Truck For Sale

Everyday I look for reasons to renew my faith in humanity and am almost always disappointed. This week was no exception. It started when I put my old GMC truck up for sale. The very first call I received on my voicemail went something like this:

A-hole: Yeah, what's up with this truck?
A-hole: I want to know the year and what's wrong with it.
A-hole: Hello...?
A-hole: You must not be home.
A-hole: Well then screw you!...click.

Very nice, sir. Patience is a virtue, but you must not have time for virtues? I guess he hasn't a clue about voicemail either? Oh well, who has time to dwell on such trivial matters?

So by day two there is a guy who agrees to my asking price, saying the vehicle is everything he is looking for. I take him completely through the truck and tell him every little problem I can think of, to which he seems much obliged. I even offer to get a new muffler on it since I have a lifetime warranty, if he wants to cover the costs. He then asks if I will have the pickup inspected also. I am hesitant to put money into the vehicle but he assures me he will pay for the improvements. He asks if I would like a down payment but I tell him he looks trustworthy and that it wasn't necessary. I spend two hours of my time getting the muffler and waiting for new parts needed to pass the inspection, while spending nearly $200 out of my own pocket. When the guy comes over to pick it up, we fill out the title and he hands me a check. When he asks for the keys I tell him I will need to wait until the check clears before I can give him the vehicle. He grabs the check from me and says if "I don't find him trustworthy enough to take his check, drawn on an account that could buy the truck ten times over, then I am not trustworthy enough to buy it from and that he doesn't want it." Do I have "sucker" written on my face or something? You can fuck right off, sir. Plus you entered a contract and have signed the title so you will lose in court if I choose to sue your cocky, self-centered ass. He agrees to pay for the new title, with A CHECK! I tell him I don't need his measley check, that I have enough in my checking account to buy a new title a thousand times over, and get off my property. That felt good.

So now I'm out a few hundo and need to retitle the vehicle. I do the DMV thing and put the "for sale" sign back in the window. I later get a phone call at work from a young kid interested in buying and he does a pretty good job of lowballing me. If I had only listened to my voicemail before talking to him I would have heard his offer of a few more hundred dollars, but what can you do? I let him take it for a test drive and I can hear him two blocks away grinding the gears trying to get it in four-wheeled drive, obviously ignoring my detailed instructions. Oh well? When the kid returns he wants the truck. He gives me a hundred bucks to show me he is serious and then asks for the rest of the keys. I ask him why and he responds "to take my new truck home." What? I just laugh to myself. Since the kid paid me mostly in fives and ones I tell him he can take it home if he puts down half of the money now and the other half when the new title arrives. He comes back with $200 more dollars, which I take, give him a receipt, and then he asks if he can use the license plate off of my other vehicle to drive the truck home? Holy shit, I think to myself. What planet are these morons from? I just walk away. An hour later he calls me and says he will have the rest of the money when the title arrives. Yeah, no shit you will.

I am thinking I just might put the new truck in the garage and drive the old one through the winter. It would much more satisfying to even burn the damn thing than to deal with these dolts who haven't the slightest clue about how business works. Match, anyone?

Peace be with you, but not for Obama

Well we've all seen the news and experienced the surprise of a sitting president, namely President Obama, being awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. Granted the man is serious about nuclear proliferation and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as re-establishing the Middle East peace talks, but this award is only partially about the fact that Obama has captured the imagination of the world with such grand ideas. Surely the Nobel award is just as much about providing momentum for peace as it is about celebrating it, but in this case the award also signifies the complete disdain the rest of the world had for President Bush and his policies.

What is less surprising than Obama being named the Nobel recipient is the reaction by American conservatives, which is ironically more severe than the reactions had by the Taliban and Hamas. Can you imagine that? Well, you don't have to imagine. It was less than a year ago we were being told to support our president and be patriotic in a time of war or be labelled a traitor. Now that the shoe is on the other foot we get a first-hand view of hypocrisy at it's finest. These same people cheered when Chicago was eliminated from consideration to host the summer Olympics in 2016. These people who preach "country first" are happy America lost just so they can imagine in their own little minds that the president has a political "black eye" from it all. It is reminiscent of the Texas schoolchildren who applauded when informed of President Kennedy's assassination. One has to wonder what they had been taught and how they had been conditioned to react in such a manner? I guess Kennedy got what was coming to him for calling them "nuts" in the first place. That'll learn him.

Apparently American politics has become so divisive that something that should make every American citizen step back and be proud, to once again accept our role on the world stage as the great nation of diplomacy and leadership, would instead decay into partisan bickering and downright hatred for your political opponents first and foremost over consideration for cause and country. Perhaps our own ignorance as a populace is to blame? Perhaps we cannot move past the debates about who's side is right, and we cannot individually and collectively" advance beyond the notion of "our side" versus them (liberals, conservatives, communists, fascists, populists, anarchists, dog lovers, cat lovers, or whatever the fuck you are not that really sucks ass). Maybe American stupidity and selfishness have become so entrenched into our daily lives that it has rendered us completely ineffective at self governance? We can no longer agree on anything, including agreeing on the fact that we cannot agree. That would require too much of a concession from either side.