Shiny things, pretty things, and things that move.
You.
My car is my home. I don’t sleep in it. It contains no furniture and does not automatically brew me coffee. Yet I feel most at home when I am in my car, moving, and it can drive me to just about any coffee shop in the city. Or in the country. There is nothing more powerful than to move along at 80 miles per hour and know that it was your hands that made that happen. Your foot on the gas pedal. Your hands directing the wheel. And, for the ultimate car lover, your hands that also ensure your car functions well enough to get you where you want and need to go. I drove my old van all the way to Eugene and back from Cleveland on an engine that I had stripped all the way down to the crank and rings. It was and still is the proudest moment of my life.I didn’t build Franklin, but I tinker here and there and I know my car. I know when it is healthy and when it is sick. And my car’s health is a pretty accurate reflection of my own health. It is an uncanny reflection really. My car is a part of me. Right now, my car is as messy as I am scattered. There is shit all over the place that’s been there for months. As I took my mother back to the airport after she had come to sit with me while I was in the hospital, I dented my undercarriage on a rock, drove over a bolt and got a flat tire, and an entire circuit behind my dash burned to a crisp. When it rains it pours. And nothing is more stinky than an electrical fire. That was just a couple weeks ago, and the electrical issue remains to be resolved. And also, the fuel-air mixture is off and it is wasting a shitload of gas – only 19 mpg last tank, the lowest it has ever gotten. That started as a probable issue in June and has not graduated to an immediate problem. And the oil light is on. Why? Because the valves are worn and it burns oil. And I have let the oil level go to low and have not filled it. Dangerous. I’m driving with a bad oxygen sensor or thermo-switch. The timing is off. Also Dangerous. Shit, man. I have to take it in.
So right now I’m not doing too well, and neither is my car.I don’t have the workspace and I don’t have the tools for most of the things that car needs and I don’t know enough or have the time to properly fix all these things. So I do as much as I can, but I always have to take it in and it pains me. I took it to someone I thought I trusted for a new clutch and head gasket. But the shop had been sold since I was last there and I didn’t find out this crucial detail until I returned to pick up the car. I just thought my man was out for the day or something. And I have never seen such incompetence in my life. Two bolts are missing from my transmission housing. The engine mount is upside down. The case still leaks oil. The bolts on the water pump housing were only hand tightened. I felt like I had been robbed and raped. There’s a metaphor for you Mr. Penetrator of Worlds.It is hard for me to trust my car to others, and few mechanics can stomach my questions and nosiness. The good mechanics understand and respect that I am testing them, though. That I have to test them even though I don’t want to.They get two chances to treat me decently. After the first act of casual disrespect I indicate that they should not judge so quickly. A sharp look, specific restatement or a probing question, and I get one of two reactions. Most common is a smile, a swift look downward followed by a soft stare with a wry smile – the proverbial tail between the legs. A look of apology. And that I return in kind. A look of apology for making him feel so awkward. We start fresh, under a bond of mutual respect. My current mechanic is one of these. He always remembers me, and we liked each other from that moment. We both knew that we had conquered the battle of the sexes, that we were immune from further problems, or something like that. I make his job easy because I take the car in, tell him the symptoms, and then diagnose the problem for him. I am usually right. Perhaps in the future he will trust me enough to teach me something. The guys at Euclid Foreign Motors were like this too. I bought parts from them, and I soon became a celebrity there. They gave me dealer prices and when I showed up they would all stop and come over to say hello talk shop with me. I spent thousands of dollars there, half of it just for shits and giggles.The second reaction is much less common, but happens enough that I feel compelled to write it here. No look downward, but a look straight in eyes, possibly a quick glance to my chest or crotch, and an underhanded comment about how I don’t need to worry. How he will "take care of me." This one, of course, needs no explanation. I would much rather trust others and it pains me that I can’t do that. It is no offense, really, just a hoop we all have to jump through because of all the ineptitude, selfishness, and disrespect out there. And I feel bad when I encounter these kinds of situations, because I know my reaction only perpetuates this kind of treatment of others in the future. I’m sorry to the 51% of you that are reading this, especially to those of you that take your car to these men. But I have to counter his jab with a punch to his ego. With my own wry smile. I have no choice but to let him choose the game we will play, but then I beat him at his own game. I am protecting my own ego, you see, and it happens to me enough that I have to do this to keep it away from the low self-worth I have attached to my own femininity. And you will do it to the generation of women that follows you. For me, I find solace in my pledge to take two steps forward for each step back.
winged migration, barbarella, harold and maude, my own private idaho, what's eating gilbert grape, dead man, delicatessen, four rooms, miller's crossing, trainspotting, napoleon dynamite, heathers, spinal tap, the pianist, when harry met sally, lord of the rings and star wars (the older ones), gattaca, spaceballs, strange brew, ghostbusters, the breakfast club, pirates of the carribean, the cook the their his wife and her lover, the secretary, sid and nancy, the princess bride, reservoir dogs, like water for chocolate, fargo, slacker, thirteen, top gun, dirty dancing, steel magnolias, magnolia, traffic, velvet goldmine, true romance, bound, the usual suspects, mindwalk, wild at heart, natural born killers, reanimator, pink flamingoes, the replacement killers, boys don’t cry, airplane, office space, holy grail, back to the future, real genius, best in show, Vernon Florida, better off dead, clockwork orange, drugstore cowboy, E.T., the jerk, Le Femme Nikita, legally blonde, lolita, girl interrupted, princess mononoke, spirited away, and anything by david lynch. Why? Because of Laura Dern and my favorite actress: