solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
Thank you, and I'll get there.
I don't really blame myself at this point. I made my peace with that last year when I kicked him out. Could I have postponed the inevitable by letting him live with me until the bitter end? Probably, but by how long who knows and the cost to my sanity was going to exceed my ability to deal with it. I just couldn't do it, and I was far from the only one. We all did what we could and none of it was going to fix the unfixable. The only thing I had control over in that situation was how much I was willing to be collateral damage. I reached my end and that was that. We were still friends, exchanged dumb memes or whatever pretty much daily, and saw each other every week or so. I'm gonna miss him.
Sorry about the brother. Alcoholism blows and there isn't a damned thing those who care can do if the person holding the bottle can't find it in himself to quit or at least tone it down to a level that's compatible with the life you want to live. Take it from someone who's more acquainted with it than most.
Edit: I forgot to mention. We did get ahold of one of his cousins (He didn't have much family left and they lived a few hours away but I'm pretty sure that I met her once.) and she was very gracious. She mentioned having offered to let him move in with her. That brought me some peace to hear that he'd had somewhere to go.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7d ago
Thank you.
The hardest part of this is watching my sister go down the same road with different details (and some invariably shitty boyfriends, one of whom shot himself dead in front of her). She's been spiraling downhill pretty badly lately (mostly because she refuses to give up on the latest shitty boyfriend, and I know it sucks to realize that you need to move out and start over from scratch again, but she was also between jobs for a few months so throw in "broke and the cards are maxed out" into the mix). I offered her a place to stay if she could find somewhere else for her dog, and she retorted that the dog is the only thing she lives for now (Guess how many times I heard that from my now dead friend about his dog.). Same story with mom (who she refuses to live with anyway) and our father (He'd probably give in she pushed hard enough, to our stepmother's fury, but she stuck them with the last dog she had the last time she stayed with them.). Her current plan is allegedly to continue staying with the shitbag boyfriend who was about to kick her out and commute 5 hours a day multiple days a week to her new job. I told her she should plan on moving there as soon as she can swing it but she says she doesn't want to live in the same city as our mother (I get not wanting to live with her but that metro area is big enough for the two of them and I'm pretty sure she's just stalling for time because she refuses to give up on the boyfriend.).
It just sucks. It's the guilt trip that never ends. Our mother was a cartoon villain of a parent and I wasn't older enough to have any chance of defending her, just older enough that I was the first to figure out to run and hide when I heard that tone in her footsteps. It wasn't my fault that I was mom's favorite and she wasn't. No amount of analyzing it to death will completely silence the part of me that feels like the sibling equivalent of a war criminal. I can't rescue her now any more than I could when we were kids. There's plenty of nice stuff you can read about "breaking the cycle", but the fact is that a lot of people don't and the odds for my sister aren't looking good.
Our stepmother is a far better wife than our father deserves and is ordinarily understanding, but she'll never totally get it. Dad will never forgive himself. It doesn't matter how outmatched in court he was. It doesn't matter how hard he did fight or how much he did spend when he could've walked away. It doesn't matter that weekend's at dad's were that much better. All that matters is that he sees his daughter in pain, doesn't know how to make it stop, and feels like it's his fault. So yeah, he'll give whatever she asks as long as he has the money. Mercifully, he made enough in crypto after Trump got elected that he can swing it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7d ago
It wasn't exactly the same situation, but my friend had also blown through a few hundred thousand in the form of an inheritance from his parents. He'd been a musician, worked various jobs (mostly in auto parts), etc. but couldn't really hold down a job after he started going down with heart failure and other health problems. Irritatingly, it's my understanding that some combination of having had a low on-paper income and having waited too long to apply for disability after he quit working (while subsisting on the inheritance) meant that he didn't have enough work credits to qualify. I don't know the exact details (Maybe he got denied initially and then ran out of work credits by the time his health was sufficiently bad.) but it was maddening to me because he was clearly unable to physically cope with any sort of labor or consistently show up because he'd have days he just couldn't do anything. You could get mad that he didn't do anything to help himself in terms of managing his health problems or maybe argue that he could've tried harder to get a work from home job but he didn't have a work history conducive to that and wasn't self-motivated enough to make it as a gig driver (Anyone can drive a car in circles, but doing so without crashing it and keeping it in good condition to use it for work actually takes some skill, and in my experience from that business a lot of people can't make themselves work enough to pay the bills without the fear of being fired.).
