Car washed

Back to reality: car washed, a zillion atoms of winter accumulated grime and road film removed. Bad news is that the leak around of the top of the windscreen still prevails and persists. At least I know where it is, all it needs is fixing.

Petrol

The strange siren song of the petrol pumps draws us to gobble up the invisible and misunderstood liquid that powers our dreams and rules our world. Loved and hated in equal measures, the seldom seen curse of contradictory freedoms is pumped through garish devices that spit liquid and eat money. We draw up to the pump in the brightly lit and coloured forecourt under the watchful eyes of CCTV and number plate recognition to complete this primitive transaction.

The nozzle is lifted from it’s holster like a Colt 45 and rammed through the valve flap on the fuel pipe, a perfect., clunking, sexual fit. We look up to the numbers, the LED read out and wait the zeroing process and the hum of the pump mechanism as it comes to life. The trigger is squeezed and held and numbers rally up like a Las Vegas slot, litres flash by in seconds, flow rates and calculations, every higher, ever deeper. Then an abrupt stop, release the trigger, try to gleam a few extra drops of the liquid, as if they translated into miles, yards, feet or inches. Then pull the nozzle free, end the delivery ritual and push the device back onto the pump, clicking it back into space for the next customer. Close the flap and click the central locking on and pay the bill making sure you pick up a portion of sushi, a newspaper and a lottery ticket in the process.

The attendants seldom make eye contact, slaves of the machine they see only a line of bar codes and screen image reflecting the pump status. “Number 7” you say, “Oh and these items”. The codes are scanned and the numbers gallop, racing across electronic space until the PIN arrives. Then back through the sliding doors, out to the forecourt and into the car to listen to unpopular music, dodge the potholes and avoid the turbulence vortexes created by blue Subarus out there on the roads.

Only one button

I often thought that I was fortunate to be able to detach myself from whatever unpleasant aspect of reality that I was becoming too close to experiencing. It was like living in a radio show but not having to adhere to some corporate and imposed play list. My ability to cut away meant my play list was always on the decks, running and rolling and (hopefully ) entertaining the small and exclusive audience that follow the show. I sat back and thought of the black vinyl spinning on some grey, dusty deck, booming into studio speakers and headphones, cigarettes bobbing sympathetically in ash trays, coffee cups jiggling to the bass, messages and scribbles on boards and buff paper scripts and show ran on into it’s deepest and most intense phase; the second side of “Let it Bleed” by the Rolling Stones played in it’s entirety without interruption, adverts, news or traffic breaks. That was real radio, unreal and imagined, hitting the centres of the brain and transporting the listener rather than dulling thought and numbing feelings.

I extrapolated myself from radio deejay to listener to driver. The music was booming up from the loudspeakers in the door pockets mixing with road noise and rumble. For the first time in a while I was driving again . Driving in a primal and hateful way, flicking the wheel, riding on back bumpers, wavering between the kerb and the white line, changing lanes, owning lanes, giving up lanes as I strutted the car across some imagined piece of territory like it was a battlefield. Finally the traffic clears up and the road appears before me like a beach abandoned by the tide. It is a that moment that the tension really rises, the space that promised serenity now opens wider to reveal the terror of the blank canvas and a line of dust that runs across the horizon towards a drowning sun.

I take the easy way out take a left turn into a petrol station that has a café bolted onto the end. I park around the side of the building and flick that locking on. The café is hidden behind signs, posters, menus and out dated offers, they clog the windows, tattooing the glass with their missed messages. My eyes play tricks but eventually I manage to find the door and go inside. It is red and silver with counters and round tables and in the American style. Pleasantly rundown but not dirty, or erring on the dirty side of clean that makes you imagine that the bacteria ingestion that might follow could actually be of significant healthy benefit. I have no idea where I am other than in the café.

There are a few customers with their backs to the door nursing cups and large sandwiches, escapees from truck cabs or van interiors, this refuge from the road holds them for some temporary purpose, food, fuel and distraction. I spin awkwardly onto one of the counter stools and ask for a plain white coffee and an egg roll. The young assistant accepts the approximate change from my pocket and passes me a mug, the food will follow some time later apparently. I stare away from the counter and over and through the window posters, they act like crash barriers against the outside world and it’s relentless left to right, right to left, east to west, west to east metal streaks. They come and go. The egg roll comes and goes and the drivers return to their cabs. I’m tired.

The gritty coffee wakens me and I’m fast asleep once more and at the wheel, behind the wheel, hanging onto the wheel for dear life, I’m never really sure how this relationship is working out and who is turning who. Even if I tried I couldn’t find that café again, it was so badly imagined.

