Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Dust in the Wind

Last night, large amounts of dirty rain pummeled the automobiles of my fair town. When I went to start my car this morning, it looked as though someone sprayed mud all over it. I thought I was the victim of vandalism, but a cursory look around the parking lot revealed that everyone else was, too. I've never heard of this before in my life. Apparently, the car wash union in town did the correct rain dance for muddy waters.

When I went to wash my car after work, the lines were incredibly long, and the wash bays weren't designed for such lengthy queues. I sat there for what must have felt like three hours. It was probably only twenty minutes. One thing I noticed was that everyone was really giving their autos a thorough cleaning, as if they had just ferried it back from a long night in Amsterdam with no inhibitions. The rough, tattooed dudes in front of me with a giant truck containing a motorcycle in the bed were treating their manly vehicle like it was a freshman girl's pink VW Bug. They inserted quarter after quarter in the machine like the US dollar was going out of style. They were nice enough to let me absorb seven minutes of prime wash time which they overspent.

Back where I'm from, people don't spend twenty bucks on car washes. We wet it down, soap it up, then rinse it off. Seems pretty simple. That's what I did tonight. It looked mighty fine when I split from the "? Y Not ?" (the actual name of the place). But when I got home, the windows and body had a thin layer of brown dust on them. What? What is in this horrible Texas air that it remains sooty? Good thing I didn't go running outside today. Well, I've learned my lesson: never wash my car. If I must do it, then I should chamois it off before I screech down the road. Who knew car maintenance could be so difficult? I wish Steve from Performance Tire and Wheel could tell me everything is going to be alright. He'll know what's up and say that this reign of dirty air will be brief and non-recurring. It was caused by the ghosts of the dust bowl who are upset because of our cavalier use of air conditioning.

Has anyone ever heard of muddy rain? None of the weather people down here are explaining it, they're just reporting that it happened. Yeah, I could tell on my own, douche bags.

UPDATE: I finally read the entirety of the above linked article, which blamed the rain on a dust storm from NM. Fine, I guess. But those weather people can still kiss my ass for allowing this to happen.

4 comments:

mark said...

I guess you could say that New Mexico really blows! No, that would be mean.

Mr. Fairbanks said...

Good one! I don't blame NM, though. I blame those dirty weather reporters. My vitriol for them knows no bounds, in case it wasn't obvious.

Unknown said...

Don't shoot the messenger.

A Reasonable Person said...

I washed my car yesterday and vacuumed and wiped down the inside. It cost me like 7 dollars - so TX is weird. I wish I had a Mustang to wash. By the way, Steve at PT&W tied a piece of my exhaust back onto the undercarriage using metal wire for no cost. Now that's a mechanic.