I spent the last few weeks looking for another car. I was leaning towards Hondas. Everybody knows about them. Some say they don’t break. There are +300,000 mile examples on Craigslist – “runs great.” They say they hold their value. A good investment. Some say they’re fun.
When I think of Hondas I think about this one time I was walking home around 4AM. A sixth-gen black Civic pulled up behind me and gave a little honk. I turned and saw a lady alone at the wheel. ‘Hey papi, you want a ride?’ she said.
‘What a nice person,’ I thought, as I stumbled in graciously accepted her kind and thoughtful offer. It might’ve been an Accord.
My girlfriend brings it up when she’s mad because she says I had sex with some random prostitute off the street. I say prostitutes don’t give out free drugs, and they’re referred to as sex workers, actually. This has made it difficult to figure out when exactly our anniversary is.
A healthy relationship is like a Honda. The engines should outlast the paint.
I found plenty of solid listings, and almost pulled the trigger several times. But every time I contacted a seller I was praying they wouldn’t respond. Deterred from fixing my car by my mechanic, father, and pretty much everyone, I planned to just have something to drive while I fix the other car bit by bit in my mom’s garage. But something about safe, reliable, and easy cars has always disgusted me. Give me the schizophrenic ones, and those on the brink of collapse, any day. I have somewhat of an aversion to risk-aversion.
One way or another, the car had to get back to my mom’s garage in the suburbs. I took the day off, figuring it would die a few dozen times along the way. But I kept the revs as low as I could, driving slower than I ever thought I would, and to my astonishment, it ran like a dream (except for almost dying at idle a few times, but that’s normal). A slow, slow dream.
Under 2000 rpm, the car’s top speed is about 45 mph, with a blistering 0-45 mph time of about 16 seconds. Traffic honked and bitched at me. I got passed by a couple of those rental electric scooters.
And I smiled the whole way. The Celica was not ready to give up just yet.
“…the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When it rains, my sunroof leaks drops of water onto my face. When I miss my double-clutch into the unsynchronized third gear, I am instantly reminded, by the grating cacophony of unhappy steel, that I’m sitting behind a pile of heavy metal gears spinning fast and precise like dancers in unison, to which I am a shit choreographer. When my engine has one of its narcoleptic fits and collapses, refusing to wake up, I must get out and push. Cars don’t seem so heavy, until you have to move them yourself. With the wind and rain lashing my face, traffic horns blaring, angry cursing, I push my sleeping giant, finding it remarkable how our world got to this point, where we all drive around in multi-ton speeding missiles with cup-holders and lumbar support, but we still can’t get along.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pilot who plunged into the Mediterranean somewhere. That was it for him.
Humans have been crashing airplanes almost as long as we have been crashing automobiles. They say that it is statistically much more dangerous to drive an automobile than an airplane. And yet, almost everyone has an automobile, while very few have airplanes. Maybe one day we will all have airplanes.
De Saint-Exupéry had his share of breakdowns and crashes. I’ve only crashed five times, and the breakdowns are more of a continual state than discrete events. He almost died in the desert. I almost died in the desert. Even though his stories are of bravery, success, and adventure, while mine are of cowardice, failure, and insanity, I like to believe that we are somewhat kindred spirits. And he’s dead so he can’t disagree.
He wrote famous books. I write a blog called The Rusted Muffler, where all my viewers are spam bots.
My writing is like my car – a series of abject failures, likely to go nowhere. So instead of buying a Honda, I ordered $880 worth of parts for the Celica.
And I’m still writing.