NIGHTMARE ON MY STREET

SUSIE: "I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?"

ME: "Oh shit."

SUSIE: "C'mon. Which one?"

ME: "The good news."

SUSIE: "Mom's still coming to watch Andrew on Friday night."

(I'm working Friday night and Susie won some tickets to a concert by Third Day who are apparently a contemporary Christian group. Somebody needs to watch Andrew and my mother-in-law drew the short straw)

ME: "That's the GOOD news?!? I'm not sure I want to hear the bad news."

SUSIE: "The bad news is ... she's going to get here about 8 a.m. on Friday because her car will be in the shop."

See this phone?

See this fucking phone?!?

HOLD IT.

HOLD IT HARD.

HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE.

On Friday, my mother-in-law and I are going to spend ALL FUCKING DAY alone together.

On average, I can take about ten minutes with this woman ... and that's with Susie here serving as my bumper.

I have NO EARTHLY IDEA what I'm going to do with her for ten hours.

I figure I can do yard work which will take me about three hours.

I can take a ferocious nap afterwards for two hours.

That still leaves me with five hours alone with my mother-in-law.

Some mothers-in-law are still sexy and some sons-in-law could probably talk them into sex.

Not my mother-in-law. She's 70 and has so many varicose veins on her body that she looks like a walking aorta.

Trust me ... if I had Photo Shop, I would have put little cartoon legs on this photo.

This, of course, ruins my life completely.

Because I KNOW what's going to happen Friday.

Within the first ten minutes, she's going to start hounding me to join her in this wretched pyramid scheme selling $80 bottles of shit water that's supposed to make you more energetic when it's actually giving you cancer of the genitals.

Then, for the next nine hours and 50 minutes, she's going to talk about this drink like it's the second coming of Christ Hisself.

And because in real life I'm a good guy who doesn't want to rock the boat with my in-laws, I will sit there and pretend to listen to it with a weak smile on my face.

And please ... don't tell me "God, Uncle Bob ... just beat her with a lead pipe if she starts talking. Don't take that shit from nobody!"

This ain't Jerry Springer, folks. This is my diary where I vent and ... like a woman ... I just want to vent and not listen to advice.

Grrrrrrr....

(Not "Grrrrr" at you ... "Grrrrr" at the thought of spending all day with my mother-in-law)

I have to get a cap or crown or some shit put on my root canal tooth this morning.

That should be fun.

It seems that Sunday night, Susie went to wash some clothes.

On Monday morning, she opened the washer and the clothes were standing in about two feet of water that never drained.

I called a repair guy yesterday who came out to laugh at my ignorance in fixing washing machines.

He opened the lid to the washer and snorted "You ain't even removed the clothes yet, boy?"

Which, hindsight being 20/20, would have made perfect sense ... remove the wet underwear from the washing machine before the repairman gets here.

"Uhhhhhhh ... nope," I said.

"Whale ... before I start lookin' to fix it, I'm'a go' need you to remove them there clothes."

So here I am, wringing out all these clothes and throwing them in a laundry basket, cursing my wife for no good reason while doing so.

I get all the clothes in the basket which is now sopping wet and dripping water all over the floor and am trying to think what I can do with all these clothes.

Logically, I probably could have put them in the dryer.

However, with a boisterous redneck in my house thinking I'm some kinda retarded faggot because I wasn't smart enough to remove my dainties from the washer before he got there, all logic was sailing out the window at an alarming speed.

So I draped all the wet clothes over the patio furniture outside like a little domestic housewife.

"You got anything ah can drain this water out with?" he asked me.

"Oh dear" I said. "Like what?"

Here's the deal ... I have never in my 42 years EVER said "Oh dear!"

NEVER.

Why in the blue hell this phrase decided to creep into my vocabulary as I'm dealing with a burly Rebel flag-waving, knuckle-dragging, pickup-driving good ol' boy is beyond me.

By the time the phrase leaped out of my mouth with the grace of a three-legged gazelle, it was too late to change it into "Aw shit, man!" or "Gawddamn, motherfucker!"

It was out there.

"Oh dear".

I'm blaming it on the fact that Andrew's been on a massive Winnie the Pooh kick and that damned Rabbit on the tapes is always saying "Oh dear!"

Thankfully, my brain stopped my mouth from saying "I said 'Oh Dear' because that's what the rabbit always says on 'Winnie The Pooh'."

I think at that point I would have just had to suffer an Alabama ass-kicking from this redneck in my own home.

Bubba spent about five minutes tilting the machine to and fro before deciding that what I needed was a new belt for the washer.

But belt-driven washers haven't been made for over 15 years, so he'd have to order a belt for me.

And it'd cost around $150 for the belt and for him to install it.

I thanked him graciously, wrote him a $38 check for the service call and booted his fat ass out the door.

I called Susie and told her I had good news and bad news.

The bad news was the washer was going to cost $150 to fix.

The good news was ... she was getting an early Christmas present ... a new washer.

She mumbled something about this being the best Christmas ever and hung up.

I detected sarcasm in her tone.