A Little Personal Body … er … Auto Care Never Hurt

Jason Falls
3 min readFeb 21, 2023

NOTE: I wrote a mediocre version of this in my weekly newspaper humor column in 1997. I’ve updated the mediocrity for 2023 because fuck that newspaper.

I was sick. Guh. Not just sick. The kind of sick where you say, “I’m sick. Guh.”

The cocktail of cough syrup, Benadryl and a muscle relaxer kept me drifting in and out of sleep … or feudal Japan … I couldn’t tell the two apart.

The television was on, but only to keep me from panicking that I was going def. It was that kind of sick where you could drain fluid from your ear canals with a horse syringe.

The only thing I could really hear were the obnoxiously louder-than-the-show television commercials.

“Protect your engine against viscosity and thermal breakdown!”

Oil change

My stupor convinced me the voice was my doctor. My nose, throat and lungs was my engine. And I needed motor oil to feel better.

Freezing cold, but sweating a small mountain brook, I new I was suffering from thermal breakdown. But I had no idea what viscosity was.

The dictionary didn’t help. “Viscosity” is a sucker definition, meaning it says something like “having or pertaining to anything viscous.” Then you look up “viscous” and it says “see viscose.” The definition of…

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Jason Falls

Writer & published author. Marketing strategist & podcaster. Dad. I think I’m funny, too.