Millstone
They say about Florida it's not the heat that's the problem, it's the humidity. That's partially true (it's both), but to be sure there's no emphasis too great to put on the latter. The whole state is practically a sauna. If the sun isn't bearing its full face down on the top of your head, the sheer volume of moisture in the air is incubating like a wet blanket around you all the time, even at night. Prone to random bursts of rain just in case the atmospheric humidity falls below seventy percent. This protrusion of land surrounded three-quarters by water and the water permeating into its ecology of near swamp-like everglades. Green, vibrant sawgrass marshlands. And where there's water there are its inhabitants; big, small, and microscopic. Creatures cut out for predation. Invaders. This is a place where it's not uncommon for one to find an alligator in the backyard as easily as one might find a wandering rabbit or a groundhog that's torn up the lawn. More than that, they seem almost proud of this, to the degree that the 'gator has become the unofficial state mascot.
It's perhaps no surprise that a certain heightened lunacy has bred there. The legend of Florida Man, the chimeric multi-faced paragon of insanity, is a testament to its unique chemistry. Something like that could only exist there in its purest and least-diluted form. Produced in a beaker mixing the heat and geography and punishing weather with additives of endemic drug abuse and poverty. A mixture whose explosion was a volcanic surge that contaminated the atmosphere. To drive through it now is not unlike experiencing a waking fever dream proliferated within the lateral borders of this skin tag on America's hindquarters, where God's face has turned away. But that's probably being too harsh. Not probably - definitely too harsh. Many lovely people call it their home, many of our seniors living out their golden years upon its radiant and balmy shores. People who've endured the worst categories of nature's wrath before and surely will again. And there's no underestimating the state's congregated theme parks, those meccas of commercialized stimuli that draw all peoples as much as any monument or tabernacle on the face of the earth. A thing particularly American, and extravagantly so. But it is a strange territory. Of that there's no doubt nor any unfairness to call it. Strange and in a way hazardous.
That's where it came from. The millstone, the cinderblock chained to the ankle. Its incept date was 2013 according to the paperwork, and who could say how long it lay there waiting, lurking, planning. How many hands had exchanged it, how many drivers had to suffer its burden before slagging it off to someone else. Not many, evidently. It had acquired little more than 90,000 miles before it was procured by its current owner; a youngish man desperate for wheels after a fateful encounter with an intoxicated driver, enticed by the discounted pricetage, the mileage, and the half-electric model that would save so much fuel. A boon for him personally and for the environment at large. What the used car dealership neglected to mention to him and what he failed to inquire about were the sawdust-like particulates that blew out of the AC vents and were generally scattered about the whole upholstery. At some point during its tenure in the sunshine state it caught a parasite; an infestation of insect that invaded the steering column and the radio and inside the dashboard. Pulling off its plastic pieces revealing a veritable hive of carcasses and little pieces of shells as sand combined likely with old excrement and inert pustules of aborted larvae. Dead, all dead, and thank goodness for it. But it was everywhere. That no amount of vacuuming nor deep cleaning would rectify. The kind of stain you can't get out, the kind you have to tear out the carpet and the layers beneath all the way down to the baseboards to locate and repair. Foundational, and corrosive.
What precise genus of bug it was was unknown and unknowable, mostly. All you could corroborate was they were brown, small, vaguely termite-like, and dead. What mattered more was the havoc they wreaked upon the electronic guts of the vehicle surviving them. The cabling in the steering wheel eaten at such that the buttons, if they worked at all, went in and out as a lightbulb on its last legs. A CD player that did not work at all, not that that antiquated relic of technology was a huge loss necessarily. No, the huge loss was the function of the steering wheel airbag. Can't quite get away with not having that, nor could you get away with selling a car without it, but damned if it wasn't discovered until months later after having been replaced several times with faulty part after Ebay bargain until finally it was fixed. Lost in the shuffle, the struggle, until the culpable party's origin was lost. Or, at least, a responsibility unprovable within the statutes of civil law. Even so, the question of how a dealership could sell a vehicle in such a condition was a mystery that would haunt and frustrate and indict a vendetta against them. Anger that could go nowhere, accomplish nothing. Just poured into the empty vessel of the four-seated chassis riddled with pestilence and rotten innards.
It was like wrestling with some obdurate beast refusing to yield. Like pulling teeth, pulling weeds, whatever your idiom. The car was a lemon. There was no getting around it. Each repair seemed to beget another as the battle with the hydra went on and on. He had to drop a leaden couple thousand not a month after the purchase to replace some corrupted jigsaw pieces under the hood. The mechanic that performed the surgeries was a cheap and loyal resource, to a point. He was the harrowed sole owner of a shop in dire need of an assistant. Every customer communicated with him directly and only, which meant that you had to pester him repeatedly to get any work going. It was round after round of unanswered phone calls and uncertain texts thrown out. He was busy man, and it was understandable, but a line had to be drawn somewhere. His services would have been abandoned were he not so affordable and if he hadn't known the vehicle as intimately as he did. Once the process was begun there really was no stopping it; it would have to run its course with this man the navigator, regardless of how long it would take or how much it would cost.
