It started with a first generation GMC S-15 Jimmy seen out of the back seat of the old Accord. Red over white, with a roof rack, and a swingaway spare tire with a metal gas can. The big flat sides and big windows, like a van kinda. But with big donut offroad tires and fender flares, not captain’s chairs and wood paneling. I liked it. My mom made fun of the name in some oblique way. My fascination with the Tonka Toy shape stuck, the unfortunate pubescent association of the General Motors truck and my mothers implied penis humor completely destroyed any youthful ideas of getting that as a first vehicle. So back to the original, neverending debate: DeLorean DMC-12 or The General Lee. Both timeless classics!

When I was first learning to drive my father was insistent that I learn how to drive “the right way” and I frequently had to perform wide ranging vehicular learning exercises. Memorizing the grid of streets miles in all directions and performing an oil change. Driving around a parking lot at high speed backwards, then launching forward and doing emergency stops until he was comfortable that I understood how the car handled. Understanding just happened to coincide with concerned shop keepers gather and pointing and trying to get license plate details. Ohhh memories. Anyhow, he took an opportunity with a neighbor’s 2nd Generation 4Runner, red again, and owned by pack a day smoking alcoholic idiots, so it was DESTROYED inside and probably outside too. I struggled to adapt to operating the clutch pedal and gear shift at the same time as I first experienced the dune-buggy like handling of a spring and shackle lifted four-bah-four with a three beer alignment, but it undeniably had… it. I binked a curb and it just went blorp and RAN UP IT. The hoonage potential was electrifying but the horrorshow handling and my own ineptitude with the clutch found me struggling and stalling it twice getting it back into the driveway. I walked away from it sweating and cursing, but the next time somebody asked if I could drive stick I said yes and I’ll be damned if I couldn’t. And now I knew that you could buy a truck and drive OVER stuff with it. LOGS AND SHIT. Epic knowledge for 16.

When I bought the baby truck, aka the Taliban truck, I originally dreamed of it as a 4×4 SAS project. Buy an old Datsun, do a leafer front and flip the rear axle plus Dana twin stick. Really, read the forums. It sounds great. Lots of finished rigs to look at. Tons of people have done an L20/L18 to a 4 speed and a Dana 20 with some offroad-shop fencepost driveshafts and had a ton of fun buggying, and it seemed like a laugh, especially when I was driving around in my 2007 Versa. “So easy” I thought, “I’ll just buy an axle and kinda line it up and weld on the eyelets square! But first lets get these weird old doors out of my attic and these old tires to the dump.” And there she sat. I helped a couple folks move with it, did a brake job and threw a Pertronix on it and my brother in law helped me put a weber carb on it. It ran like a top but eventually it needed wiring work and I bought a hot rod harness for it but never really… started on it. It seemed very hard now, to get all this petrified kingpin nonsense off and put a straight axle on the front.

I don’t even know how to weld really. So I’d have to learn that for starts.

And if I’m gonna rewire it I have to probably paint it. So I’d have to learn how to paint I guess. Red maybe.

And so I abandoned it. Well, I sold it, and dickered with the guy the way you’re supposed to when you’re done with a project car but I was glad to see it go. It was just too original and complete for me to be fucking around with and the only things I could do to it would lower its value. I was only gonna be bad to you girl, you weren’t meant for turbos and fender flares. Bosozuku dreams and stance-u? God I was gonna fuck it up.

And so I started finally looking for my red 4×4. It didn’t have to be red. But it had to be 4×4, automatic because I’ve clutched and shifted my way to my last back spasm, with room for four people or two and dogs or cargo. And it had to be small, I wouldn’t have any GMC Yukon class barge shitting on my driveway forever and since Chevy killed the Colorado that crosses off any modern GMs. I’ve had Fords and they’re fine but the Escape is a Hairdresser McSoccermom, and just as I mentioned re: Yukons, I don’t do fatties so we can write off the whole Explorer-Plus range. Dodge Nitro just… yeah lets just not talk about the N-word or the Durango for that matter. The Grand Cherokee is a porker that has only gotten uglier and more horrible with each passing year, the Liberty is the middle-manager but swears he’s gonna start camping someday counterpart to the Escape. So Daimler Benz Chrysler Renault whatever the fuck they are now, Pentastar Financial’s car branch has nothing to offer either.

