Something I never thought I’d say to a friend in 2023: “Hey, have you heard the new Beatles song?”
Something I never thought a friend would say to me in 2023: “Yeah, it’s really good!”
Say what you will about AI (and plenty of you have!), if it can clean up an otherwise unusable recording by separating John Lennon’s vocal track from the piano and other ambient noise, and thereby gift the world with one last Beatles song, it can’t be all bad.
That’s a hill I will die on.
Tara’s been talking about buying a new pickup truck for months. Actually, years. She was ready to pull the trigger way back in 2020, until COVID and supply chain issues happened.
Then, of course, we moved. She got a job. Then she got another job. Then we bought a house. Then she got another job (good hell, woman!) There was a goat fest and a sweet corn fest and an apple fest and a family reunion and a concert in Milwaukee. In other words, shit got busy.
There were a million excuses to push the truck purchase back, especially with insanely high interest rates…but then her pickup died in the middle of an intersection in August. Luckily it was just a faulty sensor, but the writing was on the wall. One day last month we piled into the truck to run errands, and as soon as she pulled out of the driveway, it started raining.
Inside the cab.
I was sitting in the passenger seat, wishing I’d had an umbrella. WTF?!
We never did figure out the source of that leak. Throw in bald tires that would’ve cost over $1K to replace and a weird rattling noise that began a few days ago, and we figured the time had come. So yesterday, we drove to a dealership in Watertown and ended up buying this bad boy.
Tara basically swapped Nissan Frontiers. Despite those recent issues, she had her original Frontier for nine mostly trouble-free years. This one is a 2022 model with 36,000 miles, so it’s a big step up from her 2010 pickup with 128,000 miles.
Just don’t ask us how much the monthly payments are. Geez Louise.
While at the dealership, I couldn’t help but have a little fun with the sales guy. Tara was talking about how knowledgeable her dad is when it comes to cars, so I conjured up some fake tears and concocted a story about how he met an untimely fate beneath the blades of a farm combine. Then, when the appraiser came in, I turned to Tara and said, “You did get all the bloodstains out of there from that incident with the hitchhiker, right?”
Why am I like this?!
(Rhetorical question. This is one of those universal mysteries that can’t be solved.)
I once dated a woman who swore off fast food because I mortified her every time we hit a drive-through. Luckily, Tara’s not as easily flummoxed. She mostly just rolls her eyes whenever I bust out these tall tales. I’ve tried to recruit her to be my partner in crime, but unfortunately, she can never keep a straight face.
One of these days she’ll come over to the dark side. Mark my words.
Who knew that a tossed-off paragraph about a fake washed-up football player named Woody Debris would resonate so wildly? The result of a typo, no less. Y’all have practically demanded more Woody.
I’m not one to ignore the will of the people. I’m actually working on a short story titled Woody Debris, All-American, which I’ll share when complete.
Shame about Woody’s father, dying in that freak farm combine accident…
Mark My Words 
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