The Plan

I write this knowing that Megan is currently in much more dire car trouble than I am. Always be aware of perspective.

—___—___—___—

I am the all-time undisputed King of Flat Tires. I’ve mentioned it before, and there isn’t much more I can say about it. Not only have I gone through approximately 30,000 tires over the last few years, but I’ve lost them in every way imaginable: blowouts, nails, slow leaks, you name it. Last night’s offender was a nail.

I had noticed the nail a while ago, but had elected to let it be on the ‘it’s-worse-if-you-take-the-knife-out-of-his-chest’ theory. It was actually successful for quite a while, but over the last week the tire had developed a slow leak, which turned into a plain ol’ leak sometime yesterday.

I complained about the tire to Adam during the rather strained but ultimately rewarding final tech/dress rehearsal for 365 (more about that later.) He had a spare can of Fix-a-Flat or some related product which he lent me to shore up the leaky bastard. I popped that sucker on there, filled the tire, and went on my merry way.

This is probably a good time to mention that I have never had a can of Fix-a-Flat do what I wanted, or even what it was supposed to.

I got a few exits down the 134 West when I heard the familiar sound of an unhappy tire. This one had the standard ‘whump-whump-whump,’ plus an element of banshee-like wail which I hadn’t heard before. I took the Woodman exit, which placed me in an area I am completely unfamiliar with (although everything in LA is near something familiar.) The tire was flat and covered in fixit juice.

The first thing I did was call Mr. Adam Legg. I wasn’t really expecting him to do anything, I just wanted to make sure somebody knew what was up, and I’d already been whining to him about the tire. He suggested I call Robert or Royana and see if they were still at the theatre. I was reluctant to do that since, even though it was past midnight on a Sunday, I really hoped to find a solution that would get me over the hill.

I carry an air compressor with me; I’m required to as King of Flat Tires. I hooked it up and quickly found the hole. It turned out that I had simply lost the nail - there was no sidewall tear or other major damage, just one small hole. I could cover it with my thumb and enjoy the illusion of a tire that was sound.

Then the ridiculous idea came to me. A while back, I had picked up a little DS accessory pack to get the thumb stylus (which I have since lost.) it came with three additional stylus….es. I wondered if I couldn’t jam one of those in the hole and essentially just replace the nail. I know it was stupid, but I really wanted to get back to my turf.

I shoved the stylus into the hole and tamped it down with my foot. It stayed. I fired up the compressor and filled the tire to something less than the optimum pressure. The stylus failed to shoot out of the tire. I called Adam again so that someone could explain what had happened to the coroner. And I drove.

On Adam’s advice, I planned to take Ventura to Sepulveda. I got maybe half a mile before I heard the whump-whump-whump of failure. I checked the tire and saw that the stylus had been shoved inside by the pressure of the road (the head on these things is slightly offset, so that it’s flush with one side of the shaft.) I sighed.

But I still had more sty….les.

For attempt #2, I used the sidewalk and a lighter to grind and melt the head into a flattened roundish shape. I was attempting to model it into a plasticky nail, hoping that the new broad head would hold the thing against the tire without getting sucked in. I filled the tire again. I drove again.

And it fucking worked.

This is clearly a temporary solution, and I can just barely afford to get a $30 used tire, but I’d like to see if I can’t get to Friday without friction taking away my little toy. I have my doubts.

But I also have a few more styli.

I woke up in the middle of one of those dreams that are so soft and sweet that an extra hour of sleep would feel like the most precious gift. Even in a car.

Of course it was about her. One of her, at any rate.

___—___—___—___

I realize now that I’m just sort of moody, but I’m really hoping to develop it into full-on brooding.

___—___—___—___

A strange happening in the night: I was awakened around 3-ish by the sound of shouty fighting right outside my window. This was odd, because my window is a driver’s side Toyota window, which placed the shouting directly in the street. The combatants were a couple who were allegedly attempting to park.

So the guy opens his door and bangs my car. I’m sure this happened in the service of some subtle dialectic point which I couldn’t quite hear from right next to him. He didn’t hit the car that hard (and if you’ve seen the left side of my car, then you know it would be undetectable visually) so I didn’t really do anything about it.

So dude storms off, leaving chick to parallel park behind me. I would never traffic in stereotypes, but god DAMN girls can’t parallel park. She hit my rear bumper three times. Again, between my sleepiness and the fact that she wasn’t hitting me very hard, I decided not to worry about it. After all, the last thing I need to do is start an angry discussion that will sooner or later include the disclosure that I live in the damn thing. I have a feeling that will generally suck up most of my credibility.

The thing is, it would have been really funny if I had come screaming out of that thing as soon as they woke me up, blankie a-flappin’ in the wind, screeching some automotive equivalent of ‘you kids get off my lawn!’ Ha ha!

I would have been shot so many times.

The cooler has been quite the little boon. The ability to keep milk on hand is enabling me to continue my controlled starvation (thanks, Slim Fast!) longer than I would have thought. It’s also been a rather unfortunate reminder of some basic rules of physics and chemistry.

Originally, the cooler lived in the trunk wrapped tightly in a blankie. The idea was to insulate the thing so that my ice would last as long as possible. What actually happens is that the cooler pees on everything.

Ok, not really, but I will say that if any little children out there need ideas for a science fair project involving the production of astonishing and completely uncontrollable levels of condensation they should contact me immediately. Or not. I don’t really like kids.

The cooler will live in the backseat for now, because a river can run through whatever it wants as long as it doesn’t end up in my trunk. I’m thinking about sectioning off a part of the backseat to sort of hide the thing, but there’s a Monster Garage/Pimp My Ride level that I would prefer not to hit. Sooner or later, I would electrocute myself.

______________________________

I realize I’m losing my mind from time to time. I’ll try to develop a schedule and stick to it. You know, so we’ll all be on the same page.

______________________________

I still have a lot of cool things I’m waiting on performy-wise. Everything sounds good so far, but I’m basing that on astonishingly tiny amounts of information.

One of the hassles of car living has been that my grocery options are limited: I can’t buy anything that won’t keep, and I can’t buy anything that needs to be cooked. In an effort to cut costs in my lean period, I decided to tackle at least one of these.

 I haven’t dealt with a cooler in a long time. I’m sure there were day trips in Berkeley where we used them to keep our alcohol cool and tasty, but I’m just as sure that I was drunk as hell, so I can’t really remember. I associate them with camping and fishing trips from my vague childhood.

The thinking was basically that ice is cheap, and if I need to buy more every two days or so, it’s worth it in the fact that I can buy a hunk of cheese or turkey or whatnot and not have to eat the whole damn thing in one sitting. So far, it’s working, but I’ll let you know if I start to feel dysenterish.

Yesterday (Thursday, October marked the end of the fourth week of the Plan, and so far I have to say it’s working out pretty well.

In a nutshell: I’m looking better, feeling better and taking advantage of more opportunities as an actor.

Now, I don’t want to do the rose-colored glasses thing; there are difficulties, to be sure. The financial picture is still pretty ugly - I have a lot of debt and a teeny income stream - but headway is being made on expense reduction and debt consolidation. Now all I need is more freakin’ money.

Some of the personal progress I’m making has been (and continues to be) painful. It’s necessary stuff, and I can’t imagine how or when I’d be facing it if I wasn’t doing this, but that doesn’t make it fun.

Having said that, I think this may end up being a defining moment for me. One of my hopes with this is that I come out of it ‘improved’, both personally and professionally. When I get out of the car, I want to be able to say ‘things are different now, and they’re only going to keep getting better.’ It’s becoming clear to me that this is something that I can actually have.

To be totally honest, I feel like I’m on the verge of the best time of my life.

So far.

—————————————————————————

You know what won’t make you popular? Taking pictures while driving on the 10 East.

I said that once I got a crappy camera I would illustrate my preliminary categories of Car People. Well, sir, I got myself one hell of a crappy camera.

 The Pro:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259208534/

This is the only Pro photo I have. The Pros are tough to find during the day…..because they’re Pros.

