Gone are the Mullet & Marlboro Days Grab my book here. Or tell your bookish friend to do so. It has rare stories you won’t find online for free. Gone are the mullet & Marlboro days for godbrother Billy. The once wild man got a wife. They had a wedding, but the planned cross-country family party was canceled for COVID. That means this is the first time I get to meet her. I often call Billy ‘cousin’ & vice versa. His mom is my godmother, & vice versa. A full day of driving out of Warren, where bad things do not happen, put me past Cincinnati in Billy’s Ohio home. I started trucking when the work day ended. Made it into Ohio after midnight. Billy & his wife, who I have not met yet are asleep. But they left the door unlocked for me. I have instructions for getting to the guest room. Wow, I get to wake up and see family (& new family) I haven’t seen in years. I let myself into the condo in the complex. Head on the pillow, memories of Billy’s visits back in the day arrive before sleep does. Yes, back in the days of dueling with telescoping lightsabers, Billy was always the Sith lord with the red blade. When the game wasn’t Star Wars, it was Robin Hood on logs that fell over the brook back behind my family’s old house. When it wasn’t Robin Hood, the game was any war from the American Revolution to Vietnam. Though come to think of it, I don’t think we ever played Korean war games in plastic helmets out in the woods. I don’t know if any kids play make-believe Korean War. Sleep comes. The condo is empty when I wake up. Billy & Mrs. are at work. A make-yourself-at-home note on the counter from Billy makes it clear, once and for all, that I slept in the correct condo last night. A day of naps and listening to music. Glad not to be driving. Then Billy & Sarah are back from work. Hugs, catch-ups & dinner time ensue. The next day, I need to grab some hole-free workboots from town. Billy recommends Menards. “How does their theme song go?” Billy asks. They’re not in my region. I don’t know. “Anything you want at Menards,” Billy sings. And I offer, to the tune of My Favorite Things: “Whistles, and pencils, and new playing cards, these are my favorite things at Menards.” It’s a hit. We riff on lyrics in loud baritones, sung in no scale Eastern, Western, avante garde, or otherwise. It’s cacophany. “When the Israelites were promised the promised land! They marched to Menards hand in hand!” We can’t get enough of these songs. “Boys are so stupid,” says Sarah from the backseat, after the final verse. Impeccable comic timing. It sends Billy & I into fits of laughter. But despite the promises, Menards doesn’t have the workboots I need. We try two more stores before I get them. We decide to test them with a hike down by the river. Down by the current we skip rocks. More dumb jokes about Menards. Kinda stuff we did a decade and a half ago. The goofing around groove is easy to find again. Next we’re back at his condo. He’s got a pond view. We bundle up, pour whiskeys, and sit in camp chairs next to his duck pond. “You’re married,” I tell him. “That makes you older & wiser than me, regardless of our actual ages.” We clink glasses. Sip the whiskey. “I love marriage,” Catholic Billy muses. “It makes me think about what it would be like to be a monk.” I swallow Tullamore D.E.W. and laugh. “No, as in what they actually give up when they do that. I used to think, ‘how hard could being a monk be?’ Now I know.” On the condo bookshelf, among volumes of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, is a framed card. The card reads: “There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.” Could this really be the Billy who once broke into a distillery with then-fellow hellions to steal a barrel of whiskey? This couldn’t be the same Billy who once teamed up with his friends to run metal wires across the train tracks and fasten them to fences on either side. They hoped that the great metal engine would catch the wires and uproot the fence. They had visions of metal posts and chainlink fence-ends plowing great V-shaped tracks into the Maryland earth, making grooves running for miles, metal sparking and screaming all the way. A whole town down the line monkey-wrenched by late tankards of milk, gas, and oil. But the train snapped through the wires and bouldered onward unfazed. The anti-climax bummed out the jokers & smokers bunkered in the hedges, Billy among them. That was back in the mullet & Marlboro days. This is now. What changed? Military school & marriage. It will modify a man. We talk about life late into the night. Grab our guitars and jam. Morning brings one more coffee together. Then I’m trucking westward once again. To be continued
