Whiteclay Part 3.

I knew that Saturday night was the night of the time change, but I made no adjustments for it. Call it my protest. It's fucking absurd that we should switch to Daylight Savings while it's still solar winter. There's been days that were near freezing with the sun still out at 7 P.M. It's unseemly. I pride myself on being tempered by Nebraska winters. I know better than to celebrate spring prematurely. there will be another snow yet, or at least one more cold snap. Yet the late sun gives me the urge to listen to Sublime and drink Corona. Nonsense, it's still heavy metal and Newcastle season. So I showed up at Dan's apartment an hour late to prove that society's artificial clock has no power over me. I showed up at the real 11 A.M.

Becky had brought Matzza bread. It's quite good and if you have't tried it yet you really should. Yet it didn't seem right somehow. For one thing, I was hungover, and would have rather had meat and grease. (No, the Mc'Donalds wasn't enough. It's never enough. I demand more fatty food to increase the liver damage and make me look hideous by the time I'm thirty.) For another thing, all of us except our infidel cameraman were raised Catholic.

And I for one would like to see the old Catholic/Jew rivalry come back. It's like the Nu/Ou football rivalry. It has drama, portent, romance, even a little grudging respect. The current Jew/Muslim rivalry is, by contrast, more like Nu/Cu in football. It's classless, mean-spirited, a lame echo. Watch Passion of the Christ and the room practically fills with the smell of insense and burning flesh on the stake. People don't hate like that anymore. Nowadays they drop the theatre and go straight to the naked domination. I blame America. We're so philistine with our bigotry. We don't put any flair to it at all, and we set a bad example for the rest of the world.

Oh yes, the crew consisted of myself, Dan Feuerbach, Rebecca Ankenbrand, and the infidel Paul Clark. It would have been better to bring a fellow Catholic who would pay for cigarettes without smoking them. But we needed someone who could rent a university camera, and I dropped out of J-school.

We took Dan's clown car. He says it's a 92 Corrola, but I thought that they stopped making manual transmissions in 1958. At any rate, the only people who knew how to drive a stick were Dan and myself, which is to say that I drove a stick once or twice seven or eight years ago. Some people say that it's just like riding a bike. Some people drink Bud Light. Some people cry at Extreme Home Makeover.

So I had some relearning to do as we headed south to retrieve my own car at 14th and Old Cheney. I killed the engine six times in the first six blocks, held up traffic a couple times, held up okay on south thirteenth. Nearly drove into Highway two traffic when I had to "stop" the car with this stone-age technollogy, nearly rolled backwards into an SUV at 14th and Old Cheney, and for good measure, killed the car again in the parking lot where my car sat. It was decided that I would handle the driving in the west, where things like "stopping" and "slowing down" wouldn't be as much of a problem. My stick skills would improve over the course of the trip, there is nothing I can't do after all. I would eventually be able to shift up and down without makng the car sound like a dying panther. And eventually I could drive out of parking lots after only two or three tries. But enough about my weaknesses, let's talk about society's.

I gathered my car, led the Corolla back to my apartment in T-Town, loaded my stuff, and we were off. Interstate 80 to Grand Island, Highway 2 to Ellsworth, 27 to gordon, U.S. 20 to 87, 87 to happytown.

But first, the tire went flat.