And so there were months compounding one after another, time seeming to contract and blur. Life became defined and divided by whichever problem was being dealt with then. New lights coming up on the dashboard instilling the panic of a paranoia justified and beginning the next cycle. A season for the steering column, airbag, disc player, cabling, until the migrant cancer metastasized itself in the big one, the electric battery itself. Four cells were replaced first, four out of a total eight, which on its own amounted to eight-hundred. A steal, believe it or not. In a hybrid system there is the smaller engine battery, regular as any other, and one much larger seated in the undercarriage with its eight fractions an entire other engine approximate. That power source was more than a quick and easy fix, far more, and it was unheard of for one so young to go out completely. What luck.
Repeated pangs of anger and frustration lead naturally to some flavor of nihilism. When you're let down so many times that you go beyond disappointment, saddled just with the primal desire to destroy. That's what the feeling became, at a certain point. Smash the windows through, set fire to the seat cushions, drive the thing into a lake. It had to be better than having to keep carrying this weight, keep heaving somebody else's pillory. And for no good reason, that was the worst part. Dumb misfortune is what it came down to. Wrong place, wrong time, and despite its evidence to the contrary, the wrong response to it. It's only natural to search for purpose in one's given circumstance, particularly the dire ones, but when tracing back the linearity of events and choices made there was little to be gleaned in the way of meaning. There was the inciting action, unjustified and purposeless, and then the reaction, which reasoned though it was yielded more senseless hardship. All the best wisdom in well-weighed educated guessing amounting to crap. What's the lesson to be learned? Nothing but "it happens" with an addendum of "get used to it".
But perhaps the car was as much a victim as any. Supposing, for a moment, that it wasn't its own fault that it was built and cradled in the arms of America's crazy inebriated cousin. Abused by flora and fauna that no human civilization should have ever had to contend with, let alone a piece of machinery. A tool ultimately complex and layered and ingenious in its composition. Ingenuity left to atrophy and superannuate. Maybe it was rained out, maybe flooded, then tossed aside after the waterborn plague of insects had had their way with it. Dumped at some time a few states northwest, eventually landing into the questionable hands of a used car dealership. Quite a ride it had been on in its six years of life. Fairly torturous in a way, yet still it was standing, though certainly worse for the wear. Had he met it earlier, in the prime of its youth, what a fine vehicle it would've made. Fine investment, if nothing else. Clean and efficient and working. A purchase to be proud of, satisfied, contented. And now that all the repairs had been made it (hopefully) would be that vehicle. A Floridian burden no more, rather a smooth set of wheels on which to glide towards better and brighter futures. That was the hope that acted as fuel for forward propulsion, but it could only go so far. There was also a cynicism suffused upon this now world-weary traveler to leaven the optimism, to ensure it couldn't exceed beyond what was realistic or warranted. That was perhaps the lasting takeaway; tempered expectations. The posture that recognizes good things can come in this life for no perceptible reason, but bad things can too.
It's perhaps no surprise that a certain heightened lunacy has bred there. The legend of Florida Man, the chimeric multi-faced paragon of insanity, is a testament to its unique chemistry. Something like that could only exist there in its purest and least-diluted form. Produced in a beaker mixing the heat and geography and punishing weather with additives of endemic drug abuse and poverty. A mixture whose explosion was a volcanic surge that contaminated the atmosphere. To drive through it now is not unlike experiencing a waking fever dream proliferated within the lateral borders of this skin tag on America's hindquarters, where God's face has turned away. But that's probably being too harsh. Not probably - definitely too harsh. Many lovely people call it their home, many of our seniors living out their golden years upon its radiant and balmy shores. People who've endured the worst categories of nature's wrath before and surely will again. And there's no underestimating the state's congregated theme parks, those meccas of commercialized stimuli that draw all peoples as much as any monument or tabernacle on the face of the earth. A thing particularly American, and extravagantly so. But it is a strange territory. Of that there's no doubt nor any unfairness to call it. Strange and in a way hazardous.
That's where it came from. The millstone, the cinderblock chained to the ankle. Its incept date was 2013 according to the paperwork, and who could say how long it lay there waiting, lurking, planning. How many hands had exchanged it, how many drivers had to suffer its burden before slagging it off to someone else. Not many, evidently. It had acquired little more than 90,000 miles before it was procured by its current owner; a youngish man desperate for wheels after a fateful encounter with an intoxicated driver, enticed by the discounted pricetage, the mileage, and the half-electric model that would save so much fuel. A boon for him personally and for the environment at large. What the used car dealership neglected to mention to him and what he failed to inquire about were the sawdust-like particulates that blew out of the AC vents and were generally scattered about the whole upholstery. At some point during its tenure in the sunshine state it caught a parasite; an infestation of insect that invaded the steering column and the radio and inside the dashboard. Pulling off its plastic pieces revealing a veritable hive of carcasses and little pieces of shells as sand combined likely with old excrement and inert pustules of aborted larvae. Dead, all dead, and thank goodness for it. But it was everywhere. That no amount of vacuuming nor deep cleaning would rectify. The kind of stain you can't get out, the kind you have to tear out the carpet and the layers beneath all the way down to the baseboards to locate and repair. Foundational, and corrosive.
