Fixing My Car

After my work is done I'm going to start a blog about how I don't know how to fix my car. It's going to wax metaphysical and poetic about sparkplugs, wrenches and fuses. It's going to feign ignorance and then delve into genuine ignorance. It's going to revisit basic principles of combustion and then marvel, blankly at the mystery of fire, the primal terror every driver feels at the existence of such a process as "explosion," regardless of how well we feel we can harness it behind any given radiator.

My blog will list tools and components I have purchased and left in my trunk for years, afraid to enter that holy temple where the past is sacrificed to the present Gods of the 9am time-punch and the scentless armpit. My blog will list repairs I have competently and confidently performed on my bicycle, only to realize that such a vehicle doesn't actually transport me to places I can use any skills above the level of stuffing envelopes for lefty causes or carrying boxes off trucks under stripmalls.

There are certain places you can only get in a car. My blog will talk about places I've driven with a car: The Mexican Border, The Outer Banks, Vancouver Island, Rhode Island, down dirt and gravel tracks to fly-swarmed barns in Virginia, along rivers to minor league hockey games outside Boston, a hundred twenty miles an hour across the square chimney of Texas, a hundred miles an hour down mountains in western New York, sixty miles an hour in the school zone shortcut to the airport and twenty miles an hour between folding tables and tents, through an open-air market in the stone parking lot on the edge of the Little Colorado River Gorge where all but one, I learned, of the shopkeepers had packed up for the evening, almost leaving the place free for me to move up just in time and catch the best possible view of the falling sun before the horizon rose up and swallowed its flame in a single gulp.

I'll write about how hard it can be to find parts you didn't plan on needing, like windshield wipers, touch-up paint, new windows and windshields. I'll write about how scary it is to install your own parts even if you know that you never plan on selling your car, just becuase in the last thirty years doing your own repairs has gone from a right of passage to an obscure, blue-collar, rural cult activity. How the myth of resale value holds its thrall even over those who crave the thrill of driving an old beater until its pistons beat the ground.

After my work is done I'm going to start a meticulously researched, poetically rich, culturally chameleonic blog about DIY car repair. But for today I'm just going to stop by the parts shop after I see the guy about my taxes. I'm gonna pick up some fuses and see if one of them makes the lighter start working again, so I can plug things into it.