He'd lived hard in the small-time rock and roll scene, wound up with old people problems before his time, and most of his social circle from the good times had either died or aged out and moved on from that life. It really was sad and I felt bad because his life objectively sucked in a way that would've been hard for the best of us to cope with. It was just beyond his means.
There isn't really anything you can tell your friend that he doesn't already know. He has to love and respect himself enough to do stop with the drugs and put up with most likely being broke working a shitty job and having a mundane life because he wants more for himself than to be a statistic. You can't make somebody care about and for themselves. He's probably looking at what feels like an overwhelming amount of effort/self-improvement for what doesn't feel like a lot of return on investment. I'm sorry about your friend, because it sucks to watch.
“He lost his battle with mental health.”
I guess that’s the contemporary Facebook suitable euphemism for “committed suicide”.
Some of you may remember the roommate that I kicked out last year. He took his own life on Saturday morning after a 10/10 argument and crashout with his daughter. Things had been rough lately but I’d seen him earlier the night before at the bar and he seemed more or less himself, just buried in his phone reconnecting with a woman from his past after her breakup such that we didn’t really talk much. The last thing I told him was that we should get together on Sunday.
What do you even say? This story was never going to have a happy ending, but those of us close to him figured that his health would take him first, or a plausibly-accidental overdose. It’s never good news when you get called to the hospital, an escort is waiting to take you back, and a police officer walks in with the doctor. “Was he depressed or did he seem like he would hurt himself?” “I’ve heard the suicide talk so many times either as his former roommate or working at the bar that I would just say that I’d see him tomorrow.” “Was he diagnosed with a mental health condition and did he take any medication?” “What wasn’t he diagnosed with?” “Did he own a firearm?” “Yes, and now that you mention it I don’t think I’ll soon forget what it looked like. I’m guessing this is why I saw a bunch of cops and crime scene tape a few blocks from where he’d been staying when I went to pick her up?” “Yes sir.”
“I wish he’d called/said something. I didn’t know things were so bad.” Perhaps I’m overly grim by disposition (most likely true) or people really are insanely naive and think that things will just magically get better (true of that person I was delivering the news to; nice guy, though) but, really? This shouldn’t exactly have been a surprise, save coming from those who figured he lacked the guts to actually do it. His problems weren’t solvable by a pep talk, nor were they in any sense temporary.
“It’s my fault!” No, it isn’t. The last person he’d been crashing with had been the latest to reach the end of her rope (pun not intended) and told him that he had to go, but that doesn’t make it her fault so much as it made her the loser of the game of musical chairs (This is how I described it to her.). The fact is that everyone close to him at some point or another had done and tolerated what they could in attempting to help him. Some had more patience and resources than others but it invariably ended the same way: frustration and defeat before reaching some form of “I can’t do this anymore.” None of us who were in that hospital room have any reason to blame ourselves. Even in some fairytale alternate scenario where the right person in the right place got him through this bad night there was always going to be another one, and another one, and…you get the idea.
I don’t know at precisely what point our friendship became an exercise in palliative care, and I don’t know if most people think in such terms (I guess not, judging by the surprised reactions from so many.), but that’s what it was. Maybe this is going to sound weird but I find myself having grieved in advance of the event to some extent. I’m sad, but not shocked. I’ll do my part for those of us left behind and at some point the grief will subside and we’ll remember the end less and the better times we had together more. Goodbye, my friend, and damn it I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you. God knows I gave it my best shot.
Selfishly, I’m afraid the contenders for the next call are running a rapid race, and those are my father and sister. Those are going to hurt.
Oh yeah, bonus material: "Is his dog okay?" "Yes, and in fact it's been staying with a different friend for some time now." I'm pretty sure that's called foreshadowing.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
25d ago
Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.
