I think I learned my Love-hate relationship with the mechanical world from Han Solo. His fierce pride and constant disappointment in the Millenium Falcon is pretty similar to how I’ve stood by and maltreated almost everything I own. Pretty similar to how I treat myself, expecting me and everything around me to just take whatever’s thrown at it and keep on ticking. There’s probably something really deep in my psychology to be realized in that behaviour, but it’s pretty much beyond me.
For those of you who think of me as this tough-guy manly gruff-type rob of a Han Solo-ish archetype, I’m sorry that the following paragraphs will probably disillusion you. For the rest of you, I’ll give you a moment to stop sniggering.
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I curl tightly with a pillow when I wish I had company. Tightly wrapped in quilts and blankets and watching the snow come down and wishing things didn’t break.
It’s stupid to get sentimental over devices and objects, but two things have come down sick in the past two days and it just makes me want to be held tight and whispered gently to.
My Saturn didn’t start. It’s been having trouble with that since the cold struck. Nothing major, a dead battery probably… but I’ve known I need to get rid of it for a while now. When my father died, he left me the OTHER Saturn (not my mom’s Saturn, and no, my Saturn is not Heather’s Saturn which is also not Heather’s mom’s Saturn – there are a LOT of Saturns in our world…). Knowing that I had a spare car around, I’ve known that I need to sell the one that I’ve got and take the spare off my mom’s hands (she’s been learning to drive stick on it, which has me rather concerned) but it’s been one thing or another and something gets in the way and when it comes right down to it, I’m so damned sentimental that it’s going to be sad to let it go.
We’ll come back to the car – item number two is my camera! It went into my pocket just fine after capturing Uncle John (host of the Cup open mic in Bel Air, MD) climbing up the side of said open mic, and then when it came out again to shoot the swiftly mounting snows in the front yard, the LCD was ruptured. Obviously I hit up against a table, or maybe squashed it while carrying the drum somehow, or maybe buckled my seatbelt the wrong way – but it has the random malicious feeling of cancer – like I rolled the dice the wrong way.
My camera is my memory, and I Love to keep the images and the beautiful things caught in time with it. I hate the fact that the price of film had been an issue in college and in high school. My memory is frankly crap and without my Little Black Books faces and people would’ve faded long ago. Having that little camera to whip out and freeze the spinning world has become exceptionally important. Just a couple of days ago someone mentioned how they’d never known me NOT to have a camera on me, and this recent Sony has been my favourite – even including my old 1970 Nikon F Titanium.
And just as that identifying characteristic is pointed out, it’s taken away.
It makes me sad. I’m sure there will be some sort of recourse. I think I just got some salespitch about purchasing an extended service plan or something a couple of days ago – I’ll have to dig that up. It’ll cost me money, but it’ll probably get fixed, but I Love it and it’s sick.
My car’s an even simpler matter – go buy a new battery and stick it in! But I’ve got the other car, and it needs to be taken off my mom’s hands, and the Saturn’s in such shape that the Blue Book value of it RUNNING is equivelant to what it looks like I can get for it for parts… but selling it for parts wouldn’t require me to shell out $70 for a new battery and looks to be considerably more sensible and less hassle… but there’s this sense of betrayal – that feeling of betrayal that I got from my Volkswagon bus every time she let me down in some way led me to purchasing that reliable and ever trust-worthy Saturn, and it seems like this horrible thing for me to turn my back on it. Stupid sentimentality over a car. I’d had plans to get it to 200,000 miles before getting rid of it, but now it seems to be too much trouble to make it go the distance.
This is something where I wish my Dad was here to talk to about it. He’d give me advice and I probably wouldn’t listen, but he’s the person I’m instinctively wanting to talk to about it.
And in the end, with snow muffling the world outside and lights slowly coming on at 6.10am, I really just wish I had someone to brush my hair out and say “yeah, don’t think about that right now – it’ll all be okay and we can worry about it in the morning” “it is morning” “hush, just come to bed”.
