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.

Something clever about Easter.

Conversation between me and my wife today:

Me: Some horrible pun about the road being tired because probably there was a tire laying in it.
Her: Maybe it had too much ham and candy.
Me: Now I have Marcy Playground in my head.
Her: God, that's horrible!
Both of us, singing: "I smell ham and candy..."

Yeah, this is what we're like, pretty much all of the time. It's awesome.

Also, if you don't follow me on Twitter, you missed this one the other day:

Me: Bah!
Coworker: Humbug?
Me: Nah. Wrong Jesus holiday.
Her: I don't know any ending for 'bah' that goes with Easter.
Me: ...Rabbas?
Her: ...
Her: .....
Her: ..........
Her: You win.

Oh, by the way, this totally isn't a real post, but you can always just read the one I wrote last Easter.

Easter: You're doing it wrong.

So, today is Easter, which is all about chocolate and jellybeans one of two days a year you go to church not Christmas.

To help you understand some of the differences between these two holidays, I've put together this half-assed handy guide.

AWARENESS

We spend months and months preparing for Christmas, but Easter sneaks up on us every fucking year.

This is how you find out it's Christmas:

October 31:
While staggering walking down the street dressed as a Slutty Sexy Something-or-Other, you glance in a store window and see a fiber-optic tree and some fake snow, which you promptly forget about once you black out.

November 1:
The faint memory of an unnamed horror gnaws at the back of your mind until you recover from your hangover and venture out, only to hear Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer playing in the mall.

Thanksgiving Day:
FOOD COMA. Today is the official beginning of the winter wealthfest holiday season. Probably, you put up your huge fuckoff cat toy Christmas tree this evening. Also, the Führer of the Socialist Liberals for Satan Party declares the War on Christmas (again).

The Day After Thanksgiving:
Today is the biggest fucking spend-orgy in the world. It's called Black Friday because you wake up in total darkness to savesaveSAVE on GREAT DEALS! and because of the black coffee you need to drink to drag your ass out of bed early enough to win at materialism. For the entire rest of the fucking year, you will hear so much Christmas music that you will actually begin to resent joy.

December 1:
You get an Advent calendar—one of those things with 25 little doors that's supposed to teach you Patience and help you count down to Christmas through cheap, shitty chocolate—and you open the door labeled "1."

December 2:
You tell Patience to go fuck itself and open doors 2-25 and gorge yourself on cheap, shitty chocolate. You don't need help counting down to Christmas because from here on out, your TV will tell you how many shopping days you've got left. Every. Fucking. Day.

December 24:
All regular TV programming is cancelled and replaced with a million last-minute shopping reminders that say ZOMGWALMARTAMAZONBESTBUYMACY'SFORTHELOVEOFGODBUYMORESHIT! At 6pm, you switch to TBS and watch A Christmas Story TWELVE TIMES IN A ROW!!!

December 25:
You wake up and distribute an entire The Price Is Right showcase to everyone in your house, just to prove you totally care more about them than other people do celebrate the birth of the Savior. YOU WIN AT CHRISTMAS! Probably, somebody mentions Jesus, and the name sounds vaguely familiar.

Usually, you find out it's Easter when you have this phone conversation on a Saturday evening:

Relative: So we'll be over after church tomorrow, probably around twelve-thirty, one o'clock.
You: ...the fuck for?
Relative: Easter. You know, ham. Chocolate eggs.
You: Um, shit.

Then you spend the next twelve hours frantically cleaning your house, because you haven't done it since they came over for Christmas.

THE PARTY

Unless I misunderstood, the whole point of Christianity was that Jesus came here as a human, tried to teach us not to be selfish douchetards, and then sacrificed himself to save our sorry asses. Without Easter, Christmas means exactly nothing. It's like if Superman ended as soon as he reached Earth. Nobody gets saved from anything, he just fucking shows up and then the credits roll. There's a guaranteed fucking Oscar winner.

