to wait until I got home because that's where the Internet was. I didn't have a smartphone, because those hadn't been invented, either. Cell phones had been invented, but they were roughly the size and weight of a brick and got the same reception as one in any place with a population under a million people, which was very much where I was at the time. And, at any rate, I didn't have one of those, either.

What I did have was a gigantic SUV that I was borrowing from my girlfriend's stepfather. I had recently used this to travel the 400 miles between the town I grew up in, where I had just spent Christmas with my family, and the college I no longer attended in northeastern Iowa. I had done this for two reasons: first, because they returned from the holiday a few days earlier than the school to which I had transferred (largely because it was attended by the girl I was seeing at the time) did; and secondly, because although I had spent the majority of my two years at the former school waiting by the phone to talk to the girl I was seeing at the time, talking to the girl I was seeing at the time, and then feeling depressed when I had to get off the phone with the girl I was seeing at the time, I had still somehow managed to stumble into a few decent friendships, and I wanted to visit.

That piece went fine; there was no catastrophe there, except possibly the fact that the only beer anybody had was Miller Lite, and the resulting catch-22 of needing to be drunk already in order to be able to tolerate it enough to drink the amount necessary to get drunk in the first place. The actual catastrophe was waiting somewhere along the 350-mile stretch of road that lay between my former college and my current one. More specifically, it was waiting just outside of Austin, Minnesota, which is the birthplace of a large number of things, including my friend Jess, whom I like, and Spam, which I rather don't.

The gigantic vessel I was piloting, like most things from America, was powered by explosions and had a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, so it wasn't terribly long before I had to stop for gas. Because commerce is one of the most powerful driving forces of the Universe, this happened approximately three minutes before the impending catastrophe decided to stop impending and start doing Very Bad Things inside the most expensive part of the vehicle it could find. This happened to be the transmission, which I worked out rather quickly when I got back onto the Interstate, attempted to return to the proper speed, and discovered that it had suddenly decided that second gear was the only way to go, and would hear nothing of first, third, or fourth. Accordingly, the maximum speed available to me suddenly dropped to thirty miles an hour, which seemed to upset approximately everyone who came up behind me doing seventy-five, even through most of them were from Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, in case I hadn't got the first hint, it began to lurch about violently every few seconds.

In a brilliant synopsis of the overall situation, I shouted "Fuck!" a number of times before pulling over to the side of the road and activating my vehicle's short-range distress beacon (which, in that part of the country, is better known as "raising the hood"). The temperature outside was slightly above average for early January in Minnesota, hovering around six degrees Kelvin, so I stood next to the beacon to signal that I had not, in fact, been rescued yet. Meanwhile, in an apparent effort to keep warm, time compressed itself so that several weeks passed between each vehicle that went whooshing by, which, in most automotive dialects, translates to a hearty "fuck you," but in the Minnesotan dialect, is accompanied by a small one-finger wave from the steering wheel and translates more accurately as "I'd really like to stop and pick you up, but unfortunately I'm on my way to a lutefisk supper/potluck and my car is entirely full of my relatives and possibly also a hotdish, so I'm very sorry, but would you accept a rain check?"

Nothing happened for a long time. After that, nothing continued to happen, but more urgently, and at a lower temperature. Eventually, it got tired of hanging out on the side of the road and went off to happen somewhere else, which, in all likelihood, was somewhere in North Dakota. It was precisely at this moment that someone finally saw the distress beacon, wasn't transporting their entire family to any fish-gelatin-based church fundraisers, and stopped to help.

As my rescue vehicle slowed to a halt, a million warnings, news stories, and horror films about the dangers of hitchhiking flashed through my mind, were completely ignored, and fell right out of my head. Instead, my attention was focused on a different problem: I couldn't for the life of me figure out why, of all the vehicles in Minnesota—a number that, although perhaps insignificant next to the quantity in, say, New York or Los Angeles, was still, overall, a respectable total—this was the one that had chosen to stop. It was tall and yellow, with the name of a school district painted on its side, yet it was only about half as long as it seemed that it should have been. I was still puzzling over this when the doors opened, and then, just as the driver looked out at me and said "car trouble, eh?" my mind finally finished registering that I was really, truly, about to hitchhike...on the fucking short bus.

