I recently read a book called The Information. I got it from the library and it took me $5.00 in late fees to finish reading it. One of the big revelations in that book for me was the fact that regardless of the possibility of life on other planets, the vast majority of the universe is dead. Most of it was never alive. If you were to average it out, life would be the anomaly. Life is the part that doesn’t quite fit. If the universe were a perfect machine, life simply wouldn’t exist.

Life is the part of the universe that doesn’t play by the rules. It is the chaos. And the last thing it does is what’s expected of it.

Now I’m rereading a book by Timothy Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek. Like The Information, there are things in there that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around. However, one of the main themes of all of Ferriss’ work is that you don’t have to do things the way everyone else does. More to the point, if you want a different experience out of life than what most people get, the best way to do that is not to act like most people.

Now when I put all of this together, a few things become clear to me. One is that our individual thoughts and desires are among the rarest commodities in the known universe. The fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it is more amazing than anything we’ll find among the stars. It is clichéd to say that life is precious. It’s said so often that it lacks meaning. But how often does someone tell you specifically that your life is precious? How often do you realize as you go about your day that every breath in your body is in defiance to the rest of the universe? We are incredible and rare. This I think gives us a certain responsibility. Our hopes and dreams are not just fanciful ideas with no meaning. They are what we are here for. We are alive to live out those hopes and dreams. If you are not actively going after what you want in your life, you are giving in to the rest of the universe. You need to live while you’re alive. It’s not what the rest of the universe is expecting you to do and that’s why you should do it.

These things are true regardless of your personal belief system. Whether we exist by God’s grace or we exist because of a spanner in the works of the universe,  it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of what I’m saying right now. You can ignore what I’m saying and keep doing everything the way that everyone else does. Or you can start taking steps in the direction that you want if you haven’t already. Remember, no one on Earth can do what you do because there isn’t anyone else who has your mind. Let’s show the universe what we can do.

-Jack Cameron

I’ve been collecting comic books since I was twelve years old. I started collecting in 1989 and never really stopped. I was there for the beginning of the 1990s boom where a single issue could easily sell over a million copies in a given month. Now there are months when the most popular book in the industry sells less than 100,000 copies. And there are signs that things are getting worse.

I am someone who enjoys reading and rereading comics. I don’t collect them as an investment. I collect them as an archive. I enjoy the stories. My 13-year-old son is currently reading my Marvel comics. He just finished reading the Onslaught crossover.  He absolutely loves these stories every bit as much as I do. (Yes, Onslaught wasn’t the best crossover.) My son and I talk about the high and low points. We talk about what’s gone on before and what’s going on now. And I can’t help but wonder if he will catch up with the current comics before they stop publishing.

What is killing comics? There are no easy answers. Some say video games. Some say the Internet. Some say it’s just technology in general.

The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that it isn’t a lack of quality. The comic books being published now are some of the best comics that have ever been published. Part of this is due to the phenomenal talent of the creators. Part of this is strangely enough the fact that comics are less popular than they’ve ever been. With less titles being put out every month, there are less creators working on comics and generally speaking the quality creators are the ones who’ve been able to survive the cuts.

A lot of people point to digital comics as the bullet that’s killing print comics. These days you can bit torrent comic books the day they come out for free. So why spend the $2.99-$3.99 for the issue at your local comic shop when you can download it without spending a dime or leaving your chair? For me, the answer is that I want comic books to continue. For example, I know that Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal is some of the best crime fiction currently being produced in any medium. It’s so good that I want to give these people money so they’ll keep making more. So when I go to my local shop and buy an issue of Criminal, yes, I know that some of that money is going to Marvel, which is owned by Disney, and it’s not as if Disney needs any more money. But I also know that some of that money goes to the creators and some of it goes to my local comic shop so that next month there will be another issue and there will still be a place to buy that issue.

I realize that not everyone thinks like this. Some people just download and share whatever comics they want and don’t spend any money at all on comics. I would argue that these people wouldn’t buy a lot of comics even if digital comics weren’t available. I know it’s all the rage to blame digital pirates for lack of sales of everything from music to movies, but I just don’t think that’s true.

So if it’s not quality and it’s not technology, what is it? Personally I think it’s the death of the newsstand. It’s that you can’t buy comics at 7-11 anymore. My first comic wasn’t bought in a comic book shop. It was bought in a convenience store. So was my second one. It wasn’t until later that I finally ended up going to a comic shop. As a kid, I’m more likely to go to the corner store than I am to go the comic shop. Why did I first go to my local comic shop? Because I missed an issue. And then, because the guy behind the counter was smart, he mentioned that if I just wrote down a list of the titles I wanted, they would hold them for me.