It's like football fans having a huge party to kick off the season, with like 30 kegs of beer and celebrities and all that food that Jesus told us to share with the poor. Everybody's screaming and cheering and spraying champagne all over. Somebody throws Gatorade on the Pope. And your team hasn't even played one fucking game yet. It's the beginning of the season; nothing's happened yet. You're not even in the stadium. You're still tailgating. That's Christmas in America, every year.

Then, a few months later, it's the Super Bowl. You've played you ass off and fought your way through the playoffs. In the first quarter of the game, it's that scene with Lawrence Taylor and Joe Theisman, and you know it's fucking over. Your star quarterback will never even walk again. But then, somehow, right at the two-minute warning, he strides back onto the field and plows through everyone by himself to win the Super Bowl. This is what the whole season was for, and you were in the kitchen getting another beer. You're like "what happened? I only watch this for the commercials. We won? Whatever, yeah, that's great, I guess. Man, did you see that one with the Vader kid? That was awesome!" That's how we celebrate Easter.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

The only thing that makes sense about this is that you can market the shit out of Christmas. We've latched onto this one throwaway line in the story about gifts, and it's exploded completely out of control. We've got advertisements like "Where did the Wise Men get their gifts? Well, if they were really wise men, they came to Macy's After Thanksgiving Sale for our fantastic Doorbuster specials! First hundred customers get a bag of myrrh and an MP3 player! Doors open 3 B.C. Don't forget, if you don't buy, Jesus will cry."

But you can't market Easter, because it's a botched assassination attempt. It's like celebrating John Wilkes Booth Day or Lee Harvey Oswald Day. So instead, we've just got pastel eggs and chocolate rabbits, because that was the best sales pitch anyone could come up with.

Anyway, happy Easter. Or if you don't celebrate Easter, then at least maybe you don't have to work today.

Apocalypse Not.

If you’re reading this, you didn’t get raptured yesterday. Again. Me neither. Actually, I don’t know anybody who did, which probably says something about the people I hang out with.

You may remember not getting raptured in May as well. It's like getting picked last in gym class all over again, but instead of playing right field in kickball, you have to fight zombies and live in that Metallica song.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook (or if you didn't in May), you missed what was probably one of my most active social media days in quite a while. I’ll graciously recap to make it look like I put some effort into this post.

No traffic on my way to work this morning. Could have been due to Rapture. Was actually because it was 8AM on a Saturday.

Although, I saw exactly zero cars with Jesus fish in 40 miles in a Bible Belt state, so maybe.

Maybe the Rapture happened, but we’re all such assholes that everyone’s still here.

Seriously, how did Tim LaHaye write like 15 books about this? This is the most boring Rapture ever.

Just after midnight:

...From that, I conclude that God Almighty is not heavily into Numerology.

The last one is from the next morning:

I have a strong suspicion that if you turned on MTV today, you’d see Harold Camping pull off a mask to reveal that he’s Ashton Kutcher.

He did admit a couple days later that mistakes were made, but thank you for donating your entire life savings to my retirement fund this righteous cause and no you can't have it back because the real Rapture is actually October 21st, so I totally still need it. But in a fantastic cosmic coincidence, May 21st was still significant to the Apocalypse. Apparently it wasn't the Rapture, just Judgment Day. It was also completely invisible, which is why you didn't see Arnold Schwarzenegger or Robert Patrick. God just quietly called Santa and asked to borrow his naughty and nice lists so he would know who to save when he destroyed the universe yesterday.

I really wish I could track down all those people in high school who had all that crap that said “In case of Rapture, you can have my shirt/car/other material possessions” and put in a claim for it. I’d be like “dude, you’re still here? What happened?” And they’d be all embarrassed because they realized that their shirt probably should have said “Arrogant Fuck” or something. I’d also point out that they probably didn’t get picked just because they were wearing that shirt, because if you need to wear a t-shirt to prove something about yourself, it's probably not true anyway.

