SELF-PITY AND SELF-INDULGENCE are wonderfully practicable emotions, if deployed properly.

So last weekend, when I was stuck in a town I barely know, with a car that wouldn't move, in a driving snowstorm with nowhere to stay, I the time for both was at hand.

I had been in Madison, Wis., to watch Northwestern get pummeled by the Wisconsin Badgers. After the game, I visited with my friend Margaret and her husband and son, and before long it was 1 a.m. and the rain had come. Margaret tried to get me to stay, but since I was scheduled to be in Chinatown the next morning for dim sum breakfast, I thought it best to return to Rockford for the night.

Out on the beltline that rings Madison, I was having trouble controlling the car in the rain. It was a near-certainty that if I stayed on the road, I'd crash. So I stopped at a 24-hour restaurant to wait out the rain.

Except it started snowing. And snowing. And snowing. Over the next five hours, I would start and restart the car, drive for awhile, and then realize it was hopeless. I drove 32.4 miles and netted 4.1 miles of forward progress. Finally, I decided the snow wasn't stopping and I'd have to get a hotel.

Too bad every hotel in Fitchburg, Verona and McFarland was full. When I asked Ty at the Super 8 in Monona why all the rooms were taken, he replied in a skateboardish tone: "Cause we're the cooooooolest." Feeling some rapport with Ty, I laid $40 on the counter and told him to keep it himself if he could find me a rollaway bed and an janitor's closet to fit me in. Poor Ty, he could have had pot money for a week, but instead he felt a surge of conscience and told me he just couldn't do it.

When I told Ty it was either he took my money or I was sleeping in the parking lot, he warned me about their vigilant security guard who patrolled outside. So I marched back to the car, pulled down the back seats, and set about making myself a camoflouged bed.

I must have looked like the most pathetic and worn-out traveler, curled up in unpacked clothes, tucked into my trunk so the Eagle Security guy couldn't see me. I had two pairs of pants on, a jacket for a blanket on my upper body and a camel-skin blazer around my waist, my legs jutting through the arm holes. Best of all, I had a necktie wrapped around my ears to keep the heat in my head.

The next thing I knew, I was awake, and every window in the car was piled over with snow. What time was it? How long had I been there? I sprung up, cast open the door and found... darkness still. I had been asleep for about 20 minutes.

The next three hours comprised my being rejected by AAA for a tow, because they considered the car "operable." After getting nowhere with someone's supervisor, that person's supervisor and leaving a message on the company president's secretary's phone, and after calling back once more to threaten to sue them for breach of contract and negligence, my cell phone gave up. I'd say my continued business with AAA is about as secure as an Enron pension.

I had given up. I spent the next 20 minutes watching three noble, virtuous and bored-to-tears Denny's waitresses try to steal stuffed animals out of that carnival-like machine to which you pay 50 cents for the chance to clumsily claw for a prize.

When I asked them what they were doing, one of the waitresses, Lindsay, told me: "In my career here, I must have spent $400 on this machine." Savvy investor? Well, yes. Unsatisfied with her dividends, she simply defrauded shareholders for her personal gain.

At 10 a.m., with the snow tapering off, I drove over to Menards, acquired 140 lbs. of sand to weigh down my sliding tires and drove the 60 miles back to Rockford at half the speed limit.

Last summer, I bought a bike in Madison. I could have ridden it back to Rockford in less time. Come to think of it, at that distance over that time, I could have run that home faster. If Forrest Gump could do it, so could I.

Aside from avoiding an accident, it was a total defeat. But it made for a story, which is all that really matters!

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