The Hippies:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259217890/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259221360/

These aren’t very good photos, but the camera is crummy, and I was afraid to get closer.

The Goddamned Idiots:

I call these guys idiots because they make no effort to hide or, I don’t know, be clean. I figure they’ll eventually ruin it for us all….but then, nobody’s stopped them yet. It’s kind of tough to call them idiots knowing that this guy is somewhere out there:

Larger version: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=259210278&size=l

And, of course, The Wannabe:

What a maroon.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m experiencing an effect similar to the superpower that makes you notice every car on the road that is the same model as yours: everywhere I go I see Car People.

I know I’m not the only person doing this by choice, but I still sort of feel like I’m one of a very few taking the approach I’m taking. I still would like to look like a more-or-less normal kind of guy when I’m not in the car, and I’d like to be as unobtrusive as possible when I am. When I meet others like me, we’ll probably form a gang. A club, at least.

I’ve been trying to define the various types of Car People, mainly for fun, but partly because defining groups makes hatred easier. Bonus! In the interest of fairness, I’ll start with myself.

The Wannabe Kerouacs

The Wannabe longs for adventure and discovery and an escape from the chilling prospect of a life of servitude to some company he has no stake in, but isn’t quite committed enough to do something genuinely risky and adventurous, like take off alone for a year in India.

Actually, I can’t even really claim Wannabe status. I’m still working for the same things I always was, I’m just more focused. I haven’t dropped out of anything except a lease. Still, there is intent here. On that note, to my well-meaning friends who say things like “just come crash on my couch until you find a place”: Stop. You’re missing the point. The fact that I am often unable to articulate the point in no way excuses you.

The Goddamned Idiots
It’s important to me to look (and be) as clean as possible throughout this whole project. Not so the Goddamned Idiots. If I give the impression of a guy with a lot of crap in his backseat, these guys remind you of some sort of vermin. If the world of Mad Max ever comes to be, these people will be the ones that the mohawk guys eat. I have seen a man climb out of a car that was so full of garbage that there was an imprint of his body in the junk surrounding the driver’s seat. Picture the safety foam in Demolition Man. I’ve seen car windows plastered with newspapers from towns that are now officially Historic Ghost Towns. I don’t know if they can’t help it or just don’t care, but these are the guys who pull in nuisance calls and screw everything up.

The Pros

If I saw this as anything other than a temporary project, these would the people I would aspire to be. The distinguishing characteristic of the Pros is that they have really nice RVs. Size doesn’t matter here, upkeep does. I don’t have any demographic data on the Pros, but I’ll tell you this: if you see a decent RV in a supermarket parking lot late of an evening, Pros live there.

The Hippies

I imagine that Hippies only show up in certain specialized areas, since the merciless pummeling of hippies is legal in many parts of the nation. In Los Angeles, the Hippies live in beach parking lots. Mainly Venice, but some in Santa Monica. They ride bikes and barbecue all day, then have dirty hairy orgies in their Technicolor Dreambuses all night. The Hippies are surprisingly rude.

——————

There are other types out there, but these are the only ones I’ve identified thus far. Nate keeps bugging me to get a camera, and when I do I’ll add photographic examples of the types listed here.

I’ve been involved in this long-running battle of wills with the DMV over the registration on my car. Originally it was almost entirely my fault, but a combination of hundreds of dollars in fines and unimaginable stupidity on their part left me feeling pretty self-righteous about the whole thing. Well, as self-righteous as one can be when one knows one doesn’t have any power and a giant bureaucracy keeps threatening to take one’s car, which also happens to be one’s home.

The whole thing took over a year and a half, and after a year they can pretty much swipe the car whenever they feel like it. The details are unimportant. At least, the corporeal details are - I asked my soul to describe the experience in it’s own words. Here’s what it gave me:

‘Since I’m eternal, it pretty much felt like one really long visit to me, as opposed to several thousand over eighteen months. It actually started pretty smoothly - I really like those little monitors they have that tell you when it’s your turn, and those little butcher number slips you get, and the pleasant lady telling you who’s next. It’s nice.

