A Bluegrass curse: A tragic adventure

Well, dear readers, it finally happened. Forty years of addled-brained and oaf-handed skill finally paid off in spades today when some somabitch boosted my wallet in broad daylight with the news guys right there filming and Howard "Stern" camped out in the parking lot.*

Okay. To the facts:
Seems my third-eldest lad, and my namesake, has a penchant for losing things. He is so adroit at the art of addled-brain loss that he has lost the one thing that adolescents yearn for more than almost any other: a permit to drive a car.

The kid lost two of them.

Two.

I would have paid blood to get one back when I was a lad, but that was when Shawnee was half an hour from any town, back before 80 and all that noise. And if I had had my permit for more than a month, I'da lost it too. I got my licence in like seven days and I had no idea how to drive. That would be why I'd swipe my brother's '79 BelAir and then my buddies would stick me in the back and drive instead.

I wasn't bitter.

Anyway, my Driver's Ed. guy taught me all about crashes, and how to do 'em, and all that, so at the end of the day I was doing alright avoiding wrecks, just by not doing what those fellas in the films did.
That's one way to get teens to listen to you, the old reverse-psychology thingumie. Tell them kids to just go out do something so stupid only a teen would think it might work, like driving with your eyes shut, and they'll never do it. They'll shut you down quicker than a hot-house floosy-dancing tart in a bathtub full of Baptists.

If you get my drift.


Anyhow, I've only had two wrecks in my life. The first was when I was driving my boss's brand new Caddy over Christmas Break, back when my family was all busted up and the whole Tocks Island thing had almost all of us near dead, I want to say it was 1973, and I was on Long Island trying to make a few bucks to stay in college. Even then, they wanted money, more long than a lil boy like me could get on a regular basis, but I beat their odds, I got me some scholarship thingumies and I mopped floors--great upper body work-out, btw.

So here I am back on Long Island trying to make a couple bucks, and one night after work, because I'm colorblind, I slowed down and proceeded with caution out into a major highway and got waffled by some guy driving an old Dodge Dart. That hurt.
Didn't do much good for the Caddy either.

My second wreck was a few days after my 48th birfday, driving up into the wilds of the Poconos to argue with a fiddle-player about payment for our second CD, after which time I neglected to stay awake and flipped the van.

All I can say is seatbelts and airbags are two very good things!

Back to the story. Pete and I arrived at the pennDOT place with not a lot of time to spare, and because PennROT doesn't take cash, I had to go and get a money order, and being in a hot rush, left my wallet out in the open where a fella helped himself to it. They got the guy on tape, and he's a regular, so they'll have a chance to talk with him eventually, but the wallet is as good as gone.

The good news is I was already right out there so I could get me a new licence.

So I would like to put a bluegrass curse on the guy right now:

I hope somebody boosts something you really are attached to, like maybe a kidney like the guy I heard about that was a friend of a friend who got picked up by some hottie in NY and woke up in a bathtub packed in ice with a scar on his back on account they stole his kidney. Ha. That'll slow ya down.

And I hope your car stalls on 80, the part with the big cememt mediums** there that mean there's no shoulder for you to cry on.

I hope you live in a world with warm beer and cold women, that your cat pees in your shoe and your dog secretly steals your valuables and buries them. Oh--an poos right were you have to walk to get into your car.

I hope all your frozen food gets wrecked because your freezer craps out while you are on a drunken spree at Atlantic City with the cash I donated to you.

While we're at it, I hope you wake up in AC married to some hideous tart named "Alice" that beats you weekly for the rest of your life for not being able to support her in the manner to which she hopes to get accustomed.

May all your colors run, all your underwear shrink uncomfortably, and may the IRS, even now, be looking over your return very very carefully.

I hope you get new neighbors that really like Ozzie and are slightly deaf and are also insomniacs hehe.
May all your milk curdle, all your take-out food be stone cold, and may you continually and inexplicably cut yourself while shaving until you look like you stopped a load of #6's at about thrity yards.

Yeah. Bless your soul.

*I made that part up about the news folks and "Howard." I did it on account of how I am apposed to be a fiction writer now, and people have come to expect a lil' "stretcher" now and then.

** if those things are mediums, I hate to see a biggun!