the true mind can't pierce existential terror

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You may be wondering why I've yet to update you on last night's bout with the teachings of my own true mind. It's simple. Last evening disaster struck in Goldie Honda. I threw on some clothes and grabbed my little wad of moth-eaten cash as I flew out the door to get some banking and grocery shopping done, and what to my shock but my car would not idle. It died every time I took my foot off the gas until it had warmed up enough and then provided an anemic idle and a scary clattering noise.

You may recall I was just held up in Berkeley for some days to get this esoteric part from Timbuktu to fix this problem and I had to charge a huge repair bill on my cringing credit card. This has made all trips back to the Bay Area for the next many months completely outrageously financially stupid for the next six months or so, no matter how badly I might want to go to the doctor. But now GOLDIE HONDA needs to go to the doctor. Car doctors here are as big in the imposture business as are the few masquerading as medical doctors. I am, in the vernacular, so fucked.

Everything else aside, the fantastic number of car problems over the course of my life had already pushed me to the very edge of frank psychosis every time I so much as heard a strange rattle in my car long before I finally bought Goldie and all problems ceased abruptly. I can't even remember all the cars I've owned in my life. Whether old clunkers bought used or brand new clunkers, every one of them broke down with startling regularity. I was stuck on the side of Highway One in a backless t-shirt and some barely perceptible shorts -- ONLY -- two days after purchasing a brand new MG Midget, somewhere far back in my babetude, and blessedly saved from quanta of near-rapes by a park ranger, but that's the fondest car breakdown memory I have. The thousands of others are studies in the depths of hell on earth.

Not only that, but I remember sitting in my attic apartment window, looking down on my car parked in the street, listening to Sticky Fingers on the stereo, at the ripe old age of 18, and suddenly becoming gripped with the terror of ever becoming carless. Even then, I didn't even need a roof over my head as badly as I needed my car. You can't take away my freedom of movement, my freedom to leave, or it is SO not pretty, okay?

So. I was sitting there in the driver's seat with my foot on the gas, hoping against hope I'd get an idle when it warmed up enough, and little bits of my brain were splatting against the inside of my windshield and up out of my moon roof, freaking, with a desperate need to call my mother. She's 79 years old, taking care of my rapidly-deteriorating 83-year-old father all by herself in a house too big for two of me to clean, let alone weed and mow and water the grounds, with about forty orchids to water, three maniac cats and a Yorkie to keep up, plus nary a Rotary meeting to miss on pain of permanent personal defeat, and won't let anyone come and help. Have I made the point yet that I should not be calling and whining about this to my mother? But where DO you take your existential terror if you don't have a mom who's up to it?

THAT is why they insist you're "unnatural" if you're an unmarried woman.

Check.

Anyway, I was instantaneously seized by this terror and it would not ebb. A pill didn't even mellow me out enough to get to sleep before some gawdawful hour. And I don't think I even got to the kind of sleep it takes to get dreaming done before I was awake again and, if not quite as thunderbolted, still anchored solidly in abjection. It took me until about three to work up the moxie, the adulthood, to dial the Honda Gods for advice. It didn't really solve anything, but got me a step closer to eventually resolving it... or... just failing to wake up one morning, dead of vexation and inseparable from the true mind at last.

So. I'm here to tell you, terror, if you cannot drop it, completely separates you from truth.

Get your Zen on or just suffer to death.