That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.
My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.
My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Whether or not "patriarchy" is a system that was codified (as in the Abrahamic religions) or simply a set of norms that turned out to be optimal for dealing with pre-industrial (or, perhaps more properly, pre green revolution) life, the idea is that beyond a certain point an excess of male intrasexual competition is bad because energy spent on that (be that fighting and killing each other in more primitive contexts, or power-swiping on dating apps and spending tons of time and money in bars for the non checked out in our present context) isn't spent on more useful things like working (This can still be seen by the fact that married men still earn more money than their unmarried counterparts.).
Likewise, some degree or another of enforced monogamy fixes the failure that in a purely free market the sexually successful male is completely relieved of obligations toward women or their children because the value of a given woman for those men rapidly approaches zero (aka. "a bitch is a bitch").
That such an arrangement also boosts fertility by enabling the median man to have a wife and children (that he is in turn obligated to provide for and defend) and that said arrangement is good at securing the loyalty of average men is a nifty bonus.
IMO the easiest way to demonstrate that patriarchy hindered certain men rather than women is merely to ask who dismantled it. Was it women? Not really. Sure, the feminists were a thing and they went along with it for their own reason, and capitalists were certainly happy to get a new supply of labor, but it was largely a bunch of upper-class male lawyers who did it.
Edit: Something I failed to convey is that patriarchy has fallen apart in large part because it's been rendered obsolete (save for the "enabling fertility" part, anyway; we haven't figured out how to get women to take what they can get instead of living childless in someone's Tinder harem or giving up out of despair for how lacking they perceive their options to be). Male provision and protection are pretty much worthless, and even loyalty to a cause or group doesn't mean much in a world where real existential threats to elite (or elite through scumbaggery; you can't take what doesn't exist from those who don't have it) men are rare.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The problem here is that James will not lose his teeth and everyone knows it, especially James. What pretty much everyone misses is that patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition. All the stuff psychoanalyzing women largely misses the point.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
It is kind of fun. No multiscreen needed, just a weed vape, a laptop, 30+ tabs, and a few hours to kill.
It gets old pretty fast though (same with porn in general). I quit weed to get a better job and don't really miss it. Kind of a shame, because fake weed vapes are dirt cheap while getting bored and going to the bar 4+ nights a week gets expensive in a hurry such that I kind of need a side gig to help pay my bar tabs (Last time that happened it spiraled out of control such that I wound up being a bartender, a fun but very time and money intensive way to develop a friend group of mostly fucked up people.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
~6-7 years. At some point /r/themotte was linked on /r/drama and I found it that way. God, I miss seriousposting on Drama.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
As a Millennial Southerner who grew up in crappy white rural schools (aka. north Alabama) where ~20% of the kids exited middle school more or less illiterate my non-ideological take is that some mix of the Bush/early Obama era Republican takeovers and/or old-fashioned generational turnover likely flushed out a bunch of shockingly old-fashioned/complacent educators/administrators (aka. dead wood) such that schools actually started giving a shit about literacy. Are we going to surpass Massachusetts? I doubt it, but I bet there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered as late as the 90s and the Southern states just started to grab it.
I don't want to get into wall of text territory, but I am retrospectively appalled that I was lavished with resources by our local school system (however misguided they may have been) because I was a non-compliant pain in the ass while my middle sister was allowed to skate through silently struggling to read because she didn't cause trouble. I'm smarter than she is, but not twice her ACT score smarter.
The past poor literacy is a very real thing. I work for a trucking company whose driver pool mostly draws from MS, AL, and GA and many of our Gen X drivers (who are otherwise successful owner-operators, aka. not stupid) are incapable of writing a basic incident report without requiring heavy editing from management to produce something intelligible in English. Likewise, many of our white-collar office staff (again, I'm picking on the Gen Xers) are barely capable of using computers. If anything goes wrong they just hit the buttons harder and start swearing. They can memorize how to do this or that but don't really grasp how to navigate an interface to find something they want. I would rate my computer skills to be marginally above-average by mid-millennial standards (I can install and use an easy Linux distro and that's about as far as my skills go.) and I'm treated like an IT wizard for what I can do.
