I hate growing up. It's made me fat.

I’ve learned some very important things the last few days. I can’t say exactly what it is that makes most of these findings any more life changing or profound than my previous discoveries. I guess it’s just that at this moment, the randomness of it all means that these conclusions carry a bit more weight with where I’m at in my life.

I've written them down and submit for your amusement. They are, in no real particular order:

NASCAR racing and country dancing are pretty much the same thing.

-    In both you navigate your way through a nightmare of a traffic jam only to continually turn left for several hours without really going anywhere at all. If someone gets bumped or rubbed the wrong way, there’s a good chance punches will be thrown.

Be nice to your friends’ younger sisters. Law of Averages says they’re most likely going to grow up to be hot. Really, really hot.

-     Facebook has taught me this. Think I’m wrong? Friend request an old buddy you haven’t seen in 15-20 years and tell me I’m mistaken.

Every guy on “Wheel of Fortune” wants to say hi to his 'beautiful wife' at home.

-     Really? Beautiful? Every single one of them? Not “incredible” or “brilliant” or “love of my life” or anything that doesn’t rhyme with beautiful or start with “bee” and end with “you-tee-full?” This drives me absolutely bananas. Hasn't anyone heard of truth in advertising? I’d definitely come up with something much better if I were put on the spot to describe my wife.

I hate growing up. It’s made me fat.

-     My wife says it’s the Oreos, chocolate chip cookies and milk, and steady diet of pizza that I insist on eating. She thinks I should consider healthier alternatives. I tell her she’s wrong – Oreos and I have been friends for a long time, and they wouldn’t betray me like that. “And the pizza?” she asks. I've yet to tell her that I'm the 5th Ninja Turtle. 

As I go down the list, I make a mental note that since I don't like country music, dancing, or NASCAR I'm no worse for wear. It's nothing more than a casual observation. As for my friend's sisters, well, this is where I give a gratuitous shout-out to my beautiful wife and say, "But you got the ring...." And the growing up? I could really go for a mulligan about now. Or a time machine.

Somewhere in the middle of that last one I have my epiphany: What kind of impression did I make on the world as a teenager? Was I a good friend?

As I make “friends” with people on Facebook that I used to be friends with in middle and high school, I wonder why it was we ever lost touch in the first place. I get that people grow apart and go their separate ways. I’m not naïve to the science that life just happens and sometimes simply demands of us that we choose sides and betray one friend for another.

It’s the choosing sides thing that I struggle with – the how and why of it that we stopped being friends. I ask myself if I treated them fairly. Was I a good friend when they needed one? Was I willing to listen more than I talked? Was I unafraid to be seen with them when no one else wanted to be? Was I willing to accept them as they were and find qualities that no one else cared to?

I wish I had a good answer to all of those questions. Hell, I wish I had a good answer to one of them. Truth is, I was just a kid. I didn’t know that as different as someone might seem, they were really dying on the inside for the same love, attention, and acceptance that I was. Growing up, nothing was expected of me in the friends department other than to choose good ones. I fell victim to the “kids will be kids” mantra of society.

Being a parent, I look at Kacie and try to figure out which category of a friend she fits into and what actions I can take to prevent her from becoming the person society nurtures us to be. How can I keep my daughter from making the same mistakes that I did? How can I show her that friendship is more than just a word?

It doesn’t take but a moment before those questions quickly abandon my thoughts as I realize Kacie embodies every single one of those qualities I couldn’t exhibit, not just a little bit, but instead with every ounce of who she is. It’s not an act. It’s not for show. It’s just who she’s decided at a young age to be. Without knowing it, Kacie’s become a reflection of her mom. I’m good with that. It means there’s hope. Hope is all any father still growing up himself can ask for.

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What in the Hex Wrong with You?

The Mustang is hexed. I think. Perhaps not. But maybe.

Frankly, I’m not sure what to believe anymore. All I know is that something’s seriously up with this car because the radiator has a leak, the ignition lock catches and refuses to give with any degree of ease, and it has no brakes.

My wife says there’s no such thing as a hex. I told her that there used to be no such things as vampires either, but try telling that to any teenage girl - or thirty-something man for that matter - sporting their choice of Team Edward T-shirt at the gym.

She thinks I’m bonkers for even entertaining the notion. Maybe she's right. I’m going to let you to decide for yourself. Like the Honorable Judge Lance Ito to my Johnny Cochran, I know that you’ll need indisputable evidence, so below I’ve provided the not-so-accurate script of events that transpired the day the brakes, well…died.

FADE IN:

EXT – PARKING LOT – DAY

BRAD, early thirties, way handsome and not a pound overweight, is showing off his (daughter’s) newly purchased 1966 Mustang to MATT, early thirties, almost equally handsome. Almost. Matt struggles to find the hood release latch.

