Took my car to a mechanic this morning. Well, sort of. I showed up at the shop around 10, ride home in tow, and the place was empty and silent, gates chained up. I had made an appointment, and I knew that the owner\/mechanic was going to be on vacation last week, so I figured that a two-hour cushion from the time the shop (and most shops) normally open would give him a wide berth to get things up and running on a Monday morning, but… Yeah. Sat around for about 20 minutes then left.<\/p>\n
Of course I don’t know exactly what it feels like, but preparing my car to visit the mechanic, I almost felt like I was packing up a little kid to send him off to boarding school or something. For better or worse (usually worse), I try to do all my car work myself, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken one of my cars to a shop, usually because I don’t have the right tool, or the time, or out of extreme frustration over a particular condition. In this most recent case, the car’s been suffering from a case of too much fuel being dumped into the system, causing it to spew black smoke on occasion (though it runs well), and rather than replacing various components of the system, doing it piecemeal in hopes that one would solve the problem, I decided to turn it over to someone who’s got 15-odd years of experience dealing with said system. My gut tells me that the set of symptoms the car’s exhibiting indicates a failure or need of adjustment with more than one interrelated system, another argument in favor of an experienced eye looking things over.<\/p>\n
It’s still hard, though. I took everything out of the car except for the basics like jumper cables and the like, emptied the glovebox of all the nonsense I had in there, turned the radio off, retracted the antenna, switched off the ventilation controls, and left the factory repair manual on the passenger seat. I had a whole slew of things to ask about, and a precise list of symptoms to describe and my hypotheses about their causes. I wanted to tell him not to smudge the fenders when he’s bending over the engine bay, and that sometimes the instrument cluster needs a swift whack to get the tach working again.<\/p>\n
Didn’t get the chance, though, since he was a no-show. Well–I will soon, since I called back and managed to interject a brief exchange about bumping the appointment to tomorrow in between flurries of excuses about travel delays and whatnot. We’ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n
In other news, Garden State<\/i> was very good, and utterly fascinating. The parallels alluded to between it and The Graduate<\/i> are well-founded, I think, although the more recent film’s themes are advanced in a far less literal fashion. People complain it being a patchwork collection of vignettes and character sketches seemingly translated directly from a fledgling screenwriter’s mind onto film, without regard for dramatic coherency, but there are threads that run through the collage, like photographs pinned to a clothesline, the latter holds them all togther and moves matters along–specifically, the focus on Large’s progressive awakening. There are also moments of dialogue in the movie that I felt paid homage to the Pulp Fiction<\/i> school of screenwriting–seemingly unnecessary details, clutter, banter, interchanges that don’t serve the plot but richly flesh out the characters. $7.25 well spent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Took my car to a mechanic this morning. Well, sort of. I showed up at the shop around 10, ride home in tow, and the place was empty and silent, gates chained up. I had made an appointment, and I knew that the owner\/mechanic was going to be on vacation last week, so I figured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}