They Don’t Know About Evil in Warren, PA Warren, PA These free stories are not in my book. Grab the book here. *** Trucking the final ten miles to my first stop on the way out west. I’ve been driving since just after 5pm. I’m charging towards a wall of milky fog. The fog is slithering all over the road. It’s rising up my windshield as I drive farther. Yellow diamond-shaped signs with ‘Deer X-ing’ are posted every few miles on this road. I hit a high wall of fog. Now I’m driving blind. High beams make it worse. I ease off the gas even though I just want to plow through these last ten miles and get some sleep. But there could be a deer standing in this stewy, soggy fog. There could be anything in here. Mind phantoms dance in the fog. Shapes that look like an animal or a human face with a giant forehead. Big teeth. It’s like picking shapes out of storm clouds. The green glowing numbers on my speedometer flicker. Every light on my truck dies. I’m bowling blind through the night. Release the accelerator completely. The lights return. No explanation. Then the needle on the speedometer jumps from 40mph to 60mph. But my pedal pressure is the same as it has always been. The RPMs are the same. They are not whining louder. Though the fog makes it hard to tell, I am driving the same speed. The needle quivers and dives down to zero miles per hour. But I’m still going at a speed that feels like 40mph. Now the speedometer licks up to 40 but then crashes to zero. Whips across the entire dial to point at 100mph. All lies. My speed is not changing. The needle is possessed. The truck is old. She’s mechanically sound, but she has emotional problems. Just under ten more miles to Warren. I got sick of hearing my music and wanted some quiet. Running in silence. Deaf to the engine hum after these hours. Rhodie, the truck, starts beeping. I slap the dash. The beeping stops. The engine starts hiccuping and coughing. It makes the ride bumpy. If I break down, I can pull the bike out of the bed and get to town. And then…what? Nothing will be open. Still. I can bike somewhere. I can do something. Or I can pull over, pull my sleeping bag out of the back, and nap in the cab till dawn. Let some cop rap on the window with his flashlight. Demand to search the truck. Rhodie, get it together. We are this close to town. Get me a few miles more and tomorrow, I will buy you everything you want and anything you need. Fluid top off, new spark plugs, spa day, you name it. The lights flicker again. Those clunking sounds in the engine jolt the driver’s seat. Little farther, please. I pull off the road, cross a bridge, and drive through a brick downtown. My Airbnb is only point eight miles away. I park in a garage across the street as instructed by the host. Grab the two most important bags from the bed. Pull the bike out too. Pull a tarp over the landscaping supplies and food. They’re not as attractive to thieves as the bike would be. With two backpacks and one guitar on my back, I bike to the Airbnb. The first-floor door is unlocked. That’s weird. I walk the bike up three flights of stairs. My Airbnb’s room is unlocked, too. I call into the room to see if the unlocked door is because the host or last guest is still inside. Or if someone broke into this Airbnb. No answer. Tiny kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom are all empty. All closets empty. There’s a key on a red piece of yarn on the table. I lock the door and go to bed. Good morning. I find a note on a chair I didn’t see last night explaining the unlocked doors. Honor system. The place is very clean. The bedroom and kitchen are squished into one room. The closet-sized bathroom with a plastic cubicle for a shower crammed into it. It looks retrofitted. Like the apartment didn’t always have a shower. Showered and shaved, I’m walking on the same street I drove down last night with brick buildings on either side. I pass a stone statue. The bridge over the river I drove across. I want to check the bed of the truck for missing items. A woman in a parka and gloves is walking past me. She says good morning and smiles. I say it back, surprised. Two more people do this. In the parking garage, nothing is missing from the truck bed. This town. No litter. Nobody sleeping behind dumpsters. No locks on the Airbnb. Every stranger says hello. Clearly, they don’t know about evil in Warren, Pennsylvania. I need to do one more day of work before my vacation begins. I work from my laptop in a cafe all day. It has a few tables and big leather chairs with a coffee table near a gas fireplace. “I don’t recognize you,” the barista says when I order an Americano and breakfast burrito. She is surprised to see someone new. I’m surprised she expects to recognize her customers. I explain the truck. The journey west. The land. She beams. Halfway through the workday, I step out to buy a phone charger. When I come back, the