A Urinal, A Bat, A Tomkitten, and A Bible

That sums up my morning. Sort of. It's really just to lure you in so you'll read the goings-on of my morning at the Mazda dealership waiting room.

Last week Jason and I got our new car - a 2002 Mazda Protege 5. It is a SWEET little car. It's an itty bitty station wagon (the preferred nomenclature is "sport wagon") that zips around curves like nobody's business. And around here, curves there are a-plenty.

Tennessee is divided into three geographic regions which just so happen to coincide with three distinct socio-cultural regions. First there's West Tennessee, with vast, ugly, boring, flat areas of farmland. Memphis is the big city in this region, home of the blues (ever heard of Beale Street?) and, of course, the shag carpets in the jungle room of Graceland, Elvis's not-so-humble former abode. The next region is Middle Tennessee, with large rolling hills that get bigger as you head east. Nashville is the big city in this region, home to most of Tennessee's cultural institutions. Fine art museums, a thriving country music industry, a symphony orchestra, and professional sports teams all have homes here. This is where Jason and I live. With all of the rolling hills comes incredibly curvy roads, and my little Mazda handles the curves like a champ. The last region of the state is East Tennessee, at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. And, as one would guess, it's the hilliest part of the state. The mountains aren't the same snow capped rocky monstrosities one might see in Colorado or Switzerland, because they are incredibly old mountains, what you might call "dying mountains". The tops of the mountains have eroded and thus they have gotten smaller over time. Oh, did I say my new car drives really well, especially around curves? Umm, anyway.. Knoxville is the biggest city in the East Tennessee region, home to bad drivers, assholes, and The University of Tennessee. I think they have a football team or something.

Jeez, I went through an entire geography lesson just so I could prove the point that my new car KICKS ASS? Well, yeah.

But one thing about it didn't kick ass. When we test drove it at the dealership, there was an infrequent rattle from the undercarriage. The dealer said if we bought the car they would fix the problem, no charge. And that all cars sold there get a free detail cleaning. So I went today to make sure they would stick to their word. I sat in the little waiting area where I graded student work for a while, drank coffee, and chatted with some fellow waitees. When Jason and I had purchased the car last week, I noticed that all of the piped in music at the dealership was Christian. Really bad soft rock songs, with lyrics like, "Praise him, my saviour, let's live our lives through him" and stuff. (And yes, I know, the "h" in "him" should be capitalized, but I'm not gonna do it.) The music sounded like any soft rock, like a Bryan Adams ballad or even an Eagles tune. If I hadn't paid attention to the lyrics, I wouldn't have known. And so today while I was sitting in the waiting area, I'm hearing the same soft poppy crap, with incredibly obvious Christian lyrics. It was a radio station called "The Fish." Ya know how people drive around with fish symbols on the backs of their cars? And some have "Darwin" in them, with little legs? And some have shark fins? Yeah, so the fish is a Christian symbol, if you aren't aware of the outside world enough to know. And if you didn't know that, you've really got to get away from your computer.

So somebody comes in and turns on the waiting room TV. It's on MSNBC, which is all news headline snippet stories. I sat there from 8:30am til noon, and there was only ONE news story that was pursued with any fervence whatsoever. And it was about freakin' Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and their new baby whose name is Suri which means "rose" in Persian and "princess" in Hebrew and she weighed 7 pounds and was 20 inches long and Tom and Katie (or "Tomkat", as some obnoxious PR person so cleverly developed in the vein of "Benifer" and "Brangelina") are at home and doing fine and no one knows if she had a silent birth and GOOD LORD!!! I heard this same crap over and OVER and OOVVVEEEERRRRR for freakin' three hours. Every once in a while they'd say something about some Duke Univeristy rape investigation, then interject a Q&A interview about Scientology with a speculative non-Scientologist journalist.

What has this country come to? Is THIS breaking news? I remember, back in my day, before the internet, that a "Breaking" story meant some bad shit had just gone down somewhere and people were probably dead. Now "Breaking" news is just whatever comes off the fax machine. There's one good thing about this celebrity fixation with which our country is so engrossed -- the state of the world must not be that bad, because hearing about some actor's kid being born isn't the same thing as a hostage crisis or plane crash. But then the logical part of me says that hostage crises and plane crashes and bad things ARE happening all the time, but our country has its priorities so mixed up that we (as a culture) would rather fixate on little Suri Holmes Cruise than gritty and painful real life.

After the second hour of this news story, I had run out of lead for my pencil, and I couldn't find a pencil to borrow - everyone had only pens. And the student work I was grading needed to be graded in pencil. So I started scoping the room for reading material. All they had were some Mazda maintenance manuals, a local auction newsletter with houses and other merchandise for sale, parenting magazines, and Holy Bibles. There was a particularly worn one right beside my chair. But it didn't have pretty pictures so I stayed away. Luckily all the other waitees left and I jumped up and changed the TV channel. Of course there was nothing on, but I did find Celebrity Poker Showdown, so I could learn how not to play.

They finally came and got me, and told me that the rattle sound under my car was the muffler - the one that's on there is not the original, and it was slightly too big, so there was a lip that was hitting something every time I accelerated from a complete stop. They fixed the problem, and did a full inspection, got a stuck seatbelt unstuck from under the rear seat, and detailed my car -- FOR FREE!!! It's such a nice feeling to walk out of a place having never touched my wallet.

When I got into my sparkly clean car, I noticed that the one item I had left in the car had been moved. Apparently they vacuumed under the seats, and found my "Internet Urinal." This was a gag gift to Jason from a friend of ours a while back - it's a little portable urinal with a female no-spill attachment. It's marketed toward computer geeks, with a slogan that says you never have to miss a second of your favorite video game again, you never have to get up from your computer to go to the bathroom, etc... Well, this was obviously a joke, but I think it's a handly little device. Anyone who has a tiny bladder and has been stuck in a dead stand-still traffic jam on the interstate for hours at a time before knows just what I mean. So I keep this little urinal under the driver's seat, in case I really need to GO. Have I ever used it? No. Would I ever? You betcha. So when I saw that they had pulled this out from under the seat, I got a little embarassed. But not nearly as embarassed as I would have been if I had forgotten to remove the coffee cup with the rotting dead bat carcass yesterday. Yeah, I had a dead bat in a coffee cup. I found it stuck to the front grill of the car. Must've hit it a couple nights ago. So I saved it, thinking that I would draw it -- artists usually draw lots of bones and dead things to get a feel for musculature and skeletal systems (and to be GOTHIC!!) But when I got in the car yesterday afternoon, on an 80 degree day, and smelled that the bat had slowly been warming up to that temperature all day, I immediately threw it out. No way in hell would I put up with that smell, not even for an amazing drawing. I rode home with the windows down and the sun roof open (did I mention my new car has a sun roof? And that it kicks ass?) so's to remove the dead bat smell, and by the time I got home my presence was graced with the pleasant aroma of my R2D2 C-3P0 vanilla scented air freshener.

Flash forward.

It's today. My car has been bat-free for 22 hours, the muffler has been fixed for 3.5 hours, and my travel urinal is back in place under my seat. Things are good.