So we’re out of modern “domestic”, patriotic and American economy supporting vehicles to purchase. On to the furreners and the old shit. Honda still makes a great minivan, even when they call it an SUV so no thank you to anything that’s not an Isuzu rebrand. While we’re on the topic of Isuzu – whatever they have now is huge and whatever they had back in the day was a little too rough and ready for me in the trim department. I wouldn’t turn down an old Trooper/TII in good shape but gooood luck finding that y’all. A Mercedes Benz G wagen? Hot. Like baller hot but what the fuck am I? A baller? And it will ALWAYS COST YOU MERCEDES MONEY PLUS A 40% MARK UP FOR BEING WEIRD TO FIX. A Subaru of any height or vintage won’t ever really be a 4×4, even though I hear they’re just a killer car. I may still own one of these one day, I love me a good boxer motor. Daihatsu Rocky? I mean of course I’d drive it, it looks like a GI Joe toy but when’s the last time you saw one of those that wasn’t either ridden to shit or about to be?

Unmolested first gen S-15 GMC Jimmies like I saw as a kid (and their GM Partner Platform vehicles) just don’t seem to exist anymore. I don’t know if the rust worm ate them, they started giving away Rancho lift kits with the purchase of a case of Skoal, or they all just got driven till they smoked and traded in during cash for clunkers but it seems like that first generation S-10 Blazer isn’t as plentiful as its counterparts in the SUV world. And that 4.3 v6 has a not great rep everywhere for like… everything. And the 700r4, at least back in the day, had a horrible rep when pushed. Nobody bought them with an iron duke 2.5 and a slushbox. The second gen is ugly as balls so big old mehquake on the classic GM options. Plus I just have a hate on for the General, second rate when new, the cars also seem to disintegrate in value faster than most of their peers. Bleh.

Ford Bronco is too big except for that super early 66 style. Ugh so hot, but too expensive. Again, who am I? The Bronco II has potential, the windows on the back are like… huge. They wrap onto the top of the thing like a greenhouse. But it apparently also rolls over onto its back like a dog that wants belly rubs and I like staying upright most of the time when driving so I guess Ford’s dead to me now too.

An old friend had a Jeep Cherokee XJ, I can’t remember if it was a two or four door, but it was definitely fun to drive. I did the ball joints and tie rods on it for him because he had some mysterious shake at speed (I now know it was probably the track rod bushing, which I didn’t check/know to check). He paid me half the cost of the 20 ton Harbor Freight press I bought to do the job, which sits 10 feet from me today, dozens of ball joints and harmonic balancer seal savers later, one of the least frequently used but undeniably lifesaving when pressed to service (do you see what I did there do you see it) tools in my shop. I remember the job being startlingly easy for a then-contemporary car. Working on my folks’s Honda was a comparative nightmare of hoses and wires, and every other new car seemed to have more crap to take off to get to normal service items. And it wasn’t like my old cars either, the Benzes and Opels and Corvairs and the like – they were simple but also not really built for fleet service. They were cars. This was more like doing a service on a tractor, it kinda WANTED you to be able to take it apart with regular tools. Like that was a design goal. I dug that a lot. In fact I ended up doing more of the front end than I originally told him I could because it was just so easy to get at. We got it aligned up the road and took it out for a spin and declared any shakes solved (it wasn’t, I don’t think, and he went on to replace other stuff, transmission mounts and motor mounts and the like), but his little white truck left an impression for sure. Dre sure seemed to like it too.

So I started shopping for my Jeep.

Next problem (and blog post): Uhhh the turn signals won’t cancel after you turn. We’ll talk about trying to navigate the parts catalog and car company politics.

Driving home, late at night in the Corvair. Past the whitewashed cross at the corner, with its base of hellfire red christmas lights. Past the big old conversion van with Waylon’s face on the side, tall as the man himself. The earscorching siren blips twice and the roller lights of the deputy’s cruiser bop red and blue chasers through the back windows and strobe like disco lights on Waylon’s weary smile.

“Shit. Fucking shit.”

The hot engine sputters and finally dies. I wait for the boots to grind across the sand scrabble pavement and keep my hands where everybody can see them. And before I open the window I mutter it again. A common refrain in those days for me.

“Five fat years and five lean years, that’s what they say in the book.”

And I didn’t know what it meant then, I said it bitter, to ask what historical richness had bought me this immediate poverty.

To ask of God why and when would mine arrive, when I’d have and not worry, when I’d slumber untroubled and toil endlessly as a machine on a track and never quaver with fear or in laziness slack. When I’d feel like this fire had purpose and direction.

To ask Him why these were the best years of my life as all His children kept telling me.

To ask Him to not exist at all, for all the good He does.

And now I’m lean and times are fat, and I say it now with a quiver, to ask what time will take from me to repay this immediate wealth.

To ask of God how and when mine was found, and to worry over when it’ll change. To ask Him to return to me the untroubled slumber of my youth, the strong back which let me toil without end, the ignorance of consequence which let me never quaver, and the aimless fire which burned out all laziness.

To ask Him why these were the best years of my life and how I could make them last just a bit longer.

To ask Him to exist. For all the good He does.

