Ignore those who will try to tell you “Happy wife, happy life!”
No, true happiness can be found in 3 very different words…
“Sh*t Happens, Okay?”
Oh, how that phrase–the battle cry adopted by The Bard and I during that hot, hot Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99–brings back memories. What originally sprung forth from a round of late-night conjecturing exactly what the hell the “SHO” in “Ford Taurus SHO”1As payment for all my hard work, Dad bought me my dream vehicular…a Taurus SHO. actually stood for,2Or to be grammatically correct: “…for which it stands.” “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” seemed to be slightly less gross than my girlfriends suggesting of “Sticky Hard-On.”
But then, as The Summer waned on, The Bard and I realized that it was the perfect description for the sh*t-show that constantly surrounded us as we toiled away on my family’s farm under Dad’s watchful eye. Nay, there was never a more apt mantra for maintaining a semblance of sanity through all the stray tires, busted transmissions,3I really need to get around to addressing the whole transmission situation, a la our work pickup, but for now all you need to know is that it provided a solid layer of “interesting” to that summer. and world-consuming forest fires we endured of those 3 months.
And to be clear, I’m referring to “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” There was nothing about that summer on the farm that should have been giving anyone a hard-on, of any kind…
Okay, so sh*t was happening alright. When I last left you, I was capping off a day chock-full of, um, “creative” fire-fighting techniques, that had left my eyesight barely functional thanks to all the smoke up in my contacts.
If you somehow missed out on those episodes, you can take a moment and catch up on them here and here real quick-like.
As always, I’ll wait.
…
…
Yeah, pretty messed up, right? You would have thunk that Dad would have taken not-burning-down-the-whole-countryside as a “win” for the day and we would have gone home while we were on top.
But noooooo. We had more ----- wheat to cut, so it was on to the next field!
In the course of moving all our equipment to this very important field ~20 miles away, I got assigned to Kountry Kommodities, our sweet semi-truck. Given that this was by far our fastest mode of transportation at the time, I wasn’t complaining too loudly about this. If I was going to have to drive anything with smoky contact lenses, at least I would be spending the least amount of time in misery rolling in ol’ KK.
Now, for some reason, Dad had me take the road less traveled, and not the highway like he and The Bard planned to do in the pickup and combine. While this sounds like an asinine detail, me traveling solo on some back road connecting Middle Of Nowhere, CO to Middle Of Nowhere, KS was more than enough for things to go even more sideways on me that day.
Ah, yes, now I recall the reason Dad had me take the less busy route: the transmission on the semi was starting to act up, so, you know, he better make sure that his youngest progeny is in Bum- ----- , Egypt if and when anything serious happens with the ol’ tranny.
Oh wait, did I spoil the surprise? C’mon, admit it though: you already knew in your heart of hearts what happened next.
Of course the ----- transmission went out on me in the middle of some lonely stretch of barely-paved highway, with ol KK slowly and dramatically grinding to a halt as it gave up the ghost.
So there I was, no cell phone, barely able to keep my irritated af eyes open, and nothing happening for miles in either direction. Well, this was a super-duper turn of events.
Nothing else to do, I started walking–no, “blindly stumbling”–down the road in hopes of finding some sort of human life that could help me out. Luckily–if you could call anything “lucky” about that day–the sole homestead on that road was only about a mile and a half away, and I ended up only having to blindly stumble for 20-30 minutes.
Some little old lady answered the door, and G0d bless that angel’s heart, she immediately took pity on me and took me in. After a phone call to one of my grandmas that lived about 15 minutes away, my personal angel gave me some wet towels to put over my head in hopes of helping soothe my very angry eyes.
In return for all her kindness, I repaid her the only way I truly knew how: as I waited for the cavalry to arrive, I regaled her with the tales of the clusterf*cky events that had led up to my showing up on her doorstep seemingly out of nowhere.
If hashtags had been a thing back then, no doubt she would have posted #Blessed across all of social media for having been graced by presence that day.
Anyways…I must have blacked out–or maybe it just seemed that way since “vision” was no longer a skill I could include on my resume at that point–because the next thing I remember was it being nighttime as I was reunited with Dad and The Bard on the combine.
And it was the heartwarming moment you’re no doubt imagining it to be, what with me having disappeared without a trace for a good 4-5 hours and all.
…
Of course it didn’t happen like that all. Somehow, Dad was pissed out of his mind at me for the transmission going out. You know, like it was my fault that he doesn’t know how to buy and properly maintain farming equipment.
Therefore, to this day, I maintain that it was an act of grace on my part when, in the middle of our yelling match, I found myself screaming spitting a fireball of Truth at him:
“Sh*t Happens, Okay!?!”
And even though I couldn’t technically confirm it was my two eyes–y’know, on account of the smoke-laced contacts, and all–I just know in my heart of hearts that in the corner of the combine cab was The Bard, solemnly nodding his head in knowing solidarity…4In order to not kill the flow of the story, I haven’t explicitly include how that day finally ended. For some reason, I can confirm that around 11 pm we found ourselves working on some completely unrelated farming equipment at our shop in Rolla, and I remember thinking to myself, “This has to be the longest ----- day in farming history.” I couldn’t have been too wrong, now could have I?
The point of the story is just that: sh*t happens, okay? Sometimes it just does. And while some people love to play the blame game and insist that all the less-than-perfect bits o’life–like faulty transmissions or raging wheat fires, for instance–be somebody’s fault, I maintain that you’ll have much healthier relationships and be much happier in life if you accept that sh*t just happening without much rhyme or reason is really the default mode of this world. Trust me, any sense of control is nothing much more than an illusion.
I just pray that others can acheive this enlightenment without having to endure a summer on a dysfunctional family farm…
Content created on: 21/22 August 2021 (Sat/Sun)
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Quite a story! Well done! And philosophical too. Keep up the good work!