manager makes eye contact with me. “How’s your road trip going?” she asks. “How’s the truck?” I ask how she knows about those things. “Word gets around fast here,” she says. The coffee shop empties out. I’m still working. “Are you closing?” I ask the manager. She is wiping tables down with a rag. “Oh, we closed ten minutes ago, but you looked so busy we let you stay. I just can’t let you back in once you leave.” I thank her. Finish work. Bag up the laptop and cables. Say goodbye. It’s time to check the truck’s fluid levels. Test a couple of theories about what caused last night’s moodiness in drive performance. I come back to the parking garage with my bags. A yellow parking ticket is tucked under the wiper blade of the truck. Thirty-five dollars. Payable by mail or online. Wow. I just became the only criminal in Warren. Time to hit the road. To be continued
Departure Day | Trucking Past Midnight *** Grab my book here, if interested. None of these free stories appear in the book. *** Good morning from the ice-block ground under this tent, here in the backyard next to the truck. The new sleeping setup works great, thank you for asking. Glad I tested it in the backyard before hitting the road. Departure day is here. If I don’t leave today, I won’t be able to meet my friend to work on the land. He’s only got one week free. And we have a large to-do list. The truck, well, she’s mostly ready. New mid-body fuel tank in place. New shocks. New alternator. Oil change and fluid topped-off as needed. Good crash course in auto maintenance and repair. No spare tire. I called three auto shops in driving distance. Described the make, model, year, and tire size. Nada. Improbable for a truck this popular. But that’s what they tell me. Maybe I can collect a spare at my first stop. The town of Warren, Pennsylvania. It’s an eight hour drive to get there from here. I should arrive well after midnight. It’s just forty hours for the full trip. I have to leave after 5, when the workday is over. Grabbing last-minute supplies on lunchbreak. Departure time arrives. I throw the last bags and my guitar in the bed. Fire up the truck. Listen to that deep mechanical hum. The engine sends jitters through the cab. Rhodie, you weren’t meant to rust in a dirt parking lot with ‘FOR SALE’ white-soaped on your windshield. Let’s see this big country, you & I. I pull off the backyard with its wet green grass matted over by fallen leaves. The tires leave two fine grooves. It’s getting dark fast. I’ve got a temporary license plate taped to the inside of the back window. The permanent was scheduled to arrive before departure day, but it didn’t. The DMV is struggling for the same reason everything else is struggling. The pandemic. I’ll add the permanent plate when it arrives, but I can’t wait for it. Anyway, that’s the reason for choosing quieter roads, even if they take longer. An audiobook about the moon landings is playing. The GPS lost service. Who cares? This early in the journey, all I need to do is keep going west. No cruise control, just a forty-hour ankle workout. Soon, I’m trucking between the reddish-grey granite walls on either side of the Vermont highway. Thick foliage grows in the dark over rolling land. Dark shapes of tree canopies, shiny from rain, run past the windows. It’s getting foggy. Deer with glinting eyes peep from the shadows next to the road. One can of Fix-a-Flat but no spare tire. Long way to Warren. To be continued
Shots at the Bodega The guy behind the bodega has his mask down. He’s pouring aguardiente into disposable shot glasses for himself, his colleague and a someone who is either his girlfriend or another colleague. It’s a Saturday night in Medellin. These guys are partying right on the job. Salsa music on the JBL. Fans, but no AC. Chatting there among plastic tubs of dulce de leche treats, pressed guava sugar candy, and plastic wrapped pan queso. The bodega is so narrow you practically walk sideways between soup cans on one shelf and auto fluids on the other back to the back fridge. Grab three bottles of water and carry them up to the register. It’s a good job if you can drink aguardiente, I say. They laugh. Maybe at my bad Spanish, maybe at the remark. Maybe at their own cramped Saturday night public work party here on this sleepy street. Out comes a fourth plastic shot glass. They pour one sloshing right to the rim. It’s for me. I drain it. Licorice flavor and alcohol that makes the throat convulse. Feel that energy kick. They laugh, and the guy behind the register plucks out a Chesterfield for the road. Well, when traveling, you accept hospitality. So I take it, accept a light, and exit. Cold water bottles dripping condensation all over my arm. Cool night. Hot cheeks from the liquor. Glad they’re having a good time in there.
