So my computer has been acting up and I took it into the shop, got it back a few days later, and had to take it back again the next day. I’m not sure when I’ll get it back, but I guess now’s a good time as any to announce that I’m taking a semi-hiatus from the internet for a while.

Beyond checking my e-mail occasionally, and using google to find out information, I’m just not interested in doing much else right now.

Since I’ve been without my computer for the past week, my quality of life has been drastically improved, and I’ve noticed a considerably better peace of mind.

There are some people I was having correspondences with, and I’ll get back to that whenever my computer returns, but don’t expect to see much posting here on the blog.

It seems to me that the human race would be so much more advanced if only our brains didn’t spend 30% of their energy coming up with new clever rationalizations for things we know we shouldn’t do.

It’s just so much wasted energy and so much ignorance. It affects us all.

If you try to get rid of one rationalization, your brain just makes another. It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole (there’s good early training for animal cruelty, by the way).

And so if you’re really brave and really dedicated, you just keep at it. You have to. You make progress, you get better. But those things are still there, and they creep up when you aren’t paying attention.

How can we bo so vulnerable, so self-deceiving, so afraid?

Maybe some time you reach a point where your brain realizes that it should just work with you instead of against you. I don’t know. I hope so, for everyone’s sake.

Little known fact about me: I am the king of putting a tea-bag in a cup of hot water and then entirely forgetting about it for at least 45 minutes.

Because I’m largely a nocturnal person, I live in a safe-ish neighborhood, I need exercise, and the temperature is awesome outside, I just psyched myself up to go on a good night-time stroll. I stepped out the door and off the steps, then it instantly started raining.

I’m going to assume that the universe is giving me permission to just be lazy and not exercise today.

Whenever I wake up and go straight to my computer the light hurts my eyes, so I find myself instinctively turning down the volume instead of the brightness.  It’s like, ow, that light is so loud!  My eyes are confused.

There was a moment tonight around 2am as I was getting home from work.  I parked my car on the street in front of my house, and as I oozed out of the open door I involuntarily looked up to the sky.  There were stars, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even noticed them being there.

I walked in front of my car and a little bit down the street to the mailbox.  I hit the alarm button on my keychain remote, the car beeped and the lights came on.  I saw my shadow thrown down the asphalt in front of me with the same kind of sudden violence with which a newborn baby is thrown into the world; it stretched as far as it could reach, perhaps trying to get away.   I noticed the texture of the rocks in the road and driveway as I walked to the front door, then the lights went out and all was dark again, save the stars.

There was a moment, as I said, a brief moment where I thought I was about to experience a poetic rush, an awakening of sorts, but the feeling passed…and everything was perfectly normal and the world continued to go on like it always does.

It’s always when you’re with someone that you’re not with them…and vice versa.

Nothing confuses me more than the times when I’m looking forward to seeing someone so much, I think about her constantly, I can’t wait to see her, the longing consumes me…and then we are together and it’s like it’s no big deal, we just talk to each other and we play our parts—we connect, sure, but not at the deep level I built up in my mind.  It’s like, now that we are together we suddenly can’t see each other, we see only our ideas and our selves that we are trying to project.

There are a million blocks in our way; when we are apart we can rise above the blocks as if they do not exist, but in each other’s presence we can not dream of breaking through them; they are so ubiquitous that we forget they are there, and we wonder why this isn’t what we expected.  It’s too real, we are too scared, we need to protect ourselves.  And then the minute we part, the old longing sets in, there is no fear, and we are truly together again.  Oh yeah, that was it!..but it’s too late by then.

Apart, we know exactly how we feel; together, sitting next to one another, it is all terrifyingly uncertain.

How exhausting.

I went to the thrift store today.

I found 3 new pairs of jeans.  I’ve dropped two sizes in the last few months and my current jeans have been getting very baggy and uncomfortable.  These new jeans are kinda tight, but in a good way.  The ladies are gonna be like, ooh boy how you get in them pants?!

