Milestones

Let’s start with the more important one, my car turned 21 this year. I am currently contemplating how to celebrate this occasion. Do I pour a liter of Aristocrat Vodka in the gas tank (that stuff is basically gasoline anyway) and go for a drive? If I get pulled over and the cop asks me if I’ve been drinking, I can then say: “No, but my car has!”. A witticism that will no doubt lead to my immediate arrest.

Perhaps I will bring two Manhattans to the car, put one in the passenger seat, drink the other one, and start talking about our shared experiences over the past 21 years. Some real quality time with the old girl.

Leather seats, a massive trunk and spacious interior. Tinted windows. Unrivaled reliability…. The 2004 Avalon is THE chef d’oeuvre of Japanese engineering. Mechanics are always asking me if I want to sell it. When I decline, they start salivating about how this car (only 88k miles to date) still has “300k miles left in her”.

You know what that means? That means I will pass this car down to my oldest kid (now 2) and then she will pass it down to her little sister. Mom won’t like this plan but in 2039 my kids will face an ultimatum: Either drive the car yourself and claim it’s “a classic” (and thus actually cool) or be mortified when I show up to your after-school activities in a 35-year-old car blasting Pearl Jam on the oldies station.

A less important milestone, I turned 40 a few weeks ago. The sad part is, in some ways, I can’t believe that I am ONLY 40.

Man…… I have been in the labor force since 1999. 1999! I was making $5.15 an hour at a local pizza joint. When they bumped me up to $5.75 an hour of my time officially equaled the price of a Chipotle burrito. And it was worth it. Get off work, get stoned, smash that burrito. The comforting smell of pizza sauce and mozzarella from my shirt mixing with the cilantro and fajitas….. a United Nations of well-earned flavors.

When people called in to place their pizza or sandwich order, there were no computers. I marked that shit down on a 3-part order pad. Circle “G” for green pepper. “O” for onion. Hell, we had “A” for anchovies. Then I ripped the little sliver of paper out, clipped it to a clothespin hanging on a zipline to the kitchen, and threw it down the line to the cooks.

Speaking of clothespins – does anyone under 30 even know what I am talking about? Do you young people know that a mixture of air and time will dry clothes for you? You don’t actually need a machine. Sure, we had a dryer, but we didn’t use it. Didn’t trust it. Thought it would fry our clothes and have an exponential effect on our electricity bill. Two foolproof signs that you are an immigrant: (1) It took you damn near a decade to start using a dryer even though you had one (2) first thing you and your family do when you move into a new home is take the batteries out of the smoke detectors. I don’t want that shit beeping at me! I am sure if a fire breaks out someone will figure it out.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2003. I am from the pre-cell phone era, a barbaric time-period immediately following the Jurassic era. I spent high school with a little black book of numbers. Contacts. From my weed dealer to rich girls with big empty houses. One of them was so rich she had her own bamboo garden 200 feet from the house. I once got so stoned there I couldn’t find my way out. Thought I was in fucking Vietnam. I had a few friends with cell phones. We would drive around, me digging through my black book and making calls on their mobiles to figure out if and what was happening.

Wanna hear something scary. If you were close to me from 1998 to 2003, I still have your cell phone number memorized.

My first phone was a burner…… Prepaid minutes. Some random Hispanic chick would call me up and leave lengthy voicemails in Spanish. Wrong number. Puta cost me almost 7 bucks a day at 35 cents a minute. Rambling about god knows what.

I’m so old I remember when the first smartphones came out in 2008. Awful. All of a sudden I started getting these multi-paragraph text messages. Fuck…  I was so overwhelmed. I was hitting the same button 3 times just to get to the letter “E” and you’re writing a f-ing novel on your phone.

I used to drink and drive. I am ashamed of that. But when I was young it was basically expected. If you weren’t drinking and driving as a young man back in the early/mid 2000’s you were one of two things – a dork or a liar.

I am still pissed that computers now have “endpoint protection”. Inspired by a former colleague, I used to load every single document I had ever written onto a flash drive and then carry it to my next gig. Copy pasting my way to a 30-hour work week. Then corporate America whipped us peasants once again…… “Nah nah, flunky! You’re gonna have to rewrite that same shelfware from scratch!” 

I could go on for pages and pages. My colleagues are trying to cheer me up: “You are still young!”. I think they mean it too. Perhaps because we live in an era of 40-year-olds with the maturity and priorities of a recent college graduate. But that ain’t me. In fact, I am already planning for and working toward my next milestone. This one won’t be an age-related one but rather an ACHIEVEMENT related milestone.

Here goes:

By 2030 I want to live somewhere where I can’t hear my washer dryer. How dope would that be? Most of my life I have been stapled to my washer / dryer unit and that shit is loud as fuck. I am tired of it! I have about 45 minutes a day to unwind and watch hockey and I can’t hear shit cause it sounds like two tank brigades are at war 8 feet away.

And I am NOT talking about those old apartment buildings I used to live in when I was in my 20’s – where the building has shared laundry rooms on every other floor. Spend all Sunday waiting for a bunch of high-calorie women to finish folding their and their lovers’ drawers. No no. I am definitely done with that.

“Dad, are you doing laundry right now?”

“To be honest, kid, I am not sure.”

…………………Baller