The Truck’s Mission Out West You can grab my book here. None of these free stories appear in the book. Yes, it’s taken a loop of trips to AutoZone, Walmart, Tire Warehouse and Home Depot with a stop at Rawlings (for variety), but the truck has new tires and new shocks. It took two trips to buy a special tool to disconnect the fuel lines from the old fuel tank. The first tool snapped in half upon use. Bought the more expensive one the second time. It took hours of wrestling with wrenches and cutting fingers on metal edges but the hole-pocked old tank is out and the new, gleaming one is in place. The truck is almost ready to make the 2,000 mile drive out west. THE MISSION The mission: Get this work truck to 40 acres of land I own out west with a friend. We’re building a lodge out there. This F150 has to bring supplies from town to the land. After this trek, it will only have to make short supply runs. Asking this truck to make this cross country journey is like saying to a pro fighter: do one last championship fight then you can open a gym, put out an online course, and dink around with some exhibition matches. I still don’t have a spare tire. Maybe I should figure that out before I leave. Tonight, I’m testing my tent and sleeping bag in what will be a 48 degree weather. The tent is a simple two-man deal from Walmart. The bag is rated for 30-40 degrees and I snagged an insert to bring it 20 degrees lower. Should be cozy. Still, I’d rather discover you shouldn’t bargain hunt for outdoor sleeping gear sooner than later. After all, this polyester stretched over aluminum will be my lodging for a full week or more. Back on foam pad and sleeping bag in between me and the nearly frozen ground, I go over the to-do list for the upcoming trip. Find a spare tire 2. Pick up propane & camping food 3. Pick up landscaping tools and big measuring tapes 4. Have a pro mechanic give the truck a final check over Bunch of other things I can’t think of at the moment. I’ll find out when they become problems. Solve them then. Good night from out here in the backyard. To be continued
Guess I Asked for This Check out my book, Odd Jobs & After Hours here. Guess I asked for this, to be crammed under the undercarriage of this truck, cranking a wrench on a bolt while a fine mist of metal rust showers down endlessly. Still cursing though, even though I got what I wanted. Job one on the new truck is getting a new mid-body fuel tank in place. We got it home without a fireball despite a drip, drip, drip of gasoline out of said tank in the final leg of the journey. The bolts holding the old tank in there are rusty and crusty. Soaked ’em down with PB Blaster overnight, but I still had to fight for every centimeter of thread on the bolt. Back on a blue tarp, and the old gas tank dripping gasoline on me for about an hour. I’m completely soaked. Highly flammable, that’s what I am on this crystal clear fall day in New Hampshire. It’s a matter of life and death to avoid my chain-smoking housemate in this moment. Shing – out slides the bolt. At last. One metal strap drops down from the undercarriage. Bonks me in the face. The tank creaks and droops down. Wires and the second metal strap hold the fuel tank in place. The rest of the bolts might need another night in PB Blaster. What is the truck for? Teamed up with a friend to buy land out west. This is going to be the work truck on the land. I’m working on a pressing deadline. My friend has one free vacation week in which he can meet me on the land. I’ve got to get the truck ready to trek well before then. I need it ready to drive across country one week before my friend is free. Right now, soaked in gasoline, covered in rust dust and fingers sliced to ribbons on metal bits, that seems unlikely. I mean, this truck needs so much work. The to do list is extensive. The sun goes down. I decide to slide back under and attack the bolts again. To be continued
My Book is Available Now | Odd Jobs & After Hours My book Odd Jobs & After Hours is available now. What’s it about? Take the time of life in between leaving home and finding a track that works. Capture the all-night shifts, seasonal work, scary rooms you rented, criminal colleagues, moments of your own questionable judgement, and get them down as stories before the river of memory washes them away. That what Odd Jobs & After Hours is. It’s a story collection I hope you find humorous, relatable, and cathartic. Filled with the types of places that (I hope) make you say, “I’m glad I got chance to be there.” Filled with characters I hope make you think, “I’m glad I got to meet those people.” I leave you with the intro page of the book itself: “Feel the heat of molten metal. Hear the clang of hammer and anvil. Be bowled over and skid across a muddy rugby pitch. Taste the kiss of the sea. Work odd jobs & after hours in the big city. Get thrown out the window. Join the all-night, coked-up film crew. Meet the vegan poacher woman, the psycho roommate with a hatchet, and the world’s greatest salesman before he explodes. Bloody your hands with the worst of it. These stories are a tin mug dipped into the river of life to draw up one cupful you can’t catch again. It’s like every portion and none other at the same time. It’s a hot day, and I pass the mug to you.” Grab yourself a copy. Let me know what you think.
