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Some days, it all goes to shit. D-Land taking a big dump on my buddylist. Check account looking bleak. Climate raw and freezing. About to plunge back into Auto Hell. Considering past history, being without a dependable ride is like hell on earth. During my middle and high school years, my unemployed mother decided that transportation wasn't worth having... or was an excellent focus for depression. Of course, it was up to me to hitch a ride to the grocery store or the laundramat... whenever the monthly child-support checks came in. It's easy to bitch about now, but at the very least, it was a good education in self-motivation. And How Things Work... pleasantly or otherwise. She managed to score a ratbag '65 Nova, just after I wangled a grant and a scholarship... Original Rust paint job, two-by-four propping up the back seat. Ah, a noble steed... which became my escape pod. It wasn't going to make the trip across the mountains, too often, so I was finally on my own. After the grants wore out, it was my own problem looking for transport. And days like this remind me that I really haven't progressed all that far from the ridiculously lean years. Years of bad teeth and sickness. Confinement. Poverty. I'm still well familiar with those demons. Automatic transmissions. Fuck 'em. A maze of hydraulic passageways to nowhere... almost literally, today. I'd been wrestling with the lack of overdrive through the weekend, ending with yesterday's service and baptism in transmission fluid. All seemed well. Until this afernoon, loaded for the Big Migration. The tapestry of curses I spewed! High-revving third gear all the way to town, anticipating eighty more miles of the same. That old, familiar gut-tightening... waiting for the grinding halt in the middle of nowhere. I did stop, but not because of the final breakdown. At an abandoned country store, I popped the hood to check the ATF stick... having a little drought of its own, after checking out OK yesterday. I fashioned a funnel out of a cellphone ad (the only thing that would extend all the way down behind the block), and overdrive returned. Long enough to get me to work, anyway. Lunchtime will tell the tale if it was just a temporary fix, when I attempt a brief test ride under cloak of darkness. I'm too old for this half-assed crap. White and male doesn't exempt me from fate. There are still blessings to be counted... though they're hiding behind a big wall of bullshit, right about now. Sure, it's escapist, but it's good to know there's a waiting vehicle somewhere close, if the need to relocate becomes overbearing. To be mobile... is good for my mental health. Not asking for much, here. Virtue is certainly getting me absolutely nowhere. Just a bad patch, to go with the other bad patches. If the world is like a pendulum, swinging from one set of circumstances to another... I hope to God it starts swinging back the other way. Pronto. |
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