On the way to the DMV in Simi Valley, I drove through the winding, ironically green hills along the lip of the San Fernando Valley, warming up after some cheap Extreme Sausage sandwiches and curiously strong root beer. More casual than obsessed, I kept wondering: Was I ready? Could I do it? Would I choke on the proverbial cock of anxiety?

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During last weekend's practice sessions, I was on the fence about any of those questions. I'd tooled around in Mom's truck for awhile, but now I had to get used to Gran's Ford Focus. It handled better and it wasn't heady with that fast-food car BO that most instructors don't care for.

At the time I still thought I'd be tested on parallel parking, so most of last Saturday and Sunday was devoted to mastering this forbidden (and god awful) art form. We'd set up the giant blue and black trash pick-up cans away from the curb like cars, spaced out just wide enough to park between. Gran did yardwork while I drove alone. The routine basically worked like this:

parallel park, wish death on anyone who came down the street, turn in a driveway and reverse, swear about some random thing that pissed me off, back up in a straight line, lather rinse repeat. Except for Gran pantomiming with body language like a subwoofer every time I parallel parked, I didn't mind bitching and driving the afternoons away.

There were more cars than usual on sunday, probably because of the 30 police officers that were stopping something big in the nearby alley. We'd just had a criminal holed up in a house on the street corner last week that was shot to death by the SWAT team, so the force was taking extra precautions and re-routing traffic through our street. Needless to say I just bitched alot more to compensate.

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So back to Tuesday. There Mom and I were at the DMV right on time at 1:30pm. A heavily bald Anglo-Saxon in his mid-40's looked at me with piercingly blue eyes over the smooth plastic grain of a divider wall.

"So, do you have your permit?" He asked in a kind voice.

I liked him. I smiled and reached down to my left pocket. Then my right. Shit. I excused myself and ran back to the car, checking my trechcoat. Nothing. While I was outside, Mom found out that the registration and insurance cards Gran had left in the glove compartment were expired. We couldn't fucking believe it. Was the woman THAT irresponsible? The things hadn't been good since early November. My only consolation was that Mom went off about Gran's mistake and forgot that I'd misplaced my wallet (with the permit) somewhere. We didn't find out until later that it'd been there all along, wedged inbetween the door and the driver's seat.

We talked with the clerk again and he said we could come back at 3pm for a 'stand-by' appointment. So after rushing back home, calling Gran and getting nowhere (since she wanted to look for shit later and just reschedule for next week), we pawed through every chest drawer, mail pile and all the relevant manilla folder in her mammoth filing cabinet. There were Return To Sender Christmas cards we'd sent out, money slipped into envelopes with Mom's writing, piles and piles of useless papers stacked with important documents. We didn't think she'd been slipping this much. Maybe Gran really does live for work and forget everything else. All I can say is that it was damn sobbering.

So the small driving saga ended and we had to reschedule for friday next week. In the meantime Mom found out her insurance was also expired and that her truck's headlights (among other things) weren't working. While she gets the truck serviced, our daily routine basically works like this: Mom drives the truck out to Gran's work then drives Gran's car back, we bitch about Gran, we eat, we bitch about the situation, I drive us around and get errands done and, yup, we bitch.

Other than all of that, though, I've been writing a new short story from a first person perspective. It's going to be part of a serial fiction column I'm doing for the new online magazine Marked Accordingly. We'd all gotten tired of reviewing the journals of teenagers as if they were literary pieces, so the shift over has been a welcome change. Meanwhile, about fuck all has been happening with the computer game team I'm a part of.

Ahhh, just another week until I have to worry about that proverbial cock thing again. Even so, I think I'm ready for a driver's license. I've cursed enough drivers out for the privilege.

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