Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The power of suggestion

They have been running this commercial of late with this guy polishing an perfect old green pickup while he talks about some designer drug that cured him of his ills so he can polish his truck again. Really stupid, but there was one in my life in 1968 that belonged to the guy that was the manager of the restaurants where I worked. You had to double clutch it every time you shifted. One of my summer jobs was to drive around Bloomington and collect used glass gallon bottles and bring them back to be washed and spruced up so they could be used to sell gallon servings of A & W Drive-In Root Beer. In August, the humidity is about 115 percent during the day and a few summers would have spontaneous thunderstorms in the afternoons. So please imagine the back of this piled high with glass jugs and sitting on the steepest hill in the midwest and the sweat dripping off my face and tshirt and the thing slips out of gear and I am rolling backwards down hill. Luckily there was no one behind me, and I clutched and clutched and clutched and finally popped into first and started moving forward again (after a giant jerk). Didn't even crack a jug.

When Marti and I got engaged and were planning to move to Utah, we bought an International long bed pick-up. It looked like a big box. I drove it delivering pizzas that winter in Indiana and came out from a college dorm and at first couldn't find it. It had slid down the hill about two blocks without hitting a thing.
We had stock racks for it that a friend built as a wedding present so we could move all of our stuff to Utah.
I looked for a picture, but couldn't find one that did it justice. Just think big square box. I left it in Utah.

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