Flipping the bird at answers

So, Delilah had a case of Spontaneous Tyre Explosion going on yesterday morning:

Bah!

I guess I should consider myself lucky it wasn’t the bald tyre on the front, while I was driving, which has happened before. Except I was going to replace the bald tyre with the spare tyre, so that Delilah would be roadworthy and I could finally get her registered in Victoria.¹

I couldn’t really believe it when Matt came downstairs and said, ‘Dude, what the fuck happened to your tyre!?’ and then pulled me out the front to witness this:

Feck!

The picture barely does it justice, but I thought I’d chuck it in there again, in case you missed how absurd this really is.

Matt’s not the sort of guy to fuck around about something like this – that’s Jesse – but I still wondered if he was having me on: he knows how much of a balls up my life has been lately, not least with regard to Delilah, so maybe he thought it would be funny.

Alas, he wasn’t taking the piss.

That little bit sticking up – it looked so much like a cartoon that it just didn’t make sense.

‘What the shit?’ I said.

‘Did you hear that shit in the morning?’

Yeah I’d heard it – Delilah is my bedroom, and sometime that morning I had been woken up by something that sounded halfway between a bazooka and someone slapping a thong on my brain. I dismissed the sound and went back to sleep, as you do.

‘Yeah I heard it,’ I said, ‘what the shit!?’

‘It must’ve exploded in the heat!’ Matt was in awe – this guy is interested in everything, and loves to imagine how things work. This would have been a marvel to him. Shit, it was a marvel to me, and I care about as much about the mechanics of tyres as I do about spreading peanut butter on my arse and running around in front of a pack of malnourished chihuahuas.

‘In the heat?’ It was 27 yesterday.

We stood around looking bamboozled for a while, looking at each other and saying ‘What the shit!?’ in as many variations in tone as you can imagine.

Why would my tyre explode like this? Why is the shrapnel sticking up in such a cartoonish fashion? Where did that long bit even come from anyway? Inside the tyre? I reiterate: what the shit!?

1. Who am I trying to kid? She’s perfectly roadworthy, and there’s more chance of me growing a beard than there is of me transferring the registration unless someone forces me to. [↩]