Tag Archives: road trip

A Tale of My Father: The (Almost) Burning Man

26 Mar

March 26, 2018

My father was a man who had quite a lot of stories, and I can vouch that they were true. Stuck in a rioting hoard of women on Black Friday, calling Macy’s to complain about their Santa at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, or refusing to take off in a small plane from the shortest runway of an airport high on cliff, he had some interesting things to talk about. 

This one is short, and though it happened long before I was born, it could have had a dramatic impact on my life.

When he was younger, my Dad-to-be and some of his friends took a road trip. The details of when and where aren’t important and I’ve long forgotten them if I even ever knew them. I want to say they were teenagers but knowing Dad and some of his friends, they were probably in their twenties but acting like teenagers. 

So they were driving and it was getting late and they stopped for gas. One guy got out and was pumping while Dad and the others took the opportunity to stretch their legs. Well, they guy pumping the gas thought it would be a hysterically funny joke to turn the nozzle on Dad and soak him with gasoline. And another friend thought it would be even more hysterically funny to chase Dad around the car with a lit cigarette lighter. 

You can see where this is going.

Almost, almost!

Natural selection nearly took a hard left turn that night but either Dad was a faster runner back then, or his cries of “what the FUCK are you doing?” got through this friend’s thick skull and Dad escaped immolation and lived to laugh about it later.

It’s a wonder I’m here to write about this.

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I Was A Passenger On The Burp Bus

18 Apr

April 18, 2016
This post is all credit to and copyright Saarah, and you’ll soon see why.

Long-time readers of this blog, of which I’ve heard that a few survive, may recall my attempts at coining a new phrase. I was sure that, with some time and effort, I could make the world fall in love with the term blog-slinging, as in I’ve had a busy day, blog-slinging this latest post about Donald Trump’s hair for you to enjoy. Well, it didn’t happen. If anything, the world has violently rejected that phrase, and I have the hate mail to prove it. (Watch out, Edna Furlitzer of Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’ve turned those letters over the police.)

But I am not one to give up so easily. Well, actually, I do give up easily, laughably easily. But this time I’ve got nothing better to do, so I’m going to try again, this time with an all-new, all-ha-ha-hilarious turn of phrase.

But you’ll have to sit through a short story first. See why so few of my long-time readers survive?

Recently, I took a trip to my ancestral home, Salem, Massachusetts. To be honest, Salem is not my ancestral home. Not a single ancestor lived there. Sure, a man named Ebenezer Tepid Ride was hung there as a witch in the 17th century, but that’s just a coincidence. Salem is my ancestral home in spirit.

I love witches and black cats, Halloween and ghosts. Most of all I love a good, juvenile belch, and that’s what this story is about.

I had spent a couple of days in Salem with Saarah, and it was great. The Witch Museum, the House of the Seven Gables, the vegan bakery that was closed every time we went there, it was all awesome. A total blast. And a blast was exactly what Saarah was letting out on the ride home. It is certainly not my intent to embarrass her, no, not at all, but I have to be honest. She was burping more than Curly after Moe and Larry forced him to eat soap.

curly burp 1

So there we were, in the car, she in the passenger seat, slightly dozing and occasionally loudly burping, me in the driver’s seat, slightly dozing too driving home and occasionally rolling down my window depending on how pungent her burps were.

NOTE TO SAARAH: Please don’t kill me.
NOTE TO READERS: It’s all a joke. Saarah has only ever burped once in her life, in 2010, and even that time it was a medical necessity.
NOTE TO SAARAH: Happy now?

Well, Saarah was a little embarrassed and said the she was burping more than a truck driver. She said it again the next time she burped too. And the time after that, etc etc etc. Yes, she burped a lot on that trip.

As the drive went on (it’s about a four hour trip from Salem) she got tired, and though the burps didn’t stop, her expressions got better and better. “Burping more than a truck driver” soon became “burping more than a bus driver,” which eventually became “burping more than the driver of the bus.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

“Burping more than the driver of the bus” became, as Saarah got more and more tired (but no less full of gas) “burping more than the driver of the burp.” That would have been funny enough had it ended there, but it took a slight regression to “burping more than the driver of the burp bus,” and finally settled on “driving the burp bus.”

So I may have been driving the car, but over in the passenger seat, Saarah was driving the burp bus.

And that is the new phrase I am coining and forcing on you today: Driving the burp bus (copyright Saarah).

If only one person uses it, it will already be more successful then blog-slinging.

 

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