I know a bit about the comic book industry, but I’m not sure why convenience stores stopped carrying comics. It might be that during the boom time of the 90s there were a dozen comics shops in any given big city. Now you can count them on one hand. (Often on one finger.) You need to get comics in the hands of kids again and kids don’t just walk into comic book shops.

With the success of so many comic book movies, one solution is giving away comics at the movie. This is rarely done and when it is, it’s done with a comic book that you can read, but it will likely never be reread. Why? Because the comic in question is essentially filler. It’s rarely written or drawn by any of the big names of comics and it is a story that takes place outside of continuity and doesn’t ‘matter’.

I think it was Steven Grant who came up with the proper way to give away comics at movies. You give away the first issue. End it with a good cliffhanger. Then you say that the second issue is available at your local comic book shop. That issue you ALSO GIVE AWAY. By making the second issue free, you get more people walking into the shop. And once a kid walks into a good comic book shop, I’m betting he’ll show up for issue three next month.

While I’m a 36-year-old guy who collects comic books, they need to be aiming for kids my son’s age. And they need to be looking at how to get comic books into their hands. Whether it’s making them available at convenience stores or in movie giveaways, the key thing here is get the kid to read a few comics. If we can’t get comics in the hands of kids, I don’t see much future for the industry.

I’m not the first one to think of these ideas and I’m far from the most knowledgeable when it comes to the comic book industry, but I do love comics. It’s a medium that tells stories that can’t be told anywhere else. Comic books have been on the verge of extinction before. But that’s one of the great things about comics. Just when you think a favorite character is dead and gone, they come back. Here’s hoping comic books can make a similar resurrection.

-Jack Cameron

All Purpose Sex Scandal Speech

My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I speak to you today. There has been a lot of talk in the media about my activities and I am here to clear them up. Yes. I was inappropriate in a relationship outside of my marriage. It was wrong of me. I betrayed the person I was married to and I will work that out one way or another, but at no time did I ever betray the people who were good enough to elect me to this office. I will continue to do the work I was sent here to do despite the personal problems of my own creation. But to be clear, the only person who should have a problem with me at this point is the one person I broke a promise to and I am humbled and ashamed for that.

(Take a moment and let them get the humble/shamed pic of you.)

I apologize for the distraction this has caused from the important issues we should be talking about. I will not be making any other comments about it because it is a personal matter that has regrettably entered into the public spotlight. It was a mistake and I do regret it. Until someone can tell me how this matter has anything to do with my stance on unemployment, national defense, the budget, or any other aspect of my representing them in this office, I will continue to serve the term for which I was elected.

Anyone who feels differently can vote for someone else next term. I thank you for your understanding and look forward to serving you in a better capacity in the future.

Thank you.

-          Jack Cameron

Note: If you have a specific problem you’d like me to write a speech for, I am available at reasonable rates.

I’ve got a pretty good immune system, but a few weeks ago I was very sick. I had this bad cough that simply wouldn’t go away and wouldn’t let me sleep. After the third day of no sleep, I began to freak out a bit. And I realized that the last time I felt this terrible, I believed in God.

I knew I wasn’t dying, but I had the realization that being really sick when you don’t believe in God really sucks. There isn’t anyone to pray to. And there’s no hope that you’re going to live on in some afterlife. There is just the feeling that the machine containing who you are is not working properly and that if it stops working, that’s it for you. There is a comfort in religion that atheism simply does not have.

I came to atheism slowly. First I doubted God’s perfection. A common question among believers is why bad things happen to good people. The answer seemed fairly simple to me. We were made in God’s image. We are no perfect and screw things up all the time. Therefore God is not perfect. Why do bad things happen to good people? God screws up.

This worked for a while. God wasn’t letting terrible things like rape and murder happen. He just wasn’t paying enough attention to do anything about it. One can argue all they want that God gave us free will and that the choices man makes causes all of the ills of the world from a drunk driver hitting a child to global warming, but if God is all knowing and all powerful, then he’s letting that happen. So either he was letting these things happen or he just wasn’t perfect enough to catch all these things. I chose the second one until I realized that there was a third more obvious and more likely choice. Maybe God wasn’t there at all.

If God wasn’t there, then there was no mystery why bad things happened to good people. Bad things happened because bad things happened. It also solved one of the biggest problems I had with God. If God existed, why did he hide? Sure, there were people who could say they saw God in the bloom of every flower and the beauty of every sunset, but if there’s a God, why doesn’t He have a phone number? Why doesn’t he talk back out loud when you pray? Why doesn’t He definitively tell everyone what the ‘right’ religion is? Why the game of blind faith? Because that’s what happens when something doesn’t exist.

