My sister, as will be generally known to readers of teacupmammoths.com, recently returned from a trip to Mongolia (Motto: Come for the yaks, stay for the nightlife), in addition to going to Mongolia though, she also spent a little time in China and Russia.  Now, Russia, as I understand things, has kind of turned into one big frozen Communist yard sale since the the Soviet Union lost the Cold War (Though a number of military and economic factors contributed to this loss, the decisive event occurred when Ronald Reagan beat Mikhail Gorbachev at a game of HORSE which was appointed to decide whether Capitalism or Communism was better.  For the historically curious among you, it wasn’t even close, Reagan beat Gorbachev quite handily while earning merely a HOR for himself).  Anyways, it turns out that even now, you’re hardly off the plane when you arrive in Moscow before people are trying to sell you all sorts of Communist leftovers.  AK-47's, red cranial spots, and or course nuclear weapons are all available at low, low prices for the interested tourist.  But at least one other thing was also to be bought there, and that is what my sister decided to bring home for me.  What as it, you ask?  It was, she told me, a Lenin hat.

            Now, I don’t know about you, but I was never the biggest Lenin fan in the world.  I mean, I know he was an absolutely essential part of the Beatles, but I think that once he went solo and became a Communist dictator, most of his songs sucked, and smacked of the malicious influence of Yoko Ono.  Nonetheless, I was severely excited to hear that my sister was bringing me home a Lenin hat.  I mean, Russia is frequently called “The Disney World of Siberia” for a good reason right?  So I was all atwitter with anticipation as to what physical form the awesomeness of this hat was going to take.  I figured that since at Disney World they sell those Goofy hats, that look like you scalped Goofy and turned the top half of his face into a ghoulish yet festive chapeau, complete with dangly ears, a Lenin hat would be much in the same vein, since Lenin is generally considered to be the most Goofyesque Communist Dictator in history (some would hold that this title ought to go to Pol Pot, but I say his penchant for genocide makes him much more of a Donald Duck dictator).  Already I had imagined how very stylish and bitchin’ I would look after donning such a unique piece of headgear as a Lenin hat; his fearsome face glowering at all who opposed my tyrannical reign, his long, floppy ears merrily blowing in the summer breeze or possibly serving as a makeshift chin strap in windy conditions, but alas, it was not to be.

            Mt sister informed me that in fact, the hat, while bearing numerous Lenin-themed pins and buttons, did not, in the strictest sense, conform to the shape of his head.  Instead, it had more the shape of those oval hats that army guys and 1950s burger making dudes generally wear.  So, when my sister handed me the hat as we drove along through the scenic Dismal Swamp, home of all sorts of scenic man-eating alligators and possums, I put it on my head immediately (the hat, not the swamp, which would have been rather messy).  I must say, I looked ever so dapper whilst wearing it, but even so, it brought with it many a peril all its own.  For instance, there was some guy behind us who was all tailgating and stuff, like he wanted to pass us, but even when we slowed down, he never did, I surmise that the driver, taking my hat to be a token of my allegiance, mistook me for some kind of Commie Pinko spy, sent to steal America’s superior swamp technology and take it back to the Motherland.

            In addition, it seems that decades of oppressive rule have left most Russians with tiny heads, and as an unfortunate side effect of this trend, the hat displayed an alarming tendency to fall off if I didn’t just sit there and balance it the right way.  This would have been okay, but every time a song I liked came on the radio and I tried to rock out to it, it would fly off and smack into other things in the car.  From this I concluded that Russians must not rock out on a regular basis, and if they do, they must have special hats made specifically for that purpose; which, if there is any justice in the world, will bear a more striking resemblance to Goofy.