What precise genus of bug it was was unknown and unknowable, mostly. All you could corroborate was they were brown, small, vaguely termite-like, and dead. What mattered more was the havoc they wreaked upon the electronic guts of the vehicle surviving them. The cabling in the steering wheel eaten at such that the buttons, if they worked at all, went in and out as a lightbulb on its last legs. A CD player that did not work at all, not that that antiquated relic of technology was a huge loss necessarily. No, the huge loss was the function of the steering wheel airbag. Can't quite get away with not having that, nor could you get away with selling a car without it, but damned if it wasn't discovered until months later after having been replaced several times with faulty part after Ebay bargain until finally it was fixed. Lost in the shuffle, the struggle, until the culpable party's origin was lost. Or, at least, a responsibility unprovable within the statutes of civil law. Even so, the question of how a dealership could sell a vehicle in such a condition was a mystery that would haunt and frustrate and indict a vendetta against them. Anger that could go nowhere, accomplish nothing. Just poured into the empty vessel of the four-seated chassis riddled with pestilence and rotten innards.
It was like wrestling with some obdurate beast refusing to yield. Like pulling teeth, pulling weeds, whatever your idiom. The car was a lemon. There was no getting around it. Each repair seemed to beget another as the battle with the hydra went on and on. He had to drop a leaden couple thousand not a month after the purchase to replace some corrupted jigsaw pieces under the hood. The mechanic that performed the surgeries was a cheap and loyal resource, to a point. He was the harrowed sole owner of a shop in dire need of an assistant. Every customer communicated with him directly and only, which meant that you had to pester him repeatedly to get any work going. It was round after round of unanswered phone calls and uncertain texts thrown out. He was busy man, and it was understandable, but a line had to be drawn somewhere. His services would have been abandoned were he not so affordable and if he hadn't known the vehicle as intimately as he did. Once the process was begun there really was no stopping it; it would have to run its course with this man the navigator, regardless of how long it would take or how much it would cost.
And so there were months compounding one after another, time seeming to contract and blur. Life became defined and divided by whichever problem was being dealt with then. New lights coming up on the dashboard instilling the panic of a paranoia justified and beginning the next cycle. A season for the steering column, airbag, disc player, cabling, until the migrant cancer metastasized itself in the big one, the electric battery itself. Four cells were replaced first, four out of a total eight, which on its own amounted to eight-hundred. A steal, believe it or not. In a hybrid system there is the smaller engine battery, regular as any other, and one much larger seated in the undercarriage with its eight fractions an entire other engine approximate. That power source was more than a quick and easy fix, far more, and it was unheard of for one so young to go out completely. What luck.
Repeated pangs of anger and frustration lead naturally to some flavor of nihilism. When you're let down so many times that you go beyond disappointment, saddled just with the primal desire to destroy. That's what the feeling became, at a certain point. Smash the windows through, set fire to the seat cushions, drive the thing into a lake. It had to be better than having to keep carrying this weight, keep heaving somebody else's pillory. And for no good reason, that was the worst part. Dumb misfortune is what it came down to. Wrong place, wrong time, and despite its evidence to the contrary, the wrong response to it. It's only natural to search for purpose in one's given circumstance, particularly the dire ones, but when tracing back the linearity of events and choices made there was little to be gleaned in the way of meaning. There was the inciting action, unjustified and purposeless, and then the reaction, which reasoned though it was yielded more senseless hardship. All the best wisdom in well-weighed educated guessing amounting to crap. What's the lesson to be learned? Nothing but "it happens" with an addendum of "get used to it".
But perhaps the car was as much a victim as any. Supposing, for a moment, that it wasn't its own fault that it was built and cradled in the arms of America's crazy inebriated cousin. Abused by flora and fauna that no human civilization should have ever had to contend with, let alone a piece of machinery. A tool ultimately complex and layered and ingenious in its composition. Ingenuity left to atrophy and superannuate. Maybe it was rained out, maybe flooded, then tossed aside after the waterborn plague of insects had had their way with it. Dumped at some time a few states northwest, eventually landing into the questionable hands of a used car dealership. Quite a ride it had been on in its six years of life. Fairly torturous in a way, yet still it was standing, though certainly worse for the wear. Had he met it earlier, in the prime of its youth, what a fine vehicle it would've made. Fine investment, if nothing else. Clean and efficient and working. A purchase to be proud of, satisfied, contented. And now that all the repairs had been made it (hopefully) would be that vehicle. A Floridian burden no more, rather a smooth set of wheels on which to glide towards better and brighter futures. That was the hope that acted as fuel for forward propulsion, but it could only go so far. There was also a cynicism suffused upon this now world-weary traveler to leaven the optimism, to ensure it couldn't exceed beyond what was realistic or warranted. That was perhaps the lasting takeaway; tempered expectations. The posture that recognizes good things can come in this life for no perceptible reason, but bad things can too.
Comments
Post a Comment