By Jim Hagarty
1994
The interesting thing about problems is how there is never any shortage of new ones waiting around the corner for you. Creaky knees, unpaid bills, leaky taps and roof repairs are the ones you expect. They’re comfortable. Treatable. You know whom to call.
But it’s a cruel world when your own car turns on you in the middle of the coldest winter on record in a truly shocking way. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with the vehicle but in the last two weeks, it’s taken to zapping me with electrical charges that have made me truly afraid to be around it.
The dry outside air, I guess, combined with my sliding along the upholstered driver’s seat as I exit the car, have been combining to set up a reserve of static electricity that, when released, would blow the hat off me, if I wore a hat. This is distressing for me because, for a very good, historical reason, I hate with a passion being on the receiving end of a mini-lightning strike. My theory, and I think it’s a good one, is that when I was a kid living on a farm which made use of electric fences to keep the cattle from wandering over to the neighbours, I had so many volts run through me, entering by the head, neck, legs, back, hands, feet and who knows what else, that I developed a deep aversion to hydro. It isn’t that I mind it running my TV or fridge. I just can’t see any useful purpose in having it coursing through my veins and lighting up the corneas in my eyeballs.
So, I am extra cautious around sources of electric power, preferring other ways to get my thrills, ways that have nothing to do with the conveyance of negative and positive energy particles through any part of my anatomy. This is why these past two weeks have been somewhat of a nightmare. I’ve been in and out of my car a lot lately, almost every time with the same result. As soon as my hand touches the steel on the car door as I go to shut it, that only familiar feeling strikes again.
“Yow!!!” is all I can say at such times. And yow is a word I do not toss around lightly.
I’ve even taken to experimenting with ways of avoiding the inevitable but I’ve discovered that once charged, you’re like a lit firecracker that won’t be satisfied until it’s exploded. Yesterday, as I exited the car, I touched only plastic parts and smiled as I walked away from the vehicle, thinking I had won a round. However, as I reached to put some change in a parking meter…
“Yow!!!”
This situation is even affecting my social life as my supercharged forefinger has recently taken to zapping the fingers of other people I’ve been coming into contact with resulting, I think, in some of them wondering if this was some sort of sign that they should ask me out on a date. And my cats run for cover when I come into the house at night, knowing from experience they’re liable to get their ears singed when I reach down to pet them.
In any case, I guess I can live with this annoyance as long as garage doors I walk by don’t start opening on their own or I don’t start receiving pictures in my head from the Hubble Space Telescope.
And who knows? Maybe these electroshock therapy treatments, several times a day, will give me just the attitude adjustment I’ve been looking for and people have been saying I desperately need.
