Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Psychology of the Fill-Up

The new car is officially broken in. A power sunroof was installed last weekend, but that has nothing to do with the car being broken in. I'll take the blame, even though someone else was kind of like behind the wheel. The sunroof worked to perfection and looks great, but when the car was started after the demonstration, it stalled. It wouldn't start.

The sunroof-installing guy thought he hooked the sunroof up to the wrong circuit and blew a fuse.

I knew better. I tapped my wellspring of experience; I have more experience than anyone on the planet, you see. "Out of gas," I said, matter-of-factly.

Penalty: Remote door locks.

While the sunroof-installing guy was installing the remote door locks this afternoon, one of Stacey's friends picked us up; and we had dinner together, wherein the conversation turned to my new world record. In addition, apparently, I have, besides having reached double figures in the running-out-of-gas records, another psychological foible related to internal combustion engines, which may be the source of my running-out-of-gas habit.

I never fill the tank when I get gas. Stacey's friend, a world traveler, retired consultant to the petroleum and auto industry, said that she had never heard of that before ... she realizes that sometimes people don't have the cash to fill the tank, but to have never filled the tank was very strange and unknown to her, an obvious defect of the mind.

So, I got to thinking, doing that critical self-examination of defects in character my therapist talks about. For some unknown reason, in therapy, the gasoline fill-up thing has never come up.

The exploding Ford Pinto may have influenced me in some way, but I recall that I was not filling up the '68 Chevy Nova when I was given the opportunity to drive that car back and forth to college; and I think that was before it became common knowledge that Pintos blew up when rear-ended if there was enough gas to spray out the hole a protruding bolt punched in the tank after the car was rear-ended and igniting from the heat of the exhaust pipe.

No, it wasn't the Pinto engineering problem that was the source of my gasoline neurosis -- and I classify it as a neurosis because it affects only a portion of my personality as opposed to the whole, according to the old way of classifying stuff like that, because I cannot find the disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV).

It was Miss Hawn. And don't think there's anything Freudian about that. She was my fifth grade teacher. We were studying the Future Downfall of Man -- the Internal Combustion Engine. We were dismantling a single-cylinder, three-stroke, gasoline-fueled lawnmower engine to identify all of the the parts. This was an after-school project.

After taking the engine apart and putting it back together, I washed my hands and left. I noticed wadded up wet paper towels or toilet tissue sticking to the ceiling in the boys' bathroom. There was a short list of usual suspects who could have done that, but it wasn't my problem. I needed to get home. I figured that it was not my business, but Bob Munson thought it was his business.

He came into the boys' bathroom as I was leaving. I was running home and had reached Shady Oak, the street where I lived, named after the big, old, shady oak trees lining the street; and I heard good, old-for-the-fifth-grade, four-eyed, bean-pole Bob Munson (I always picked him for my basketball team because he was tall and could rebound, but never for football because he fumbled a lot after he was hit.) yelling something. He was way back, probably by Darlington Avenue; so, I couldn't really understand what he was screaming about "Hawn" and "wants you" and "come back to school." It made no sense to me on that breezy early-October afternoon because I might get to see part of the Yankees-Cardinals World Series game if I ran and didn't stop.

The next day, Miss Hawn wanted to see me, the 6th-grade hall monitor claimed. So, I found myself standing in front of the diminutive Miss Hawn. Someone saw me wad up wet paper towels or toilet tissue and throw them at the ceiling, according to Miss Hawn. My denials fell on her little, tiny, apparently-deaf ears. I had done it, according to Miss Hawn. She would have believed me had I returned to school when Bob Munson called me, but I ran home when I heard him. That meant I was guilty, according to Miss Hawn. World Series? What? She was obviously not a baseball fan ... or, perhaps, she was a Yankees fan.

Penalty: Stay after school the following week and take apart and put together the gasoline-fueled lawn mower engine every single day. Unfair? Hah, she had already called my mother. Mothers and teachers stuck together back then. And that meant I was (I would learn this word used by jurists everywhere later in life) fucked.

I encountered the snitch later that morning. Good, old-for-the-fifth-grade, four-eyed, bean-pole Bob Munson was grinning. But he countered that he told Miss Hawn that he saw me leaving the boys' bathroom. He didn't tell her he actually saw me wadding up the paper and whipping it at the acoustic-tiled ceiling. Why would he tell her he saw me when he didn't. He was nervous, though. Only he knew if he was lying or whether he was worried about the pick-up football game the next morning, the one in which I wouldn't pick him and then cover him when he was on offense, waiting for him to touch the ball and lay him out flat. I thought it more likely that it might be the latter.

Miss Hawn was the real culprit here, assuming that I knew something about the wadded up wet paper towels or toilet tissue sticking to the ceiling or that I threw the wadded up wet paper towels or toilet tissue sticking to the ceiling at the ceiling. She didn't believe me. She falsely accused and then convicted me, sentencing me to the after-school study of the gasoline-powered engine.

Miss Hawn. Look what you've done.

Posted by Bill at May 25, 2007 11:12 PM