Got the Truck Home. Just Barely. Audio available Getting Rhodie roadworthy Check out my book for rare stories you won’t find online. Like I said, bought an F-150. It’s a ’94, just like me. It’s dark blue and rusty, also just like me. (Kidding). A mechanically savvy friend agreed to drive me to the northern Vermont town where I bought it to pick it up. Brilliant leaf change and reddish, craggy angles of rock wall all along the 89. About 72 degrees, and not a cloud in sight this particular time of year. That’s the good thing about Vermont, even if the taxes make you want to hang yourself and there are statistically more bureaucrats than normal people. Yes, some of the young newcomers there want you to live on chlorophyl and charcoal and drive a sail-powered Prius, but the land itself is gorgeous. I kid, they’re good people, the Vermonters, especially the old school farmers. What scenery on the drive. Rolly-polly hills. Apple-red, pumpkin-orange and goldenrod leaves overhead. Can’t wait to see it passing by out of the window of the new truck. New, now there’s a wrong description if there ever was one. Rust holes pock the lower part of the blue bed. Rust encrusts the undercarriage. If you lift up the rubber mat under the driver’s feet, you can see clear through to the pavement below. If the brakes go, at least you could use the Flintstone option. Why buy a truck in such morbid condition? Other than affordability? There’s a cliche about certain women, that they look at a chatty, coke-head wino and think, “I can save him.” Even knowing nothing (yet) about mechanics I look at this battered truck and think something similar: I can save her. We are here. There’s my blue ride where I left her. The auto-savvy guy strolls up to the truck. This is the first time he is seeing it. He’s been advising on the truck hunt from a distance, but I forked over the cash for this one on my own. Wonder how I did. He chuckles at the degree of rust. He asks me to turn the engine on. I slide into cabin, with its cloth seats, elderly rubber, and old truck smell, and fire up the engine. Whine, rattle and roar. “Holy moly, that is the worst sound I ever heard come out of a truck in my life. Shut it off.” A twist of the key, and peace returns to the Vermont afternoon. Well, it could be worse. Savvy guy opens the hood. He pops the belt off of the wheels in there. Spins the wheels. The rattling is all coming from the alternator. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as he says that, the guy who sold it to me, an old-school Vermont guy, a walrus-mustache biker with a leg in a brace, hobbles into his shop and comes out with a brand new alternator. Just like that. He plunks it down on the edge of the hood and says it is included in the price of the truck, no extra. That was pretty cool of him, I thought. Unclear what the standard etiquette is when you buy a truck for cash, but that seemed pretty cool. The bolts on the old alternator love their home. They won’t evacuate. We soak them down with PB Blaster. Out comes the old part. Its wires need to be snipped, poked into the new part’s metal tubes, and the tubes crimped. Out comes a pen knife and the copper wires get their oxygenated crust scraped off. My friend lays a wrench down on the edge of the truck’s open hood to create a hard surface he can use to hammer the tubes into a flat crimp. He brings the hammer down. Orange sparks fly up. The wrench slid under the blow. It completed a circuit running from the positive battery terminal to the edge of the truck. After some adjustment, my friend tries again. The tubes are crimped and the new part is connected to the wires. Now it’s time to get it bolted in place. Getting the belt back on is a two-man job. I scoot under the truck to hook the belt over a wheel from there. Then I’m back up to crank back on this wrench that lifts the set of wheels the belt runs on to make them reachable. The wrench is just too short. My friend grabs a piece of pipe from his truck, and saws it off with an electric grinder. Orange sparks rocket off the metal and onto his jeans. The grinding rips through the quiet air, and echos off the barns. He hammers the wrench into the end of the pipe. Now it’s a lever that will work. I crank on the better lever and savvy guy shoves the belt into place over the wheels. I fire up the ignition. Nothing. Dead battery. That was fast. It sparked a second ago. Trip to town and back for a new battery. Last thing is fixing a flat tire. We grab an air tank from the truck and fill the tire. We’ve got about 25 minutes to a town where we can fill up the nearly empty gas tank. I am driving the new truck while my friend follows . The truck is rattling and rumble-bumping along. It likes to lurch way to the right. Driving takes constant correction on the steering wheel. It sounds better with the new alternator in. Hey, here’s a