There are a number of events in life whose sole purpose in occurring seems to be part of some bizarre practical joke the Universe has decided to play on you, and this qualified in every possible way. I assume that the next thing that happened was that the driver offered to give me a ride to a mechanic's shop in the next town and then did so, but honestly, the details here go a bit fuzzy because I suddenly noticed that, not only was I hitchhiking on the short bus, but that I was not its only passenger. There was also a boy, roughly ten years old. In a wheelchair. Wearing a helmet. At that point, all the rational bits of my brain came to the realization that their services were no longer needed, and promptly passed out.

When they came around again, I was once again standing next to my disabled vehicle, but this time there was a tow truck parked immediately in front of it, and its driver was looking my engine over. He pulled out the dipstick and examined it, which led to the following conversation:

"Well, shit."
"What's wrong?"
"It's your transmission."
"Well, yes, I had guessed as much. What's wrong with it?"
"No, this"—he held up the dipstick and indicated the shards of metal clinging to it—"is your transmission."
"Oh."

When we arrived back at the mechanic's shop, I was more than a little surprised to find that the bus driver was there waiting for me. He offered me the use of his cell phone to call my girlfriend and ask her to pick me up in Worthington, which was about two hours of awkward silence in a car with a complete stranger and his teenage daughter on their way to her high school volleyball game farther down the road. I was something less than completely comfortable leaving a number of my possessions behind, given that they were guarded by nothing more than a few locked doors and the integrity of a group of strangers who made a living by dismantling automobiles, but by this point, I had resigned myself to the fact that whatever was going to happen had very little regard for my feelings on the matter, and that it was a waste of time and energy to put up any sort of a fight. When I returned to retrieve the rest of my things, I discovered that, in addition to the bit about picking up strangers while driving unconventional vehicles, "Minnesota Nice" also meant that no one in town even thought of breaking into the out-of-town vehicle sitting unguarded outside for a week. As for the borrowed colossus, it was towed back home and summarily sold for parts, which had apparently been the plan for it all along, until it had been offered to me.

The next time I went home, I bought my first cell phone. It cost twenty dollars and did nothing but send and receive calls and text messages, which everyone I knew was reluctant to use. I understand if this is the one bit of the story you simply cannot bring yourself to believe. I agree; it's completely ridiculous.

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Some days are just assholes. By the time you get out of bed, they've already been awake for hours, coming up with ways to be a dick to you. Especially Thursdays. It's like their entire purpose is to make goddamn sure you don't take Friday for granted. Last Thursday was one of them. It started out like every other day, with the strident noises at ass o'clock in the morning.

Every. Fucking. Day.

Then some boring shit happened. I took a shower and got dressed. While I was doing that, apparently Thursday went to hide in the kitchen and waited to jump out and punch me in the face.

The last thing I usually do before leaving for work is put out some food for the feral cat colony we inherited when we moved into our house. Our own cats are obsessed with the food that we give to the ferals, but one of them can't eat it because she has a "sensitive stomach," so she can only handle Science Diet Food For Cats With Expensive-Ass Digestive Conditions. The other one will try to eat literally anything she can get into her mouth (seriously, anything—even shit like cardboard). They had already managed to tear a hole in the bag by reaching under the laundry room door. When I went to carefully pick up the bag so it wouldn't spill, the Gobbler jumped up and tore the hole wide the fuck open.

It wasn't actually the Russian
Blue that tore the bag, but I can't
fucking draw the caliby. It was
totally a team effort anyway.

Then, while I was distracted by the Purina version of Exxon Valdez (for those of you under 30, that was Deepwater Horizon, but with a boat), my lunch went into stealth mode, or maybe it found an invisibility cloak. I don't know, but I totally forgot to grab it before going into White Rabbit Mode and running out the door shouting "I'm late!" to no one in particular.

In all fairness, it may have just been hiding from the Vader spatula.

Of course, I didn't realize it until I was almost all the way to work, so there was nothing I could do about it except hope that it hadn't gone bad by the time my wife went home for lunch.