On a related note, Jesus has mutated from a tasteful fish icon into a giant, crappy, Photoshopped murder shark. I'm pretty sure this is exactly how the Apocalypse was supposed to happen.

You're gonna need a bigger crucifix.

UPDATED: You're welcome, Internet.

So, I warned you the other day that I had been planning to do this, and today I did it. I know. I'm surprised, too.

I've been quietly claiming little bits of the interwebs for myself lately, and now I'm forcing them upon sharing them with you! I'd meant to do this last week, but didn't. If you've stopped by since last Saturday, you already know that story.

Here's what you've been missing:

I have a Pinterest now. I've been collecting awesome stuff. You're welcome.
http://pinterest.com/snark/this-stuff-is-made-of-awesome/

Also, Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/causticsnark/

And stuff that has nothing to do with me, but that you should check out anyway.
The Rejection of Anne Frank. This is exactly how it would happen today.
Reasoning with Vampires. It's really hard to go wrong when you're making fun of Twilight.
Vampire Moths. It's moderately terrifying until you realize they're basically just giant mosquitoes.

In case you haven't heard, the Rapturepocalypsequake happens again today, so you can probably expect to see more of this. Also, lots of recycled dinosaur jokes and REM lyrics. In case of Rapture, you can have this blog. Not because I expect to go, but because if it does happen, I'll be too busy dealing with the zombies and figuring out how to find food to update it. Plus, it probably wouldn't exist anymore anyway because if God really wanted to destroy the world, He'd probably start by shutting down the Internet. In the event that doesn't happen, I'll be back tomorrow.

Blas for everybody in the room.

So, the other day, I was at home, cleaning and packing up the living room. I threw on Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill for some background noise. Also because it's awesome and hilarious and reminds me of how I said like three years ago that I was going to write some material and actually do stand-up, even once, ever. Also, we're moving. Surprise!

There's a bit right in the middle where Eddie is going on about Christmas and Easter. This is where I was when, for maybe the fifth time in the two years we've lived there, there was a knock at the door. Without pausing or muting the TV, I got up to see who it was. For once, it wasn't a locked out neighbor. Or a different locked out neighbor. It was an arbitrary middle-aged Korean couple.

I'm pretty sure the conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Can I help you?
Them: Hello! We're from the Church of Something I Wasn't Listening To, and we've come to bring you a special message about God.
Eddie: Forget peace on earth, I don't care.
Me: Um, ok.
Them: Something about God. Or Jesus, maybe. Either way, it's very special. And it's in the Bible. Can we come in and tell you more about it?
Me: This may not be the best time.
Them: Oh, are you busy?
Eddie: ...squadron of Spitfires, for fuck's sake!
Me: Yes, my living room is full of boxes. And blasphemy.

Actually, some of that may be completely made up slightly paraphrased. You didn't come here for hard news, anyway. I did feel sort of bad because they were so cheerful and not creepy. Except, y'know, for the trying to talk your way into total strangers' houses bit. There's probably a line of creepiness just on the other side of that.

I tried to get an owl to deliver this, but they *so* don't get the Internet.

Dear All of Texas, But Mostly Tarrant County:

If you have a car, you can be a wizard! There's a magic wand attached to the left side of your steering wheel. If you wave it, you can create a magical light show! If you wave it downward, flashing lights will appear on the left side of your car. The incantation for this spell is I'm going to turn left. If you wave it upward, they'll appear on the right side of your car (that spell is I'm going to turn right). You don't have to say the spells out loud when you wave the wand, but you can if you need to. Here's a picture of the spellbook I found them in:

It's totally the same as Hogwarts.

It doesn't matter what kind of vehicle you have, they all have this magic. Even the ones made in Texas.

P.S. If you don't believe in magic because it's evil, it's totally not a magic wand; it's a Satan repeller. But you still have to use it because it's the rules and you go to hell if you don't.

This is from Leviticus, probably.