About two weeks ago, I reached for the door handle on my Fiat 500e and my frail, 50-year old weakling hands broke the door handle. I was in a hurry, so I just tried to figure out if I could get inside my car and went on my bitter way. As do most of the little things in my life, it started bothering me that the handle broke so easily. When I bought the car, I was excited, because it was all-electric, so it didn’t require gas, and the engine had fewer moving parts. I didn’t think it would require much maintenance. It hasn’t. But a lot of little things keep going wrong.

It seems like every other day I’m replacing a light bulb. At first, it wasn’t a big deal, because it was an easy fix. But then the tires started getting flat, I started getting warning for tires, another bulb would go out, and then two weeks ago, the door handle broke. I’m just about to fix that tomorrow, and then my passenger side window starts acting up. The electronic window wasn’t working, but now it falls down a little, which is perfect timing in the winter when I get the nice tropical winds blowing in from Alaska.

What I’m trying to say is I’m tired of everything breaking all the time. Yes, all cars have little stupid things that don’t work. I’m sure even Lexus door handles break from time to time. Everything breaks down sometime, even humans. I’m just saying that I wish things breaking down could take turns sometimes. Like go in shifts of five years or so, would be great. Just to give us a little break from the breaking.

What really bakes my bagel is the planned obsolescence we are always hearing about. You know, how a car manufacturer is building in that a car will start breaking down about 5 years from when you buy it? Which is why they are so kind and generous to offer a 3-year warranty. Or how Iphones will usually only last for 2-3 years, because they don’t want you to still be used the Iphone 2 in 2023. Even if your phone physically lasts that long, don’t count on the software updates to still be working on the ancient piece of doorstop.

If stuff isn’t breaking on its own, people do a pretty good job of breaking stuff either intentionally or unintentionally. This summer, I went on a trip to see my friends. We went to this place where you can purposely break stuff. I went in there four half an hour and used a bat to break old VCR’s, TV’s, lamps and just old pieces of metal. I’m all about efficiency though, so I decided to break two things at once. I hit really solid piece of metal with my metal bat and that caused a reaction called a rebound and I ended up hitting my own shin. In addition to breaking me, I also just got some inspiration about what I would like to do with my care when it is done being a useful member of society. Go Street Fighter on it. IYKYK

While I still own my car, I have to treat it like a precious little flower and tend to its sensitive little petals and its gentle little door handles, just so I can beg it to take me to work for one more day without incident.

I’m getting a little tired of having to treat everything around me with kid gloves just so they will work. Like if I say something to my son, like “we have to wait until we get our tax refund in February before we can start looking for cars for you” then he might start slamming doors and breaking walls in our house.

Or if I suggest to my daughter that a boy she is dating might not be quite the one that she is looking for, I might be in for a month long freeze out for not saying the exact thing she wanted to hear.

Things are way too glasslike in today’s society. That is way different than the society I grew up with. We were of a Teflon society. If we came home with only four scars, a small bump on our forehead and all of our limbs attached, my parents were completely unfazed. And talk about emotional scars. There was no such thing as being offended back then. You could be bullied by teachers legally. Even your guidance counselor could tell you straight up that you weren’t good enough for college, that bullies were just there to toughen you up, and you weren’t cool enough for the girl that you had a crush on.

Nowadays, broken little children get “anxiety” if they only get an Iphone 13 instead of a 14 for Christmas. They throw hissy fits if they are asked to work in an office, or forced to work 40 hours a week. And heaven forbid if the internet ever goes out, because their hands would stop working if their phone appendage didn’t work. They are “depressed” and can’t function if their parents can’t afford the $1500 upper bowl seats to a Taylor Swift concert in Australia. And don’t ask Gen Z girls how much they expect a man to earn for them to even consider dating them, because you will be amazed how easy they think it is to earn $10,000 a week. And if the guy could be at least 6 feet tall, be devilishly handsome and have enough rizz to have 1 million followers on YouTube that would be a minimum for them. Good thing they at least bring good looks to the table.

People are like the code on a website. If one little asterisk is missing from the code, it crashes your site and leaves you with the infamous 404 (the error code when a link is broken on your page). That is how we are. As strong as people think they are, one little tiger attack and we are finished. When I watch a channel on YouTube, called Dumb Ways to Die, I think of all the ways that we could easily be ended. An asteroid can land on your house, a firework could go a little astray, I could be outside in -160 F for 20 seconds, fall asleep and become a popsicle. I don’t mean to be macabre, but we are the fragilest of creatures and it’s a miracle that any of us survived for more than 15 years.

If earth shifted 1 degree closer or farther away from the sun, we’d all be history, no matter how weights we lifted.

That’s why we have Bitter Friday Giftures…because no matter how broken or frail we are, we can just look at the shiny little giftures and be distracted from our eventual doom…enjoy!

Yes, even a precious little kitty…

This is going to be me…

Just wait until my brute strength…

Don’t let me use my strength…

I’m just a little tired of…

It would really be great…

Instead of everything…

I’m just tired of these phone companies…

Sadly, the things that are more broken than our phones…

Our bodies…

Our hearts….

Even our brains…

But worst of all…

ARRGGGHHHHHHHHH

Bitter 404 Error Ben

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