The Key to Life

Snow is predicted for tomorrow, and the all-season radials on Maire Anne's 2008 Honda Fit are nearly down to the wear bars, so it was time to throw on the steel wheels and snows. I pulled the Z3 M Coupe out of the garage and pulled the Fit in to do the wheel swap.

Now, the single-bay roll-up door to my two-car-wide garage is on the right side, so when I need to change wheels, I pull the car in and angle it left so there's room on the right side. I begin jacking up the right rear of the car (and you do the right side first because the car will slide slightly when you jack up one side; if it's close to a wall, you want to jack up that side first because if you do the other side first it may get too close to the wall). 

And then I remembered: Because the Fit has alloy wheels that are an incredible theft target (and I've never understood why; they're only 15x6, but apparently they can be used on a ton of cars), it has a set of those bloody keyed anti-theft lug nuts. You know the ones -- instead of being hexagonal as the Flying Spaghetti Monster intended, they are cylindrical but have an embossed curved slot on the face, into which fits a key whose outside is hexagonal. You buy them for high-theft wheels, and you use them until the wheels are no longer a target, or they strip when you're trying to change a flat and they've been on there for eight years and the corrosion is stronger than that thin curved embossed slot. Whichever comes second. Then you take them off by hook or by crook and throw them as far as you possibly can, not only hoping never to see them again, but swearing never to use locking lug nuts on any -- any -- car, no matter now pretty the wheels are.

The problem is, if the wheels are a theft target, you can't leave the lug nut key in the car, or at least you shouldn't, or at least if you do, it shouldn't be in an easy place like the glove box. I looked in the glove box, and sure enough, it wasn't there.

Now, at times like this, the mind plays tricks. I remember once being about to walk out the door on vacation for two weeks, looking at the spare set of keys to every car I own hanging in the hallway, and thought "this is dumb. If someone breaks into the house, they can steal every car. Don't leave them there." So I hid them. And I remember thinking "don't be too smart about this; just get them out out of the hallway." I have equal memories of hiding the keys in a pair of socks, above a book on a top shelf, and under a rock in the backyard.

Never found them. Ever.

So, similarly, when the lug nut key wasn't in the glove box, I conjured up images of it under one of the seats, in the spare tire well, wedged behind one of the speaker covers. I checked all of these places. No lug nut key.

I asked Maire Anne if she'd taken it from the glove box. No dice. Ever rational and helpful, she said "maybe it's in the garage." Well, I said, it's unlikely I'd do that, since it needs to be in the car if you get a flat, but I suppose it's not impossible. 

So I looked in the obvious places in the garage. With the other lug nuts. With the socket sets. Next to the radio where I put other useful things like trashed Swiss Army Knifes, tire inflation chucks, and White-Out. Nope.

Damn it, all I wanted to do was get the snows on my wife's car, and I'm stopped by these stupid lug nut keys.

Somewhat dejected, I walked over to the beat-up notebook computer in the garage, turned it on, and started to google "Honda lug nut key."

And I looked down, and the key, in its little Honda-logo'd pouch, was right next to my foot, about 2" away from a big pile of junk immediately to the left of the garage door opening.

What the...?

And then I thought about it.

Because of the situation of having to pull a car in toward the left to deal with the door being near the right wall, and having to jack up the right side of the car first, I always change tires in the following order: right rear, right front, left front, left rear. The lug nut key was 18" away from the left rear tire. It would've been the last tire I did when I took the snows off and put the alloys on this past spring. That would've been the last time I used it, when I had to put the alloy wheels and thus the keyed lug nuts back on. I clearly forgot to put it back in the car, but there it was, right where I'd left it. The fact that it hadn't gotten kicked clear across the garage was nothing short of miraculous.

I love it when the universe makes sense.

THERMOSBLOG: You Know You Want It

I have two addictions left: Coffee and sushi (well, three if you count locking the door behind me and Maire Anne, but that’s a basic human need, not an addiction).

So Maire Anne was surprised that, when I packed for this one- to two-month trip to Dry Prong, I didn’t include a one-cup coffeemaker. I explained that, addiction or no, sometimes the logistics simply aren’t worth the trouble.

In the first place, there's always coffee at breakfast at the hotel, and it’s usually passable enough.

Second, I was taking a pound of ground Starbucks Kenyan just in case, and if need be, could buy some filters and brew it using the coffeemaker that is in just about every hotel room these days.

