I Can't Drive A Stick Shift And I'm Perfectly Fine With That

Yesterday me, Hank, and Caleb went up to New Hampshire to drive some race cars and do some pit crewing. When Louis told me about it I made one thing very clear: I can’t drive stick. But he said that didn’t matter and he made sure that all the race cars made available to the public were automatic and it would all be fine. Louis lied.

In order to drive the cars you need to sit in a 45 minute class about safety and throughout that little seminar it became very apparent that these cars were manual transmissions. That’s when I started to panic a bit so I shared my little “I have to drive stick and don’t know how to drive stick” predicament with Twitter and, of course, the car hardos came out of the woodwork.

“Wait… you can’t drive stick?!?”

“Just the other day you were laughing at Neymar because he can’t swing a bat and you can’t drive stick?!”

“What a pussy!”

“Sucks to be a girl bro”

“How do you ride dirtbikes and ATVs if you can’t drive stick?”

Fuck all of you. Why in the world would I need to know how to drive a stick shift? That’s such an incredibly unnecessary skill in 2016. It’s like remembering phone numbers or knowing how to do math, there have been technological advancements that make those abilities useless. Why in the world would I want to make driving more difficult? You mean my entire time on the road I have to keep my hand on this stick? That’s my phone hand, and it’s always busy while I’m driving.

I can’t drive stick. I also can’t crank a Model T or ride a horse bareback because they’re things that are obsolete and pointless in today’s world. I find plenty of my shortcomings as a man embarrassing but the inability to shift gears isn’t even close to one of them. Unless you’re Dominic Toretto then it’s a completely pointless thing to know. The only thing a manual car is good for is to make your passenger think, “Wish this was an automatic so I wasn’t rocking all over the place every time he shifted.”