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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
Every car is a piece of crap. Makers and dealers spend billions
trying to hide it. Mechanics charge sick sums for knowing it. Regular folks
know it, but we’re addicted to the junk.
New cars add demonic electronics and secret codes to all the classic
leaks and clanks. Modern broke-down victims gazing stupidly under the hood find
the fancy guts more baffling than ever. Desert solar bonus: within five years,
every exposed plastic, vinyl, or rubber part is brittle, faded, cracked, or
broken off. No matter how you pamper your gleaming overpriced Dodge Hedgehog,
it slowly morphs into another peeling-chromium turd.
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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
Being what they are, all cars break down eventually, sometimes
permanently. Often, inconveniently.
When a rich person’s luxury junk-heap dies, a simple phone call
magically transports it to the auto-shamans. They replace a $28 electra-diddle
in 10 minutes and charge $928, plus tax, environmental fees, and a special surcharge
to keep the dealership out of bankruptcy. High-class cars require high-class
billing, the price of convenience and clean hands.
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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
But without a Platinum Card to heal your tin
cart, every breakdown begins an anxious adventure: Not now! Not in this part of
town! What’s wrong this time? Not again! Why me? Now I’ll be late! Grandma’s
going to be pissed! I hate this evil crapmobile! Who will help me push it out
of this busy intersection? Not in these shoes! Shut up you bawling brats, our
world is crashing down, we’re all going to die here! And the real agony: What
will this cost and how will I pay? With luck, you get the Arizona 134-degree-asphalt
bonus adventure, saved from heat-stroke by a few swallows of plastic-flavored
hot water from a bottle rolling around on the floor-board. (As opposed to the
Alaskan adventure: 57 below zero, and you are, actually, going to die.)
Transportation problems are old as the wheel,
but so is the ingenuity of poverty-stricken peasantry. If your iron horse
refuses to budge no matter how hard you beat it, breathe deep awhile, let your
adrenaline metabolize, and consider your many options:
1. Take the car to where you or someone can work on it. Any fool
can tow one car with another. Use a chain, rope, strap, steel cable, or baling
wire and duct tape if you have plenty. Critical: the towed vehicle has to do
the braking for both, to keep the tow line taut, or you may get the instant
terror upgrade. Pulling my new bride and her little car with my old truck on a
mountain highway once, we wound up whirling across a cliff-edge gravel pull-out,
Japanese moon orbiting planet Detroit, connected by steel cable and adrenaline
hearts. Concerned for my lover’s safety, I was immediately reassured when she jumped
out and threatened to kick my ass.
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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
2. Another option is what we did next time, same mountain: leave
the clunker where it is, hitch a ride home, and figure it out later. Or, if it
has stranded you “for the last time dammit!"--set it on fire. Or, kick it
goodbye and let the State impound and auction it to a fool to re-sell to another.
In this new adventure, pregnant she and I and our dog got a quick ride from a
furniture truck driver, who figured correctly I’d help unload in return. We
made friends and a good time was had by all. I came back next morning, with the
miraculously correct part, and fixed her car by the roadside, which is actually
number
3. In driveway, parking lot, gravel pull-out, or best of all a
greasy friend’s backyard tin shed, fix it yourself. Read about how cars turn to
crap, on the interzone or at the library. Complete sets of tools are cheap from
drug addicts at swap meets. Fear not: humans designed and built it, so humans
can take it apart and (try, at least, to) fix it.
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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
4. If you ask politely, the demented men who work on cars for their
own amusement are often happy to loan tools and give advice, asking nothing in return
but a 30-pack of mass-produced American piss-water beer. They delight in
helping ignorant slackers, and the entire gender, that skipped “auto shop”
class, whose only screwdrivers are vodka and orange juice, and who love
technology until it betrays them as it always does. He gets to feel superior,
you get hands-on schooling, and your only tuition (besides the 30-pack) is
oil-stained clothing, bleeding knuckle wounds packed with dirty grease, sore
muscles, and the senseless beating of your pride by his snide answers to your
obviously stupid questions.
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| Gold King Mine, Jerome AZ |
Every aggravating repair attempt, every screw-up, as well as every
triumph of man over machine, comes with a bit more piece-of-crap knowledge. By
the time you are too old to do anything, you will know how to do everything.
[Special note in the interest of Gender Equality: Now that modern
men are blessed to share in the joys of child-rearing, house-keeping, cooking,
laundry, (and thus, post-partum depression as well,) it is only fair to suggest
that modern women might enjoy the inseparable and equal delight of contorting
and cursing in a puddle of carcinogenic juice under a tiny car parked in a
sticker-patch.]
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| Gold King mine, Jerome AZ |
5. Don’t buy new parts. The part that broke will break again, and
may be engineered that way to sell you yet another. Junk-yards, ironclad proofs
of my first-sentence assertion, may offer the same made-to-break parts so cheap
you won’t mind that they keep breaking. Note: the “junk-yard dog” stereotype is
based on fact, so keep a golf club with your tool kit.
6. For an instant hassle-free solution, unload your burden to
whoever will haul it off. Even with the worst of the deal, your immediate
reward is priceless freedom. No more time, cash, or aggravation spent on a
doomed buggy of dubious utility. Ride to work with co-workers, run errands with
relatives. If you hate them, pretend you don’t; it’s like getting paid to act
Christian.
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| Jerome AZ, Gold King Mine |
7. To simplify, and minimize swindling, sell it before it breaks down. Bicycles cost
little and keep you thin; cars cost lots and make you fat. Busses may be smelly
and crowded, but when they break down, you can walk away with a bunch of new
friends and laugh about it. For gods’ sake, does anyone walk anywhere anymore?
If you are too fat to walk a couple miles to the grocery and back, stop going
until you aren’t. Car-less survival is more than abject poverty, it’s
enlightened superiority.
8. With or without a functioning vehicle, one simple act prevents
all breakdowns (and “DUI’s”): STAY HOME! Use stuff up, wear it out, make it do,
or do without! Wear what you own, eat from your shelf, visit by phone, pay
bills with an elf--or computer. Sit out the mass frenzy of dinosaur-burning planet-roasting
whiz-bang crap units racing the vast asphalt web to nowhere for no good reason,
and you may also reduce the odds of having an emotional breakdown!
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| Jerome AZ, Gold King mine |
%$#@!
“…the “brainy” economy designed to produce this [abstract and
superficial] happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either
manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant
titillation of the ears, eyes and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost
inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims
of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio,
preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in
all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to
magazine, [to computer!,] keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release
through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies,
and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of
sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled
bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature
or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease
without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.
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| Jerome AZ, Gold King Mine |
“For this stream of
stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same,
though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no
interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles,
glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow
conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will
buy one more….
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| Jerome AZ, Gold King Mine |
“It isn’t that the people who submit to this kind of
thing are immoral. It isn’t that the people who provide it are wicked
exploiters; most of them are of the same mind as the exploited, if only on a
more expensive horse in this sorry-go-round. The real trouble is that they are
all totally frustrated, increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to
the most acute and subtle joys of life which are in fact extremely common and
simple.”
Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Pantheon 1951,
pp. 61-62