So I’m sitting there reading Good Omens, and finally they call my number. I go up to the counter, and things start getting bad really fast. The guy is basically screaming at me from the start: ‘Where’s the title? Where’s the FUCKING TITLE?!?!?!’ I said I didn’t know; that last I’d heard the DMV had it and didn’t know where it was.

“Are you blaming the DMV?”

“No, I’m not blaming you - I’m saying I sent it in to you and I can’t know what happened once you got it.”

“That sounds like blame to me.”

“Fine, I’m blaming the DMV.”

“ONE FOR MAE!!!!!”

That last bit wasn’t really directed at me, it was aimed at the entire building. All the DMV people said “MAE” with one voice as the poor saps on my side of the counter started wailing. This didn’t sound good.

I was grabbed by a Clive Barker version of the Ink n’ Paint bouncer from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and hustled into a little room. I didn’t even know the DMV had little rooms. The creature rumbled “wait for Mae,” and left me alone.

About three hours later, I heard the door open and a rather pleasant voice said “Hi, I’m Mae. How can I help you?” I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. At least she was clean.

Mae

So I tell Mae the whole story and she starts asking me questions. Lots and lots of questions. They started out pretty normal (What year is the car?), became strange (How many babies could you fit in the carburetor?), and ended up just plain inappropriate for the DMV(If it happened while you were camping, does it still count as gay?)

Finally I asked her if all these questions were relevant, and she said we’d move on to the practical test. This involved playing that stupid slappy hand game. I had to get her three times in a row or else she wouldn’t let me leave.

She was wicked fast. AND, she had super bony hands. I finally got her, but it took half a day and I was covered in blood. When I won, I let out the softest of relieved sighs, and she instantly punched me in the jaw. I came to on the beach, covered in raw human sewage. I didn’t get my registration.’

Today wasn’t like that. I told the guy my story, he brought up my record, and made a scowly face. This broke my heart, until he said it wasn’t me and something about ‘who did that?’ Next thing I knew, he was handing me my card and sticker. You know how people in movies say ‘get outta here, before I change my mind’? He didn’t, but I actually ran across the parking lot to avoid that very outcome.

If nothing else, my soul is at peace. For a while.

*****************************************

Horse Lady

Everybody knows I love video games, and I sort of broke down a little bit and traded in most of my stuff for a little handheld to take the edge of the loneliness on those quiet nights when you dicks don’t call. I got a DS since it’s a little cheaper, and you can’t really cry with Mario around.

I’m not ready to stary writing reviews here, so this isn’t one. One of the games I picked up is Animal Crossing: Wild World, a handheld version of a game I had for the Gamecube. It’s a little hard to describe to non-gamers, mainly because you guys don’t really understand how complex these things are (and are expected to be by gamers.) Essentially, in Animal Crossing, you’re a guy in a town where everybody else is some sort of anthropomorphic beast. You have your little house which you decorate, and you garden and run errands for people and have little contests and design clothes and all sorts of goofy little things. You don’t win - it doesn’t work that way.

One of the weird (but, for us, relevant) aspects of the game is that it’s real time. If you play for an hour, an hour has passed in the game - the same hour, like from 2:15 to 3:15. If you quit and play again the next day, a day has passed in game. If you don’t play for a month, all your flowers die. Really.

So your little animal friends come around and talk to you and so on. Here’s where the thing’s been messing with me today. I was playing around while lounging at a park, and the Horse Lady (they have names, but I’m not even good with real people names) came over and said she wanted to visit my house. I said sure, come on over. She said she had to get ready, so when should she visit? I said five minutes. Then it got weird.

HL: “Come on, this is special, I need to get dressed.”

Me: “15 minutes.”

HL: “It’s not like we do this every day.”

Me: “6 o’ clock.”

HL: “Sounds good! Don’t forget!”