On an amusing side note, I vividly remember No Child Left Behind because suddenly my teachers became very friendly during the annual standardized tests and worked to ensure that I was filling in the answers correctly (They were confident that I had the right answer and less confident that I was bubbling in the scantrons correctly.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
Correct. IME at a state school you could get a B.S. or B.A. in Econ. The B.S. program was more rigorous while the B.A. in Econ program wasn't especially challenging in terms of math. Cal 1 was sufficient to pass the vast majority of those classes. On that note, I was a history double-major (originally intended for econ to be a minor but the difference between minor and major was something like 18 credit hours) and I was impressed by how easy the final paper was for an otherwise difficult (I was rusty on the math so I actually had to put some work into it.) class on international trade: four pages double-spaced. I wrote one of the more boring papers I ever put together and received an A+ on it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
My situation is marginally different, but I find myself in a similar boat. After a decade post-graduation of slumming it at an overpaid service industry gig (owner's crony/top driver at a locally-owned doordash clone) because I was too lazy to job hunt followed by a year of going broke in a low-paying blue collar job I was fortunate enough to luck into an office job at a trucking company (thanks to having gotten to know my current boss at my side job as a bartender) that's simultaneously the highest-paying and easiest job I've ever had.
I feel like I'm in some kind of twilight zone where I get paid lower-middle class money to do nothing. I maybe do five solid hours of work a week in the office and my boss is happy with me, and his boss with him. It's a small satellite terminal and I feel like there's enough work for maybe 1.25 people, so I got hired to do some background stuff that my boss finds unpleasant and be his buddy. I was warned by the upper managers who hired me that the slow learning pace would be frustrating and it is, not because I'm struggling to grasp what I'm doing but because I'm asked to do so little and feel like I'm going to get fired because I barely do anything. But hey, my boss is scrolling on his phone/watching TV/shopping online almost as much as I'm scrolling Twitter or reading a novel on my phone, so we're even? I get texts from him about how I've been a blessing in his life. The most important thing I accomplished this week was fixing my boss's refrigerator at his house (I got lucky, the problem wound up being a $10 temperature controller, and it took me about an hour to replace.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
The way I choose to look at it is that you may never perfectly "fit in" with a given clique of people, but thanks to all the crossed wires you'll probably have something to contribute for a given group. It's probably not possible to actually be unique without being at least a bit weird, but it doesn't have to be crippling. The way I like to put it (having been repeatedly armchair diagnosed as autistic by randos at the bar, something I find irritating) is that there's a difference between being a bit of an autist (guilty as charged) and diagnosable as autistic (I doubt that.).
That said, truly kindred spirits (instead of "tolerable enough") have been hard to come by in my experience. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, was too much of a nerd to fit in with the redneck kids, my family situation could be summed up as "Hillbilly Elegy with the details scrambled and maybe a bit worse." (Something it took me too long to learn: When middle-class Millennials gather and complain about their families, they don’t actually want to hear about traumatic stuff. Dropping a nuke and insta-winning the dysfunctional family olympics makes you a party pooper. Likewise, women who want to hear about your mommy issues more than you want to talk about them usually have bad intentions.), and somewhere along the way the teachers decided that I was “talented and gifted”, I reformed from being “likely to wind up dead or in jail” to “reasonable success story who is gainfully employed and lacks a criminal record”, and “talented and gifted” wound up being my escape at 15.