After an enormous absence, Leo Gallagher showed up in my life, two times in two weekends.

When I was young, I watched his specials whenever they were on TV and they were on all the fucking time. I watched him on flying machines and telling truths and making me and my folks laugh at the same time, at the same nonsensical things we all take for granted. He had this weight to him, he was serious but goofy, his words were true but funny.

As he wandered in to the Mt Tabor lounge to record the podcast, it was clear he still had it; like a switch he turned on and off or a livid puppet he could still operate.

The face would lock into Classic Gallagher and he’d do the wind up for a good one — Something fun like chairs if our legs bent the other way or a hilarious rejoinder about how good fudge is. (My 12 year old brain yearned for it) — and then he’d drop that face and he’d say something about how there’s two types of Mexicans, good ones and bad ones, and we have nothing but bad ones here.

Mostly it was depressing.

Part of me cringed, to see that fame and fortune don’t make you happy if you’re too smart for your own good. The grotesque reveal: if your brain is convinced you shouldn’t be happy; moreover that humans shouldn’t be happy — you won’t be, and others joy will only bring you pain. Part of me wished he could be happy playing with the puppies one last time, which is what everybody but Gallagher himself was ready to let happen. Part of me cringed when he broke, too stoned to follow his own thread or too bored with his invective to care, to shamelessly promote one or the other of his idiotic patent troll plans. And part of me just tuned out because it became obvious that when he says something deep he’s just trying to butter you up to sell you watered down race bait, convince you to buy his pseudointellectual babble, or obliquely ask you to give him drugs on the street when you see him.

He was full of memorable quotes, and I’m sure there’s tons of discussion about the brown folks talk but he also said that humor was taking something that other people like and smashing it. By that measure, he killed. He smashed my opinion of what it was to be the smartest kid in the room. He smashed my innocent belief that he wasn’t a racist. In fact it forced me to realize I only thought he wasn’t because I’d seen Gallagher, Stevie Wonder, and Gordon from Sesame Street in tight offwhite bellbottoms, so clearly they were in cahoots. The rending of my youthful optimism about race in America, laff riot.

I worried about him for a minute, I read he was broke. And then I read he wasn’t really broke he was just getting a lot of traffic tickets in California and so he was avoiding his houses. But the article has another notable quote.

“I see things on the side of the road, which, of course, I’d never see if I just drove by. And I pick up these things, because, to me, it tells me about the society, and I find parts of cars and they’re important parts—and I wonder how the car is driving without that part now. It just seems odd to me.”

When I read it last year I heard it in the old Gallagher voice and my heart went out to the brave spirit speaking that truth. And now I know that he was just trying to sell some plan or idea and I wonder what it is. I wish he’d just come out and say it. Is it you Gallagher? Are you the important part that has fallen out of our societal vehicle, the pitman arm or the tie rod end all abandoned on the side of the road? Should we hit the brakes and swing back around for you, dust you off and install you back where you belong?

That’s not how it works man. When something breaks and falls off your car in the real world, you call one of those unmentionable brown folks and have em’ tow your car to a yard, where they replace it with a shiny new one.

Maybe one that isn’t as racist.

I guess I was kinda hoping the Mayans were right. Or at least the tabloid New Age version I’d grown up with. Some “far off” date in 2012 would occur and life would end. “Deal”, I thought. “I can do ’til 2012 standing on my head.”

Fall 2012. It was finally happening, I actually got a little excited, but I played it cool. I consciously ignored the news stories about it, the Facebook discussions. I consciously chose to ignore the date as it came up, dismissing any discussion about it. I didn’t look it up or mark it on my calendar. I didn’t want to jinx it, like if I accidentally talked too much about it, it might not happen. But most importantly I wanted to be genuinely surprised. The full apocalypse experience.

But in the darkest part of my stupid little heart, I thought one day I’d get on the bus to head to work, and while I stared aimlessly off the Parkrose Max platform, there’d be a funny smell, or maybe a startling noise. Each earthly ear deafened as every living throat shrieks simultaneously. A livid, howling meatpipe organ of agony, wavering higher and higher as the thousand layers of the blessed veil are ripped from our eternal eyes. My gaze would fall upon the workbooks of a construction laborer, caked with that funny extruded swirl slurry of concrete thin set and silty mud that always reminds me of dying ferns or the filigree on some Victorian sconce work and then I’d have the futile, thrashing fugue of worry about our foolish small world for the last time. My human eyes would weep and melt and smolder, and it wouldn’t even merit screaming through my flaming beard about, for All would Know/See/Hear the 12th Bak t’un was at an end and there would be no more need for calendars or eyes to see them. The time of man and trains and Parkroses would be over. The winter felt bleak enough, the summer short enough, the re-election of Barack ‘R/C Hunting Enthusiast’ Obama hollow enough. Every nut bag in the world out there collecting guns for their ‘big statement shooting’. Fracking? Fracking and flaring? Are you fucking with me. Fall 2012 just had that Apocalypse feeling to it. I thought maybe we had a goer.