Shell. Perfect. I pull in. The truck has two gas tanks, one in the middle of the body and one in the rear. The condition of each tank is unclear. The switch that toggles between them is set to the back. I put seven gallons in the back and seven gallons in the front. As soon as the pump is back in its holster, we hear trickling. I look under the bed. Rivulets of gasoline are trickling all over the pavement out of the front tank. I pull it up near the grass next to the shop. We figure we have get it home, even though it is dripping gas from one of its tanks. My job is to watch the rearview mirror as I drive in case the truck makes a spark and a fire starts. The plan is pull off to the right, scoot out of the passenger door should that situation happen. Well, I’m watching the speedometer, the road, my sideview because there’s no rearview and then just before our exit, almost there, almost there- BOOM! Tire blows. I pull off to the side of the road and scoot out. Soon, I’m riding home with my friend and Googling the tire type for a ’94 F-150. All the shops are closed because it is Sunday night. I guess I’m doomed to a fine from the cops for an abandoned vehicle. Or maybe not. Wouldn’t you know it, my friend has a trailer’s tire with the exact right lug pattern. Yes, it will be so skinny compared to the other tires it will practically look like we jammed a bike tire on a truck. But for one more exit? Twelve more minutes of driving home? It should work. Back home, we grab jacks, blocks, the tire, and head back. After the roadside tire change, I ease the truck home watching the mirrors and dials with intense paranoia. After everything, there’s the truck in the front yard, leaking gasoline into a five gallon bucket. Got it home. Just barely. Tomorrow the real work begins. To be continued
Something’s Been Bugging Me Audio available Free stories here. Grab my book here for stories that can’t be found online. Rhodie It’s not like it used to be. Or so I’ve heard, I wasn’t there for it. You used to have an even shot of common-sensing your way through auto repairs decades before I was ever born. In fact, the first check engine light was called an Idiot Light. As in, “something’s wrong. Gee, think so, idiot?” Now a car runs on computers. That check engine like flicks orange, it can mean any number of countless problems. You open the hood, and there’s a big tangle of wires. Plastic veneer covers the key components you need to reach. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing looks accessible with typical screwdrivers or wrenches either. Sleek unassailable surfaces greet you. Replacing a Headlight But let’s pull back and talk about a simpler light. A headlight. Replacing a lightbulb is so easy that if you want to make a joke about how dumb somebody is, you ask how many of them it takes to change a lightbulb. Surely you twist the old one out and twist the new bulb in before the cops pull you over. Right? Wrong. A guy I know, a guy who knows more about cars than anybody wanted to replace the headlight on his girlfriend’s Volkswagen. He’s a guy who can restore and modify a 60s truck from the frame up. The headlight fix is almost, ALMOST beneath him. He popped the hood and saw an absolutely unreachable socket behind the burnt out bulb. He opened the repair manual, and saw you had to remove the entire front end to reach the bulbs. It was a thirteen-step job per the manufacturer. Who cares? Well, now you can’t fix the issue for the price of a dollar fifty bulb. Now you can’t keep bulbs in your glove box and pop new ones in when they die. In fact, the manufacturer would like it very much if you took time out of your weekend or workday to bring the car in just to change a headlight. Why is it Like this Now? By the time you’ve researched and developed a car, paid engineers, designers, emissions counselors, marketers, shippers, manufacturers, regulation consultants, regulatory fees, crash test costs, and things you can’t imagine go into making a vehicle, your margin is slim. This is even true on a car that’s $32,000 five years used. A great deal of money gets made in repairs. How do you squeeze a little more money out of your product? You design a car that needs plenty of repairs. Something that doesn’t threaten life and limb like a faulty brake but still gets you pulled over like a headlight makes a profitable problem to maximize. The Less the Customer Can Do, the Better That’s fine if you’re the car company, but now I’m the absolutely egg-faced chump bringing a car into shop for nothing but a burnt out lightbulb. It’s other little things. Cars ride lower on average. They want it so you HAVE to lift it with a jack. You can’t just scoot under there. Does it bottom out more often? Good. That’s more repairs. Want to change spark plugs? Change the oil? You need the proprietary wrenches. Is the wrench for sale? Is it worth