my weekend ... and the fall yet eventual Rise of Frank the Ford

Saturday...

When shitty things happen it is really easy to focus on the shitty…like right now when I am broke down 50yards from the San Mateo Bridge Toll Plaza on my way to an event at a fly shop in the Bay Area. Exactly 181.85 miles from home (travel is a right off, I keep track of this stuff) I am pretty sure that my transmission is toast and after I pay the $485 dollars to the tow truck driver to get me back to chico, ca I am sure something like a transmission on a Ford F250 is super cheap to fix and totally worth while on a truck with 166,262 miles on it…and lets be honest I am sure if I get the transmission fixed nothing will start to break on the truck and I will have years of care free vehicle owning ahead of me…shit.

My view for a few hours...

Lets not diverge though on the shitty…I mean I did put $100 a gas and spent $20 on food and skipped guiding for the day to make this event happen. Along with getting up at 5am and packing for about 2hours last night all my fly tying and promotional shit…sometimes having a good business or “dollar and sense” kind of mind is a fucking curse cause when shit goes bad it is hard to focus on the intrinsic, non-monetary, things in life…I get stuck on the time sucking, and flat monetary hemorrhaging of the shitty things…that said I am going to focus on the positive…

Like the fact that I didn’t break down ON the bridge and that the cal trans tow truck driver that just towed me from the bridge to a 76 gas station, “off of bridge property” was a nice guy and patient with me being a total “bridge break down retard” ….

Any time I break down a long way from home I am reminded of an experience when I was younger traveling with my dad. My dad for some reason had bought this giant dodge bronco thing and one of our first trips with it was a multi day white water rafting trip on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. Well on the way back we broke down some where north of Lake Shasta. This is way before cell phones so we had to walk to a gas station and call a tow truck driver…knowing what I know now about the redding area now I should not be surprised that the driver was a total tweaker. My dad and I still laugh about the fact that the guy did not stop talking for the whole drive as we sat 3 deep in the cab of his truck while he traveled down and around lake Shasta to redding towing our bronco at 70 plus miles an hour. I am pretty convinced that this meer glimpse of what serious narcotic use did to a human being made a significant impact…so if that guy is still around, which I highly doubt, thanks for showing me the light.

On that note … my fear ounce I realized my situation was “ I will have to drive in the cab of a tow truck from San Mateo back to chico…shit"…Right now as I sit in the cab of that tow truck I am thankful for the fact that the tow truck driver is normal, has good conversational skills, and can appreciate the necessity for silence on a long drive. He also told me that my transmission was most likely fine just something called a “cylinoid” was fucked up and that cost about $250-500 so that was good news and really started us off on a good note to be honest….

….I take back everything I just said I just listened to my tow truck drivers life story and aspirations to turn his life around in 2015 from about Fairfield to Maxwell with a brief pause between Maxwell and Willows and then from Willows to Chico there was a review and recap….

All the above being in the books I am now at home on my couch with my two boys watching some animated movie from the Pixar line of visual crack and things are OK… Frank my truck(he is big, fat, American, and eats a lot) is dead in-front of my house but trucks can get fixed (frank will rise again), more money can be made to pay for it all, and there will be another event next year to get to.

Sunday....Music