Two Slightly Embarrassing Things

1. Kenny Chesney just married Renee Zellwegger and I'm tickled for them, mostly because it means that rumors of a romance between him and the patronizingly-cowboy-hatted Katie Couric are a lie! 2. I cannot wait for the new Dukes of Hazzard movie. It's not just my inexplicable crush on Bam Margera and all his friends, including dirty ole Johnny Knoxville (but how can you not like a man who takes Knoxville as his last name?), and it's not just my deep and abiding love for Willie Nelson, though, as I've said, I'd leave y'all for him, it's also my love for getting in and out of cars via the windows. I tried to explain this to Jon over at Crap & Drivel, who was complaining about his crappy car, and it's true. No matter how bad the car, if your dad lets you climb in and out the windows, you cannot wait for him to show up to school to get you. Take, for instance, our crappy cars. Now, you weren't allowed to climb in the window of the Sky Chicken, that was the good car (I think it goes without saying that an 86 Buick Skyhawk is never the good car) but the 77 Caprice Classic? That was a car you could abuse. And so what if it was a tank, so it sometimes smelled like the EPA had no jurisdiction over it, so it often had some dead thing caught in the grill, so the speedometer was just a rough guess, rounded to the nearest hundred, so the odometer gave up after 175,000 miles and just spun wildly, I loved that car from the moment my parents brought it home when I was in grade school to the moment my dad decided it was too unsafe for us kids to be driving around and junked it. I'd buy another one in a second, if I had the disposable income. We used to play this game, called cat and mouse, where we'd load ourselves up in our too-fast cars and speed off into the night, chasing each other down long empty straight roads, and though the boys all drove Cameros, I had eight cylinders and a heavy, heavy car that was already so rusted my parents couldn't what damage was new. No muscle-car testosterone fueled teenager could catch me when I hit gravel going eighty and never slowing down. With the windows down, all you could smell was wet corn growing and the bugs were so loud you felt like you had to shout to compete. The gravel under the tires sounded like rain. And so, it was just me, and that car, and the night, and we were headed out of town and away from everyone who might entangle us. You may wonder what the soundtrack is for something like that and so, I'll tell you, that for me, it was always The Doors. The Man from GM says that there's a guy out west who refurbishes old Caprice Classics for poor police departments, but that he'll fix 'em up for anyone who's got the money. Let me tell you, if I win the lottery, you'll see me once again driving an old Caprice Classic and, if you're lucky enough to see me stop to get gas, I'll be climbing in and out of the windows.