I don't know how many of you wash your own car. I do. By that, I mean that I wash my own car. Not your car. So when you saw me out there the other day rubbing your car vigorously, it was not for any purpose that included cleanliness. I can tell you that much.

I wash my little car at one of those do-it-yourself car wash places, where you get your tokens and pile them on into the machine, then perform the wash with an ever-increasing anxiety that you haven't put enough money in and the time will run out, leaving you with a sudsy ride for all eternity. That kind of place.

Anyway, my usual program at the car wash is to put my 87 quarters in the little machine, and set the selector to "Rinse" which usually results in a startlingly strong spray of water out of the hose. I learned it was startlingly strong when I attempted to rinse some suds off my hand in the stream of water and lost about 3 layers of skin. The hand-rinsing resembled that old Civil Rights Protest footage you always see with the protesters having firehoses turned on them, or perhaps a prison atrocities movie.

After the rinse, I move straight to the "Foaming Brush" portion of the ritual. The Foaming Brush is connected by a hose to the ceiling of your little car-washing alcove and rotates to allow you to easily circumnavigate your car. Theoretically. I don't seen to be able to accomplish the Foam Brushing without some sort of minorly embarrassing or life-threatening episode. At some point in the circuit around the car, I always manage to get tangled up in the hose, or have to execute a dainty pirouette to stop the hose wrapping around my neck anaconda-style. If you've ever seen Conan The Barabarian, where he has to fight a giant snake puppet thing, you get the idea of me battling the Foaming Brush.

Conan, of course, was only dealing with a puppet. I, on the other hand, have an adversary which not only threatens to cut off the vital supply of oxygen to my brain, but also continually spits out foam (unless of course it's one of the innumerable occasions where the Foaming Brush has somehow been rendered impotent and can summon only the feeblest of sud-streams. This is roughly every other time I wash my car.)

So, here I am trying to deal with the Herculean task of taming the Foaming Brush, in public I might add, so everyone else at the car wash can watch my bumbling exploits. This is too much for someone as uncoordinated as myself to deal with. The floor is slick with suds, I have to suds up the car before the machine begins to beep that it's running out of time, and I have to keep the Brush in contact with the car without either getting choked to death or slipping and falling on my butt.

Do you begin to appreciate how tough my life is?

That's about all I have to say about the Foaming Brush actually. I know you probably don't care, but think of my travails the next time you do something even moderately coordinated. Maybe you can donate some coordination my way. I could sure use it.

I'll be out of town for a week or so, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to update for a while. Please find all your non-sequiturs and rambling elsewhere for the time being. But don't let me catch you wandering off to someone else's blog while I'm gone! There'll be hell to pay.