Great loopy cats

Well that was that. I put some it down to bitter experience and most of it down that eternal problem of occasionally slipping into and out of parallel universes. Percentages don’t apply here. I don’t mean this to be any form of explanation or justification either, it’s just the way it is. When you are driving a car the laws of physics can be put to some extreme tests. Does any driver really know what is actually happening under the bonnet, in the fuel system, in the movement of the wheels and suspension, in the heat and gas changes, in the liquids and the lubricants and increasingly as cars develop in the electronics. These are dark, unknown and mysterious places under extreme forces. All we hear is a machines rumble, the heat of the reactions and the energy as the systems come together. Meanwhile we are moving quickly in an other wise apparently stationary world, although it is of course moving also. At the microscopic level the effect and the ramifications of all this chaotic release of energy is unfathomable. At this point of realisation (where understanding is either very low or minimal) anything is possible. That’s when the physics of motoring, the ambiguity of travel, the contradictions of being and the illusion of movement all come together. Getting in a car, starting it and then travelling generates some serious situations.

When I did eventually get out of the car and arrived at some destination or other I decided that it was time to return to my studies. The past six or seven months had made little sense, there had been travel, despair, drunkenness and that feeling of moving quickly in a solid object whilst other objects remained still hardly moving at all. Some objects also moved, as if in sympathy, resonating with my speed and direction but never catching up. Ultimately I was left feeling alone and despite the change in location, like I’d not gotten anywhere. I’d also gained the habit of wearing a strong pair of sunglasses that allowed me to view the world in a constant state of monochrome, nostalgic beauty. Whilst this added a visual ambience to most things and was useful for people watching and anonymity, it also meant my self imposed schism with reality grew more intense. I was double minded about the whole thing. Thinking and musing on your own, for too long is not a good thing. I clunked the car door shut, flicked the remote and walked indoors. Once inside I decided that I would look outside and take stock.

I sat at the white table and clicked open my phone. The mobile signals seemed to come and go like the wind, flocking like strange digital birds, feeding on some strange electric swarm of insects and riding currents of energy I couldn’t see. They carried the odd and complex messages of telephone conversations and text messages and all the spurious internet junk across their wide invisible wings, passing the information between them like a billion ping pong balls. Looking into the distant blue, as I was, that was how it seemed and I felt better connected now that I was finally stationary.

As the text messages rolled past like tides I regarded the world at large. Thinking the first of a number of self centred thoughts I decided to eat much more fruit, less sugar and take in much less alcohol. My background breeding makes any form of alcoholic excess disastrous so for me to eat that peach (that peach) would be a very good thing. A very good thing to do right now.

I ate the peach and, for my pleasure took a long time doing it. It was the right colour, the right texture and sitting at room temperature being consumed at the right time. I took it, placed it on a plate and quartered it north to south using a sawing action to curve the blade around the stone at the core and once the fruit had opened prised the stone away from the flesh. Slowly I added a drip of Worchester sauce to each of the four slices and allowed a little tinting of the fruit, then I ate each piece in three bites, twelve for the whole fruit and so nothing but stone remained, stranded on the plate in a few drips of sauce. That was that. As I ate I watched the traffic in the street, the pedestrians, a few dogs and a cat sleeping on a roof gully. The signals had tipped my phone into life and when they did I winked towards the grey mobile antennae as an offering of thanks for it’s relaying effort. The townspeople carried on with their business regardless of me eating, watching and listening. I was another Saturday afternoon and I had stopped, still in one spot for all of a half hour. There are far too many fractions out here and no enough wholes, for that I blame the government and the dark lords of science.

You wont find the dark lords of science (without any capital letters) mentioned in many places. As far as I know I’m the only one to mention them. While I respect them as you would an equal or greater enemy I refuse to formalise their title with any additional capital letters, bold text or any other superfluous mark of recognition that would somehow enhance their status. The last thing I’d want to do is enhance their status. There are of course other dark lords, hidden in history and literature, bobbing between the words of fact and fiction, not sure where they should reside. Mostly they stay shielded in the nether world of wider human imagination where anything is possible and where living and breathing may be more likely than in the (so called) physical world. Here their creators tolerate them and allow them a religious freedom to wander hither and thither causing panic, pain and misunderstood experimentation. I allow them not such latitude. The dark lords of science that I know need no latitude, they are legion, unrestricted and unbounded in their work. They are an industry.

I don’t quite know when their industry began, it may have always been there, in the early iron and bronze forges, in the light and in the burning logs. In the ore and the coal and in the heat and hammer blows that tested and formed materials into solid, cutting and piercing objects. Some objects were marvellous, functional and saved the work of many, some were frivolous and decorative, some were dark and misshapen and put to unspeakable uses. The dark lords knew best of these instruments and coveted them, the y traded for them, they stole them, they bribed with meat and position for their acquisition. They hid them from light and planned for their future use. The hammers then turned silent and the fire blew out. The great sheets of ice came and the world shrank back into self defence from a deep and heart stopping cold. In the icy wilderness the dark lords travelled through frozen worlds of still born thought, freezing and influencing and taking shape, grinding and revelling in the friction and generated heat, shaping the world of blunted mountains we recognise today.

