Riding bitch in a Honda Karma

“You’re inviting some bad karma,” my wife said before she shut up.

That I had already picked up a speeding ticket and sat in stop-and-go traffic for a few hours didn’t seem to factor into her calculations about my karma. Seemed to me like I’d already run afoul of the karma-harpy. Driving home from Florida on the Sunday after Thanksgiving is the travel equivalent of having Chinese water torture on your testicles. Don’t ask me how I know.

“As you drive through our city, county, and state, we’d like to remind you to follow the law.”

That actually what the cop said to me in Abbeville, Alabama. My kid waved at him through the window and said, “Hi.” You’d have thought Santa Claus was standing there with a badge and gun, except the cop looked and sounded like Lamar Latrell on steroids and was sticking me for my first traffic violation in a decade. I’d been doing 80 in a 65 and he wrote me for every bit of it. I have to wait ten days before I find out how much it cost me. All I’m saying is I’m glad I still have one testicle left after that night in Beijing.

Once the officer was safely in his Dodge Magnum (yeah, a cop in a car with the same name as a condom), I said, “I hope he wakes up with a bad case of the crabs,” and drove as quickly as 65-mph would carry me over the Henry County border into Jimmy Carter’s home state.

“I never thought I would be so happy to be in Georgia,” I said and kicked it back up to 75 miles per hour.

The joy of being in the Peach State lasted until I hit the traffic about 40 miles south of Atlanta. After that, I turned joyless, sullen, and angry. Over the course of the next several hours, I wished a different venereal disease on at least four different people. By the time the guy in Commerce, Georgia cut me off, I had run out of social diseases.

“I hope when that guy gets home he find out his wife has been cheating on him,” I said and then muttered a few Fred Flintstone curses under my breath.

The frustrating part about it was that we’d originally planned to head home a day early so I could finish up some work on Sunday. By Friday at the beach, I told the wife we could stay until Sunday if she wanted to to. She did, we did, and now here we are.

That is all a long way of saying, it’s all my fault. I know better than to speed through small southern towns. I know better than to travel on travel days. I know better than to wish VD and adultery on other people. My wife is occasionally right about things, and about the karma she is sure to be spot on.

And so here we are in beautiful G-Vegas. Its snow-cloudy to the north, cold-sunny to the south, and a bubbling pit of bad karma in the middle. To distract both you and me from the ugly monster that is sure to climb out of it before I leave for Mexico on my birthday, here is one final vacation pic of my good looking kid. Thank goodness he only takes after me in the way he acts.