                                          BRAD
                         Supposedly it’s in the center, under the grill.
                         Right above the bumper.

Matt continues feeling around the car’s front end with no success.

                                          MATT
                         You sure?

                                          BRAD
                         That’s what Google says.

Getting out of the Mustang, Brad goes to the front of the car and peers into the grill. Matt continues feeling for the latch.

                                          FEMALE VOICE (O.C.)
                         If you guys are having this much trouble with a simple
                         hood latch, I’d hate to have seen you trying to
                         work your magic on prom night.

They both turn around to find Brad’s MOTHER-IN-LAW walking up behind them. She looks great for her age, somewhere in the middle of Seventies super-model meets Fifties TV housewife.

                                          BRAD
                         You do remember that I went to prom with your daughter.

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW
                         Yes. And now I feel much more at ease about that night.

The Mother-in-law rubs her fingers over the open door, tracing its angles.

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW (CONT'D)
                                    (almost mocking)
                         Nice car. Take me for a ride?

Matt moves to the passenger side, distancing himself from the Mother-in-law. He shoots Brad an ‘It’s a trap!’ look. Brad doesn’t catch it.

                                          BRAD
                         How about I let you drive it once the brakes are fixed?

                                          MATT
                         Dude!

                                          BRAD
                         What?

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW
                                     (cackling)
                         Sounds devilishly fun. Until then…

A black stretch limo stops in front of the Mustang. The rear door opens from the inside.

                                          MATT
                                     (whispering)
                         I was giving you the sign!

                                          BRAD
                         What sign?

                                          MATT
                         THE sign. Not to say anything stupid.

                                          BRAD
                         How was I supposed to know?

The skies darken. Lighting flashes. Thunder crackles. Rain pours down.

                                          MATT
                         You coach 12U softball. You should know a sign 
                         by now when somebody’s giving you one!

Brad spins in the direction of Mother-in-law to retract his statement, but the limo’s gone.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           FADE OUT

Look, I said not-so-accurate script, not God’s honest, whole truth and nothing but the, that’s the truth, Ruth, truth. But I really did tell my mother-in-law that she could drive the Mustang once the brakes are fixed. The irony is not lost on me that ten minutes after I made the remark, the brakes no longer functioned.

Does that mean someone's sitting in a candlelit room with chicken feet scattered on the floor amidst markings written in blood, using a Hot Wheels version of a Midnight Blue 1966 Mustang and poking it with some crazy big needle while chanting Voo-doo hoo-doo? Probably not. I sure as hex hope not. But if that is the case, then perhaps it’s possible the car will work sporadically like the dead guy on Weekend at Bernie’s, which gives me a glimmer of hope while I wait with anticipation for Andrew McCarthy or Jonathan Silverman to accept my friend request on Facebook so they can help walk me through this mess.

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OFF TOPIC: Um, Did He Say...Douche?

Yesterday my friend Christy sent me an email asking if I knew the song “Higher Love.”

"Um, yeah. It was only a number one hit for Steve Winwood in 1986 from his album Back in the High Life. Doesn’t everyone know that?” I wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead I opted for, “By Steve Winwood.” Taking the moral high road blows and is much less rewarding than giving someone a hard time.

I hit reply and waited for her response. I’m thinking she’s going to tell me that she just heard the song at lunch and really likes it, or that it’s going to be featured on season two of Glee (premiering Tuesday, September 21 at 8/7C on FOX).

“You know, up until yesterday when I saw the name of the song on my Sirius Radio,” she emailed back, “I thought it said ‘make me a pie of love.’”

Talk about coming way out of left field. She must have been tailgating.

But it got me thinking about music and how each of us has a song or two that leaves us swearing the singer is crooning one thing only to learn later in life (sometimes much, much later) that it’s really another. Interestingly enough, that song was one and the same for Kacie and I. If you’ve ever heard “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Over the summer, Kacie and I were driving around town doing whatever it was we were doing when “Blinded by the Light” came over the FM airways. I’m jamming out playing drums on the steering wheel. She’s jamming by doing whatever Guitar Hero moves she knows. And then the chorus hits, and she freezes. Her body is literally motionless as she faces forward – but she’s trying to peek at me through the corner of her eye to see if I caught it too. She's looking to me for a sign that everything's okay. I did no such thing. Instead, I fought not to look at her because laughing hysterically would have only made things worse.

Manfred tried his best to keep the party going, but a silence had started to build that brought with it a certain awkwardness. Changing the station would have been easy. Telling Kacie what he really said would have been easier. But that’s not me. I spent over twenty years thinking I knew what the lyrics were to that song until I looked them up on Google earlier this year. It’s only fair - she needed to figure it out for herself. That’s when she surprised me.

