Where Not To Find Relationship Advice

No, I am not a relationship expert. No, I am not going to give y’all relationship advice. No, I am not trying to confuse you. I personally hate hearing relationship advice and I don’t give it because I don’t know what is rattling around in another fucker’s skull. With that being said, I got a rather lengthy e-mail from my #1 hater (fan/stalker) explaining how I can have a better relationship with my wife since I’m such an asshole. I won’t glorify her ignorance of my marriage by sitting examples but it made me sit down and think of the top five (5) people nobody should take serious relationship advice from. Finding people to give you advice on relationships is like finding people who want a free lunch; everyone has something to say about relationships just like everyone likes a great free lunch. Some of this advice is good and should be filed away in your subconscious for safekeeping, but most relationship advice isn’t so fucking good and should be taken the same way you’d take an article written for international woman’s magazines, with an enormous grain of salt. I don’t think it’s not that people intend to give shitty advice on relationships, rather, the advice is poor because the people who are giving it are either not qualified or they have ulterior motives. With that being said, there are five people (or types of people) you should stay away from when the advice on relationships starts flying.

1. Any and all television personalities. It’s important to remember that they are, above all, entertainerss with that being their number one goal, to enyertain. Entertainers care about their ratings, not about your relationship. If you’re looking at these shows as a model of relationship behavior, you’re barking up the wrong tree so much that you’re not even in the right forest. So while these shows and these people may occasionally offer a pearl of wisdom, remember that it’s Hollywood.

2. Your never-married aunt is another person whose advice on relationships is best to avoid at all costs. People who have never married often can’t help but harbor a certain essence of bitterness or misplaced desires. This isn’t to say that every single person in the world is bitter, but many who have dated for years and never gotten the ultimate reward are like professional athletes who have never won a championship: they are bitter about their lack of a ring.

3. Your seven-times married aunt is one more person you should avoid getting relationship advice from. On the opposite side of those who’ve never married are those who change spouses like most people change cars; when their husband gets too many miles, they trade him in for a younger model. These people can also be bitter because even though they have married, they haven’t done it successfully. But the biggest reason not to seek out their advice for relationships has to do with them not really knowing how to make a relationship actually work.

4. Your ex, never trust your ex to give sound relationship advice. Logic tells us that an ex might have insightful advice that you can truly use. They know you, they know what went wrong, and they know what you could have done to make your relationship work. Logic tells us this, but human behavior tells us the opposite. If you and your ex are truly friends (and don’t just pretend to be in front of the children), no longer harboring any feelings for one another, then an ex might actually be your relationship guru. But if your ex has feelings for you at all, be it love, anger, or hatred, they may purposely sabotage you instead of helping you. Sometimes, it’s just too big of a risk to take. Plus, isn’t that person you ex for one or more reasons?

5. And for the love of whatever diety you pray to, do not take relationship advuce from any comment sections of the internet or from unsolicited e-mails. I was once told that the internet can be a wonderful place for advice on relationships, but it has to be the right area of the internet. What is the “right” area of the internet? Should we just Google it?  The comment section of web articles is not a good place to get advice on relationships or anything else. These sections are filled with baiters whose main goal is to get a rise out of people. They do this through racist, sexist, homophobic, religious,  and other offensive comments. They cause people to do two things, lose faith in the happily ever after, and lose faith in humanity in general.

Which is why y’all are here, right? Expecting me to drop a pearl of wisdom by accident? Well, don’t feel fucking stupid or misled, I mentioned at the beginning this was to help shed light (both serious & funny) on some of the people we might have in our lives. Want my advice? Do whatever works for you and piss on everything else. The end, that’s all the advice I have. As well, that is the only advice I will ever need. My relationship may not look perfect to you but it works perfectly for us.

Finding This Treasure By Accident

First of all, let this serve as a lesson on how to be reminded that your wife is always in charge. Whether you want to accept this little factoid or not is not the question, but it is definitely the answer. Even tho I am very good at what I do some things are a pretty hard sell. But, I am getting ahead of myself totally here. So, Let me start at the beginning where everything started so y’all don’t get even more lost than usual. Anyway, not too terribly long ago I got a phone call from my mother-in-law where she proceeded to explain to me that her cousin’s uncle’s father’s niece’s father (or something to that extent) had passed away recently. He owned a house and property deep in the sticks here in southeast Texas and was a known hoarder of too many things to list. So, of the two people that all his worldly belongings were left to in a verbal will passed down word of mouth for a while is my mother-in-law and one of her sisters who had passed years ago. She had no idea about any of it until she got her phone call. She went on to explain that nobody had seen him in years since he kinda lived “off the grid” if you know what I mean. My mother-in-law wanted me to drive here out to the property to see what she had just inherited. She thought I would get a kick out of it since I go to so many estate auctions. Fair assumption, I like digging through dead people’s stuff looking for that one or two things that jump out at me. I hooked up to my trailer and then drove over to pick her up so we could make the 1 1/2 hour drive to BFE Texas to take a look around. When we arrived at the property, which doesn’t show up on a GPS by the way, it felt like we were going back in time, way back.

