This is a terribly long post because I haven’t posted for a while and I think I have a lot to say, even thought I have to just run past certain things that I want to say but can’t because they’re too recent and relevant to my life to be mentioned here.
Car (1)
Long story short: The junk transmission in my car was replaced under warranty after four months of very intermittent transmission mallfunctions while driving. I quickly learned that there was no way for any mechanic to diagnose the problem unless the problem was actually taking place, and since the problem was infrequent, I had no choice but to drive the car to the point of breaking. Along with that fear came some mental breakdown.
I could see no way around it. If I wanted to get the car repaired under warranty, I would have to drive it to the point of breaking, because the mechanics could not diagnose the problem. I’d have to drive it on public roads knowing full well that I was driving a vehicle that was prone to sudden inabilities to accelerate–at highway speeds and up hills.
I had long arguments with God about the moral rightness of me driving an impaired vehicle simply to save money on replacing a transmission. But we’re talking a thousand dollar car part here. Is that what the life of some innocent driver is worth to me– a mere thousand dollars? I’ll do my best to drive safely, but there are no guarantees that my car will cooperate (I told myself), and with the tailgating ways of drivers around here, my greatest fear was driving up a slight grade or steep hill and the transmission problem kicking in and the car losing all acceleration and speed, causing a multi-car pileup on an uphill.
It was mental hell. Seriously. Being an adult has never been so unappealing to me before. But hey, that’s life. You’re born, you go to school, then one day things begin to get interesting. (That last line is, if I recall, verbatim from a US navy recruiting advertisement.) I’m being sarcastic, of course. Things don’t get interesting. Things just stay the same. There’s war, there’s peace, and a few people are just totally determined to get their names written in the history books. (I wish I had the guts to become an adventurer or a pirate or something. I totally do, but I’m afraid of getting in trouble with the law, of all things.)
I picked up my car from the mechanic after three weeks of having them test-drive it on a regular basis and finding next to nothing and diagnosing no problem and repairing no parts.
I was feeling very fatalistic when I drove all the way up to Ithaca, NY, by myself. I felt as if I might have been making a one-way trip, but what choice did I have?
This particular day was was a Monday, and I was determined to show my face at a certain place in Ithaca that I needed to visit. If I could not make it there, I had decided that life would no longer be worth living according to the old ways that I was used to. Something within me really wanted to keep living life in the old way and I told myself that if my car was to break down anywhere, I would walk or hitchhike or steal my way to where I needed to go. If my desperate circumstances led me into a life of crime, then I guess that would determine my destiny, and me and the law would be at odds for the rest of my life. All for a car, so I could live my life. (But is it really my life if I require things such as cars to live it? I shouldn’t think of myself as an individual, then, so much as a member of society, bound to service it in something close to feudal terms.)
It took me two hours to get to Ithaca. Along the way, the transmission problem began showing up intermittently but it seemed to be something I could control by not accelerating quickly, especially up hills. Turns out that Ithaca is surrounded by rolling hills– fun in theory and poetry but not if you’re driving over them along a narrow road with one lane in either direction. I felt terrible but I had no choice but to keep driving at overly cautious speeds. I was constantly afraid that some driver in a hurry would come up behind me, get stuck, and get impatient with me for going slow. That’s how concerned I am for the feelings of other drivers. I don’t expect them to be understanding; I try to be understanding of them. I’m the one at fault. I’m the one who doesn’t deserve to be driving because it’s my fault for driving such a broken car, and if I was smart, I wouldn’t be driving it at all.
Life doesn’t always give you the option of giving up. After getting a little lost but not in an unwelcome way, I bought a map at a gas station then found my destination and did what I needed to do there. Then I got back on the roads to go back to PA. I had gone down a very long steep hill going into Ithaca, but now I was driving up it.
It’s at times like that when I say the name of Jesus over and over, because when I can’t put faith in my car, I put my faith in the one who has the power to change reality so that nobody gets hurt.