A little girl stuck her head under the door while I was in the dressing room, standing there in my boxers.  I said, “Hello, dear.  Do you know it’s not nice to watch people while they’re changing clothes?”  She said, “Okay,” and continued doing it.  Then she asked her mom if this was a restroom and why there was a boy in the restroom.

I also found an awesome warm working jacket with a nice faux-fur lining for $5.  Score.

And to top it all off: the jean jacket.  I’ve never had one before.  It’s pretty much bad-ass, y’all.  There were cute sorority girls there looking for Halloween costume stuff, like terrible Hawaiian shirts.  As one was passing by, I stopped her and said, “Hey, would you mind giving me your opinion on this jacket?  I’ve never had one before and I’m just not sure I’m a jean jacket guy.”  She said, “Yeah, I’d say you’re a jean jacket guy….”

Yes.

Last night, my roommate, Wes, and I went bar-hopping.  We were sitting at a normal bar called Normal Bar having a conversation with each other when this half-drunk guy just sat down at the table with us and used the candle to light his cigarette.  He was young, 28-30, with pale skin and tightly cut blond hair.

He listened to us talk for a while with his head down, just nodding, the way drunks often do while they’re waiting for an opening to get in your conversation.  I was telling Wes that I wished someone would come up to me and argue against my vegan lifestyle by saying, “Hey, but if some animals die and decompose into the ground, their bodies fertilize plants, so basically you’re just eating animals anyway whenever you eat plants.”  It’s a solid argument.

The guy (who we will call John) got interested.  It turns out he had a lot to say about plants because he studied horticulture in college.  We heard about how plants had feelings, and they grew differently if you surrounded them with angry music or happy music.  But he was very interested in why I would be vegan.

“Now, I’m a good ol’ Southern boy myself, so I could never not eat meat and I like to hunt and fish and all that stuff.  So I could never go vegan, but I’m just really interested in your reasons for it, and I just don’t understand where you get protein from…”

Spinach came up, among other things, and he said, “What?  You can get protein from spinach?”  I replied, “Yeah man, elephants are pretty strong, and all they eat is leaves.  And what does Popeye eat when he wants to get all buffed up?  Spinach!  The only problem with spinach, though, is that it’s protein only goes to your forearms, so if you want to bulk up elsewhere you need to eat other things.”

Wes and I, both, were having a bit of a laugh between ourselves as we dealt with this random guy who had walked up to interrupt our conversation.

John talked a little more about the vegan thing, then at some point he mentioned that he had been in the military, and had also grown up in it.  I was interested in this.  I wanted to commiserate with John over this fact because I had also grown up in the military.

“My dad and grandpa were in the Air Force, my other grandpa was a Marine, and my brother’s in the Navy,” I said.  ”So, what branch were you in?”

“I was in the Air Force…but don’t ask me what I did because you don’t want to know.”

Knowing what the Air Force’s role is in these wars, I was pretty sure I knew exactly what he did, judging by the way he said that.  But he was wrong: I did want to know.  You can’t just say something like that and expect people to let it go.

‘So come on, it’s okay, what’d you do?”

“Well, I mostly did recon.  I scoped out targets, marked them out, and called in air strikes.”

“You mean, like drones?”

“Yeah, yeah, a lot of that,” he said, and a somber mood started to overtake him.

I just said, “Oh, alright,” and maintained a calm appearance, but in my head I was buzzing.  I didn’t know what to do.  If you read other things I’ve written on my blog, you know that the drone issue is a big deal to me.  John went inside to get another drink, and I told Wes, “Man, I don’t know what to do.  Like I don’t really want to talk about this but I also really do.  I’m violently opposed to what this guy does…I don’t know how to handle this.”

Well it didn’t matter how I felt about it because he came back and started unloading.  It seems the Pandora’s box had been opened.  ”I mean, I don’t feel good about what I done,” he said.  ”I done lots of bad things, to bad people.  I just get on my radio and say some coordinates, and then bam, they’re out,” he said, while using his right hand to indicate a bomb or rocket hitting at the back of his neck.  He used the phrase, “bad things to bad people” many times during our conversation.  It’s the justification, the mantra.

He had seemed drunk before, but now he was dead sober.

