Rebuild

I know I haven't blogged in a time, and I'm trying to take it in new direction. Where I would before try to protect some details about my life, keep them private, engage in self-censorship, now I'm not even gonna try. I figure there's already enough on the Internet to ruin me, and I'm of the socio-economic level now that I wouldn't notice very much if it did.

I got on the highway to head back home from my writers' group the other night, when my car began to misfire. I thought it was the EGR valve. Anyway, it didn't conk out. I got it home. I had date the next night, so I knew I had to get it repaired the next day, or find other means, because cancellation was not an option.

I took it into the shop. While the shop tested it, I went to my Dad's to take care of my brother Joe. My dad had asked for help. He had to go to the doctor. My sister couldn't take up the slack because she had to work the graveyard the night before.  I had told Dad I was having car trouble in case it broke down completely on the way to the shop. I made it. They told me it would be mid-afternoon before they got to my car, so I walked to my Dad's.



There, I had some time to plan out bus routes to meet my date. It's not easy where I live. St. Louis has too low a population density to make good mass transit viable. But Metro has a good website, I made my plans.

Wasn't necessary, because my sister got up to give Dad her keys and I took the opportunity then to ask her for her vehicle. It as an SUV, so I was going T-Rex size carbon footprint that night.

I went to see my lady friend. It was the first time I had mutual sex this year.  It happens so seldom, I never take it for granted.

I dropped the SUV off at my sisters, and went to take the lousy Metro home. It had been years since I rode the bus, and a few things had changed. For one thing, the prices. Two dollars for a one way fare, three for a transfer. My ADHD gets far worse when I'm tired, and I was exhausted then (but smiling). I had left the one-day bus pass I purchased earlier that day back home, that was the first error. With the distractions I couldn't understand what the driver was telling me. I couldn't understand why a transfer cost more than the bus fare. If I had thought one second about it I would have known. Transfer is for riding more than two buses. Anyway, I ended up paying five dollars.

Then, I missed my transfer. It was an intersection I was familiar with. Stranded, unwilling to wait it would take for another bus to come (if it was scheduled to come at all), I threw up my hands and called my sister to give me a ride home. She was very gracious about it.

It turned out my car has a damaged engine. Three cylinders are working, one is dragging. Old Saturns just soak up oil. It's hard to keep up with it. Not only that, I believed those synth-oil blends that said they provided protection even when there was no oil. Well, it turned out I was a little short on oil, so a piston stopped working.

This morning, I had to get my car from the shop. Hence, I had another adventure with the mass transit system. I only wanted to pay for one bus to get there. Call me cheap, but so's the government that pays my disability. I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing that out. When your pay is low, cheap is for survival. I had to walk 3/4 a mile to get to the right bus stop.

I walked out of my apartment this morning to discover it was colder than I imagined it would be. Wasn't this like, the first day of spring? Hasn't daylight savings time started? Isn't there Global Warming, and isn't it supposed to give us some benefit for all its destruction? Never mind. Nature has given us the finger.

One of my bleak memories of riding mass transit is waiting on the cold bus stop. As a result, you try not to get there too late, and you try not to do it too early. I didn't want to sit on one of Metro's cold metal benches that suck warmth out of you like an ass-vampire. Standing is somehow worse. I guess because you have that metal bench hypnotizing your derriere like an ass-vampire, telling you that you need to sit. And you never know if Metro is looking at the same clock you are (though in theory, clocks should be synchronized throughout the country, but I've never trusted theories without data to back them up). When I left, I wondered just how long will it take me to walk 3/4 a mile? If I got there to early, I probably would have walked around the block a few times. Anything but waste more seconds on a cold, windy bus stop than I had to.

On the good side, I love the architecture in my neighborhood, even in its blighted parts. When I could lift my eyes into the wind without turning them into icy marbles, I had a good time. I actually passed by a boarded up bar that had a Falstaff sign hanging over it. Falstaff? I'm surprised somebody hasn't stolen that sign. I hadn't heard of that beer since the 1970s. I wondered if somebody wasn't trying to make the bar into a museum or a tourist attraction. Yes, it worthless, but it just wasn't something I expected to see.

The bus shelter didn't have a back wall. I almost had my glove blown out into traffic before I discovered that. It was just bench and a frame. The minute after I arrived, two high school girls, playing hooky showed up, and lit up one of those obnoxious whistle cigars that somehow make tobacco smell worse. 

But it was only a brief time before the bus arrived. It was like being rescued from the arctic. I got on board, dropped my change in without missing, and sat down to read. I had forgotten the temperature gradient involved with mass transit. I was like I stepped from a glacier to the surface of the sun.

I left my fiction collection at a cafe the other day, so I was reading Noam Chomsky's Hegenomy or Survival. I know it's dated, but I've had it on my shelf forever, and really wanted to read it. On this excursion, I managed to speed read a whole six pages in forty five minutes. My father used to tell me how good the bus was for getting work done. Probably it is, unless you have my attention deficit. I couldn't concentrate on there for anything.

Really, I shouldn't complain about riding the bus. I have a friend, a fellow writer, who is visually impaired. She has a rare form of macular degeneration that struck when she nine. She lost the center of her vision, that is, all find details. She commutes for about five hours a day by bus and Metrolink. To do her work, she has to bring some special equipment with her, a closed circuit television, basically. The thing weighs something over thirty pounds. It feels like a boat anchor when you pick it up. She has to lug it as part of her commute. She's attractive, so she has all kinds of stories about obnoxious, socially reprobate guys trying to pick her up. By comparison, this was peachy.

There's always adjustment shock, and that's all this experience was.

I got off at Dobbs Tire and Auto Repair and went in to pick up my car. I was delighted they didn't charge me to test it, they had pity. Three to $5000 for an engine rebuild, I guess, strikes pity in a lot of people. I asked him if I could drive the thing still on three cylinders. He didn't say I couldn't. He said go easy on it. For my next question, I asked him if I blew out the other three if the rebuild would cost any more. As I expected, he said it wouldn't. I felt relieved, like had received a stay of execution. 

I got in the car and I drove it carefully home, and I'm going to be driving it carefully from here on out and watching things like oil. If I'm careful, I could stretch about another thousand miles or two out of it. If I'm extremely lucky, that might give me enough time to raise the cash for a new engine. With a rebuilt engine, this Saturn is still better than any used car I can buy in the $3-5,000 price range.

Meanwhile, the engine knocks, it shudders and shakes at stoplights, and it may totally fail at any time. In other words, it's like every car I ever drove up to 1990. It's just so retro.