Dream
It’s like a terrible dream in which I stand on the top deck of a sailing ship, a caravel. I stand over the captain’s quarters, and all is calm and peaceful although there is a hushed sense of foreboding among the crew. A captain comes up to me as the other crewmembers watch, and he offers me a choice between two or more “things”. I can’t remember what those things were or how they were relevant to anything. Perhaps it was to check one box instead of another, or to press a button, or to touch a steering wheel and turn in the right way. Whatever it was, I always chose very quickly and nonchalantly, and immediately regretted it. Suddenly the sky and the seas are stormy and a huge wave washes me overboard. I can’t do anything but splash and try to stay afloat because there is no scrap of wood or anything for me to hold onto. As I watch I hear the screams and dying gasps of drowning men, men whose lives depended on my decision, I realize that they are angry at me. Their last emotion before they die is hatred of me. I’ve betrayed them. If it wasn’t for me, they might have had a chance to live longer and enjoy more days of life on this earth, days full of work and pain and emotion.
I didn’t ask for this choice. I didn’t ask for this dream. I have no idea why I am on this ship, except that I belong there for some reason that I can’t say. But the choice is mine and always was my own. The captain had given me a choice between two or more choices, and only one was safe and correct and good. When I chose wrongly, I not only caused my own death, but the deaths of every other person aboard the ship.
What I’ve described was a recurring nightmare from when I was younger. The same dream, over and over. The same decision, carelessly made, causes lasting consequences for me and all the others.
Can you choose for me? I wonder. Can you take me up like a cause that is not lost? I don’t want to do anything wrong. The most loving thing I can do for those I love, I often think, is to leave them alone, to tell them never to look at me, because I don’t want them to learn to rely on me. Don’t rely on me for anything. Go away, or else I’ll go away, and although I can’t forget you, I will pretend that you don’t exist anymore, since when you aren’t in front of my face and subject to my touch I have no assurance that you are actually real, or that you ever existed. It’s easier to be alone. It’s easier to not have truly lived, to not have lived abundantly. Let me cling to my tiny household idols and my scraps of security blanket. I’m young but already I want to retire.
It’s situations like this that make people think that it would be easier to die. Life means you have a chance to fail and mess up and cause pain to others. But why, I ask God, why me? Why did I have to be born into this miserable world out of all possible worlds? I feel so limited, as if I was made to appreciate things on a higher level, but instead I find myself down here, entering into contracts I cannot keep, letting people down, disappointing myself, afraid to move, content to remain paralyzed and static because it’s safer. If I was never born, I would never have developed these emotional reactions. What hasn’t happened yet can’t possibly matter to you when you’re not around to react to it. Life is fighting–against nature, against injustice, against callousness. It’s hard. But what makes life feel easier is knowing that people are happy with you and approve of your actions. In that sense, everything I do is for the sake of my emotions. I drink water when I feel thirsty because I don’t want to feel thirsty anymore. I sleep when I feel drowsy because I don’t want to feel drowsy anymore. I stand up when my legs turn numb from sitting down, and I sit down when I’m tired of standing up. I let my emotions lead me along by a hook in my nose attached by a string held in their hands, and I feel glad for the privilege of being led.
Car (2)
The transmission problem is no longer intermittent, but constant. The engine is revving like crazy as if it’s stuck in low gear even though I’m not driving on an incline anymore. The check engine dashboard light has turned on. It’s gotten to the point where I will never get home today and will endanger hundreds of people if I continue to try to drive this vehicle. I pull over on the side of the road. This is just outside of Ithaca. My cell phone reception is non-existent, so I have to walk to somebody’s house and use their phone. It’s a cordless phone, and I stand outside and talk. I call my insurance company and arrange for a towing service. I call somebody who was relying on me to give him a ride to work and I tell him that I can’t because my car is broken. It’s ninety-six degrees and humid. A beautiful day. I go back to my car and stand on the side of the road for twenty minutes under the shade of a tree as I wait for the tow truck to arrive.
I was pleasantly surprised by the tow truck, which was brand-new. It took an hour and a half to get my car back “home” and the ride cost me over two hundred dollars out of my own pocket, above what the insurance company was paying. I said to myself, well, there goes my movie and eating out and clothes and game money for a year.
At last we pull in to the mechanic’s place and disembark from the tow truck. There was a nice hot summer wind blowing. The tow truck driver lights a cigarette and holds it in his mouth as he lowers the car from the truck. Tobacco smoke mixes with diesel exhaust. Two of the mechanics come out and walk up to me, saying nothing and appearing rather nonchalant. They know me by now. I mean, I don’t know if they know my name or anything, but I’m such a regular by now that they certainly recognize my face.
