How to Break Stuff Vol 1. No.2

Entropy

When I was 19 — gutting flooded, moldy houses full of other people’s things in New Orleans — I succumbed to the melodrama that often attends late adolescence, especially when one is a philosophy major in a disaster zone.

Taking an awl to my crowbar — the tool I had in my hands 90 percent of the time — I scratched out, “nothing is ever destroyed — only rearranged.”

(I overused em-dashes then, too.)

I don’t think I had a complete philosophy behind this paean to thermodynamics, save maybe a begrudging respect paid to the inevitable heat-death of the universe.

But then, as now, I found calm in the act of trying to temporarily sidetrack that rearrangement from a headlong dive towards entropy.

Anyway, I’m thinking about that because this weekend my car got utterly smashed in a hit-and-run while parked.

The damage was wild. The sub-frame — the metal cradle that holds the engine and transmission slung beneath the frame of the car — was utterly destroyed. It buckled inward, smashing the transmission. The control arms — which attach the wheels to the subframe — were twisted and snapped.

A wheel fell off.

And somehow in all this mechanical violence, the engine lost what I think is fuel pressure. It spins, but it won’t fire up.

The last time I wrote this little letter, I talked about repair from a place of logic. Repair makes sense. Repair is sustainable. Repair is liberation.

But this car, my trusty Volvo, is a total write-off.

To repair this doesn’t make sense. It’s 26 years old with more than 200,000 miles. The repairs, by the “book,” will cost more than it’s worth.

The smart thing to do would be to give up the car to the great salvage economy, where its unbroken parts become repair-part cores, where it ends up in a pick-and-pull, and one day maybe its two good remaining doors can fix someone else’s ride.

But I feel myself succumbing to the melodrama again. This is my car. I like it.

Sometimes repair is emotional. I want to fix it.

So — that’s the job now. The car is at a trusted shop where the mechanic has two straight sub-frames that will fit (it’s work best done with a lift and a hoist, anyway).

On Saturday, I take an early-morning bus to meet a friend with a truck, and go pick up a well-used but still-whole transmission from a local junk yard.

The engine? We’ll figure that out.

I had other plans for this newsletter, and other projects I wanted to tackle, but something broke and it needs fixing.

Bear with me while I delay the rearranging.