So I missed several hours of work yesterday morning while I took care of business and filed an insurance claim on my car. The insurance company naturally wanted to send me to their affiliated vendor to do the repair work, but I wanted to talk it over with my dad first — he’s a mechanic and an old-school car guy who knows lots of other car guys, and I wanted his recommendation before I made an irrevocable decision — so the telephone drone who took my claim put things on hold until I made up my mind. I was given a callback number for “the claim office that would complete the process” (presumably a different call center from the one that opened the claim, or at least a different floor in the same building; seems rather inefficient to me, but what do I know of modern corporate labyrinths?).

I took the car to see a guy, got a quote, then, with the clock pushing noon and the certainty that my inbox at the office was buckling under the strain, headed for work. I got busy and didn’t get around to calling my insurance company back, which was probably foolish procrastination on my part, but that’s how it happened and I won’t apologize for it.

This morning, I tried calling that claim-office number first thing, figuring I could maybe fax them my bid or something and have everything wrapped up in short order. Silly me…

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[Warning: Grown-up language ahead. Click away now if you have a weak constitution for that sort of thing.]

This is what some asshole son-of-a-bitch did to the ragtop of my Mustang on Friday night. From the placement and size of the cuts — near the edge of the top, and right over the door-lock post and the door handle itself — my guess is that someone was attempting to break in, rather than merely vandalizing the car. Not that I’d know anything about how to vandalize a car, since it was drilled into my head from an early age to actually respect other people’s property, but it seems to me if the goal had been merely to ruin somebody’s day, the bastard would’ve carved a big X right down the middle or something. But as I said, I don’t know what could be running through the mind of someone who’d do this to another person’s car.

Needless to say, I’ve had a pretty crappy weekend, alternating between surges of impotent rage and a crushing sense of violation and generalized despair. I tell you guys… between losing Rusty, various work-related issues that I’m sure no one would be interested in, some personal stuff I’d rather not share, and now this, I’m feeling completely and utterly defeated right now. I know it’s a cliche for old farts to bitch about how the world has gone to hell since they were kids, but, well, it has…

I stayed up way too late last night watching a really bad movie called One Million Years B.C. I remember liking it a lot when I was a kid, so when I ran across the DVD on sale for five bucks, and I considered that it contained stop-motion dinosaurs animated by the legendary Ray Harryhausen and Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, I thought I couldn’t go wrong. Sadly, it turned out to be one of those flicks that should’ve remained a fond memory. C’est la vie.

The real injury, however, happened when the receptionist here at my office asked me why I was looking so tired. I told her… and got a completely blank look. I didn’t expect her to recognize the movie title, but she didn’t know who Raquel Welch was either. Come on! Raquel Welch? She was only one of the biggest sex symbols of the 20th Century! And she only appeared on one of the most famous cheesecake posters ever produced! (That’s it up there at the top of the entry. I remember many comic-book ads for posters-by-mail, and this one was always the largest thing on the page. It’s still available, too.) But no, the kid had no idea whatsoever.

Some days I really feel like I may as well stop fighting it, apply for Social Security, and go invest in a rocking chair…

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Enough. You win.

I am tired of snow and overcast skies and wind. I am tired of wearing long underwear and my fur-lined Cousin Eddie hat and still feeling cold. I am tired of driving my broken-down old rattletrap Bronco because it has four-wheel drive and I won’t feel as bad if it gets wrecked as I would if it were my Mustang. I am tired of having to leap over puddles and ridges of filthy gray slush, and doing weird little dance steps and windmilling my arms because my lousy, worn-out shoes keep skidding on the slick pavement and I can’t find any boots I like this late in the season.

Seriously, I know we need the snow to replenish our depleted reservoirs, and most years I really don’t mind all this winter stuff. But this winter seems like it’s been a very long one, and for the last couple of weeks, we’ve been getting storms about every three days, with blasts of arctic cold in between the fronts, and I’m really, really, REAAAALLLLY sick of it.

So, weather gnomes, just tell me your demands and I’ll meet them. You want ransom money? A helicopter to the Bahamas? A first-born son? J.J. Abrams’ secret notes on how Lost is going to turn out? Whatever you want, I’ll get it for you. Just stop with the snow and cold already!

That is all.

You know, I realized this year that New Year’s Day is actually kind of a sucky holiday.

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In response to a thought-provoking WaPo article about the future of museums in our ever-more digitized and entertainment-driven world, this guy asks:

If we can access a white-laser virtual model of the Mona Lisa at a resolution of 10 microns from our personal computer, why bother getting shoved around and consumed by the crush of tourists at the Louvre only to get no closer than 3 feet? …What’s the point of going to a museum today?

Um, to see the actual painting rather than a picture of it? Isn’t that astoundingly obvious?

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How do I know that the season is changing?

Well, for one thing, the temperature when I left the house this morning was delightfully cool, somewhere in the upper 60s, the first time it’s been that low in several months and a welcome change for this curmudgeonly blogger, who has found this year’s record-setting string of 100-plus days to be just about unbearable.

But the real tip-off was the legion of cute young co-eds commuting up to the U of U this morning for their first day of classes… which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the Utah Transit Authority’s asinine annual ritual of shortening their light-rail trains just when a reasonable person would expect that they’d need more capacity. All summer long, the trains have been running with four cars and were mostly empty. Now, this morning, with all these new faces waiting on the platform, there were just two cars, and we ended up wedged in like cattle.

Morons.

Any further comment would be redundant…