Were the Mid 1990s the Final Era of Quality Car Construction?

Today I bought a car, and tomorrow I am petrified of going all the way to the Registry of Motor Vehicles and being told of some past infraction I wasn’t aware of. Government offices kick my paranoia nerve into overdrive. I just realized that the address on my driver’s license has been out of date for years…maybe they’ve been trying to contact me with some important announcement (or punishment) and I missed it!

The gears of the world are sharper these days, and there are more of them. To put it another way: there is more than enough rope out there for all of us to hang ourselves. And we need to be careful to know where all our important papers are, at all times. I would like to scan all of mine and put them on a digital device--perhaps the new Windows Tablet!--and have the thing short out from a lightning strike during a thunderstorm. Everything gone. And when the goons come knocking, tell them I’ve got nothing left. I went and shredded the originals, to save room in my office. Now what are you going to do, lock me up? You have free health care in prison, right?”

And all the while they’re laughing inside, because the NSA has copies of my documents and has had them for years. But they don’t need to tell me that. The real infraction is not knowing where my own copies are.

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A Honda Accord, 16 years old, old enough to drive itself. We test-drove four cars before that, including a 2003 Civic hybrid and a 2002 Volvo Station Wagon. None of them felt as snappy and responsive as this old beater. If it continues to drive as well for the next several years as it did today, I'll be a happy man, even without a CD player or air conditioning. It was the first car we looked at all day that didn't have a check engine light flashing or a dead battery, and it cost a third of the others. 

I'll be grateful for the low price again tomorrow, when we pay the sales tax. 

I've already ordered the Haynes service manual, thinking maybe this will be my tinker car. I always wanted to learn more about the Honda Civic I used to drive; maybe if I'd been more proactive with it I could have learned to switch out the engine myself, instead of selling it to a ruffian.      

Seems a little weird to be stepping into an even older car, but the mileage is low: 145,000, compared to the 190,000+ of everything else we tested. Despite some rust on the muffler, it's amazingly quiet--so quiet that at idle, we thought it had stalled. 

The modern cars I've been in lately always feel tinny and cheap. The Chevy Malibu we took to Maine was comfortable, but always felt it was one bump away from rust and ruin. The Nissan Versa I rented for a drive into the city sounded like an asthmatic wheezing into a tin can, and it got pushed around the road by the slightest gusts. As I white-knuckled it home, I thought, at least I'll get some good mileage from this lightweight. Then I filled up the tank and did the math: 22 mpg. Might as well have taken an SUV! My co-worker's big Ford gets better mileage than that. But it, too, has an engine that sounds like it's wheezing away at RPMs inappropriate for its speed. 

Is that just the way of it, now? Little tinny motors in all size cars being pushed towards the red-line to make up for their diminutive size? Each time we test drove another car we went back to our disintegrating Volvo and thought, gosh, this still feels nicer. 

And then we found the Accord, with its welded aftermarket gearshift handle and its AM/FM radio, and it just felt healthy.

I don't know, maybe it's because I'm used to ancient cars, so that anything post millennium feels off (lightweight, chintzy, plastic, disposable) to me. The Wife describes the feeling these new cars provide as "sitting in a marshmallow." Overstuffed upholstery envelops you and holds you in place; meanwhile a tidal wave of plastic in the dashboard, center console, and side-panels encroaches on your legs, and overwhelms you with childish buttons and needless distraction. And when you actually drive these things, they twitch and judder, hesitating and then surging with each switch of the automatic transmission. It’s style over substance. And what makes it worse is that the style is so tacky.

It seems strange to me that the nineties should be the last bastion of decent car-quality. But even one of the dealers told us, "Yeah, we'll give you something on trade for your old Volvo. People are always looking for parts for those, because they don't want to let them go." 

In the end we decided to keep it.

Corona Special Birthday Surprise

Coming to grips with new-fangled technologies.

Those glasses were empty when I started, I promise

Next to a younger (and fatter) descendent.

On Going in Circles

 

Return From A Voyage

 

Stones mark the way down.

Climbing in to the clouds.

We could see our house from here! The town of Bar Harbor, and Bar Island, which is only accessible at low tide.

Sister and I at the Summit

Don’t Do It—For A Better Tomorrow

I’m not entirely sure what I was getting at with the last post, but I think I was prodding at the idea of renunciation as rebellion. On the one hand, it seems like boycott is the lazy man’s path to social change. (What could be easier than doing nothing?) On the other, it sure seems like there’s a lot of evil we could undo by just not participating.

Don’t buy those blood diamonds, for instance.

Don’t buy tickets to the Hollywood movies that fund the MPAA’s war on the Internet.

Don’t drive (and don’t buy gas) if there’s any other conceivable way of getting where you need to go.

Don’t use credit cards for routine purchases. Why support the banks with more transaction fees than you have to?

Don’t buy expensive gifts on Christmas—focus on making things for the people you love, instead.