Third, there is a trailer here at the survey site in the Kisatchie National Forest. There’s a coffeemaker in it, and there’s usually a pot brewing. Work site coffee has historically been far more objectionable than hotel coffee, but this has changed somewhat for the better. Just as granite countertops and stainless steel appliances used to be part of a “gourmet kitchen” found only in high-end houses but have now been pushed down into much new construction, Starbucks coffee was once exotic but can now be bought in many supermarkets (though not my precious Kenyan). I was pleased when I found the UXO technicians in the trailer brewing Italian Roast.

Still, most of the day, I am not in the trailer – I am out in the field, spending hours in a pickup truck, processing data on a laptop computer, and waiting for things to go wrong with geophysical equipment. And, after three weeks, I exceeded the threshold of what I could stand of no coffee, bad coffee, and cold bad coffee. No problem, I thought – I’ll brew Kenyan using the coffeemaker in my room.

Wrong.

When I checked the room coffeemaker, I found it didn’t use basket filters. Instead it relied on those silly little coffee pads that look like some sanitary product gone horribly wrong (“CoffeePad – For that Wide Awake, Morning Fresh…” never mind). Both Maire Anne and I have, on occasion, punctured these, poured out the execrable coffee they’re filled with, and substituted our own, but this was far more effort than I wanted to go to for an extended stay.

There’s a Walmart nearby (where in America isn’t there a Walmart nearby?) and due to the wonders of Chinese manufacturing, I came home with a Mr. Coffee 5-cupper for twelve bucks.

Again, under the heading of simplicity and reduced logistics, I’m often content to let coffee get cold and simply drink it that way later in the day, but once I started brewing Kenyan in my hotel room, it tasted so damned good hot that I wanted it hot throughout the day.

I needed a Thermos. 

Thermos is, of course, like Xerox and Kleenex – a brand name that has become a noun. (I guess the generic is the uninspired “insulated beverage container.”) Maire Anne and I have owned a black Thermos – a genuine one – for easily 20 years. It works so well that it puts other, uh, insulated beverage containers to shame. Several years back we ponied up to buy a coffeemaker that, when the timer comes on, grinds beans fresh in the morning and drips the coffee into an insulated carafe (which sounds so much more elegant than insulated beverage container). But the carafe doesn’t keep the coffee hot, so we wind up pouring the coffee into the Thermos as soon as it’s brewed. And, actually, the mechanism that swings the ground coffee container under the dripping water malfunctions, so after coming downstairs first thing in the morning to find drip coffee cascading onto the kitchen floor several times, we now grind the coffee the night before, thus rending the two reasons we bought this not inexpensive unit moot. But I digress.

If the push-down of “what were once luxuries are now necessities” is one dynamic in the consumer product marketplace, another one is the division of products across sub-departments of stores. For example, I went into a Shaw’s last month to buy tea. I found what appeared to be the tea aisle, but the selection was meager, expensive, and with names like “Chai” and “Tsao.” I looked up and saw a faux wood-carved “Wild Harvest” sign with stalks of wheat blowing in the gentle leftist breeze. I realized “oh, I’m not in the coffee and tea asile – I’m in the Shaw’s Is Trying To be Whole Foods aisle.” I found the regular coffee and tea aisle, with its plain lettered sign, Folger’s coffee, and Lipton tea. So the tea is in two places, and tea I was looking for was in the wrong place.

With that in mind, go into a Walmart, K-Mart, Target, or other such store and try to find a Thermos. Those arrayed around the coffeemakers are either insulated mugs (which keep coffee warm for a relatively short amount of time) or sleek stainless steel tubes that look more like a projectile or a device to pleasure a woman than something to store and dispense hot coffee. I bought one because a) I was there, b) it was ten bucks, and c) I’m out of town, Maire Anne’s not here, and I want to see the reaction when I’m flirting with a woman in a bar and I whip this baby out and say “come on, let’s party!”

I kid, I kid.

Not surprisingly, the pleasure device masquerading as an insulated beverage container didn’t work for shit at keeping the coffee hot; it was cold by noon. The jury is still out on its performance as a pleasure device.

Back to Walmart. I must simply be looking in the wrong place. I poked around in kitchenware and found a separate section containing three related things: 1) the kind of squat wide-mouth Thermos you’d put beans in, 2) sports bottles, and 3) stainless Thermos-like devices that looked less like a Hitachi Magic Wand but still were small and had integrated pour spouts. One of them was branded Thermos and actually had the performance characteristics printed on the label: “Cold 24 Hours / Hot 12 Hours.” I was, literally, getting warmer. Could work. Fifteen bucks. Done.