He went on: “It just kills me though, because I’m a person who saves people, who protects people.  My mom was a nurse and my sister’s a doctor, so helping people is just in my blood.  That’s what I do now, I’m a paramedic.  I want to save people now, not kill them.”  From the way he said this, it was clear to me that John was trying to make up for all the people he’s killed—lots of innocent civilians among the bad people, I’m sure—and that he even seemed to have two tallies running in his head: people saved vs. people killed.

“It’s not like I want to kill people.  I don’t go to bed at night thinking, yeah, I got ‘em!  Sometimes I can’t even sleep at night when I think about all the people whose deaths are on my head.  It’s like, I have this one skill, and I can use it to keep people from dying.  But I have this other skill, and all it’s good for is taking peoples’ lives away.  These are the only two gifts I have.”

“You know, when I was about 15, on till I joined the Air Force when I was 22, I was very political.  I’m a conservative and I would just get all fired up about it, it was all that mattered to me.  That’s why I joined, you know?  But now, after all I’ve seen and all I’ve done, I just don’t care about that any more.  I don’t believe in God, I don’t care about politics.  I just want to help people.  I want to have my own tribe,  just people close to me that I care about and protect.  That’s all that matters to me.  And I don’t want to kill anyone any more, even if they’re bad people.  You know what I’m saying?  I don’t want to kill anyone, for any reason.”

Wes and I didn’t really know what to say to all this.  Neither of us has any way of relating; we’ve never experienced anything close to a dilemma that intense in our lives, never had to deal with the guilt of having killed a person (much less whole groups of people).  But we tried to make him feel better, like anyone would, with a litany of ameliorations: “You didn’t have any choice but to follow orders….You weren’t the one that gave the orders….No one’s against the troops anyway, we’re against the people that started the war and keep it going…You’re a good guy….It’s all in the past and all you can do is look forward….You just did what you had to do, and I’m sure you were protecting your buddies on the field when you called in those strikes.”

“But that’s another thing,” he said.  ”I did protect my buddies out there.  I always protected them, no one I was watching over ever got hurt.  My people were always safe, I always protected them.  Maybe you don’t understand if you haven’t been in combat but that’s all that matters, keeping your friends alive.  I mean, there’s nothing like seeing the guy next to you take a bullet and fall down and bleed out, the sound of it….But then after I came home, I got a call from one of my buddies.  He told me, ‘I got hit, man, I got hit bad.’  He was in a hospital, they’d taken him to the hospital in Germany, but he was too messed up.  And me, I felt this small,” he said as he squinted and looked at his thumb and forefinger held about a centimeter apart.  ”I wanted to save him, but I couldn’t.  I don’t ever want to go back there and I don’t want to kill people no more, but I still want to be able to save my buddies…only now I can’t do anything for them, and it makes me feel so small.”

I looked into his eyes as he said these things and I could feel a vast chasm between myself and him with the things he had done and seen.  Try as I might, I could never cross it; I could never truly understand what it was like.  (I mean, I feel the guilt of murder, which is one of the reasons I went vegan, but that was a choice I had the privilege of being able to make; I wasn’t forced to drop bombs on defenseless villages.  As much as militant animal rights people would like to deny it, there is a huge psychological difference between eating a cheeseburger and blowing human beings up with bombs and rockets.)

This discussion went on for a while, until Wes and I had to leave.  We just tried to let John know that we understood, that we didn’t blame him for anything.  We also tried to be as lighthearted as possible about it, for what it’s worth.  It’s not what we had in mind when we went out to go bar-hopping, but in a way, we were both really excited about watching this guy with all these internal conflicts unload them all right in front of us.  Wes was a sociology major and I was a psychology major, so we were both fascinated; it was like case study gold sitting there in front of us.  If only we had a camera to record it, to show people: look here, even the guys who make it back safe are not okay.

This is what war does to people, even the ones who weren’t on the front lines and in the middle of firefights.  This man, whose real name we never actually got, is going to have to live with the things he’s done for the rest of his life.  It’s going to eat away at him, it’s going to keep him awake at nights.  It’s going to come out when he least wants it, like when he’s trying to have a good time at the bar.  This darkness follows him around like a lead ball chained to his neck, and it probably always will.