The one place I really fit in was a residential high school aimed at “gifted” STEM students. Sure, I quickly learned that I don’t care much for math or science, but I was good enough to pass with Bs and history and English teachers need pets as well. The student body weren’t truly brilliant for the most part (nor was I), but they were comfortably above-average (smarter than state-school undergrads, at least) for the most part and many were sufficiently weirder than I was that I passed for normal by the standards of that place. Was it fun? Yes. Does isolating a bunch of weirdos into a boarding school for three years and indulging their proclivities help make them less weird? LMFAO no. Some years later my favorite English teacher told me that I was the smartest person she’d ever taught (confirmed by her kids, who were amused/relieved to discover that I liked drinking beer and bullshitting just like them; on a side note being raised by a teacher of gifted kids with an excessive regard for intelligence has to have been a trip. I hope she never told them that she adopted a Chinese and an Indian because she was afraid that the local pool of white kids up for adoption would turn out to be dumb white trash.). Why? I don’t know. I guess she’d never encountered someone who was literate and also mechanically-inclined.
I guess the way I would describe my life as an excessively-online weirdo is that I find myself living in a world where people rarely get my references (and TBF I barely watch TV or Movies/wasn’t into Star Wars, Star Trek, or Harry Potter so I don’t get theirs either). Read books? Too bad. No one’s ever heard of my favorite novelist (that would be Lionel Shriver); they’re too busy reading 50 Shades of whatever. Favorite band? No one I meet has heard of Dog Fashion Disco or The Dillinger Escape Plan. I could go on but it is what it is, and I at least like football and cars enough to have something less obscure or hoe scaring to talk about.
If you want a pro-tip to level up your social skills in a hurry and have the time to spare, get a side gig working the door or barbacking a night or few at a place where people you want to be around (or at least don’t despise) like to drink. Being an acquired taste (I’m probably guilty of that.) doesn’t preclude making friends, bar patrons are a captive audience, and you’ll be forced to at least LARP as a normal person. Every once in a while you might find someone actually interesting to talk to! You’re right about time being of the essence, though. I’m 34 and the place I live (an SEC college town, and it’s summer so it’s pretty dead right now) probably doesn’t help, but I presently find myself in an episode of “Do Millennials even leave their house anymore?” I go to the bars and pretty much everyone I run into are either undergraduates or old and half of my friend group moved somewhere else after covid (a mix of people getting shaken out of their complacent lives as overpaid service industry types by the shutdowns and the town getting annoyingly expensive to live in as out of state student money gentrifies the place relative to the crappy local white collar job market).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor".
Being the best of a bad bunch isn't good enough (and it isn't as if the EU and commonwealth don't also have tons of immigrants, so we can't blame nativists for their poor performance). Unless I'm missing something, real GDP growth in the US was worse in the 2000s (and far too much of that growth went to the healthcare sector) than it was in the 80s and 90s and has been thoroughly mediocre since. Aside from the post-covid rebound in 2021 the average Millennial has never seen real GDP growth exceed 3% during their working lives.
Of course, thanks to the fact that federal spending has grown far faster than the economy during the last 25 years, VA-7 is doing better than most.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
FWIW, as a 2/3 Trump voter (albeit in a red state, so I knew my vote didn't matter and just thought it would be funny if he won the popular vote) I'm generally bored with the Epstein stuff and wouldn't be surprised if he was in it or if he was covering for others in his circle.
I mean, he's more Ross Perot and Bill Clinton than he is Pat Buchanan (so the immigration restrictionists should be expect to be betrayed), even if he was clever enough to ape the latter for politics' sake.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Yeah, I forgot about Fetterman. My Fox News watching boss (a normie not-online Gen X Trump voter with, yes, a goatee) mentioned offhand that he kind of likes the guy since he had his stroke.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Human Bio-diversity is a thing.
Unfortunately, you aren’t really allowed to talk about these things in polite company, but most people fundamentally understand this.
Thanks to social sorting by occupation/income/class/education I'm not sure that HBD is that obvious to your average layman. The kind of black person that hangs out in lefty college educated millennial circles is not the sort that drives an Altima with a fake paper tag. If anything, your average college educated white millennial might be more likely to know/be related to some embarrassingly white trash types than they would the average ghetto-dweller. Pro football players are supermajority black, but high school football players and more broadly football fans more closely reflect the demographics of the sort of places that are into it.