Don’t click on those banner ads. If nobody did it, they would go away.

Don’t say yes to aggressive sales pitches—ever. If they were rendered completely ineffective, you wouldn’t have to listen to them any more, and the poor employees of faceless corporations wouldn’t be required to put their voices behind things they don’t believe in to keep their jobs. Corporations could go back to producing items of genuine value that people legitimately want to buy.

Don’t purchase the extended warranty or the protection plan. Ever. They exist to make money, not to protect you, and they just give the company an excuse to shovel more obsolescing  shit into your hands, ticking to a break-down just past the expiration of your contract.

Don’t pay for that insurance policy. It’s powering a system that exists to take in more money than it pays out, while driving the cost of services out of reach of the people who need them most. Health insurance, auto insurance, home insurance—isn’t it interesting that we’re legally required to pay these? If they had real value, would we be required to buy them at the point of a gun? Free market, my foot!

For god’s sake, don’t take that loan! Why would you pay interest on crap you you didn’t need in the first place?

And for the love of God don’t go into debt for that college education—which, thanks to the ubiquity of student lending, costs more than a house, without providing a single square inch of shelter.

Even if you have the money, think twice and then twice and then eight times more before you say yes to that college education. It’s an ultimately meaningless piece of paper in a world where everyone has one. Wouldn’t you be better off using those four to eight years building up work experience and saving for a house?

Start saying “no” to bullshit and you discover there’s very little left in our daily experience to say yes to.

Ah, but think of what we can do then, as we start seeking out real relationships and experiences to treasure.

Fountain Pens, Retro-Tech, and Rebellion

AHA! I’ve broken out The Fountain Pen again! It’s a relic from early in The Marriage, from a year when each of us was delighted, on Christmas Morning, to discover we had bought the other a pen. We were each going to be writers, you see.

Actually, come to think of it, this was before  the marriage—what you could call the pre-marital honeymoon and cohabitation phase.

My Good Lord, were we ever so young?

I bought her a tortoiseshell Parker from Staples. She out-did me with a Schaeffer from the Levenger catalog, a semi-translucent Lucite barrel with brass bands and a 14k gold nib. I’ve used it so much over the years that the tip is visibly worn on one side. This is a small sign of age, compared to what my body shows: grey hair at the temples, laugh-lines around the eyes, spectacles on the face with a corresponding restriction on my driver’s license. This pen has, in fact, remained constant through tremendous change: seven different addresses, six different employers, three novels in countless drafts, summers of sailing and winters on skis.

Now I find myself coming back to the tools of that time. Including this one.

While so much else has changed. Back then, we lived an isolated, 19th century style life in one of the smaller towns on the lower Cape. In a rebellion against the suburban landscape, we survived without a car, riding our bicycles where we needed to go, or walking if there was snow on the sidewalks. There was no Internet, not in the town where we lived, not at a price we could afford. What there were, were plenty of A.O.L. floppy discs coming through the mail, handy to re-format and use as backups for the WordPerfect documents I wrote on The Wife’s laptop, a machine that had cost her $3000 several years earlier, in college. (For several decades there, it seemed that a new computer always cost $3000.) This laptop was a revelation to me, as was the bubblejet printer that could output any font in any size—bringing home to me for the first time the full significance of the Kitchen Table Publishing Revolution. And then for some reason I never entirely embraced it. I wasn’t ready to abandon my Olympia and Remington desktop typewriters. (Later on I did abandon them, to my even later regret.)

We lived our lives in a sort of bubble, getting our news from newspapers purchased at the Superette a couple of miles away, or from the magazines we picked up at the Post Office just down the street from the Superette. Serious entertainment would come from the books we bought in binges from second hand shops in Provincetown or Wellfleet, when friends were kind enough to take us there in cars—or lend their cars to us. (Have you ever wondered if people read Shakespeare for fun? That used to be us, sitting by the fire, arguing over who got to be King Lear and who had to take on all three daughters.) Lighter entertainment came through the TV we had, which was one of those wood-encased models on wheels (the wood would later catch fire) coupled to a VCR. If we walked for two miles in the opposite direction of the Superette, we could reach the Video Empire, which, despite the grand scale implied by its name, was actually a tiny little rental shop in a four-store strip mall. This is where we encountered the BBC renditions of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, and considered ourselves cultured. But on the nights when we didn’t have the energy to pedal to the rental place, we could always pick up one snowy channel whose signal somehow made its way across Cape Cod Bay from Boston. This is how we discovered Judge Judy, as well as a particularly egregious TV adaptation of Conan the Barbarian. Pickings were slim. So other nights we just watched our bootleg recording of Young Frankenstein, which eventually caught fire.

But now look at us. We live in a small house in an isolated Cape Cod town. Well, that hasn’t really hasn’t changed. We have a car, too. But we drive it as little as possible thanks to the tremendous cost of gasoline and repair. So transportation hasn’t changed much either. Instead of the 1890s, we embrace the values of the 1930s. It’s a big step, even if we’re still completely out of our time.

