#1: Oil Change

I have gotten the Wall Street Journal for two years. In the beginning the love affair was strong and I was a faithful reader. As time went on other things took precedence and I fell to just reading the Opinion and Editorial sections. Now I just pick up the paper and toss it into the trunk of my car where I warehouse it until recycling day.

The biggest reason I don’t read the paper is that I cannot simply relax. There is always something that needs to be done and if I don’t do it right away the world could end within the next four hours. God forbid that I have to put something off for a few days. In those cases I obsess about the task until it’s checked off the list. A perfect example is the oil in my car.

Last week I “had a feeling” that the Suburban needed an oil change. Sure enough I was a couple hundred miles over the prescribed 2500 mile oil change. It was Christmas weekend and I knew better than to try and knock it out then. So I had to put it off. And putting it off meant obsessing about it.

This morning I woke up exceptionally early and lay in bed running through the list of things to worry about until my brain locked onto the unchanged oil. I lay there for awhile until I finally had to get up and take care of it. I rolled out of bed at 7:30 and got dressed; choosing to ignore the fact that it was 19 degrees and New Year’s Day.

I need to digress and explain that when I do work around the house I have different levels of old clothes. The bottom of that list is oil-changing clothes. If my neighbors had not seen my attire before they might think a bum had fallen asleep under my car. In fact a bum would probably say “Hey, look at the bum sleeping under that car.”

So there I was, dressed like a hobo preparing to perform a “quick” oil change. Being a modern man, I can admit when I have a problem. One continual issue I have is judging where to place the drain pan so that I can catch all of the oil as it pours from the engine. I have progressed to stacking blocks of wood in an oil-soaked Jenga-type pile in an effort to get the pan as close to the plug as possible. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t. Today was a day that I didn’t.

The initial pour was dead on and was a beautiful black stream pouring into the precariously perched drain pan. Unfortunately, I was so proud of that initial alignment that I forgot to account for the reducing stream as the oil level dropped. In a matter of seconds my driveway looked like the latest parking spot of the Exxon Valdez. So began phase two of the oil change; clean up. Enter the January 1, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

I quickly grabbed the unread newspaper and went to work sopping up the oil. Fortunately, we were nearing recycling day and I had an ample supply of unread papers stored in my car. Moving past my frustration, I had to chuckle as I watched the header disappear into the growing black blob. I thought to myself, “How many people use the Wall Street Journal to clean motor oil off a driveway?” I would venture to guess that very few high-powered executives and real estate moguls are outside on New Year’s Day, donning a wardrobe consisting of two jackets found alongside the road, and scrubbing their driveway with unread Wall Street Journals. I will go so far as to declare that I am the very first person to ever perform such a feat. Please disregard the fact that I have absolutely no research to back up this claim and rest assured I am not about to collect data to substantiate it. After all, I cannot even make time to read the damn paper I was using to clean up the mess. You will just have to trust my “gut feeling” on this one.

As I amused myself with comparisons to Peary reaching the North Pole first, I was stricken with an idea. There are probably hundreds of uses for my unread Wall Street Journals. In fact, I bet I can find a use for each one of my 300 plus unread papers throughout 2010.

So in the spirit of every other useless blog out there, I am undertaking the task of documenting the many uses for the Wall Street Journal.

Use #1: Cleaning up spilled motor oil.

John Hansen is a self-proclaimed genius and one of the coolest men to walk the face of the Earth. He wears very awesome western shirts and has lots of remote controls. He is the co-author of the unpublished mega-hero novel The Power of Zahn, available as soon as someone decides to publish the greatest story of modern times.