Better, but still, by the end of the day, I had lukewarm coffee.

I thought, why is this so hard? I don’t want fucking stainless. I just want a Thermos to keep coffee hot all day. Where is a man’s Thermos? The big ones. The kind without some whiz-bang integrated pouring contraption. The kind you have to unscrew to get at the goods. The kind you can use to bang a tent stake in with.

And then I realized.

Camping.

There they were. All sizes. All shapes. And not stainless.  I found one 12” long that held 16 oz and said “Hot 24 Hours” (again with the pleasure motif confusion; it does look like it’s “ribbed for her pleasure”). $20. I'd spent a total of $45 on Thermii.

But my afternoon coffee is piping hot.

And I am happy.

(What? You were waiting for another pleasure device joke? Get your mind out of the gutter. My needs are simple.)

Guns and Power Tools -- The MLK Hearse at Silver Dollar Pawn in Alexandria Louisiana

As many of you have seen from my weekly Facebook posts, I am in Dry Prong, Louisiana. Actually, that's not true; I'm in Pineville LA. But Pineville simply isn't as funny as Dry Prong. So, first, let's get the geography right. I'm here for four to eight weeks to participate in a survey for unexploded ordnance at the former Breezy Hill Artillery Range in the Kisatchie National Forest. Dry Prong is the little town smack dab in the middle of the Kisatchie. Alexandria LA is the nearby city of about 50,000 where we fly into. It's about 20 miles south of Dry Prong. Pineville is just across the Red River from Alexandria, a bit closer to the survey site and easier to find a decent hotel at Per Diem rates.

When I'm on the road for work like this, I'm generally content to work, 10-12 hours a day in the field, 2-3 hours a night processing data in the hotel, 7 days a week, until it's done -- it's not like there's a lot else to do -- but, as per my previous Facebook post, it's hunting season in the Kisatchie, and they just switched from bows to rifles, so we ain't out there this weekend.

So I did what I find oddly relaxing to do when I'm on the road -- hit pawn shops. I picked up the pawn shop habit when I lived in Austin TX in the early 80s, and bought a boatload of high-end stereo equipment, band gear, specialty tools, and musical instruments. Now that everyone has an Internet connection, though, it's next to impossible to get a deal on anything in a pawn shop; one google search and even a proprietor in a remote corner of American can learn that a Mossman guitar is worth money. But old habits are hard to break, and hope springs eternal.

So this morning I loaded up the GPS with locations of five pawn shops in Alexandria and I made the rounds. I found myself at the Silver Dollar Pawn & Jewelry, which, unknown to doesn't-watch-reality-television-me is the home of the cable show Cajun Pawn Stars. This is a large, very impressive store, more than just your usual dirty shelves of guns and power tools. They have a number of collections of photo and print memorabilia, some of which are civil rights era-related. There's a case for Rosa Parks-related items, there's one for Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and of course one for MLK.

When I was done wending my way through the large store, I began to leave, but noticed some signs referring to the "MLK Hearse." Sure enough, in an offshoot of the ground floor, behind a velvet rope, is the restored 1966 Cadillac Superior hearse used to transport the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr's body from the hospital to the funeral home after that horrible day in Memphis in 1968. (Note that this is different from the mule-drawn wooden farm wagon used to transport King's body during the funeral.)

One never knows quite what to make of these sort of macabre physical curiosities, particularly when an object was a player in the true historical drama of civil rights. I'm a person to whom context is crucially important. A lawn jockey is offensive, whereas a collection of lawn jockeys as part of a museum display on the history of racism in America, now that has proper context. But this is not a museum; it is a pawn shop / antique / memorabilia store. So what is the intent of the display of the MLK hearse? 

Along with the display of the hearse was a storyboard explaining that the store owner's son bought it to add to their civil rights memorabilia collection, then was killed in a plane crash. The restoration of the hearse was thus something of a tribute from the father fulfilling the vision of the son. The vehicle was displayed quite respectfully, in a separate section of the building, behind a velvet rope, with other King-related memorabilia, but it still seemed more than a little bit out of place, like a dead body quietly watching a raucous dinner party.

