J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #4: "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues" by Jim Croce

My folks played Jim Croce. I pretended to read a book that didn't exist for an autobiography book report in high school about Jim Croce. He is played regularly in my house as a grown folk to this day. That is one chill ass dude who made some real ass music, even if it was folksy and AM radio-ey. I sometimes wonder what went wrong with us as a people to where kids don't have blonde hair like used to did in the '70s, and guys can't grow bushy mustaches like back then either. It is said that humans have a lot of the immunity inside their hair follicles, thus the story of Samson (as well as that bitch Delilah) is not so far-fetched. We wear strange hair nowadays, with dudes purposely rocking cybertronic close cut beard designs and women shaving their cooches bare. Hell, even dudes shave themselves. Seems we are reverting to our childhood, like any lost ass adult with mental issues. Right now, we have ebay to buy all the dumb shit from our childhood and fill those empty gaps, but our kids, they won’t grow up with the same shit to look back on. What are they gonna buy? Obsolete smartphones? Old gaming systems? Lolcat emails?
Whenever I ride by the car wash, whatever car wash, I see those dudes working and I real that there’s some real dudes. They are not fucking around online and they ain’t checking their emails twice an hour much less having them zapped directly at them through their robot phones to where they are playing space invaders all the goddamned time, putting callouses on their thumbs from rubbing across their tiny button pads too furiously. At times, I feel like, “fuck it, I’m getting ahead in life,” and other times I feel like life is getting ahead of me. But it’s like a long distance trip where you’re four states from home on the way back in your daily car, and maybe you can sense you’re low on oil or something. Something’s not quite right, you can feel it, even though there’s no obvious light saying, “Yo, shit ain’t right, homeslice.” And you know something’s not right; but you don’t know what. So you just try to make it home. That’s where I’m at, waiting to figure out what the problem might be, riding along on cruise control, thinking I might’ve took the wrong exit 60 miles back, but I don’t have a map. How the fuck does everybody get to where they’re going? Seems like everybody else got given a map but I didn’t.
Eventually, I figure, something will either get completely fucked in my ride, like I’ll get skin cancer or shot in the shoulder or something, and it’s like the car breaking down on the side of the road. You know everything’s screwed for sure at that point so there’s nothing left to do but call AAA and hope your alzheimer’s ridden mother-in-law accidentally renewed your membership. Or you limp home, and it still doesn’t feel right in the car, it’s just not going the way you feel it should, and nothing happens but then it breaks down on the side of the road on like a Tuesday afternoon. You figure out the problem and hitchhike home and fix it on Wednesday morning, or at least get it running again, and life goes on.
I don’t really know what the fuck my point is other than I feel like about 200,000 miles without an oil change for the last 15,000. Sometimes I can sit there and understand how people flip out and stab motherfuckers in batches or dive off the top of buildings with a half-gainer into concrete wasteland ten stories below. Jim Croce is like a goddamned tincture that eases my chronic internal struggle. He’s working at the car wash, and it sucks, because he wants an office with a desk and a secretary, but he’s just working at the goddamned piece of shit car wash. But hey, fuck it you know. Everybody’s got a struggle in they brain of one variety or another.
That’s the goddamned beauty of music - you can be sure emotionally of whatever it is that is overriding your every waking thought, but then just the right song will come on and twist it all - the whole wide earth and everything that happened to you, today and forever - into a completely different angle, and it’s okay. You drink a beer and figure tomorrow’s gonna be another day, and you can get up and catch a ride to where the car is broken down on the side of the road, and you’ll figure out with the help of your Haynes manual how the fuck to replace the starter solenoid, which for some reason is behind the engine block. And then you’ll be moving along again, maybe looking like more of a piece of shit than everything else moving along, with your busted grill and dented passenger side and one fender a different color than the rest. But you’re still moving, and though you probably won’t ever get to where you thought you were gonna go when young and smooth-skinned and with big wide eyes full of trust and optimism, you’re still moving. You piece of shit.
STEAL "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues"
NEXT UP: Me and Mike Gee getting down in the camper!