As this thought continued to echo throughout my life, certain things began to bother me. It bothered me that Presidential candidates were all but required to say how they believe in God and pray for guidance. Personally, I didn’t want a leader who, when the chips are down, is on his knees praying. I want him leading. It bothered me that intelligent people who I loved and respected spent a good amount of time talking to a big man in the sky who wasn’t really there. It bothered me that it had taken me so long to realize just how little real evidence there was that any God existed at all.

However, what bothered me more than any of this was the fact that if there was no God, my existence was going to be the next fifty to seventy years at best. And then I would never exist again in any form that could really be called me. I am here for a while and then I will be GONE. Not only that, but the same is true for everyone I’ve ever known. We are all here to go. And even the greatest among us will likely be forgotten in the next few hundred years.

To me, such a colossal waste of humanity was the greatest tragedy possible. I think and feel and remember. I may not believe in a soul but I believe in who I am and I think it’s worth saving. I tried thinking back to my earliest memories. I tried thinking to before that. I wanted to try to remember what it was like before I was. And in that infinite nothing, I realized, that was all that was waiting for me when I die. I would just not be. I don’t think there’s any way to explain what a crime I feel this is.

I am jealous of believers and I hope they’re right. I really do. I’d prefer Hell to not existing. I want to be me and I want to be me as long as possible regardless of where that happens to be. There are those who I suppose would call me agnostic, but I’m not. I don’t wonder if there’s a God. I just hope that there is.

I’ve researched life extension possibilities. Cryonics, cybernetics, and other solutions aren’t at the point where they can do me any good. Maybe in a decade or two. And then such technology is probably reserved for the very rich. The odds aren’t good when it comes to living forever if you’re an atheist. And when I was on the floor of my house coughing like crazy, I couldn’t help but say, “God, this hurts.” But I wasn’t surprised when there was no response from the heavens.

Many people have said that I have a criminal mind. So it seemed only natural that I might watch a show like Criminal Minds. And I did. The first few seasons were entertaining, occasionally even riveting psychological drama. It helped that they had capable writers and a good cast. The likable team of misfits that made up the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit was a great juxtaposition to the horrible deeds of the serial killers they’d catch each week.

The problem is that there are only so many ways to show the FBI catching serial killers. And there are only so many kinds of serial killers. So after having them catch young serial killers, old serial killers, partner serial killers, father & son serial killers, femme fatale serial killers, cop serial killers, and a bunch of others I’ve left out, what is left? The detail. That’s it. Exactly how they get caught. Exactly who they kill. And exactly what they do to them. The show used to be catching the man (or woman or child or Eskimo stilt walker) responsible for dropping the bodies. Now it’s become about exactly what they do to those bodies. They no longer just find bodies on some logging road. Now we are treated to a few minutes of the killer taunting or cutting or raping or whatever else they can come up with. It’s gone from psychological drama to torture porn.

This isn’t the first show to lose my interest after falling into this trap. It happened with Oz. It happened with 24. It’s not that I can’t stomach to watch these gruesome scenes. I typed up police reports for two years and have a vivid imagination and the things I’ve read (and thus imagined in my head) in the Child Protective Services reports are worse than anything I’ve ever seen on the big or small screen. I have no problem with the gore, but the gore has to have a point.

If the scene is not furthering the plot or furthering the character, then it’s just there to titillate and as a storyteller, I tend to be offended at that sort of thing. The Shawshank Redemption has scenes where our main character gets raped by a group of inmates. That scene is less than a minute long and there isn’t one shot of throbbing penises penetrating him. Why? Because it’s entirely unnecessary.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are times when the sex, the violence, the torture, or the wonder have to be front and center and we need to experience it to really get the movie, but this only happens in the presence of good storytellers. I recently watched an Australian movie called The Square. The story is about a man who commits one sin, then a slightly worse one, then worse, as slowly he’s entirely compromised as a human being. It’s an incredibly well done film and there are no unnecessary scenes in it even though there are a few very unpleasant ones.

At the same time, master storytellers tend to be able to tell a story without overly graphic scenes. The best sex scene in any movie I’ve ever seen is in Robert Altman’s movie The Player and it has no nudity in that scene. A master storyteller understands that given the right fuel, the scene will light up in our heads better than anything they could film. It’s why Silence of the Lambs is a better thriller than any of the sequels. If you know how to tell a story, you don’t have to go there. The audience will go there on their own and they won’t feel too dirty afterword.

I get that not everyone is like me. Some people like to watch pretty explosions or special effects or graphic sex or violence.  I do too, from time to time, but I prefer all of those things to be accompanied by a story. Otherwise it’s all just porn: There to get you off in only the most base way and better when you don’t think about it at all. That’s not what I want from my entertainment.