I hope he saves a lot more lives.  I hope he can reconcile the war within himself.  I hope he can find peace.

And most of all, I hope we can end these wars as soon as possible.

No doubt, most everyone who owns a car has some kind of mechanic horror story.  My last one, which I might have written of here before, involved a mechanic installing a new radiator and not connecting the hoses right, and then his shop charging me for it twice (all of which was fixed, but at great expense).  Well, allow me to tell you my new one:

As I recently reported on this blog, my car died while waiting at a red light at the busiest intersection in town, during rush hour.  I couldn’t start the car, and I couldn’t get it out of park, so when the tow truck finally came, we had to drag it (painfully) onto the tow platform because we needed to get out of the road and the wheels were locked in park.

I had it towed to IMPORT SERVICE CENTER of Athens, GA, mainly because it was right there at the intersection, but also because it was walking distance from my house and I didn’t have time to call friends and ask them for recommendations on better auto shops.

The guys at ISC discovered that the reason my car died was that the battery was poorly connected.  The cable connectors didn’t fit tightly onto the terminal posts, but someone had stuck paper clips in there as shims (which were unsuccessful).  This is a subplot: Three weeks ago, my battery died.  It was pretty old and I was not surprised.  I usually do batteries myself, but since I was buying it at Auto Zone (the one on Broad St.) and they offered free installation, I decided I might as well save myself the trouble and let “the professionals” do it.  The kid they sent out to do the job obviously had little idea what was going on.  He struck me as rather moronic, but I thought, “This isn’t rocket science, how can he fuck it up?”  He didn’t tell me about how loose the connections were, or that he’d shimmed it with paper clips, as opposed to the $2 post-cover shims they sell there in the store.  So this is the reason my battery died.  We’ll return to this subplot later.

At the shop, they also discovered that my car’s right front CV axle was damaged and needed to be replaced.  One of the mechanics called me while I was in the middle of band practice and told me this, saying that it would cost $500 to replace the axle, which he described as being very badly damaged.  I said, “Um, I’m not an expert, but $500 seems pretty excessive for a CV replacement….”  He responded, “Look, for this particular car, the parts we need alone should cost upwards of $500, so I’d say you’re getting a pretty good deal considering the price we quoted includes labor and everything.”  Being that I was in a situation where I was pressed for time and I also wanted to get my car back (and functional) as soon as possible, I had little choice but to tell them to go ahead and do it.

This morning I got a call from the shop telling me that my car was ready.  The total bill was around $750 (this also included the cost of towing and a brake job I had asked them to do).  I got over there and I looked at the receipt.  On the pricing breakdown, I saw that the amount they charged me for the CV axle was $298.  I asked the mechanic if he still had my old one sitting around, because I wanted to see what was wrong with it—mainly I was interested in finding out if dragging my car with locked wheels onto a tow truck could have anything to do with the damage to the axle, because then I would want to hold Auto Zone responsible for the cost of that repair.

He took me into the garage and I saw the box that the new part had come in, and they had put my old axle in the box.  He picked it up and pointed out the problems.  It looked to me—though, again, I’m no expert—like the CV boot had come off, and they probably could have just replaced that.  This is not what he had described to me on the phone.  On the phone, he said, “The boots are all torn up and there just isn’t any grease at all on those bearings, they’re dry as a bone!”  There was definitely grease on the bearings.  Sure, if I continued to drive it, it would have slung all that grease out, but it wasn’t close to “dry as a bone.”  He said that damage probably wouldn’t have happened during towing, but that we have no way of really knowing.

So after picking my car up from the shop, I took it to Auto Zone because their manager assured me on the phone that they’d fix the problem all up, no cost.  It was a zoo there and it didn’t seem like anybody was in charge so I just waited until finally someone was free to help me.  While I was waiting, I asked one of the clerks to look up the cost on a right front CV axle for my car.  Retail: about $60.

So, the shop had charged me $298 for a part that costs $60 retail, and which they probably got for half as much or less.

