I need to write the Tom Waits song of the past year and a half. War and Pestilence certainly came riding. A plague of locusts upon the land – which had their own plague. Headless snakes and blind birds. A quiet mouse that was dead by dawn, sleepless nights and pollen counts and politics gone wrong.
Oh, it writes itself. I just got to put it to a beat. I’m looking forward to it.
The world is shifting again. My streaming jobs are winding down. Dave Eisner lost his interest in the IMT : LIVE programming with the new year, Live from the Lair and VOM numbers are slowly going down, and John Platt will be going back to in-person shows after next month. Though I’m happy that I’m not as busy as I was last summer, I’m looking at the slow demise of my income once again and so reinvention or return to old inventions shall come to pass.
Or maybe I should see it as the return of spare time in reliable chunks, time that can be turned to new projects? Time that can be turned to driving.
Driving. I’m also beginning to more seriously contemplate finally replacing my beloved Saturn. The parts required to pass the next inspection have finally worn out and worn thin on the ground. I was fortunate in that a family friend managed to dig my last air exchanger thingie out of a junkyard, but it’s already rusted out and died (went in to the car in pretty rough shape) and my poor steed probably shan’t be worth the costs involved come inspection in December.
I’m eyeballing hybrids. Not just because they’d be cost effective but also because we’ve been watching Sweet Tooth, which is all about human animal hybrids. (a fantastic show, but a strange mix of beautiful whimsy and absolutely trigger-inducing human and panedemic horror). If things continue as they are I’ll have no problem affording it, but if there’s one thing Life reaffirms regularly, is that there’s no assurance that things will continue as they are.
With a new car comes the realization that any new car will mostly likely not be a stick shift.
I’ve never owned an automatic transmission vehicle before. I don’t care for driving them very much, but like so many things I’ve Loved over the years it’s a dying breed. With a new car that skill will atrophy and pass – and I’m not simply sad because of the ego trip and arrogance that comes with that “anti-millennial theft-protection” and the illusion of greater control – but because I generally parse the physical act of driving stick as a strange communication with my father. It’s a visceral, physical connection to a (stressful) formative memory, learning to drive stick with my father – and later memories – teaching Heather how to drive stick. Having a skill passed along to me and in turn passing it to another.
Thinking about it – there’s very little of that in my Life. My lineage of knowledge took place through schools. Certainly my parents gave me Life lessons, but those are gleaned through the School of Not So Hard Knocks (when you’ve got family) from every angle. My parents gave me all of my “be a functional self-aware and self-maintaining human” skills, but it’s not been my function to pass much of that along. Guitar is something I’ve picked up and passed little hints to others. Rowan and I have developed our streaming skills together… but generally I can’t think of ANY other tidbit of knowledge that was passed to me one-to-one and then passed along to another one-to-one. I think it’s not wrong of me to say that driving stick is the one skill in which I have been a conduit to others.
But here it’ll probably end.
So though being in the initial stages of eyeballing a new car is exciting – and in many ways involves a lot of fantasizing, there’s a lot of sadness involved in the idea that I’ll probably be leaving behind this manual (pun-intended) skill behind – its personal connection, its exclusivity, the beauty of climbing a hill or coming to a stop and always, unconsciously having to maintain a balance of secret spinning gears, meshing them and listening to them. Feeling the strength of the car as you’re in the right gear, feeling the mechanism rebel when you get it wrong.
Damn. Now I’ve gone and made myself sad.
I’m keeping Kristen company in a drive down to Virginia to pick up some stuff, drop off some stuff. Watching the packed traffic crawl past on the opposite loop of the Beltway I’m pretty sure Kristen’s estimates for the length of this trip are optimistic, but we’ve got plenty of leeway before I’ve got to be back at my desk for tonight’s streaming performance with SONiA disappear fear (perhaps the only act with more complicated capitalization than my own) and Ertugrul Erkisi. Focus is billing the show as a crossing of Jewish and Muslim faiths, but as far as I know the former doesn’t really put religion into her music and the latter sings in Turkish so you can’t really tell. Still, it should be a cool show.
As long as the 2+ hour drive doesn’t become a 6+ hour drive!
Hush rob. Why would you even say that?
And so I watch Kristen drive. And it looks so carefree. One foot dancing back and forth betwixt accelerator and brake. The left leg doing nothing. Not worring about the clutch in stop and go traffic. Sigh. I DO want cruise control. I won’t miss the leg cramps after time spent in THIS kind of driving. But I’ll miss shifting.