“Um, did he say…douche?” she asked, her voice full of trepidation. Kacie said the word “douche” as if she thought she’d immediately be kicked out of the car for uttering such vulgarity. I loved it.

The parent in me understood that it was not the time for shtick. I wanted her to like the music that was such a big part of my growing up. “No, babe, he didn’t. He said deuce,” I clarified. “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.”

Relieved, she sunk into the passenger seat. Her face began to regain its color. “Good. I really like that song – but not if it says…you know.” She changed the radio station.

Funny. I liked the song better when I thought it did say douche.

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I Brake for…NO ONE!

Sometimes we become so focused on reaching a particular destination that we lose sight of one very important aspect of the trip: you have to be able to stop when you get there.

We’ve all seen television shows (80’s detective shows in particular) or movies where someone was barreling down a winding road, repeatedly stepping on the brake pedal only to have the car keep going. After near misses with oncoming traffic and narrow escapes from skidding off the road at the edges of hairpin curves, the driver somehow has the presence of mind to maneuver the car up the first embankment that conveniently comes along and then jerk the steering wheel hard in one direction or the other, causing the car to spin out and settle in a cloud of dust.

The same thing happened to me this weekend…minus the high rate of speed, winding road, driving up the dirt embankment to stop the car, and Magnum P.I. (man-crush – as noted in my Jibber Jabber section) to tell me the brake line had been cut in an attempt to keep me from being able to testify against the island’s most notorious drug kingpin.

Okay, fine. So I was only on a two-lane road with no oncoming traffic and going less than fifteen miles-per-hour, but the brakes really did fail in a similar manner causing me to repeatedly mash the pedal to the floor. Nevertheless, it scared the crap out of me – especially since I had three twelve-year-old girls in the car, who by all accounts, think I'm pretty awesome. I would have hated to have driven the car into a row of bushes, thus causing them to rethink their position. Thankfully I am in fact awesome and had the situation on lockdown. And because the streets were desolate and we weren’t going very fast, the situation was never out of control. But that didn’t keep my mind from playing a lightning round of ‘what if’ against itself.

Deciding not to push our luck any further, I ditched the Mustang in the first vacant spot I could find where she’d be safe from the public and we’d be safe from her. I phoned my wife to inform her that the four of us were going to need a ride home. Like, preferably sooner rather than later.

The realization that we’d have to fit six people in a Nissan Xtera that barely had room for five posed a slight problem, but after doing some simple math and choosing of straws, I closed the rear hatch on my wife as she was contorting her body to fit in the space currently occupied by a tricycle, a bag of clothes to be taken to Goodwill, and whatever odds and ends that managed to find their way into the vehicle but never out of it.

“Girls,” she said as I climbed into the driver’s seat, “who’s going to do this when you get your drivers’ licenses?” Probably not the best thing to ask when trying to deter three preteens from doing the same thing at some point down the road.

“Not me,” they replied in unison. Liars.

“Good. It’s not safe. I shouldn’t even be doing it,” my wife finished. Her speech delivery lacked a little something in the convincing department. It's a wonder our children aren't delinquents.

“Well I won’t be able to,” Kacie quipped. “My Mustang has a trunk.” Crap, I might have spoken too soon.

On the drive home I contemplated my next move. Having the brakes worked on was already at the top of our to-do-list, but we’d hoped that a simple bleed or adjustment would suffice until the time came when we could convert the front drums to disc brakes. With the recent developments, I knew that major surgery was probably going to have to be performed because whatever caused the brakes to bail on us was more than just bad shoes or drums. From what I’d read online during my pre-purchase research, the Mustang was either going to need a new master cylinder, brake lines, or all of the above.

We made several calls to some local automotive shops to see if we could bring the car in for a diagnosis so that I could order parts, but with the holiday weekend, they were either closed or busy and wouldn’t be able to get to us until Tuesday.

Knowing that we couldn’t leave the car abandoned at its current location, we made arrangements to have her towed back to our apartment. Spencer from Spencer’s Towing (no relation) in The Colony took special care in getting our jalopy up on his flatbed, calming any fears that we had about having it towed.

Fast forward two days to a gorgeous Labor Day where the weather is absolutely perfect for driving a classic car around town with the windows down. This is the type of day these cars were made for. Trust me, they were. I read so on Wikipedia.

But are we? Nope.

Do we want to be? Yep.

Can we? Negatory.

Why is that, you ask? Because apparently our classic car has a mind of its own and has seemingly turned into the overbearing boss of an Indonesian shoe factory/sweatshop. “Keep going! No stopping unless I say so! You want a what? I don’t care what you want. There are NO BREAKS!” Or brakes in our case…

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The What, Why, Who, and How of it...

