Pronounced Lie-Nerd Sky-Nerd

I got this Lynyrd Skynyrd sweatshirt at Wal-Mart for $7.

People don't seem to react to me the same way when I'm wearing it. There's a glaze of automatic dismissal in their eyes. Point of fact, they react to me exactly the way I would react to you if you were wearing a $7 Lynyrd Skynyrd sweatshirt from Wal-Mart. But I can't think of any way to signal the fact that, even though I think Lynyrd Skynyrd is awesome and I'm not wearing the shirt in any way ironically because I totally think wearing this Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt that I got for $7 at Wal-Mart is awesome, neither am I the kind of person who would buy a $7 Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt from Wal-Mart and then wear it because I think that's an awesome thing to do. I'm a complicated kind of man.

I ain't the one.

I'm not generally a Wal-Mart person. But I had to go somewhere. I had to go somewhere because I had to recharge my car battery. It's been dead for over a month – since I got back from Christmas, essentially. I didn't feel like calling Triple-to-the-A, so instead I waited for about three weeks, and then ordered a jump-starter from Amazon.com for $90.

What's that you ask? How could I have possibly justified doing this when I have AAA and the whole point of AAA is that they do things like this for free so you don't have to do things like buy a $90 car jumpstarter over the internets?

The answer to this question will, for now, remain shrouded in mystery. I don't want to give away too much of my aura.

I picked Wal-Mart because I didn't know how to get there, and my mom bought me a little GPS thing for my car. So I clicked "search" on the little doohickey and typed "Wal-Mart," and it located the nearest Wal-Mart. It told me to "turn left here" and I turned left. It said "merge right" and I merged right, onto the interstate, which was jammed with cars going seventeen thousand miles per hour. It said "put the pedal to the metal" and at first I thought it said "put the petal to the medal" and I didn't get it, because I only infrequently polish war memorials with roses while I'm driving, but then I got it, and then I burned rubber. When you go for a few months without driving, the circuits in your brain start to re-sensitize to just how dangerous driving is -- to just how little has to go wrong for everything to go wrong. I'm pretty convinced that when Karl Benz invented the car, he was looking for a way to consolidate the bullet and the coffin into one convenient package. I mean, he was German.

(Fun fact: the Daimler-Benz company was eventually renamed after a guy who sold Benzes. He had a daughter named Mercedes, so he called the cars he sold Mercedeses. So every time you think somebody is preposterously and self-aggrandizingly named after a luxury car, just remember – it's really no more outlandish than naming your daughter after a hamburger. My daughter is getting named Mercedes Wendy's, with the apostrophe-s and everything.)

What I've found about this GPS thing is that it always gets you where you need to go, but it always gives you different directions to get there. I went to Target -- I'm a Target person (ie, low-rent yuppie for whom the helvetica font represents the height of modern luxury) -- and it took me there one way, and back another way, and neither was the way with which I actually already know how to get to Target. At 11 o'clock at night, it told me to turn down a one-way sidestreet that was lit up with 10,000 watt police floodlights. I turned down the street. Then, I saw that it was next to a fast food restaurant with no drive through, and I turned around. The fast food restaurant sans drive-through is the thing, for me, that signals that I've stepped into a new kind of economy. That I have, in effect, gone beyond thunderdome. Does this make me a racist? No. But something else probably does. Maybe I'm wearing it right now.