            As you probably remember from my last blog (unless you have like, the shortest memory in the world like some guy in an artsy movie or possibly a cocker spaniel), Hitler has ganked a radiator hose in my van, and as such, I have had to seek out another form of transportation.  Unfortunately, since my sister wasn’t able to sneak a yak through customs on her way back from Mongolia, I’ve had to settle for the next best thing - my grandmother’s car.  “Why is that less cool than a yak?” you may ask.  Well, her car happens to be the oldest Ford Tempo ever.  Like, its so old that Gerald Ford himself made it in the very fires of Mount Doom (because of course, that’s where Gerald Ford lives).  To make matters worse, this car clearly hates me with a burning passion not felt by a car since the part of General Lee in the movie “Gettysburg” was given to Martin Sheen instead of to the General Lee.  On the bright side though, my grandmother doesn’t drive anymore, so her car is free whenever I want it (Fun Ben’s Grandmother fact: when she was growing up in Kansas, her uncle’s phone number was 9).  Still, since it lives right next to my van, it always sees me paying attention to my van; changing it’s oil, putting air in the tires, and occasionally giving it a piece of rawhide to chew on when it does tricks.  So yeah, my grandmother’s car is extremely jealous, and as a result takes it out on me by being all passive aggressive.

            For instance, it always stalls out at traffic lights when you first start out, and the only way to keep the engine running until the light turns green is to throw it in park and gun the engine.  This all works pretty well in isolation, but to the casual observer, it appears that I’m trying to challenge everyone else at the light to a drag race or something.  So I’ll be sitting there, right next to some guy in a rice rocket, revving my engine like crazy, looking all manic and stuff as if I can, by the very power of my mind, force the car to keep running, and then when the light turns green, the guy next to me totally peels out of there, while I’m usually pleasantly surprised if I can attain a speed of over 15 mph.  On the bright side, at least the guy in the ricer gets a little self esteem boost out of the whole tawdry affair.

            Also, as you might well have already inferred, it has a tiny engine.  I mean, when you look under the hood, there’s a lot of junk in there that looks like an engine, but I’m pretty sure that if I could get a good look at it from underneath, I’d find like, a hamster in one of those little hamster purgatory wheels, and a rubber band, four AA batteries (Hamster Purgatory, by the way, would be a band name so awesome that it almost justifies the existence of my grandmother’s car in the first place).  Now, I’m used to driving a car with a tiny engine, but at least in my van, all the sound insulation in the firewall is worn out and it always feels like I’m really going until I look at the speedometer.  Not so in my grandmother’s car, where even when you floor it, it just makes that sound like one of those little toy cars that you pull back a ways and then they crash into stuff, go into reverse for a foot and a half, and then smack into a credenza or something.

            To make matters worse, the engine light keeps coming on to tell me the car is overheating.  At first this really freaked me out, since I prefer the cars I drive to not catch on fire and explode more frequently than can be helped (yeah, I’m just old school that way).  But then we took it the repair shop where the guys has like, +7 to Jalopy Mastery, and he said that all the repair parts to the car have gone extinct and we’d just have to live with it (I suspect that Hitler was probably somehow involved in this debacle as well.  One of these days I’m gonna drive out to the middle of nowhere, put the child-safety locks on, and then stop the car, jump out and close the door really quickly so he’ll be stuck in there in the heat and melt like a bag of delicious invisible Nazi Reese’s Peanut Butter cups) (The Invisible Nazi Peanut Butter Cups, by the way, would be an exceptionally awesome name for a band).  But anyways, I’ll be driving along, and the engine light will be all blazing mightily forth from it’s place on the dashboard, glowing with an unholy fire like the Eye of Sauron or something, just tempting me to drive the thing back to Mount Doom, and see if Gerald can do anything about it, or at least put a piece of duct tape over it so I won’t have to be taunted by it’s seething and nameless evil power.

            Finally, it’s just a goofy looking car, like it was what the future of old lady cars was thought to be back in the early 80s.  Maybe if I had a monster truck conversion done on it or something, then it would look really cool, but I don’t have enough money to do that right now, so I’m just gonna have to settle for driving it around places where everybody is really tiny so I can still enjoy that much sought after monster truck vibe, like the Midget Quarter of Richmond, or maybe even Safetytown, home of the only completely ornamental Ukrop’s in Virginia.

            So, I guess what I’m really trying to say here is, I really don’t like Hitler messing with all cars, and we probably ought to pass some sort of a law against it, instead of just giving him community service every time like we’ve been doing up to now.  Also, if that hamster dies in there, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to find a proper replacement one for it unless I go all the way out to Zordak and Anastasia’s Domestic Auto Rodent Junkyard and Fashion Bargain Warehouse in Goochland.

