mileage
Possibly in an attempt to prolong the last few weeks of test taking, I’ve taken on the long lost hobby of car shopping. Here near the peak of a carless lifestyle, as the auto industries dismantle around us, I’m hooked into craigslist feeds and spend evenings organizing note cards and post it notes scrawled with nonsensical 4wd114k013995s and bluenewtire shorthand. It’s all in preparing the tools I need to get things done. My energy is pent up, spent sparingly on side tasks, a few new plants for the garden, one…more…bike tube, enough to keep me going for the next test, and the next, but soon enough the dam will break, and I’ll be slamming into it the flood with all the 4wdbluenewtires I can get my hands on for $5000. Or maybe more like an ark with fold down seats, gathering discarded construction debris and homeless dogs as I roam the city.
And here’s where I meet the man who I might become, trying to sell me the XJ that’ll get me there. Him, a retired military psychologist with a verdant south side river mission composed of an old stone house, a 10,000 square foot car garage designed to seal up in the event of a flood, and spare train car, 18 wheeler, and decommissioned fighter jet just hanging out on his river fed green grass lawn with the dog. Me, a young impressionable one-day-retired architect just soaking it in as the late evening sun feathers out behind layers of thirty foot tall bamboo growth, dusking to the point where his obviously red dyed grey beard starts to look naturally red, and then grey again. There was a driveway full of vehicles to choose from, each with its own story, but each connected by this one man who would collect them, clean them up, and release them back into the outside city better off and ready for 114k+ miles more of work. Talk of fuel mileage turns into stories of the one jeep caught in a tornado, to the pecan trees that try to bash in his house roof. Some drunk guys wandered into his hideaway, passing out in the caboose. Inside, I saw the extent of his projects, spiral stairs and rolls of film, all mostly finished, but probably on twenty year time lines. Half the house is a shell of nice historic looking cottage/bureaucracy loophole, merely roughed in with plywood inside, yet housing finely carved jukeboxes and pipe organs that are not yet ready to return to the world outside.
Three hours into to my fifteen minute test drive, neither was I, but we both had to get back to our projects.