I expected some kind of mark-up for convenience, but that is just infuriatingly ludicrous.

Anyway, someone finally came out to mess with my battery, and this person also obviously had no idea what was going on.  She was using a wrench that barely fit the nuts right and stripping them, and she even accidentally bridged the terminals with the wrench and caused sparks to shoot everywhere—which she then proceeded to blame on the battery.  She told one of the other employees that she couldn’t get the terminals to fit tightly and he told her to…wait for it…stick a paper clip in there as a shim.  She was about to do it when I said, “No, absolutely not, you will not fix my car with a paper clip like the last guy did, which has ended up possibly costing me hundreds of dollars and a very bad day.”  She was flustered and just didn’t know what to do, so I walked over to the battery section and picked up the post-cover shims and brought them back and put them in front of her.  ”This is what you will use, you sell these for $2, they are right there in the battery section, and they work much better than a paper clip.”

She couldn’t figure out how to do it right, or she was scared after having sparks shoot out at her, so I had to wait some more for the one guy who seemed to maybe know what he was doing (although he was the one who told her to use a paper clip…he was still the only one who seemed to know anything).  Finally he came to my car and I told him about everything I had been through as he put the post-covers on the battery.  About the paper clip thing, he said, “Yeah the guy who installed it should have told you it wasn’t fitting right.  The paper clips are something we just use for a temporary fix if someone needs to just get their car somewhere and they can’t afford these post-covers.”

What a load of horseshit.  He told that girl to do it, and he didn’t say anything about it being temporary.  And people just needing to get their car somewhere?  Where would they be trying to get it besides a shop or an auto parts store, where it would already be?  And people can’t afford the extra $2 for those post-covers, if it means the battery connectors actually fitting right?!  Two dollars, two fucking dollars, and they can’t afford it?!  Puh-leeze, man.  That little $2 fix could have saved me hundreds of dollars and a huge headache.  No one ever even told me it was a possibility to use those, I had to find out myself by looking on the internet.  I’m fairly sure most of the employees there don’t even know they exist.

As I said, it was like a zoo at the Auto Zone, so there was no one with the reins that I could talk to about getting a refund or other compensation for all I had been through as a result of their shoddy work.  I even ended up having to pay for the post-covers.  They did give me the name of the store manager who could help me, but he wasn’t around then so I’m going to have to call him later.  Hopefully I can at least get him to refund me the cost of the battery.

I’m still so frustrated at how much the Import Service Center marked up the price on that CV axle.  Granted, I should have been a better consumer and done more research, but the thing about auto shops is they catch you at your most vulnerable times and it makes it easier for them to bend you over a barrel and have their way with you.  You’re desperate, you’re crippled, you can’t go where you need to go, do the things you need to do.  You need your car back as soon as possible, and they egregiously lie to you and take advantage of your situation.

When I talked to the mechanic on the phone, I was trying to find out exactly which part it was because I was considering about looking into buying it myself, but he was very reluctant to tell me which part or parts exactly I needed; he skirted around saying what exactly it was and used general phrases like “You just need this axle replaced.”  ”Okay, so which axle is it?  And is it the whole assembly or just part of it?”  ”It’s a front axle, it’s just in really bad shape and you can’t drive the car with it like this, we’re giving you a deal….”

Hopefully in the future I will be able to always buy the part myself, and I’ll try to remember to never take a mechanic’s word for it; I need to see for myself exactly what he’s talking about, and I can’t let them talk me out of it.

Quite an expensive learning experience.

It sucks that you have to deal with this kind of crap when you’re already in a terrible position.  They just kick you while you’re down and suck all the money they can out of you.  When I walked in to pay my bill, I tell you they were all smiles, so glad to see me…so glad to screw me out of my money.  One of the guys did at least make an attempt, throughout the process, to seem friendly, helpful, and caring, but it’s all overshadowed by the hit to my wallet.

Since my car’s been in the shop, I’ve had to ride my bike a lot.  I want to keep doing that,  and use my car as little as possible.  Hopefully I can avoid having too many more experiences like this one.  …But you never know.