Kickin' Rocks

with Don Pennington

Have a Nice Day......don't ya just hate that?

Did you ever have a day when all you wanted to do is sit on the curb and watch the cars go by? We all have our bad days and sometimes we just need a break like sittin' in the back seat of your ‘40 Sedan reading an old Hot Rod Magazine ("old" being the key word, the newer issues aren't so good), there is a time when you just want a soft chair and a locked door. Well the key thing here is that you are having one of "those days". The best thing about a bad day is that tomorrow will be a better day, that may be one of those Laws from Mr. Murphy. The staff here at Lapidary and Sons has made an exhaustive study of the subject and have found that on the day you were born, if you put on your hot rod t-shirt, went out and sat on the curb and did nothing, pretty soon the junk mail would start coming and even if you never subscribed to a magazine, you would still get threatening notices from collection agencies. If you don't make a move, or sign anything, you will still be a target for the bad day people.

One of my favorite things to start off a day heading in the wrong direction is the arrival of the annual greeting from the Tax Assessor's Office. Property tax is a tidy little system that allows a person that we elect to hire people we don't know, to threaten you with taking your house if you don't pay a tax on something that you already own for something that you get no benefit from. I guess we should be grateful to Mr. Tax Collector, he makes our day better, he takes our money and does the tedious job of spreading it around to the dead beats, who prefer not to hold down a job but continue to pop out kids as fast as they can, so they can get a bigger check to buy food and cook the ever delicious ammonia and Sudafed parfait. We finance these freaks by being a member of a club known as the "tax rolls"... club, better known as the bottomless money well that the bureau-freaks go to whenever they need a bump in their pension check, or set up a new program to educate people on such things as which hand signals are considered road rage and what we think of property tax.

But if we got rid of all the stuff that makes us crazy, there would still be stuff that makes us crazy, because as an official hot rodder you are always looking to make things better. The bad stuff never goes away, there is no such thing as perfect chrome. It drives you whacko, sometimes you just want to nap for about a year. The world is nuts, they say the ice is all melting and that the oceans will rise thirty feet in the next hundred years, putting almost all the major cities in the world under water. Hmmmm, sounds like a real estate opportunity. Those people in Boise aren't so nuts after all, they are soon to be on the beach, and that may be a good day for them. It's all going goofy. Who is responsible for this mess, and how can we put a plug in it? Well you can't, and that is one great thing about screwing with cars, you can close that garage door anytime you want and climb in the back seat with a stack of little books until the storm goes by.

Having a good day or having a bad day doesn't seem to be under our control. It just seems to happen. But apparently most days are considered to be bad by default, why else would you have a t-shirt of a bumper sticker that says "Have a Nice Day". Do we need to be prompted to have a nice day? When the kids leave the house in the morning do you tell them to have a nice day? They've got to stop in their tracks and ask themselves, what's out there that  my mom and dad have to hope we have a nice day. If the standard deal was a good day, the shirt would be "Have a Bad Day", but of course nobody would buy a "Have a Bad Day" t-shirt, well there is this one guy that runs a yellow Studebaker at Bonneville that would stock up on them, but he runs a ‘61 vintage 394 Olds in the Stude and seems to always have a bad day. Come to think of it, that would be a great shirt for him, the yellow smiley face would tie into the yellow Stude, put Old Stud Racing (that's his handle) across the top and flip the smiley mouth upside down and add "Always Having a Bad Day" on the bottom. If you have ever tried to make an old Olds run 220 you will understand why he's so grumpy.

The Stude guy actually does have some sort of control over his bad days. He could junk the Olds or not fire it up at all, or go to the ultimate and just don't get up in the morning, that would make his days trouble free. But maybe not. Maybe bad days for some people are their good days. We all know negative people who always seem to be having a bad day... every day, but they think it's a good day. They are getting by just fine though, they have a hot rod or two, nice house, garage full of parts, bathe weekly and all that, maybe it's just a different life style, no better and no worse that you and me. Hell with them, let's concentrate on us.

What it comes down to is, everybody should do their own deal, some could care less what kind of day they're having, they just roll with the punches. That's the thing after all, do what you gotta do to keep the gloom thinkers away, don't worry about it too much, create your own atmosphere and if that's weird to others, well that's the way it goes. Gotta go now, the mailman is coming, tax statements are out and I have to run and lock the garage door, grab my stack of little books, throw on the head phones and jump in the back seat of my ‘40, I'm gonna make it a good day.