I found the physical presence of the hearse quite jarring. I may have been only five when JFK was shot so it's hard to discern the actual root memory from the endless replays seen over the last 49 years, but I was ten when the twin tsunamis of the MLK and RFK assassinations roiled America, so they're smacked in there with a leather punch. The events are forever linked by the speech Bobby Kennedy gave in Indianapolis to the largely black crowd who did not yet know that King had been assassinated:

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to ... be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

Two months later, RFK was dead.

44 years later, I'm face to face with the hearse. In a pawn shop.

The wooden funeral farm wagon is apparently on display at the King Center in Atlanta (you couldn't ask for more appropriate context than that), but this ain't the King Center; it's a bustling pawn shop featured on a cable show. The hearse is here as a tourist attraction. While the hearse was respectfully displayed, and while there was some mitigating context to its presence, that context was myopic by historical standards.

As a Car Guy, I have mixed feelings about these macabre vehicles. On the one hand, people should follow their passions and collect whatever blows their skirt up, but on the other, I thought "this is just weird. People don't collect things like this. If they did, the JFK hearse would be out there attracting attention, and it's not." Then I did a quick google search and found I was wrong: In early 2012, the JFK hearse sold for $160k to a collector. Further, the ambulance that took JFK to Parkview Hospital sold the year before for $132k. I thought, what kind of collector buys these things? What is the mechanism for enjoyment of this sort of vehicle? How much does the excuse "it's a piece of history" let you get away with? What is the endpoint? A private museum of hearses used to carry famous people, displayed along with strands of hair found during restoration? Imagine, Marilyn Monroe's lifeless body was right here. Next hearse. Imagine, Kurt Cobain's lifeless body was right here. I don't think so. Would I pay money to see the hearse that carried John Lennon's body? Hell, I'd pay money not to see the hearse that carried John Lennon's body, and it's difficult to imagine any context where the display of such a thing is historical as opposed to exploitative. Is the MLK hearse the exception because it's part of the 60's political assassination holy trinity? I don't know.

The guns that shot JFK, RFK and MLK are evidence in crimes; they should be preserved, in the custody of appropriate agencies. Whether the vehicles that carried their bodies have true historical significance is questionable.

A part of me would feel better had these vehicles been allowed to pursue their normal life cycle, which is for Neil Young to party in them, then for them to return to dust. Instead they're being kept alive, as if on life support, as mute reminders, like stroke victims who have seen horror but cannot speak.

And then I looked up and saw... guns and power tools.

So much for context.

Bentley Publishers Has Officially Announced My Book

Bentley Publishers has put out an official press release announcing my book. Click on my name to drill into the "author blurb" page, and on the title to see a book blurb. There's a "keep me notified" button where you can sign up for release

 info, and a link to my October "Roundel" article where I told the story of how the book deal was 18 years in the making.

I have a long history of being uncomfortable with self-promotion, but I must admit that I can't stop smiling about this.

https://wiki.bentleypublishers.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=117866673

Book Getting Closer

I received another advance check yesterday from Bentley Publishers for my book "Car Nut: Why Men Love Cars, and How Fixing BMWs Saved My Sanity (a memoir with actual useful stuff)." Bentley says that, very soon, they'll have an author's page up on their web site. More news as I know it.

Notes From The Road (labor day version)

It's Labor Day and, again, I find myself driving the work truck. This time, unlike the last post, I'm not towing a boat -- I'm hauling a 32' trailer filled with geophysical survey equipment. I'm halfway to Camp Lejeune NC, having stopped in Dover, Delaware for the night.

In my last post, I enumerated the terrors of towing the boat over the George Washington Bridge (replete with my trailer disintegrating at the most inopportune of moments) and swore I'd never do it again. True to my word, this time I took the Tappan Zee Bridge. Problem is, if you're driving a commercial vehicle (much less a commercial vehicle towing a 32' trailer) and you need to head south of NYC, you can't take the Garden State Parkway or the Palisades Parkway, or any parkway; those are for passenger cars only. But this time I took the Tappan Zee to I287 to route 17, which was a very manageable roughly 20 miles of two and three lane road that gets you to I80 to the Jersey Turnpike. I'd highly recommend this route to anyone looking to bypass not only the GWB but also the terrible roads the GWB feeds north of NYC. 

