Registering My Stupidity

This all happened in the last four days. It is a slice of my life. It resembles a slice of fish head pie.

(It is not pretty.)

A few weeks ago, I had found a ticket under the windshield wiper of my car. I glanced at it. I saw that something official had expired, and it was important enough for a $50 fine.

That is when I realized I hadn’t renewed my registration in a long time. I remembered an email notice of some sort, which I sort of ignored. But that was months ago.

I left the ticket on the windshield. There’d be time enough to retrieve it and get this thing settled. I do that sometimes. I am the opposite of Vito Corleone: I am a man who likes my bad news to trickle in late and feeble and almost forgotten because then maybe it will be. Sometimes, my speed-camera ticket doubles in size before I pay it. People call this the “idiot tax” for good reason.

Next thing I did was get on a highway. The ticket, of course, blew away. This has happened before. I think I subconsciously want it to. In many ways I am not an adult human being.

So I went home. I let a few days pass, because I do that, and then checked my car registration status online. Something leaped right out at me. It said I could not renew online because I was more than two months from my required renewal date. Below this were instructions for late payments. I slammed the computer shut.

Two months late is very bad. I knew that from, um, an experience in the past. Two months’ delinquent means you can no longer handle this online or by mail. You have to make pilgrimages to the DMV, with Documents. And answer questions. And fear the worst and hope for the best.

I am very bad with paper and dates and numbers. They terrify me. I have said this before, but when an ATM tries to show me, unbidden, my bank balance, I cover it with a hand so I cannot see it. Whatever the number is, it never looks right to me, and I start to worry.

My point is I began fretting, visibly, over my impending ordeal with the DMV. I had trouble sleeping. I am not making any of this up.

The next day, out of the blue, Rachel said this:

“I’ll do it for you.”

“What? I can’t let you do that!”

“It’ll be your birthday present.”

Now we were talking. My birthday is, indeed, coming up. This would not be a selfless act of mercy by Rachel. It would be a gift! A birthday gift is one’s birthright! She wouldn’t have to lay out any bucks! Win-win. No guilt-debt incurred.

As a normal person, you probably think that this is a terrible deal for me. To so easily forfeit a big ol’ birthday present for a chore I could do myself might seem nuts.

But I was so excited by her offer that I almost couldn’t speak coherently. I said “Y-y-y…”

“Yes?” Rachel asked.

Yes.

So the next day — she’d already had the day off from work — she left the house with Documents and my driver’s license. It turns out I did not have an up-do-date Proof of Insurance, so she contacted my insurance company and talked to an agent who said I had evidently never bothered to set up an account, but that I was insured, but needed an account, which Rachel then created online, where she found a Document proving I had insurance. But because our home printer is balky, she went to the library to print it out.

Her next stop was the Vehicle Inspection Station, just to make sure there’d be no problem about this later. There would have been. It turns out I was overdue! She got it inspected. It passed.

Then she hit DMV. She waited a half hour, then explained the situation to the clerk — the major lateness, etc. — and when the woman asked why I was not doing it myself, Rachel said I was “sick,” which is, as I have demonstrated, kind of true. So the woman clucked and shook her head sadly, and said Rachel would have to get a power of attorney from me, and gave her a Document for me to sign.

“B-but, will I have to find a notary…?”

“Nah,” the woman said, turning back to her paperwork. This was the D.C. DMV, home of the Jughead Shrug. No notary needed.

Rachel came home; I signed it. I would have signed over my life savings, under the circumstances. Rachel went back to the DMV. Her new take-a-number number was vastly worse than it had been before. Hours on a chair awaited her. Behind her a guy was clipping his fingernails. Somewhere to her right, another guy was making what Rachel decided was a “death rattle.” She didn’t look.

More than two hours went by. Rachel called me, and talked in a furtive whisper. She now saw that there had been two power-of-attorney forms to sign. She was not about to come home again — so, she’d signed it right there, doing her best to imitate my handwriting. Her voice was a little strangled. “I hope this doesn’t get us into trouble.”

Finally, shortly before closing time, they called her number. She trudged to the desk, her heart thudding.

The woman called up my case. Examined her screen. Looked at Rachel. Examined it again.

“He’s not due to renew his registration until November. It’s more than two months too early. You can’t re-register yet. You’re good to go”

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So. Here is what happened. The ticket I’d received and didn’t look at too carefully had evidently been because I was late getting the car inspected. When I’d called up my registration page, it was with the absolute assumption that my registration was late. The paragraph about “two months from your required registration date” was maddeningly imprecise, because this is the D.C. DMV. I assumed two months late, not early. The DMV sucked, but I had clearly been the the main idiot and neurotic-in-charge, right from the start.

Anyway, Rachel is the woman with whom I am fortunate to live.

This is also her. It is in The Post today. This column has been building to this moment, as you will see.

It’s a gift video, and it is brilliant and startling and moving, but as we have established, The Post will ask for your email address. I cannot maneuver around that. If you decide not to watch it, it’s about Rachel, and chemotherapy, and hair. And me. It is joyful.

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Yesterday, after the Charlie Kirk assassination, I was asked by a reader if I approved of the nearly unanimous decision by major news sites not to show the actual moment he was hit by the fatal bullet, and collapsed.

This was my response:

“No, I do not. It seems patronizing to me. If I were the editor of a news site, I would warn people unambiguously in advance, but make it available. Note: I am in a tiny minority with this opinion, so I have grudgingly concluded, over the years and multiple killings, that I might be wrong. I definitely don’t proselytize the issue.

“Even the grotesque Zapruder film eventually became mainstream. I think we can handle this sort of thing, and showing it serves a purpose. We are forced to confront the brutality of brutality.”

Note: I have since seen the full assassination, including the shot and about five seconds afterwards. It is extremely graphic and disturbing. It is, in a bad way, unforgettable.

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