To give a Trump-coded example I work for a trucking company in the deep south whose employees are almost entirely black and white, and of the pre Ellis Island variety at that. Your HBD guy would argue that our black employees are in fact an above-average sample of the black population of AL/MS/GA while the whites we have mostly aren't (More accurately, there's an age gap. Our white employees are mostly older/from a time where college education wasn't that common and trucking was more widely considered a good job. Our average office guy was a trucker for a decade or few before they switched to the office.) but IRL it looks like a place where "90s colorblindness" (aka. the normie Trump voter position) is accurate. The black and white men (and it's all men) I work with are largely the same: high school educated/some college at most, very Southern/rural-coded, married or divorced with children (Educated incels would rage at the fact that fatass truckers can get laid and they can't.), of average intelligence, and somewhere between fat and fat as hell for the most part. The drivers (and frankly a lot of the office guys; I was hired into the office with no trucking experience based in part on the expectation that as a college educated white guy I'd have superior computer skills) might not be the brightest guys, but we pay well above-average for trucking so we get the kind who are experienced and by and large have their shit together (especially the owner/operators).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
The mustache/goatee combo might be slightly right-coded because it’s popular with certain types of boomers and early Xers, but even that’s a weak indicator.
In my experience goatees are incredibly Trump-coded, but that's mostly because they seem to be almost universal among (mostly) high-school educated Gen Xers and the sort of Millennials (almost always blue collar) that wear them. On that note the only politician I can think of off the top of my head with a goatee is Chip Roy.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I think beards have become somewhat obesity/soy coded at this point thanks to too many out of shape guys using them to cover up a poor/mediocre jawline. On that note it works for JD Vance and very much does not for Ted Cruz (and it probably wouldn't even if Ted Cruz could grow one; he just needs to embrace his inner Gen Xer and stick with a goatee. See Chip Roy.).
There is a generational bit to it though. I've gone with a beard and just a moustache (the latter briefly because I thought it was hilarious how much I looked like a carbon-copy of my maternal grandfather) and the female millennial bartender was very much pro beard (and is dating a bearded lefty soylennial) while the zoomer barbacks (most of whom can't grow either) complemented the moustache.
As a Southerner who lives in Dixie Alley it was hard not to be brought back to 4/27/11 by the news coverage.
It's different when it's your family and your town where they're spray-painting X's on houses. I was in Tuscaloosa that evening, a student delivering pizza, and the level of destruction in the impacted areas (20% of the city, but more like 50% of my store's delivery area) and suffering inflicted upon victims was beyond description. Funny enough I'd spent much of the day worried about my family in north Alabama because they'd been hit earlier.
As you say, life is fragile, fate is capricious, and weather awareness only goes so far. To their credit the meteorologists got it right that day and managed to convey "This is going to be bad." in a way that penetrated typical Southern skepticism about storm warnings. Still, when you're talking about EF-4s and EF-5s there comes a point that not much short of a bunker is going to save you.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
As someone who was in Tuscaloosa when we were hit earlier that year I chalk the local nonchalance up to a few things. Aside from the over-prevalence of false alarms it's hard to really comprehend what "this happens" means unless it happens to you. I shrugged it off as a joke even as I was dodging an EF-4 in my car delivering pizzas until I was rummaging around bombed out parts of town with my friend whose survival had suddenly been in doubt looking for his friends because communications were pretty much totally gone. I learned something about myself that week: It's easy enough for me to be personally brave or at least unconcerned with my safety enough to do something stupid like volunteer to take a delivery knowing full and well that there was a tornado on the ground. Holding it together in the face of people who'd lost something to everything and who'd only been guilty of being less fortunate than I was in the space of a few minutes was not so easy. The sense of suffering and apocalypse was overwhelming and not something I hope to witness again.
People were understandably more obedient toward the weather people for some years after (and to the meteorologists' credit they got it right on 4/27/11) but over time I guess you're going to be a worry-wart or not. Maybe my take isn't the healthiest, but it's this: If it's an EF-3 or less you're unlikely to get hit in the first place and probably will survive even if your house gets trashed. If it's an EF-4/5 after having seen brick apartment buildings and schools flattened I feel like there's not much point in worrying because unless you've got a bunker to climb into whether or not you survive is more a question of fate than weather awareness.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Heh, it's been kind of entertaining watching Shriver wander from The Guardian to The Spectator over the last decade, her boomer 2nd wave feminist liberalism (and I don't mean that as an insult) not sufficiently hip for the contemporary left and she too stubborn to get with the times.