your time and money to do all that arithmetic comparing buying new wrenches to bringing the vehicle into shop? I’ll tell you right now, I didn’t grow up fixing cars. That said, is is the story of my first project truck. It’s a blue 1994 Ford F-150. It has 84 thousand miles, and that mileage is probably real given the decent condition of the upholstery and pedals. If the dial had been reset, the upholstery would have been chafed to ratty rags by the long-term friction of the driver’s body. It’s got a manual four-wheel drive with a big joystick to engage it. Not one of those dinky plastic buttons they’re doing now. I’ve got help from somebody great with vehicles, an engineer who grew up taking every machine you can think apart and putting it back together. The to-do list: Replace rear left spring shackleReplace mufflerBypass smog pumpFresh tiresOil changeTransmission fluid I’m sure the list will only grow, but I’m looking forward to learning. There’s an ugly history with the auto giants of the world and the average American who would like to fix his own car. See, back in the day, the auto giants were lobbying to make it illegal to work on your own car. Illegal. Home repairs were eating the profit margin. Ever seen that meme floating around about how Republicans were the party that lobbied against mandatory seatbelts? Reasonable laws like that were the headlining door keys to mandates that brought the cost of a brand new truck from $3,200 to $65,000. A few red-faced red staters railed against this march of progress. The auto companies said, “just take out a six-year loan instead of three.” What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, the ballooned price of a vehicle loses the spotlight to student debt and the housing crisis but it’s there, and it’s not going to get any better. What were your lofty aspirations when you were a kid? Forget astronaut, let’s just say you just want to do things for yourself because you like to. To that aim, I say, “good luck.” Big forces are machinating against you. On the other hand, if the role of spectator and consumer is all you’ll ever need, there’s a comfortable, comfortable future ahead of you. When they couldn’t ram that no home repairs law through, the giants realized they could get the same effect through the power of technology. Now a new Toyota Corolla has more lines of computer code coursing through it than a supersonic fighter jet. Devil’s Dues The engines are more efficient. A computerized engine can detect humidity, altitude, O2 levels, and countless other factors to optimize engine efficiency in a way a purely mechanical engine never could. Hooray. Our air isn’t as bad as China’s, where there are no emission’s laws. Again, hooray. Clean air is good, truly. I write that without irony, for people who need that clarified. Still, it’s good to be able to do things for yourself. The more people like that there are, the better off everybody is. Having the option of doing a fix yourself will get you farther if you break down somewhere without cellphone service. I drive through places with no cell phone service often. A headlight should not be something you need to bring the car to a mechanic for. The Journey Starts I got an OBD that pairs with my phone. That’s the scanner that your cop shop will plug in to read the error code. I used it to diagnose and replace my mass air flow sensor. First fix I ever did myself. That was on a Kia Sportage I don’t own anymore. Now I’m going to repair this F-150 and drive it across country. To be continued Fiction
Odd Jobs & After Hours | What’s Your Book About? I’m publishing a book titled Odd Jobs & After Hours soon. It should be available in paperback by March 1. The e-book edition will follow that shortly. Still figuring out if it should become an audio book. The title is exactly what the book is about. It’s a collection of the type of stories you run into in between leaving home and getting your feet under you. Scary rented rooms, evil bosses, psycho roommates, after-midnight shifts, rugby games, squatters, poachers, and more. It’s written. I’m dealing with all of the final details. After that, it will be very easy to grab a copy on Amazon. For now, here is the intro page of Odd Jobs & After Hours. “Feel the heat of molten metal. Hear the clang of hammer and anvil. Be bowled over and skid across a muddy rugby pitch. Taste the kiss of the sea. Work odd jobs & after hours in the big city. Get thrown out the apartment window. Join the all-night, coked-up film crew. Meet the vegan poacher woman, the psycho roommate with a hatchet, and the world’s greatest salesman before he explodes. Bloody your hands with the worst of it. These stories are a tin mug dipped into the river of life to draw up one cupful you can’t catch again. It’s like every portion and none other at the same time. It’s a hot day, and I pass the mug to you.”