So it’s fitting that our shitty 2006 that started with a transportation nightmare would end with a transportation nightmare.

Two days before Christmas, Mary Milan and I drove from Chicago to Central Wisconsin. Her brother, who lives in the suburbs of Chicago, planned to make the trip with his girlfriend the night before Christmas, so he let us borrow his small, sporty, standard transmission Saturn, for what should have been a non-life threatening a 4 hour drive.

Neither Mary Milan nor I really know how to drive standard. Although we both conceptually understand how to do, neither or us have logged a whole lot of manual driving time. The first and only time Mary Milan drove manual, “it didn’t end well” and the last time I did, I stopped traffic in Burbank for 4 minutes in a Porche Boxter.

We decided that I should drive but we had an exchange very similar to this one in Aliens:

Ripley: How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?
Gorman: Thirty eight… simulated.
Vasquez: How many *combat* drops?
Gorman: Uh, two. Including this one.
Drake: Shit.
Hudson: Oh, man…

I sort of looked at it like I do swimming. I can “swim” but I can’t tread water, so if I ever got dropped in an ocean, I would just have to keep on swimming or I’d drown. Simple. Same with this standard transmission thing. I figured just get into fifth gear and on the highway and we’re home free. Just don’t stop.

As we hit the road, a gentle rain started falling. Like any responsible driver, we turned on our windshield wiper to low and discovered that the driver’s side wiper had a habit of flying open, hitting the driver’s side rearview mirror and swinging back onto the windshield (if you can imagine a windshield wiper wiping 180 degrees, that’s what it was doing, except 90 of those degrees were off the windshield).

We thought it was strange but since it was doing a fine job pushing water around, we ignored it.

Then it started raining harder, but we forged ahead.

And then harder still, but we forged ahead.

And then, it began to sleet.

I turned the wipers to high and it was still impossible to see. A big truck passed us on the left, making us eat a mixure of water, ice, and dirt on our windshield.

“Why did you turn the windshield wipers off?” Mary Milan asked.

“I didn’t…”

Dun-dun-dun!

Our driver’s side windshield wiper had overextended itself one time too many. There is was, off of the windshield, hyperextended above the mirror, jutting into the next lane. Its death caused the other wiper to stop working as well.

So there we were: driving in sleet with no windshield wipers and too afraid to stop because we weren’t sure if we could get going again.

Did we do the smart thing and stop?

Hell no.

Like idiots, we kept on driving, hoping the weather would clear. It was the easterly moving Denver storm and we were moving westerly. So we would pass it, right?

Oh, hell no. We drove right into it.

We were tatooed by a withering rainstorm for about 2 straight hours. These were the only two things I could see: blurry red brake lights, the center line divider, and nothing when a car passed us.

About an hour away from home (we had stopped twice - once for gas and once for my sanity), Mary Milan suddenly said, “Oh, shit,” under her breath.

The skies had darkened and I thought she was referring to the loss of light, to which I was less concerned about since we couldn’t see anyway.

“It’s beginning to snow. We have to get home before the roads ice up,” she said.

In about five minutes, we were smack dab in the middle of the “Snowstorm of 2006″ which was in the process of leaving more than 20,000 people in the central Wisconsin without power until Christmas day.

We blindly slid about the last mile, nearly ditching once or twice, before we got to the safety of the farm.

When I turned off the ignition, I could hardly believe that we were still alive. We only lost about 45 minutes because we mostly drove as if we had operational wipes (in fact, we even passed one or two cars that did).

This was what we hoped to be the Last Shitty Thing of 2006 but boy were we wrong when two days later, James Brown passed away.

As documented here, Rocky IV has a lot going for it, and the 4 minute James Brown song and dance number is really just gilding the lily. However, it’s cinematically and theologically effective because when Drago goes on to kill Apollo, you’re left saying to yourself, “This is impossible. The Godfather of Soul just performed ‘Living in America.’ That unmoved Russian monster has no heart. And because of this, there must be no god.”

Good riddance 2006.

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