I Could Not Make This Stuff Up....

This may actually be back in the "you might be a redneck if...." department--see what you think.


From the Associated Press comes the story of a man in Kitsap County (a county or so over from the one I live in) who apparently had been working on repairing a Lincoln Continental for about two weeks. At that point, he decided to remove the right rear wheel but was not able to get the last lug nut off. He tried and he tried and he probably cursed and tried some more (the paper doesn't mention that...but I feel fairly confident about it) and then finally took the only action that a real man could reasonably take.


He shot it.



No, really. He went and got a 12-gauge shotgun and fired it at the stubborn lug nut from about arm's length. The deputy sheriff commented that the man was "bound and determined to get that lug nut off", to which I am forced to reply thusly: Deputy, if you think he shot that wheel because he thought it the next logical step in removing the stubborn lug nut, you are high or stupid, and you have clearly never been driven to near insanity by the infuriatingly calm mutiny of a small, smug, inanimate object.

Speaking as someone who has known intimately the impotent rage of the computer that repeatedly informs me that it "cannot perform that operation at this time" (I don't WANT an operation--I want the damnable thing to print!), the knitting pattern whose precise directions would actually produce a three-armed sweater (and possibly a four-assed monkey) if the knitter is not vigilant for the carefully buried errors (I nearly typed "booby traps", but that just made me giggle like a 12-year-old boy when I used it to describe a sweater pattern), or the printer that chews and swallows paper so fast that the pie-eating champions in the world are worriedly trying to sabotage the thing to eliminate the competition, my hat goes off to you, Kitsap County Man. Stupid, yes. But satisfying--at least before the pain kicked in? Oh, I can only dream of such bliss.


It seems that Mr. Kitsap County hadn't figured on the way that buckshot scatters and ricochets, nor how close he was standing to it when it did. He'll be fine, although I don't doubt he's a hurtin' unit right now--he got hit with scatter all the way up to his chin. And I'm sure it doesn't help to have to tell the doctors and so on that he did it shooting his car wheel because the lug nut wouldn't come off. Laughter may be the best medicine, but I'm pretty sure that having it directed AT you wasn't the intent of that particular prescription.


The article also mentioned that the man "did not make a statement at the scene", a comment that makes me wonder just a bit about our press over here as well. What's he gonna say while he lays there full of buckshot, anyway? "Yup, shot my car and myself with one shot. It totally rocked. I'm thinking of mounting that wheel on the wall of my den when I get out of the hospital. Do you know a taxidermist that does wheels?"

An unlikely hero, this newly ventilated man from Kitsap County--a man who struck a blow for inept people everywhere when he stood up and refused to take it anymore. Just before he laid down to swear colorfully and bleed.

And this much is certainly true: you may be a redneck if you have ever put yourself in the hospital while attempting to shoot your car. You are probably a redneck if you have ever attempted to get a coherent statement from the man full of buckshot and embarrassment, writhing on the ground. And you are almost certainly a redneck if, like me, you kinda wish you'd had the guts (and temporary stupidity) to do something just like it.

But without the bleeding, naturally.