The house was a one bedroom, kitchen/living room combo with a porch across the front and east side. It was discovered very fast in a quick scan of the interior that there was no indoor plumbing as I had to make a trip out back to the outhouse. I will be honest, I didn’t use the inside of the outhouse since I about blew chunks from the smell when I opened up the door. That old man should have layed off the burritos! Other than that, the house was basically falling down. The house had repairs to the repairs which had once been repaired. I would have venture to say that this house served him well for the past 65 years. The story is that he built this house to impress the girl he was courting and wanted to show her what he was made of. Ok, yes, she fell for it and they lived as a couple un-married for 52 years when she passed away. That is about all the history I know, the rest is pretty sketchy at best. We spent a fair amount of time looking around the house. We found some furniture worth restoring, an iron claw foot tub was found in the bedroom, and some pictures and such. I went ahead and loaded that stuff onto the trailer. That was what was in the house since he lived a rather meager life. We discussed me coming back in a few weeks to finish cleaning out the place and then go ahead and level the building before it falls in on itself and kills somebody. Seems sad to me since the man built it all by hand. But, it is in bad shape, I don’t think it would survive a revival or a move to someplace else. I will have to make sure to get a few of the old window frames since those are always pretty cool to have, there is so much a person can do with them. Then we made a final pass and we were out the door. She had mentioned he collected junk and such so I wanted to go look around the property a bit. He had a few buildings which had collapsed in on themselves some years ago by the looks of them. It is when I got behind the second building that I knew I had struck gold because there was an old truck and a few antique farm implements hiding in the shade of the trees.

I was beside myself actually. I was standing in front of the remains of a 1940ish Chevrolet pick-up. You know how a kid gets when there is a new toy or game at the store and you can’t pull them away because they had become all glazed over with excitement? That was me, I will admit that, because I was immediately thinking of what I could do with it so I could sell the idea to my wife. Some of you may be thinking it was wrong of me to look at it as I have to sell the idea to my wife, but in my defense, what my wife would of seen if she were there was a rusted out truck in the trees, not what I can make it. I now have the vision. Plus, now I know what I will do with the 427 Hemi that I have had sitting in the corner of my shop for the last three years. My vision is something close to stock on the body. I see it John Deere green with yellow accents and the green and yellow interior. The sad thing is I always had a mystery vehicle in mind for this vision but a big fat question mark for what vehicle it would actually be. So, yea, I have been waiting for this truck. It not having a bed is perfect as well because it will become a wood flatbed. I can see the re-birth of this truck in my head. I might have actually given myself a headache thinking about this so hard. However, I have been looking for less to do rather than getting into another long term project. In many ways, I’m torn. Since y’all have gotten the jist of this post y’all already know I loaded it up on my trailer and took it home. In fact, it is still sitting on my trailer backed into the shop, I didn’t want it to rust. Plus it gives me more time to warm my wife up to the idea of restoring this beautiful truck.

Not to get off on a tangent here but I often wondered why owners of vehicles let them get to such a state. I would think they would want to pass them on to someone who would either take care of it as it is or transform it back into it’s former glory. Yes, I do realize that old men do not part with their worldly possessions easily. Plus most old men don’t want to see these old cars turned into chopped down hot rods. I get that fully and I understand it to the extent that I almost don’t want to do what I want to do to this truck. So, in many ways, I’m torn on what I want to do. I always wanted a hot rod. I never actually wanted a classic car to tool around in tho. But this truck is screaming hot rod at me, I hear it echoing in my head right now as I type this post. I will be fair with whatever I do. As I sat and watched it rust on the trailer in my shop I was still wondering what my wife was going to think. At that very moment the door to the shop opened. It was my son. He was excited because he knows he will be driving it one day. He told me he would be looking really cool pulling in the parking lot for the high school the very first day. Luckily for me he is only pushing twelve, so I have a few years. He is a terror on wheels already, I can’t even imagine if he was driving a hot rod truck as his first car. I have mentioned before in past posts I see myself in him and that truly scares me. My dad was the same way with me, if I wanted to drive it, ride it, or fly it, he never told me no. Now he is very excited. Shortly afterwards, the door opened again, this time it was my wife. She had a stupid little shit eating grin on her face. She just wanted to see the surprise I brought home. Of course, my mother-in-law had just let the cat out of the bag when she called her to ask if she liked the truck. Fortunately, she just walked up to me, kissed my shoulder on her way to walk around the trailer while she just shook her head. When she made it back around the trailer she told me, “I don’t care what you do with it, just make sure you don’t build something that your son can kill himself in showing off to the girls on the first day of high school”. All I could do is smile. She knows I am going to build a hot rod. She also informed me that my new “girlfriend” had better understand I am married or she will end up on fire while heading down the bank of the creek. Interesting the way my wife puts her thoughts into words that make a sharp and effective point.

For now, my new girlfriend will just have to wait her turn. I have plenty of time but I don’t have the desire to start anything real big yet. Luckily my wife has not brought up the fact that I already have other projects that have been just sitting there waiting for me to finish. Plus, I don’t want to make my H1 mad since she is very temperamental when she finds out I have been driving something else besides her. So, I don’t even know what I am going to do with the old truck yet, if I am even going to do anything with it. My wife had mentioned just selling it, no harm no foul, and call it even. I think my wife fears that I will become one of those men who buy old shit to rebuild or restore and never actually get around to doing it. Then, when I die she has to get rid of it. So, I don’t want to be one of those men, but at the same time, I do like to tinker quite a bit. Well, it’s neither here nor there, I have a new project whenever I get ready to take it on. I didn’t ask for it since in reality it fell in my lap. But, I guess I need to learn to tell myself no more often. Plus, strangely enough, I like my cars already done and ready to drive. I spent too many years buying beaters and constantly fixing them just to keep them on the road. Luckily I haven’t had to do that for about six or seven years. I will just let the old truck sit on the trailer in my shop for now. Soon enough I will need my trailer and then the real decision will need to be made, roll it off in the shop or roll it off back behind the shop. I am sure only time will tell.