He says, “Only does it for you?” and I say, “Yeah.” That’s how it is. Without saying anything we both understand what they will do next with my car. My car is like a fixture at their place by now. They’re bound and determined to diagnose the problem and succeed this time around, and their job should be easier now that it completely refuses to run in high gear.
About twenty minutes later the mechanic gave me a ride home. That was good because mentally, I was ready to hitchhike home again, the way I did on a previous occasion when I left my car at that mechanic’s place.
To sum it up: Three weeks of having somebody else risk their life driving my car around at no cost to me, and the car refused to malfunction for them. But I get it back and find it easy to drive it into the ground. At least this time they were able to diagnose the problem and arrange for the transmission to be replaced under warranty. Recently I got my car back with the replaced transmission and it seems to be running fine, but the fear is still there. I keep expecting it to do something weird. It’s like I gained post-traumatic stress disorder about driving.
Car (3)
So now I get a little bit tense and distracted just from thinking about driving my car, and it makes me feel depressed. I think these are mild panic attacks. It really stinks to feel this way because I know it is holding me back in various ways. Not having reliable transportation or not feeling capable of relying on transportation is affecting my decisions and I’m wondering if I’m not getting a little bit irrational.
The day I got my car back, I almost died twice, both times when making left turns. The first time I was a passenger in somebody else’s car (going to the mechanic to pick up my car), and while the other two passengers remained silent, I practically whispered the word ‘whoa’, as if in awe of something, and that was enough to get the driver of the car I was in to stop pulling out into the road as a big gleaming pickup truck blazed by with its horn blaring. I saw it coming and the weird thing was that when I got home with my car, I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t said anything.
The second time was all my fault and I deserved to die. I mean, I wouldn’t have blamed anybody if I had caused an accident. I was turning left out of a gas station in a place where there wasn’t much visibility to the right and some car was speeding along far above the speed limit and I swerved into the other lane to avoid getting hit by it. There were no cars in sight in that lane and I got back into my lane in time.
I don’t know why– maybe it was nervousness– but with that new transmission in my car, it felt as if I was driving a car for the very first time, by myself. It was terrible. All my timing when making turns and accelerating felt off and I couldn’t tell how fast the car was supposed to accelerate or how the engine was supposed to sound or anything. It was as if I’d forgotten how to apply pressure to the gas or brake pedals and was slowly learning how all over again.
My greatest fear as an adult is the thought that by driving a car, I could cause injury or death to somebody who did nothing wrong except for thinking that the roadways were safe. I have a growing hatred for this system. Curse Ford for making the automobile the cornerstone of American society, displacing everything just to make a profit. If it wasn’t for cars, we wouldn’t have suburbs and rush hours. Curse Eisenhower and everybody since him for approving the interstate highway system and contributing to globalization and our current society in which we feel as if we can relate more intimately to a international brandname like Pepsi or Adidas than to some farm fifty miles away that grows the food that we eat to live. (After all, we see more commercial messages and experience more emotions about such branded products than about fresh vegetables.) Curse every weak-willed mayor and city council for improving the roads to a point where we can’t drive anything as slow as a horse; we risk our lives bicycling even in the bike lanes, we risk our lives crossing the street in marked crosswalks, and we risk our lives driving cars because the roads are all broken down and laws unenforced by the police. Curse all the times when the rules are bent, tweaked, or otherwise ignored in the name of love. I hate when I say things like this because it makes me sound like such an ungrateful and despicable person, but I guess I’m just obsessed with cause and effect. There are reasons why what we take for granted now used to not be taken for granted. If you hate the symptoms, you ought to hate the causes even more. I’m just trying to defend myself against a system that I cannot possibly influence in any practical way. I’m a licensed driver and I bet I’m better than most, but when it comes down to it, I’m not proud enough to say that I deserve to be on the roadways.