The only downside was that I left at 7AM and kept waiting to see a service plaza with a big Starbucks sign on it. I didn't remember which plazas on the Mass Pike or on the NY roads have Starbucks in them, but I can now report that if you take I80 to I84 to I684 to I287 over the Tappan Zee, there aren't any. Finally I saw the sign for the Sloatsburg Service Plaza with a Starbucks logo (yay!), then realized it was just after the exit for route 17 (boo!). I toughed it out, got on 17, took it to the Jersey Turnpike, and had to pass the Vince Lombardi, Alexander Hamilton, and Grover Cleveland service areas before good old Thomas Edison flashed the familiar green and white goddess-of-coffee logo, thereby further cementing ol' Tom Edison's place in my heart. When you're towing a trailer, you have to be careful not to overdrive the speed rating of the tires; 55mph is a good goal. But, as this is less than the speed limit, you see the projected arrival time on the GPS recede like Tantalus bending to cup his hand in the water. It was five hours before I had a break for  my traditional two doppios.

The problem with driving to anyplace on the mid-Atlantic coast south of the mouth of the Chesapeake is that there are two ways to get there, and they both suck. There's the inner route, where you take Rt 95 or one of its beltway variants and go around DC. I've done this several times, and have sworn a blood oath that I will never, ever do it again unless it is on a weekend and very early in the morning. And there's the outer route down the Delmarva (Delaware Maryland Virginia) Peninsula which forms the outer side of the Chesapeake. When you get off the Jersey Turnpike and cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge, you immediately have to choose which of these routes you're going to take. The Peninsula route is 200 miles down route 13. At the end you're rewarded with the Chesapeake Bridge Tunnel, which is 20 miles of post bridges across the mouth of the Chesapeake with occasional submerged sections (if it were all bridge, the big ships couldn't get through) and is absolutely spectacular. But to reach it you have to run the gauntlet of route 13, which at times is a limited access 2 or 3 lane highway surrounded by bucolic farmland but for long stretches is like Route 9 just outside of Boston -- a blur of stop lights and strip malls. Among the more, ah, pleasant attractions slaps you in the face when you cross from Maryland into Virginia. There's a souvenir store with a big sign that says "THE SOUTH BEGINS HERE" and a big Confederate flag. Really? Really? The warm welcome of the Confederate flag notwithstanding, towing a trailer and getting up to speed to have to slam on the brakes for a light every mile is no fun. I've taken this route too, and swore that -- you guessed it -- I'll never do it again. Plus, this being Labor Day weekend, I didn't know what would await me for beach traffic.

But, like Captain Lucky Jack in Master and Commander, I was forced to choose the lesser of two weevils, so the Peninsula it was. Fortunately, the beaches are at the south end of the Peninsula, and I stopped for the night in Dover which is closer to the north end, so I hit absolutely no traffic, but not so lucky were those coming home from Labor Day and headed north -- I passed a 50 mile long backup.

So far the only surprise has been the restaurant. When I'm towing, I try to stay in hotels with a restaurant either inside or directly across the street so I can park the rig at the hotel and leave it there. Unfortunately the hotel restaurant has a "closed for the evening sign." I assume that Labor Day evening is the official start of the slow season. Fortunately, this is what takeout and delivery is for.

Here's hoping tomorrow's trek to Camp Lejeune is equally as uneventful.

Book Deal with Bentley Publishers

On Saturday 7/14/2012 I announced the following:

It is with joy bordering on the profane that I announce that Bentley Publishers, publishers of the best damn automotive repair manuals in the world, has signed me to publish my 350 page book, tentatively titled "Car Nut: Why men love cars, and how fixing BMWs saved my sanity (a memoir with actual useful stuff)." It's my life, viewed through the lens of cars, in a way that other car guys and the women who love them will instantly relate to. It's that miserable Triumph GT6+ I owned in college. It's rebuilding the engine of Maire Anne's VW bus in the kitchen of the apartment in Austin. It's the 25 BMW 2002s. It's the 3.0CSi I've owned for 25 years. It's loving how my 911SC gurgles. It's teaching my kids to drive in the Suburban on the beach late at night on Nantucket. It's a defense of men as intimate caring creatures, even though we often appear to have the emotional intelligence of algae. It's an explanation of why, in a world in which we have so little control, I thoroughly enjoy working on cars and get such a charge out of identifying, diagnosing, and completely fixing a problem. 

Can you tell I've been practicing the elevator speech? How does it sound? I think it's pretty good considering Maire Anne (the best wife a car guy could ever ask for) and I celebrated last night and I was drinking Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway's favorite cocktail -- champagne and absinthe).