When they did emerge from that frozen time out, other things had happened and our journey was underway. We’d built buildings, pubs, clubs and bridges and explored science almost up to the same point as they had. With the internal combustion engine the final piece was in place albeit we’d yet to crack the problem of a hydrogen based fuel system. The dark lords of science watched and waited.

It may have been Benz, Henry Ford, Thomas Chevrolet or any one of a thousand inventors who they used to channel their forces, we’ll never know, their victims are gone and cannot speak but heir work and their legacy goes on.

From where I sat, peach taste still lingering in the back of my throat I could see evidence of their work, even here, even in the badlands amongst the poor and the peasants. The industry of the lords had long and far reaching tentacles, like Hollywood, radio or more recently mobile phone marketing. I was swing back in my chair now, thoughts coming in like avalanches or dust storms or hailstones. They always ran like some great, inexplicable natural event. That’s thoughts, natural but unnatural and often unwelcome because of the baggage they bring and the damage they might do. Abruptly my direction changed and I waked into the kitchen. On the worktop a dozen hen’s eggs sat on a tray. I took one and broke it into a white cup, the yolk golden, the white gleaming and translucent. I shook it, looked at it and drank it down. My body was crying out for protein, it had been a long day and journey.

Ginger cats are everywhere, great loopy, orange blank faced felines, smiling through whiskers, looking with dilated pupils, standing still, turning their backs and sleeping for 23 hours a day in a place where you would prefer to sit. I’m watching one now, the gully one, lazy, licking and stretched on the warm roof tiles. What could disturb that fantastic disconnected beast? The world passes by, the sun crosses the sky, the dogs sniff and fret over strange smells and the promise of an easy meal. The cats remain aloof, far away, hollow vessels for the comings and goings of the dark lords of science. That’s their purpose, that’s their function and that’s how things are.

I think that the medication may be wearing off. That’s obvious in my eyesight improving. I can see the cat clearly. It could be the protein kicking in. It could be the lack of alcohol and other external stimulus. It could be down to staying out too long in the sun.

Off roading

Me, not the car.

Transfusion

The old cat needs about a litre of oil top up every 500 miles or so, probably normal and not unreasonable for a 120000+ miler. The catalytic converter noises continue but are no worse so I'm hoping that we'll make it to the next service, whenever that might be.

Still life

Fresh from a hands on (and hoses and foam on) car wash, first proper clean in about three months: still life with car, bottle bank and refuse pound. The car's clean condition lasted less than 24 hours. A run to Aberdeen at back at a steady 70mph and 37.2mpg meant that the winter road film returned with a vengeance. Spring and some sort of spring clean and a full service are hopefully just around the corner. The road noise from the failing catalytic converter is beginning to irritate however but I'll leave the final decisions on how best to rectify this (there is an obvious way) to Dr Ford's technical representatives.

Not Spring

Unrelated Saab takes corner

Now that it’s nearly Spring I have to sit down and think. Frankly I don’t quite know what I’m doing or where I’m headed. I’m tempted to use words like “interplay” or “sectional” I want to drop them into planned conversations as I try to, using as little language as possible sum up what I see happening. Of course this doesn’t work and I remain tongue tied and if I’m not being too tough on myself, unhappy with my overall performance.

In the end it is all about people and your dealings with them. That of course can translate into dealing in cars and other manufactured commodities. I’m not as good at this as some others but I can learn. Having said that I just said that this was the end. I’m not quite clear on where all this is; somewhere presumably. We all need to pay tribute to something, occasionally.

Meanwhile I’ve stopped driving fast, most of the time, but I’m thinking about the price of petrol and the end of February. For a short month it seems to run on, never ending and it’s not even started yet. Maybe I was wrong about it nearly being Spring, it’s Winter everywhere and has been for many months and the car’s underside needs rinsed to clear all that corrosive road salt, muck and chemicals that hang there like demented stalactites. Clean, clear water, applied at high pressure, the first sign of spring and no salt ricocheting around inside the wheel arches. Lookin’ forward to it already and the celebration that surrounds the achievement of a reasonable weigh loss report. I’ve no idea who is sitting in the back.

Frozen frozen

Still no respite with the cold, those icy tentacles get everywhere and the early morning warm up has become a regular chilly routine. Any day now I fully expect some kind of breakthrough to occur, most certainly.

Cougar Christmas

Nearly there, still managing to get just enough traction in the snow. Merry Cougar Christmas.

Tedious

After a ten day hiatus of bad weather and the car stuck in the snow, Thursday night saw me finally rocking and rolling it back to the freedom of the open road. The two mile run on hard packed snow and ice was not an easy drive but the car slid through and out onto blacktop. Inside the condensation and deep freeze conspired to make things misty and unpleasant, a long run to Aberdeen and back with the temperature set to 25 to top blow was the only way to dry out the interior and blow away cobwebs. Winter...

Frozen

We are frozen, our fluids are all frozen, stuck to the ground and it's well on the way to -10 or worse.