And now I’m pruning my apple tree, and cleaning unfrozen dog turds, and pulling out new blackberry from the cursed rock pile in the corner. I even had to clean out the fridge the other day. No miscarried souls in there to drag my unwashed heartfeather to limbo for the big tally, no locusts eating my bread butts, no ichorous grubs fouling my greens; just that gross old chicken juice smell. Bz’cht* the UnPronounceable hasn’t rent from the Heavenly Crystal realm into ours to see what chaos the poison Ego has wrought on Gaia’s juices and gargle its foul fermentation, and frankly it’s February. This is well past tardy and deeply into “being stood up”.

Maybe we all have to live after the rapture.

Maybe it happened, Jesus or Quetz’al or the turtle we all live on the back of came back – just popped in all cool to see how those sick ass monumental, healing teachings they left us with were working out, “POP QUIZ HOT SHOT”, and we were all so distracted by steam whistles or vacuum tubes or our own polyp filled assholes that They couldn’t find anybody who would even pay attention. Crawled out of a cave way out in the middle of the Australian outback on the top of a pile of rocks on the vernal equinox just like all the signs said, like what it told _everybody_ to write down, and the only one present to celebrate was a wild dog who was so scared it threw up, but was so hungry it immediately ate the throwup and skulked away. Cruised up into the stratosphere to figure out what was such a big deal we couldn’t even remember to show up for the big soul weighing mid-term rally, and couldn’t make sense of our jibbering at all. We were busy making shit we didn’t need and trying to sell it to each other in bulk and shitting and shrieking and swatting at each other so noisily that we were unrecognizable as civilized mature organisms. The dominant primate horde little more than an infestation of children, swaddled in shit and money and secrets and hysteria enslaving each other in increasingly small loops with shiny stones and sharp swords. Feral. Unsalvageable. So It-What-Taught just left us in our mess, chuckling darkly as it slid back to the Realm Immemorial.

“Good luck with that 3D printing stuff guys. Sounds great!”

The Spring Break mentality.

That’s what I’m calling it now, I’m not really quite sure if that’s the best name for it. A work in progress.

I don’t think it really started during elementary school for me, but at some point as I was transitioning between childhood and “life after”, I learned that the best way to deal with something horrible happening was to put your head down and wait for it to end. If you waited long enough, a respite period began, and the sweetness of that relief would be so monumental and complete, it would wash the dreariness of this bad shit away. It worked with so many things, in the short term, things would be awful, bullies would be throwing my shit in the shower and pissing on it or somebody would be shooting an impromptu dart into the meat of my leg or the security guard would be harassing me for the fifteenth time because he “didn’t like how my eyes moved” when he asked me about shit, but at some point, all of these shitty people would just be gone and I’d be back in my cave again and everything would taste sweeter. Icy blue cans of Pepsi pulled one handed from a seemingly never-empty drawer in the bottom of the fridge simply tasted better, than tepid Coke bought from a flickering steel caged soda machine situated neatly between the redneck and chicano “free harassment” zones. Carrying my rented cello to the orchestra room past the wrestling gym, for example, was a higher stress proposition than dragging it down the hall to my bedroom, and playing it on the corner of my bed.

For me, Spring Break represented freedom from the world at large. I missed the school work, the schedule. Semesters, quarters, periods and penalties for being tardy, all of this made sense to me. On the first day back to school I’d wake up before my alarm, get ready and sometimes be at school when it was still early morning dim and I’d have to go hit the greenway and ride ten or fifteen miles to waste some time. But after a while, knowing that going to school meant “seeing other humans and the way they treat each other” ground me down. And soon I found myself with my head down, enduring, waiting for Spring Break. When I could wake up and look forward with great excitement to a day where, if I was really lucky, I wouldn’t see anybody my age for a whole week straight. Nobody. None of this confusion and constant fucking harassment and no weird “what do we do with you now” panic like summertime brought along, just a solid week, unmoored. The prospect is so catalyzing, I can barely eat (and in those days I could ALWAYS eat) and Friday before it begins, instead of hitting the snooze button for the fifth time, I’m waking up before my alarm again. The dusty red pink haze over the horizon lases first sunlight to the cicadas and me, jittering our enthusiasm for daybreak in the parking lot.

Waiting for relief works when the problem is too many days of teenage angst in a row, because as I now know, the only cure for being a teenager is to wait until you’re not one anymore, but in most other situations, sitting with your discomfort without a plan is failure by any other name.

I am tired of failure, regardless of how easy it is.