Car (4)
There are far more deaths on American roadways than deaths from terrorists in the world. I think that America should spend more money on ensuring the safety of American roads than on national defense, since the casualties of the road system are far higher than the casualties of terrorist attacks. American roads are more dangerous than anything the terrorists can throw at us, and yet we live in fear and get involved in foreign wars to defend ourselves from terrorists while leaving ourselves wide open to death by automobile? All the roads I’ve seen around here in Pennsylvania and New York are absolute crap. There are potholes on the interstate and I zip through them at seventy miles per hour because I don’t have a choice. It’s the only road I have to use and there are a lot of maniac drivers out there. We all use the same roads here and what makes me want to cry is knowing that most people don’t care. Most people take it for granted that this is how it is. They have no interest in changing things, or even living their life differently. I don’t want to be one of them.
A little part of me gets tired each time I drive my car. It’s a sick feeling, and then my thoughts get all depressive and sad, like I see something like a moth on the wall and my first thought is that it will die and turn to dust. Or I see people smiling and it reminds me of how little there is to smile about. And when the driving stops, and I can get out of the car I feel good all of a sudden, like I could just dance for joy in the front yard, and if somebody were to stop and stare at me, I could tell them to join me, because I’m so glad to have survived another holocaust of car fumes and jangled nerves and crushing anxieties.
Maybe I just find it impossible to put my faith in a piece of machinery unless the radio is playing loud music or other people are talking with me to keep me distracted. Do you ever think about what a motor vehicle really is? You are sitting behind a container for tiny controlled explosions, and below you are all of these metal and rubber objects spinning very fast and getting relatively hot. All of it is automated and mechanical and explainable, but if one component breaks, the whole thing could blow up. I wish I had lots of money to throw at some reliable honest mechanics so they could tell me what’s going to be next to break on my car, but I guess I’ll just drive it until it breaks while I’m going down the freeway since that’s what I’ve always done and it’s what other people do.
America’s government has no business fighting foreign wars by spending billions of dollars in borrowed money when the roadways in America are junk and more citizens are dying every day thanks to idiots with driver’s licenses and idiots who hold the reins of power yet would rather fight foreign wars than maintain America’s infrastructure–roads, power lines, stuff like that–than to terrorists.
I really don’t know what to do about bad drivers. If you are too quick to take a driver’s license away from a bad driver, you ruin their entire life because they need to drive a vehicle to work or get to work, and there might be hope of teaching them to drive better. To relate this to a Biblical metaphor for something else, it’s like taking a millstone away from a person as collateral for a loan. You might as well kill the person you are taking it from, because with it goes all hope of having food (flour?) to eat as a reward for hard work. Even if you are a hard worker, in our society you can’t get to where you need to go to work unless you have transportation. You just aren’t allowed to live next to where you work. Society isn’t set up that way.
Story
I’ve been trying to write one novel–one story– for the past six months. If this is as serious as I can get about writing, when the only real work I have to do involves driving around looking for a place to work, then maybe I don’t have the discipline that it takes to write stories for a living, or even for a hobby. My standard is this: It has to be the kind of thing that other people will find meaningful. I can’t just write stories off the top of my head– I mean, I could do it, and I could write a whole lot of words and get this great big random and wonderful plot going, but the idea comes first. The plot must completely match the idea. I cannot tell stories without abstracting the concepts. I think it’s cheap to write a story that shows, not tells. It may be more difficult to write, but it’s far more difficult to understand, and why write a story if you don’t want people to be interested in reading it?
But I’m still hopeful. I feel as if my whole life is a research project, and I may not be able to say what I want to say with the skill I want to say it in until I get older.
Happiness
If our minds tell us that we are happy, then everything else will seem to us to be okay–acceptable–reasonable–rational–useful–good. If bowing down to one idol makes us happy, then we will see no reason for bowing down to another idol. Maybe that’s why there are problems and strife in the world. When we are hit with weakness and sickness and then forced to see past the idols and really take a good look at ourselves in the mirror, we can’t help but dislike what we see. But we refuse to believe it. Everything we do is for ourselves, right? We do what we think is right, but only if we think it benefits us. If our masters really mistreated us beyond what we could bear, we would have rebelled against them. We would have staged an uprising and slain them with their own weapons. We would have done this for ourselves, to secure happiness for ourselves.
Games
Trading Pokemon on the GTS is oddly addictive. It’s fun to pull off quick successions of trades. Today I came across a Lv. 100 Dusknoir that somebody wanted to trade for a Lv. 9 or lower Chansey. So I checked the Chanseys that were on offer and traded my Miltank for one that was Lv. 1, then I immediately traded that Chansey for the Dusknoir.