            So, here I am, back from the scenic and exotic land of the Outer Banks, home of sun, surf, and those damnable yuppie tags that half the people here in Richmond seem to think bestow some manner of coolness upon them.  It was a good trip, and by way of reference to, here’s a little summary of the goings on surrounding my triumphant return from vacation:

            First, as you probably noticed from the paucity of blogs this past week (The Paucity of Blogs, might I add, would make a totally sweet name for a band), I was unable to secure regular access to the internet.  It turned out to the be case, you see, that if a fellow wants to get ahold of a wireless connection down at the beach, he has only two choices:  any number of expensive boutiquey little coffee shops, and an abandoned parking lot shrouded in eternal darkness.  As you might imagine, what with me flourishing in the shadows and all, I chose the abandoned parking lot option.  It’s not that I didn’t try to gussy it up though, by doing what I could to add a certain degree of coffee shop classiness to it, it just didn’t work out that well.  Like, I brought along all these different sized coffee cups, and then I gave them confusing and vaguely Eupopean-sounding names that had nothing to do with how big they actually were, and instead of just taking along regular and decaf, I brought all the funkiest-named coffees I could find in Food Lion (which, in case you were wondering, is staffed completely by Ukranians, or at least North Carolinians who’ve really been practicing at it), and then I’d sit out in the car a think way too much and ask myself, “May I have a Vienti-doube-whipped-iced-Jamocha-cream-latte?”  And then I’d get all frustrated and gruff with me, because I’d said it wrong and ordered some kind of mythical beverage, but in the end I’d explain it all to myself and then I’d charge me five bucks for what tasted like a cup of brewed shoe polish and chewing tobacco while I surfed the web and tried to avoid the stares of emo kids.  But it’s really hard to do all that in an abandoned parking lot, so I just ended up checking my email and going to Wal-Mart, where they don’t have the internet, but they do have all sorts of unholy beach-flavored Starbursts.

            My voyage home today was no less interesting than my trip down, a little better actually, since it wasn’t dark and I didn’t have to play the William Shatner Twilight Zone game to entertain myself while we were driving (you know, the one where you scream, “There’s something on the wing!” and then you roll down the window and try to crawl out of the car while gibbering like a madman about Priceline).  We did, for instance, get stuck behind a big line of trucks all following this one car that was, of course, going way too slowly.  And its not that they weren’t allowed to pass, it was just that all of them had somehow been recruited to join this one little car’s truck harem or something, which isn’t really all that funny; I just wanted to work the phrase “truck harem” into a blog.  Then we were behind this guy who completely overreacted when we passed a cop by the side of the road.  You know how when most people pass a cop car, they think something like this, “Good heavens, there’s a police officer.  Mayhap I shall slow down so as not to unduly arouse his ire!”  This guy apparently was thinking more along the lines of, “Oh sweet flying death monkeys!  It’s a cop!  I’d better slow down to 15 miles an hour or he’ll punch me in the face!  Oh no, he’s gonna punch me in the face anyway, I’d better veer way off the road, so his magical Inspector Gadget arms can’t reach me!”  And that’s exactly what he did.  This guy nearly drove into a swamp full of possessed soybeans so as not to pass too close to a cop car.  It was totally sweet.

            At length, we passed into a curious realm, where all the street signs had a little picture of some kind of weird thing in the corner.  I’m not sure exactly what it was supposed to be, but I think it was some kind of inexplicable doom sloth, that probably reigned over the people of the land, and demanded regular sacrifices of human blood and free dinners and IHOP.  It was weird, and we didn’t stop to investigate further, since I myself have something of an inexplicable doom sloth phobia.  Shortly thereafter, we passed a place called “Poopman’s Produce Stand”.  I do not thing I shall ever pass a produce stand with a less appetizing name, unless it was something like “Fartblossom Vegetables” or “Cornucopia of Stank”, though Cornucopia of Stank would make a pretty cool name for something, like maybe a downscale version of Linens ‘n Things.

            And so, in due time, we made it home, to find that the house had indeed not grown giant chicken legs and walked off on its own (don’t laugh, it happened last year when we went on a road trip to Canadia).  Concerning what I actually did while I was at the beach, fear not, I shall post detailed travelogue of awesomeness in the next couple of days.  Meanwhile, peruse at your leisure a few of the blogs I managed to get written before my laptop melted down like a Soviet power plant running off Windows 95.