Fitting attire for when the rubber hits the road

Well I found out what was making my car shake it, shake it, shake it like a polaroid picture… I promise never to intentionally put the words to a Black Eyed Peas song in my blog ever again.

Anyway, getting back on track, let’s get this story started in here… oops I did it again. Oh no. Now I’ve quoted Black Eyed Peas twice and Britney once. I’m not sure I can go any lower. Although I haven’t yet stooped to mentioning nudie runs. Although I guess now I have. Bugger.

And to think I took two minutes coming up with those Black Eyed Peas jokes. That’s time I’ll never ever get back. But again, I digress. Tonight was a significant milestone in my development as a man. Actually there were two milestones today. And a kilometre sign. Let’s drag this blog into the metric era. Firstly, in a moment of post State of Origin apathy I realised that my desire to rub in such a crushing one-point victory just wasn’t there. I realised in that instant that at some point in the last few months or years I’d discovered that there was more to life than sport. Once again I blame girls for this – everything that goes wrong in my (or anyone else’s) life is directly attributable to members of the opposite sex.

The second kilometre sign moment came tonight when I discovered what was wrong with my car. I was travelling down a road (not the road less travelled, or the road to nowhere, or one of the roads that a man must walk down before you can call him a man… actually maybe it was one of those – that’s the whole point) at a reasonable pace (and by reasonable I mean the speed limit) when my car made a funny clunk sound and started bouncing rather than shaking. “Ahh,” I thought to myself, “I’ve just blown a tyre/tire/tier/rubber wheel thing/the round thing on the bottom of my car. So I pulled over and examined the damage. I’m quite impressed. It was pretty blown. I managed to pull over in the vicinity of a streetlight but just to be sure I responsibly put my hazard lights on. Unfortunately the crevice thing that my spare tyre sits in is under a plank of wood. The plank of wood obscures the light in the boot when it is raised so it took me a while to unscrew the spare tyre and find all the pieces of the jack, but once I got there it was fine.

At this point I called Dad – just to make sure that I wasn’t going to break/brake my car by doing anything stupid. It turns out my theories were correct. Changing a tyre is as easy as umm, doing something similar. I was back on the road in no time and suitably covered in a combination of grease, dirt and some other unidentified pollutant.

I should point out that in my moment of distress – when I thought “ohh crap I’m doing 80 and my tyre just blew” (editors note: I probably actually said something slightly different out loud but the meaning is essentially the same, and this is slightly more appropriate) I was actually following directly behind one of the lovely girls from church – who it turns out saw me pull over and just kept driving. What a shame – I missed out on such a great opportunity to literally flex my manliness muscles – it’s probably not a bad thing that she kept going. She tells me she’s an expert tyre changer and has managed to complete the process in under 15 minutes. I think I managed in a respectable 25ish – a good portion of that was spent ferreting around in the boot of my car.

So now I’ve changed a tyre. I’m all manly and stuff. Now when I sing in the car (in my extra deep voice) i don’t do that funny wavering sound that you make when you’re going over a cattle grid in a car and you go “ERR-RR-RRR-RR”…you get the point. If you don’t maybe you should find a cattle grid and try it. It’s kind of like that Red Indian (Native American) warcry you make when you bounce your hand up and down on your mouth while going “OOO-WAA-WAA-WAA”… or maybe that’s just me.