I suppose what makes her fun to read is her uncompromisingly brutal honesty (Critics would just call her uncompromisingly brutal, but hey, some people have a taste for bitter.) combined with a scalpel-like vocabulary. It doesn't matter if the story is especially great (some are; some aren't) when the telling is that fun to read. That several of her novels draw from personal disquiet only add to the charm. I only later learned that So Much for That (an over-the-top takedown of American healthcare) was actually based on a close friend's death from mesothelioma.
To be frank she reminds me so much of my favorite English teacher from high school (a unique, highly intelligent, and, yes, profoundly bitter person; we were kindred spirits in that regard) that I sent her my copy of We Need to Talk About Kevin after reading it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Mania by Lionel Shriver. Her novels are fun in a way that's hard to describe.
Welp, I guess I have a project car now.
The friend of mine who recently passed away left me his car. It's nicer than my car on paper (nine years newer and with 90K miles whereas mine is pushing 250K), but I didn't love it when I owned it, and while mechanically sound enough it is beat to hell with loads of stupid body damage, and the interior is trashed (In my friend's defense, one of the things I hated about the car is that it has a white leather interior that looked great when new but is extremely difficult to keep clean, and the grade of "leather" Mazda used isn't winning any points in my book for durability.).
I'm in the middle of a bare-minimum cleanup (The driver's seat is hopeless and the back seat is rough, but the rest came out fairly well and leather conditioner smells much nicer than stale dog.), and working on a to-do list. I'm not sure what I want to do with it but, keep it or sell it, this pig is need of some lipstick.
In terms of relatively low-budget fixes, I need to do the following:
Fix the rear bumper/replace the broken tail light. I'm fairly confident that the huge dent can be popped out if the bumper cover is removed, and you have to remove the tail lights to remove the bumper cover, so I've ordered the tail light.
Replace the cabin air filter. I did this when I first bought the car from a chain smoker, but holy crap that was 7 years ago. Part ordered, and my fun observation is that cigarette smoke is easier to clean up than dog hair (It was a shorthaired dog.).
Comprehensively finish removing the mud from when the car was driven into a sinkhole. Time consuming, but free.
Repair the touch screen. Mazda touch screens are notorious for the digitizer cracking/delaminating and causing issues (namely, ghost touches that cause the radio to go crazy), but a knockoff replacement is cheap and the job doesn't look that hard. I've ordered the part.
Rotate the two good tires to one axle, get two new tires, and an alignment. Hopefully nothing in the front end is broken, but the absence of clunking is an encouraging sign.
The front brake rotors are warped enough to be irritating and are likely too worn to be turned, but hey the rotors are cheap on Rock Auto. The brake fluid also needs to be flushed because the brakes are even mushier than I remember them being. Low priority.
The Y-pipe/rear muffler either needs to bent back into shape or replaced such that it sits in the hangers correctly and doesn't squeak over bumps.
The driver's side door seal needs to be replaced because it is torn and makes for some annoying road noise.
The LED headlights need to be removed and replaced with the stock halogens. Those were bright enough and the fans for the LEDs make an annoying humming noise.
Things I am unlikely to fix:
The big scrape on the bottom/side of the car. You almost have to look for it and this would require real repair work.
The driver side door skin is damaged from where the fender was smashed into it. I replaced the fender to fix that because it was surprisingly cheap to buy a whole new painted fender, but a whole new door skin is not cheap, and again it's another one of those things where you kind of have to look for the damage.
Almost all of the undercarriage plastic is missing. Added together, that's a few hundred bucks worth of plastic, I never noticed a difference in fuel economy or road noise to justify it, and why would I pay to make changing the oil harder?
The front bumper has its share of scrapes, but fuck it it's an eight year old car. It doesn't have to be perfect, just not look like and feel shit.
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