Yes, my seatbelt is actually wider than my body. Safety first, motherfucker.

And then when I got to work, I was all pissed about forgetting my lunch, so I forgot to grab my keys and badge and had to go all the way back up to the third level of the parking garage to get them. When I finally got into the building, there were notes plastered all over the place that said that IT had done some kind of upgrade the night before and now basically nothing worked.

The note basically said "here are all the things that aren't
working today. It actually listed "Etc." as a bullet point.
Then it listed one or two more things after that, because
they don't know what "etc." means. Or "upgrade," apparently.

For some unfathomable reason, we still opened. After that, I spent pretty much the entire rest of the day pretending to be Scotty from Star Trek. Every time someone asked me for something, I was all "Ah cannae do that, Captain!" It probably helped that I was also wearing this button:

I'm not entirely certain whose reflection that is on the left, but
my money's on either the Grim Reaper or Emperor Palpatine.

It was even better since our catalog is actually called Enterprise, but probably you don't care because you don't work here. If you did, you wouldn't be reading this right now because you'd be too busy dealing with whatever asinine bullshit this Thursday was trying to pull.

Seriously, fuck Thursdays.

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.

DON'T PANIC.

So today is Towel Day. If you don't know what that's all about, I suggest you go and read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Seriously. It's only like 200 pages. I'll wait. Otherwise, this won't make a whole lot of sense, and it's slightly more serious than funny today, so this whole thing may just end up getting lost on you. At the very least, read this (from the third chapter of the book):

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
     A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
     More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker may have accidentally "lost." What the strag will think is that any man that can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
     Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

I first picked up a copy of HHGG at the age of twelve. It was a small stroke of luck that I even came across it in the first place. It had been cleverly hidden away in the A section of the fiction area of my school library which, in turn, had been even more cleverly hidden away in a town of 100 people in North Dakota. (Actually, it was the Omnibus Edition of the trilogy that was published about a year before "The Hitchhiker's Trilogy" became a misnomer. FYI, and such.) The cover bore a cartoonish planet with a wide mouth and lolling tongue. This planet was juggling three similar planets. Ten years later, a face like this one (except with eyes) would come to be known as the Jake Face, and would become the exclusive facial expression used in pictures of me.

Apparently I wear that hat a lot. And that jacket.

The book had only been checked out once or twice before, but I would go on to add my name to its card (remember those?) several times before I graduated. I started reading it immediately, and had already finished the first chapter before I even reached the desk to check it out. My initial impression was that this may have been the single greatest combination of words ever assembles. As I progressed through the book, I would discover that this may have been an understatement.

I remember thinking—because I was twelve and American—that the error in Ford Prefect's attempt at adopting an inconspicuous name was merely orthographic in nature, and that misspelling "Perfect" was simply an entertaining irony. At some point not long after this, I read in the introduction that the name was actually a mistake on his part regarding the dominant species on the planet, and suddenly I began to understand that this was a book I was going to be reading very many times. It's the first book I remember reading in which I was not only being told a story, but also learning a lot about How To Write. Before that, most of what I'd read took itself far too seriously. Douglas Adams was the first author to show me it didn't always have to be that way. He somehow managed to blend Telling The Truth and Making Shit Up in a way that was funnier than anything I'd ever read before (or since), but also incredibly intelligent. He was one of my very first literary influences.

In 2001, at the age of 49, he joined my ever-growing list of authors whom I deeply regret having the misfortune of never being able to meet in person. I was just about to finish the first year of a Bachelor's degree in English at the time. $20,000 of higher education had equipped me with the ability to go "oh, shit" and feel a deep sense of loss, which is as good a tribute as any of us who Make Shit Up can hope for—that it meant something to someone, even someone we never met. Especially someone we never met. Two weeks later, some people who were not me created a holiday to commemorate his life and his work. That's Towel Day. That's today. That's why I spent the past two nights making this:

Just the towel. I didn't make the book. That was Douglas Adams.
Honestly, have you been paying any attention at all?

Also, I think I just made it through a whole post without saying "fuck." Except for there. Fuck.

Anyway, happy Towel Day.