But we’re connected. There are six computers in the house, and a few of them were manufactured just last decade. More importantly, we’ve got a router, and a broadband connection—and this changes life entirely. Now, we can purchase goods from around the world and have them delivered a couple days later. We can watch movies and television programs on demand. The answer to any question we have comes to us through our “Glowing Mother”, The Wife’s nickname for Google piped on to an LCD.  We can follow political revolutions as they unfold, absorbing photos, videos, and reports delivered by citizen journalists and activists around the planet. We can know it all. And if anyone was listening, we could tell it all.

Yet I’m sitting here scratching away with a fountain pen, just as I was all those years ago. Is this the sign of some mental defect? An unwillingness to adapt? Or worse, could this be a sign of intransigence, resistance, incipient luddite revolutionism?

There was a banner in my High School gym that exhorted, “Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way.” Whenever I saw this, I was happy to step to the sidelines, ignore the game, and hang out in my own little mental workshop. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, not playing dodge ball. And I was always proud of this rejection. I could rebel by doing nothing. I was your modern day Thoreau.

But today—isn’t this what everyone is doing, with their tablets and their smart-phones? Today, isn’t it the crowd that’s tuning out the big game and plugging in to some kind of interior monologue?

Granted, they’re not alone. They’re texting, reading watching—communicating. But they’re taking themselves out of the local struggle and plugging into an echo-chamber of increasingly-fine-selected special interests. They’re skimming personal-tailored newsfeeds to reinforce their preconceptions and world views, just the way Dick Cheney insisted on having the TV in his hotel room pre-tuned to his precious Fox News. They are alone without being alone. They ignore the game and rebel, but they’re paying subscription fees to participate in the revolution.

I suppose this is what the free market is meant for. Every decision about where to spend our time and money is a sort of revolution, a rejection of what we’d supported before. A bigger market means more options, more chances for satisfaction. This keeps the money flowing, since a system with more options makes it more difficult for people to withdraw from the system entirely. The free market means you can disagree and still be welcome. So long as you spend money, you’re still one of us.

Even pirated music has to come across subscriber-supported lines. Even the pirate’s modem is plugged into electric utilities.

Even this fountain pen, with its gold nib—mined, no doubt, in some miserable hole by long-suffering hands—the use of such an object is a participation in a system, and represents my membership on the team of consumers. Come to think of it, I am on my last ink cartridge, and must soon head to the corporate store, or click Buy Now on the corporate website to acquire more. I’m not opting out. I’m paying in with everybody else.

But no. With this pen, there is some rebellion. It’s in the longevity. This pen has put down half a million words by now. It’s crossed out just as many. It was purchased once, as a token of love, and used hard for a decade and a half. I may have bought cartridge upon cartridge, but I’ve bought no other fountain pen in 15 years. And there’s a rebellion in this monogamy which just turns me on, somehow.

ITAM Excuses Just In Time

Is it the end of International Typewriter Appreciation month already? Did I miss it?

No? I still have time?  Thank goodness.  Better bust out the old stable of tools…

You’ll pardon the lack of a scanner, I hope. These pages were all photographed with natural light, under a skylight. A little crude, but I rather like the gradients of light washing across them. And if I wanted perfection, I wouldn’t have bothered with the typewriters at all.

The final draft was from the Royal Safari. I did a rough copy on my Lettera 32.  Remember the days of editing by hand? I still find that this is the best way for me to polish my thoughts, and in many cases I discover I actually had more to say than I thought the first time through. My rule of thumb has always been that if I cut more than I add with each revision, it’s all right.

I’m not sure I got the balance right on this one.

(Kind of reminds me why they invented double-spacing.)

The Lettera 32 is a nimble little machine for rough drafts and getting the ideas out. It doesn’t weigh much more than the IBM keyboard.  And I’ve actually got room for it on my desk with all the other junk.  I’ve just never been entirely satisfied with the output. The type always comes out light and grainy, even with a fresh ribbon.

The Royal Safari is a bit slower. Type too fast, and the letters start to bunch up. But the typeface is just right, somewhere between pica and elite, just ornate enough and just classical enough. So if you can get into the right rhythm with it, it’ll give you a sharp final copy.

He’s the obligatory shot of my treasured M-Series.

Is that grime or patina on the corners and between the keys? Doesn’t matter—it’s history.

Speaking of history, here’s the old Mercedes we had, back in the day.

Probably the finest car we ever owned, or ever will own. It may have gotten 14 miles to the gallon, but boy, were those ever stylish miles. $2000 for a new timing chain was where we drew the line. Sold it to an eager enthusiast for what we’d paid for it years before.

She’s still running, though. I saw her in a local parking lot, with the same obsolete security sticker on the back of the rear-view mirror. I’m glad she’s in good hands.

Good machines, you take care of them, they stick around.