The View From Planet Kerth: There goes your privacy, rolling down the road

The license plate holder is back on my car, framing the plate with a message to tell the world everything they need to know about me. Not that it’s necessary. Facebook and the Russians already know.

Still, I was excited when I found it again. It had been sitting in the garage, buried under piles of old garage-rag T-shirts, car sponges and almost-empty spools of fishing line of varying weights.

My kids — Jenny and Dave — gave it to me years ago for my birthday or maybe Father’s Day, and when I opened the package and read what the frame said, I said: “Holy cow, that’s perfect! Where did you ever find something like this?”

They gave each other that hapless look that newer generations give each other when someone from an older generation says something so anciently stupid that you wonder how they can even make it through the day.

“Well … we had it made up that way.”

Oh. Right. You can do stuff like that these days.

The frame said: “Hawaiian-shirt wearin’ blues man (who’d rather be fishing)”

And, as I said, that’s the perfect description of who I am. Facebook and the Russians can stop digging for data — my kids nailed it, and now it’s bolted right there on the back of my car again for all the world to see.

I don’t know how I lost track of it — a few years ago I sold the car it was first bolted to, and then we bought a new house and moved, and before I knew it, in all the confusion the plate frame was gone, having found its way under old T-shirts, sponges and fishing line spools in the garage. But not anymore. I found it again! Now it’s back on my car, proudly telling the world everything it needs to know about me.

And yet the larger question remains: Why do I do things like this? What makes me think that the rest of the world will smile at my sense of sartorial whimsy, or flash me a thumbs-up at my preference for Muddy or the Wolf over Mozart or Wagner, or pull up next to me at a stoplight so we can trade favorite fishing lures through our rolled-down windows?

Why don’t I realize that most of the rest of the world will sit behind me at the stoplight and shake their heads at how clueless some people are about the pathetic impression they so willingly make?

I mean, after all, how would personal information like that play on a dating website? “I love to wear my rainbow-bright flowered shirts and listen to gravel-throated guys sing over cheap Stella guitars from a Sears catalog — when I’m not chunking a chub into the lily pads for largemouth bass!”

Can you say: “Lonely days, lonely nights?”

But I’m not alone, am I? I’m not the only clueless one out there advertising my idiocy.

That guy driving the big black Hummer through the rough-and-tumble streets of the suburbs? I’m betting his name is on the mailing list of every male-enhancement product out there.

And that guy still walking around in public wearing the MAGA hat? I’m pretty sure the Velcro strap is the only thing keeping the air from hissing out through the holes in his head.

Or that guy whose bumper sticker invites you to pry his Smith & Wesson from his cold, dead fingers? I’m sure when he picks his kids up at school, he thinks all the little boys and girls in the schoolyard are flinching and ducking in admiration.

Of course, we’re not all like this. Not all of us are delusional about the impressions we think we are making as we drive down the road.

Take my buddy Bill.

Bill has always refused to tolerate announcements of any kind on his car. No license plate holder. No bumper sticker. No “baby on board” flag. No “My kid is smarter than your kid” sign. He’s so adamant about it, when he buys a new car he peels off the dealer’s decal before he drives it out of the lot. He is, you might say, a purist when it comes to displaying private details of his life on his ride.

So when Bill sees me pull up in my bouquet-blues-and-bass mobile the next time I see him, I’m sure he’ll give me a little smirk and a hopeless shake of the head. But I won’t let him tease me any more than that, because I know the little crack in Bill’s shell of superiority over all the rest of us delusional dweebs.

That’s because I happen to know that Bill was once a nationally-ranked mile runner in college. Oh, he won’t tell you that, and there is nothing obvious on his car that announces his gloried past.

But if you study Bill’s car close enough, you might notice that the three letters on his license plate just happen to be the initials of the college he went to, where he set a mile record that lasted decades. And the four numbers that follow those letters just happen to be the same numbers of his best time in the mile, all the way down to the tenth of the second. I wouldn’t exactly call it a hypocritical violation of his purist approach to auto displays, because it’s a hard-won honor he earned — but it’s also a trump card I hold to keep him from riding me too hard about my loony license plate.

Oh, he’s not as ham-handed in his vanity as the rest of us mopes are. But I know, because I see the subtle clues to his deep, hidden, secret vanity — clues that could only be solved by the savvy of a Hawaiian-shirt wearin’, blues lovin’ fisherman.

Or, of course, Facebook and the Russians.

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The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears every Saturday.