...this has been my primary form of entertainment this year, it seems -- myself once, and two friends. I guess that's my come-uppance for having a pickup truck....

So, anyhow, time comes to deal with the bed. Frame is a drop-together, no-fasteners thing. Just a wedge-shaped slot and groove joint, firmly welded by gravity and recreational activities.

My standard approach, beating on the damned thing with the flat of my hand, doesn't budge most of the joints, and begins to suggest to me that my hand might not care for the abuse. I ask "do you have a hammer" to Ed, who obligingly goes hunting. To Elizabeth: "there's an awful lot of good stories that start with 'do you have a hammer'".

Ed returns empty handed. I take a spin through the garage. On the wall, hanging from a hook, is a hammer.

I return to the living room. "I found a hammer". Ed looks. "I'm not feeling too sure about this". What I'm holding is a four pound sledge.

...weilded appropriately, it produced results. Nothing like a little appropriate persuading on your side. It also gave me another opportunity to tell my "how I destroyed a car with a sledgehammer during lunch on the quad at college one day" story.

The car in question was already totaled, and had been stripped (glass, engines, interior, etc.). It was pretty much just the body of a mid-1980s Toyota Corolla. A frat was selling off pops at it with the hammer as a fundraiser.

This was my second quarter back in college after my brother died. I'd held back a bit on activities my first quarter to get up to speed with academics, started swimming again over winter break when I realized there was absolutely nothing else to do, and was going out of my skull. I'd been doing noontime swims as the first week of the quarter started. This was the day I discovered two things: Fridays, the pool was preempted by a gym class (that wasn't actually using it), and a good workout is a really good way to stay sane. I was steamed as I left the gym after having suited up and found a locked door....

So I see the car on the quad, aforementioned frat, and say to myself, "Self, that is such a typically bone-headed frat thing to do, we will have no part in this". I watch, bored, for a few minutes as a couple of guys who know nothing about how to handle a sledgehammer or the structural weak points of a car, do this lift-and-drop thing in the middle of some body pannels. It made noise, in a sort of very out-of-tune, deadened, steel drum sort of a way.

I say to myself, "Self, we can do a much better job of this than they can". I'd been known to work off frustrations back home splitting wood, and would get really annoyed when the frustrations outlasted the wood supply. The offer of a couple of cords to work over is still strong inducement to get me home for the holidays.

I pay my three dallah and grab the hammer. It's an eight pounder (that's a tad on the heavy side, standard splitting sledge is about four pounds).

The way you work a hammer is like this. You hold it in front of you, about chest high, right hand at the base of the handle, left hand choked up toward the head. You drop your left had toward your righ, and let the momentum carry the hammer behind your back. As it clears the zenith, you encourage it downwards, strongly. It picks up a goodly momentum. Once you're into the work, you catch the rebound just a bit but keep the rhythm going.

If the object of your interest is, say, a car, you focus your attention on such things as, say, the middle of support struts, hinges, joints, and similar components. In my first three minutes, I dropped the driver side of the roof to door level and removed the driver side door.

Feeling slightly better, I yielded the hammer. This being a high-fallutin' college, a few observers actually learned something, and started applying my technique to the car. But not as effectively as one might have hoped.

I asked, "So, what's it going to cost for me to go in again?" "Don't worry," the reply, "You're good for business".

Second time through, I dropped the passenger side of the roof, took off the passenger door, the trunk, and the hood.

For some odd reason, it was very difficult to take notes in my next hour's lecture. Something about being able to hold a pen that seems to be a requirement. But I was a lot less pissed off than I'd been leaving the pool. My classmate who was a member of the frat was also duly impressed.

They guy whose car it was was apparently sitting curled up in a corner of the quad watching the goings on, saying "I can't believe what they're doing to my car....".