As I sit here typing, it’s 5:15. I have to turn on the game in 40 minutes or so or the Horse Lady will be upset. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you want to call me, don’t do it at 5:45, because I have to go wait at my FICTIONAL FUCKING HOUSE for the FICTIONAL FUCKING HORSE LADY to come by and laugh at my wallpaper.

You know the worst part? The worst part is that this is exponentially better than my actual social life. Some people have dry spells, but not me. I have the sort of droughts where the townspeople move on because they don’t think it will ever rain again, and wonder if God is angry because they stopped setting people on fire. I do dry runs at priesthood.

I would be over the moon if I knew a Horse Lady was stopping by later. Real Horse Ladies won’t give me the time of day. You can imagine how I do with primates.

I don’t know why it took so long, but I had my first experience with the 99¢ store today. The only word that comes to mind is ‘enlightening.’ I have, once again, been humbled.

Combine the wonder that people must have felt at Barnum’s Museum with a sort of real world Where’s Waldo? and I think you can understand how I felt it. At first, I kept thinking “that can’t be 99 cents. No way! That’s 99 cents!?!?” After a while it became a challenge: I was determined to find the one thing that cost more than 99 cents. You know what? I never did.

You can see pretty quickly how it works. The merchandise is a mixture of stuff that generally hits $1 or so fairly often on sale at your regular grocery stores (say, Pringles), stuff from what had to be the Fifth or Sixth World that nobody would ever buy unless it was 99 cents (like an 8 pack of different paper cutters) and products that failed at the big time. A container of malk would not have been out of place.

Whatever drug the Trader Joe’s folks spray to make their customers completely forget how to navigate an aisle is clearly a dilution of the stuff they use at the 99¢ store. People just STAND there. Blocking EVERYTHING. Combined with the fact that the clientele seems to skew towards geriatric, I would guess that the 99¢ has a much higher than average percentage of their customers just drop dead in the aisles. I think that’s what some of them were waiting for.

I was there looking for one of those foldy-sunshade things for my windshield, partly for camouflage, partly to make my car less burny and partly to quiet the rage of the eight-year-old me who doesn’t understand why all the cars have sunglasses except ours.

I didn’t find it (although I was told it would be ‘about a dollar’), but I don’t care. I’m going to stop at as many 99¢ Stores as I can until I do find it. It, or a Hello Kitty stapler. Or a pack of gum that tastes like the Beatles. Or a jar of Pumpkin Butter. Or a six-pack of cans of tuna with Extra Dolphin. Or….

As many of you know, my intention was to either repair my broken laptop or replace it at some point. Right before I made the final plunge, it became clear that replacement would have to be it. See, I’ve never been very good at soldering. I knew this going in, but after comparing motherboard replacement costs to new laptop costs I figured I would go ahead and take a shot at it.

Smoldy

2004-2006

I tried.

So I need a new laptop, and it has become pretty clear to me that I need to obtain this replacement ASAP. It turns out that I don’t actually like to write with pen and paper anymore. I was pretty shocked; like everybody else I have any number of notebooks full of….stuff, and I’m pretty sure this confession is costing me some serious artsy-guy credibility. Nevertheless, I like the glow, the hum, the tapping of keys, the ancillary programs, the distracting programs, all of it. I’ll use a notebook, but I’d much prefer that it be an addition to the laptop as opposed to the whole of the thing.
Financially, it looks like it’ll have to be next month, which gives plenty of time for the plea I am about to plant to take root.

The last laptop was the cheapest Dell available at the time ($650 or so) plus an upgrade or two. This is still the bottom rung pricewise at Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City, what-have-you, and is what I’ll probably end up paying this time around.

However, I figure I know enough people that there’s a good chance that somebody has seen some crusty little used thing on craigslist or knows a place with some crazy sale. I’m shooting for $400, mainly to see if I can. It needs to read DVDs, have built-in wireless capability, and have a couple of USB slots - I’m not super-concerned about the rest of it. My $650 will get me 512MB of RAM and a Celeron/Turion or simliar. That’ll do: play movies and my archives, let me surf and write, play a few songs and an occasional emulated Castlevania and I’m happy.

Keep your eyes open!