my car terror is almost over

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On my way down to Berkeley with a check. You never can tell, I might turn out sane. It's not going to be pretty trying to part with Goldie, but I'm having to part with too much I love already, so....

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love, 99
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let's have a movie before we turn in

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I will begin my trip south tomorrow. I have to get to a REAL doctor before my eyeball blows... and... I have to find a replacement for my beloved, the sainted Goldie Honda. Nothing could induce me to do this if I had a choice. But they can't fix Goldie up like new because there is NO way to get the carburetors for it. So I'm dropping steroids into my left eye again, having gotten the jump on it, noticed it coming before I had to put the blinding drops in, which means I will be able to SEE to get down there... I think.

This will be Shakespearean I am sure. Just getting something akin to what I want to match up with what my mother will pay is going to be tricky as hell, and the three things most likely to send me over the edge are doctors, car salesmen and my mother. Not in that order. At least we seem to be in the same ballpark and maybe when we get to it, it will straighten out without either of us getting much grayer....

I'm aiming for this one because it's almost identical to Goldie, only much newer, with more bells and whistles:


I wonder if this guy would come with me?

The blogging might thin out some over the next week, but I will do my best.

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love, 99
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it was the last part on earth not working correctly

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So I've got Goldie back, unfixed, but still able to limp around until maybe, and only distantly maybe, they can get me some used carbs from a wrecking yard and have them rebuilt by the only guys who do it, who also may not even be in business anymore.

I'm not kidding about needing that wealthy socialist gentleman! This is not good. But at least I can get out from underfoot here for the moment and make my way back, or part way back, or....

Possibly the buddhas of the ten directions will intervene as they deem appropriate. They showed great mercy at the lab after that frickin' traffic jam yesterday. That was definitely the not-subject/not-blind koan gig rewarding me for not going postal, not picking the thread of selfhood with which to strangle all sentient beings. I'm not doing a good enough job, but not 100% backslid into the glue pit either....

This car thing is terrifying. You can't even contemplate how devastating the no wheels thing is in my situation.

I think, though, that I'm going to have nothing but time to contemplate it....

I don't know why I don't give a damn about the news today, but maybe I will have a burst of enthusiasm for it later, or I may be trying to get back home, or get somewhere.... So if it goes completely quiet here, I'm traveling and will get back to you as soon as I am able.

maybe the image should have been a lightbulb

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My hair actually looks almost exactly like this just now. I'd succumbed to the urge to lop a bunch more of it off. It had grown very long again behind my back, while I was ignoring it utterly except for when tripping over the pounds of it that hit the floor. When I lost forty pounds, I decided to do something about my hair at last. First I had about five inches cut off in a very chic long million length cut. Then I had had another three cut off in an equally chic way. And just the other day I had yet another three cut off, to leave it just long enough to pull into a ponytail with but an inch or two to spare. It was a shitty cut, because the chic place was closed when I wanted it off, and so it is good to just pull it into that ponytail until next month or so when it can be made chic again. Doesn't matter. I'd sprayed it up and blown it to see if I couldn't make something wild and wooly enough for me out of it, but there's still too much hair for that, and so it just went back into the ponytail until further notice.

A few minutes ago I took it out of the band holding it into the ponytail all these days so I could brush it thoroughly before showering. My hair is sticking up almost exactly like this right this very now. The outright amazing part is that hardly any hair broke off when I brushed it. Usually handfuls of it need pulling from my brush when I'm done. Scaring the pee out of me every time, making me run to a mirror to check how close to bald I must be every time, but mysteriously finding I still have hair on my head every time. It did finally occur to me that the problem wasn't with the growing of the hair -- it grows outrageously fast -- and it can't be that it's falling out so much as it is just breaking off. Otherwise, for sure I'd have been all scalp and no locks long since.

My hair had been up in that ponytail for four days, and just four or five short strands came off on the brush and one or two hit the floor. This has not been the case for almost 20 years. I may finally have cut off all the hair that has been breaking off and tripping me for so long due to my severe lack of vitamin D. I might now be down to the hair that's grown since my vitamin D level has finally gone back up into the healthy zone.

My teeth have stopped breaking and I can no longer move them with a little finger pressure. My skin looks way better. My hair may finally have stopped threatening the integrity of all vacuum cleaners. Damn. This might turn out okay.

Oh!

Yes, I do look goofy as hell, but I don't care. I feel SO much better.

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7pm Update: Well, there was still too much hair in the comb after shampooing... so... it's better anyway.

My shower seemed to decide the left index finger I cut so badly last night to start bleeding like mad again, and so I had to spend a lot of time rinsing it again with hydrogen peroxide and wrapping that back up in a wad of antibiotic ointment and gauze so I could go out into the world without bleeding all over everything... but the tip of that finger is now asleep.

Heavy sigh.

I forgot to freak about Goldie, and she started right up -- AND HELD HER IDLE JUST FINE -- not even rattling too terrifyingly this trip. Thank the buddhas of the ten directions. Thank you very much indeed.

Notwithstanding WalmartGreens calling me to come get my prescription, the pharmacy was closed due to the holiday. Somebody forgot to tell the computer when to nut up about this stuff. So I just bought a daaark chocolate bar and stopped for some sale tomatoes on the way home. I'm having albacore and tomato and scallion salad for dinner.

Like a vaguely hip paragon of virtue healthy old baggy maniac.

[That was a braino. Dammit! I won't set foot in a Walmart, let alone spend money in one. But I keep getting Walgreens mixed up in my mouth with Walmart. I use the new Walgreens because they have the very least inefficient bozos behind the pharmacy counter. It is a plague of the north coast that even heavily staffed pharmacies are nothing but abortive attempts, misfiled prescriptions and malfunctioning computers. I've tried every single one up here, and the one independent one that wasn't any better but wasn't corporate went out of business. So. Walgreens. Sheesh.]

time to face very possible catastrophe

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If I don't get in Goldie I won't have anything to eat over the long weekend. Will she keep running, and if she does, will her tailpipe stay on?

I'm going to find out now.

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.

car trouble

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Goldie Honda has been having a little idle trouble and she started overheating on the way up the steep, steep hill to my friends' house. Luckily, I got here, could unload all my stuff, call the Honda Gods, and get her down there right away, but that meant having to wait around for Trish to get off work and pick me up, and all kinds of folderol getting her car together so I can drive it over to Marin for the doctors tomorrow... and... well... it might be serious. They couldn't nail it down in the two hours they had with her today, and it could be really bad. Or the thermostat has just gone dotty.

That car has 265,000 miles on it. Twenty years old. Drives like a brand new car. Most amazing handling car in history, bar only the Porsche 911. When that car dies, I will too.

... Have I ever told you what a good driver I am? It's awesome. And I know what I'm saying about handling. Every man who's ever ridden in the passenger seat of my car has had to remark upon my driving, even trying not to, but... I tellz yiz... I'm good.