Cars are a lot like people. They may look like they’ve got it all together on the outside, but there are often deeper seeded issues going on that aren’t visible from the exterior. To quote one of the great intellectual minds of the 80's, Bruce Hornsby, "That's just the way it is." We're all a little messed up in our own right.

When my wife and I first discussed purchasing a classic Mustang to function as a secondary car, people around us encouraged the dream, perhaps because the notion that someone they knew owning a vintage Pony was pretty rad. I suppose there was also the hope of getting to ride in it or possibly even drive it.

They reminisced about having a muscle car of their own back in the day, or pondered aloud how they wished they'd had the money to buy the classic car of their dreams and fix it up. But when the time came to actually purchase the vehicle, those same people questioned if we’d lost our minds. “It’s so old,” more than one person said. “What if it breaks down?” I have to say, the men's jockstrap my mom mistakenly bought me to wear in Little League was more supportive.

We weren’t blind to the fact that whatever used car we bought was going to need some work. All the nostalgia in the world can’t replace the simple truth that something is going to go wrong on a car this old. In fact, A LOT of somethings are going to go wrong.

As you can see from the photo, the car looks great…but she’s a ten-footer, meaning that she may look great from ten feet away, but the closer you get, you can tell that she lied on her dating.com profile.

I know what you're thinking, that some people are just incorrigible. If you're not thinking it, you should be. I am. But back to my story...

“What about a new car?” we were asked. “They come with warranties.” Sure, but a new car also comes with a hefty monthly payment leaving the owner paying more for the car than it is actually worth. We didn’t want to do that. We couldn’t afford to do that. Dave Ramsey wouldn’t want us to do that. My wife and I needed a cheap(ish) used car that would get me from home to work, back to home, and then to the University of North Texas in Denton two to three nights a week.

More importantly, the reason behind purchasing a 1966 Mustang, and the reason I’m writing a blog, is this: I’m going to spend the next four years restoring it for my daughter’s 16th birthday, and I’m going to use Google to tell me how to do it.

Stop laughing. I’m being serious. If you’re not laughing, you probably think that I’m barking mad. It’s okay – I’ve considered it myself over the last several days.

You see, I know next to nothing about cars or restoring them. I’m able to put gas in the tank and air in the tires, and I have a working knowledge of where certain integral pieces of the engine are located. My first car was a 1969 Chevrolet heavy-half pickup. It was a disaster on wheels and looked like crap, but it’s where I gained my basic knowledge of cars. Other than that, I’m pretty much Average Joe who takes the family car to the local tire store to get the oil changed. Actually, that’s not true. My wife takes the car in to get the oil changed. I stay at home and watch football and play video games from the comforts of my living room.

So in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention now I won’t be restoring every aspect of the car myself as there are just some things I don’t have the time, patience, or capability to work on, but everything outside of paint and body, major engine, and transmission work I will try to do myself or with the help of friends or family (Shane, I will be calling you, so don’t dodge my calls. You either, Matt).

Oh, and my 12-year-old daughter, Kacie, will be helping me. Did I mention that yet? I don’t think I did.

We want Kacie to be part of the process from beginning to end. She should have a say in what kind of tires, wheels, interior options, and paint this car will have. After all, it’s going to be hers in less than four years, provided she maintains an acceptable grade point average and doesn’t get into trouble with the law. (Who am I kidding? She can still get into trouble with the law just as long as her GPA is good. A criminal record might keep her out of an Ivy League school, but there’s always community college.)

You see, I’m writing this blog (that you’re hopefully bookmarking and planning to check regularly, whatever that is) because I want to document this experience in a way that my daughter and I will be able to share during our adventure (or debacle, for you pessimists) without keeping a diary and losing points on my man-card - which I've been told is in danger of happening due to long time mancrushes on Tom Selleck and John Cusack.

For those of you hardcore restoration enthusiasts, I apologize in advance. We won’t be doing a total strip down and rebuild. This process is more about a daddy getting to spend time with his baby girl than anything else, while giving her the one material possession she’s never wavered from wanting. She’s had to sacrifice a lot as a child for my mistakes as a parent, so I want this experience to be a good one for her.

We can only fix things on the car when we have the spare cash, so the process may seem painstakingly slow at times. Perhaps you’ll be entertained by my incredible writing skills and superb wit. If that doesn't work for you, then consider this a fantastic way to kill time on the company clock - provided you can get past big brother. I’ll also try and post pictures when the opportunity presents itself and links to sites where I pull my directions/info on the particular project we’re working on at the time in case anyone wants to "try this at home."

Hopefully you enjoy this experience as much as we hope to. Now, I’m off to get a box or seven of bandages to keep by the keyboard. I have a feeling that this will be my one and only post without skinned knuckles…

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