No, this is not about any tragic mishaps. . . I didn’t have any rough encounters with telephone poles. . . (although it might actually help the current state of my car.)
No, I’m just lamenting the fact that my car is hideous-looking right now, both inside and out. The inside is almost always awful, although it has been particularly ghastly as of late- but what really astonishes me is how terrible the outside of it looks as well. To look at my hood you would think that I had just driven the car through a Louisiana swamp.
As for the inside, there is an unbelievable amount of garbage piling up – so much so that I half expect to find a newspaper proclaiming “Dewey Defeats Truman” on the floor, once I dig things out. Right now, you can’t see any of the floor at all . . . in neither the front nor back. Even the floor of the driver’s side is cluttered with all kinds of stuff, although I do take pains to keep the brakes and gas pedal unobstructed. ( I have been told that one wants these to be in good operating order, and that trying to brake with a Dominos Pizza box getting in the way can complicate matters in ways best avoided.)
I know that on the fairly long list of things about me that frustrate my long-suffering wife, the State of my Car is very close to the top of the list. . . and thus far my heartfelt remorse has not advanced me past general hang-wringing and apology-proffering and on to actual modification of habits. And at the rate I’m going, frankly it never will. But how unfortunate is that, especially when it makes it basically impossible for me to pick up a passenger in my car. (I’m lucky to fit myself in!) I felt especially bad about that this morning when I drove on to the Carthage campus and spotted my colleague Amy Haines walking towards the fine arts building from a very distant parking place. . . and I could no more offer her a ride with me than I could have burrowed a tunnel from Carthage back to Racine. I honestly don’t mind the mess for me . . . that’s pretty evident by now . . . . but I do mind when that mess starts to make doing basic favors like giving someone a ride utterly impossible. But can this be turned around? After all, I’m someone who weighed 271 at the start of 2008 and 204 by the start of 2009, so I’m clearly someone who can throw out an old set of habits for a new set . . . but somehow I look to this particular matter with far less confidence, and I don’t know why. Is it that I secretly prize my car and what it looks like as demonstrating what a creative genius I am? Or am I really so oblivious that I can allow the junk to pile up until it towers above me like the pyramids of Egypt and not really notice it and be bothered by it? It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that this is behavior that you might find mentioned in a mental health textbook…. not in the chapter about mass murderers, mind you, but where they talk about people who spend weeks at a time in the same clothes and then throw those clothes away and put on something else. I had a relative like that and I sometimes think that my Messy Car Cluelessness (or MCC as I’m sure it will start to be known) is some faint echo of her problems.
Anyway, my project for the weekend is to do some long awaited excavating, so that I can see even a small patch of the floor again. It will be a thrilling sight, I’m sure- if for no other reasons than because it will be a fleeting glimpse at best.