There was a great comic book series in the 90’s called The Maxx. It ran 35 issues and was still fairly popular when the creators stopped making it. When asked why they stopped, they said they didn’t have any more story to tell. This is what has happened on Criminal Minds. They have no more stories. All they have left are some decent characters who week in week out share the screen with some other characters who are doing horrible things to people. If you’re a long time watcher of the show, you’ll also notice that the newer episodes have more killers who take their victims hostage for days. This isn’t something most serial killers do, but it’s hard to torture dead people and that’s all they have left to show us it seems. Unfortunately they have no more story to tell, but they all still want paychecks and people are still tuning in so Criminal Minds will continue. I just won’t be watching them.

-Jack

This is the first time I’ve done a book signing and to say I’m excited is an understatement. Comic Book Ink is one of the best comic shops I’ve ever been to. Signing there means a lot to me.

On top of that, it give locals a chance to meet me and buy my book. I’m still selling it for five bucks. Like I said before, Ruin Your Life was never about making money. Just having some fun and sharing my thoughts.

If you’re in the area, you won’t want to miss this. I’m not the only attraction. Here’s the full press release.

HOMEGROWN HEROES
Signing
SATURDAY
JUNE 19th, 2010
2:00pm – 6:00pm
at
COMIC BOOK INK
Tacoma, Washington

BEN MISENAR
HEROCLIX & MONSTERPOCALYPSE Sculptor
–and–
MARK MONLUX
ARTIST / WRITER of “Seldom Seen Films”
–and–
JAMES STOWE
ARTIST / WRITER of “Daddy’s Nut Shot of the Day” &
ARTIST Dockyard Derby Dames Posters
–and–
8 MEMBERS of the “DOCKYARD DERBY DAMES”
Roller Girls
–and–
MARK YOUNGMARK
ARTIST / WRITER of “Zombocalypse Now”
–and–
JACK CAMERON
WRITER of “Ruin Your Life”
–and–
STARS of the DEAD GENTLEMEN Movies
“The Gamers” / “The Gamers: Dorkness Rising”
“Dead Camper Lake 1 & 2″
The BRAND NEW WEBSERIES “JourneyQuest” debuting THIS JULY

When I’m not writing about my car or books about how to do the wrong things the right way, I work at a company in Kent dealing with inventory and purchasing. In one way or another I’ve been dealing with inventory work for the last five years. So I know a little about it. I understand vendor relations, pricing, iventory management and everything related to those processes. And regardless of what you’re selling, these processes are very similar.

While a case could be made that the retailer is being charged more for the game and thus must pass that cost on to the customer, let’s talk a little about pre-orders. The only real advantage to a customer for pre-ordering something is that they are guaranteed to get it even in the event of a sellout. However, from a retailer’s standpoint, a pre-order has all sorts of advantages. As a retailer, a pre-order means you have a guaranteed sale. This item isn’t going to use up valuable shelf space. It also means getting the money before the item is sold which can often make or break a small business. It’s a lot easier to buy inventory if you already have the customer’s money. So if you’ve already paid for an item months before you actually get the item, you’re doing the company a big favor. They don’t have to stock the item in hopes that it will sell. They don’t have to put a price tag on it. They don’t have to spend time putting it out on the shelf. They don’t even have to pay for it with their own money. They have yours.

Now, given all of that, let’s take another look at this situation. A 15-year-old kid takes thirty-five dollars cash and gives it to GameStop in December. Sometime between December and March GameStop buys a the game from the software developer. It’s more than they expected to pay for it, but odds are it’s still under the thrity-five dollars they pocketed back in December. I know this because you can buy the same game from Amazon.com for $32.54. So GameStop’s increase in purchase cost did not exceed the purchase price. It only cut into their profits. And yes, those profits are needed both for business and for overhead, but as I mentioned before with a pre-oder there’s almost no overhead. The employee simply needs to open the box they came in, pull out a game, and hand it to the customer. Still, instead of just eating the five dollar profit loss, GameStop’s current policy is to stick the additional cost to the customer, even when that customer is a fifteen-year-old-boy. They do say that whenever this occurs, an automated service calls all the pre-order customers to notifty them of the price change, but my kid never received such a call.

This is a short sighted way of dealing with customers. Yes, it avoids a small profit loss on a new and popular game, but what GameStop isn’t paying attention to is the one thing that is most important in business: Customer Relations. Someone who pre-orders a game isn’t likely to be just a casual video game player. The sort of customer that pre-orders is an avid gamer and the sort who probably spends more money than average on games and gaming devices. A customer like this is likely to spend more than five dollars every time they walk in the door. Not to mention the fact that a customer like that probably uses the Internet more than average and is likely to tell others about their experience. When you look at it like that, maybe taking that five dollar hit wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Instead what has happened is that GameStop has five more dollars than they would have and has lost the business of my family. In the twenty-four hours since then, my wife has told everyone in her family, on her Facebook page and on her Twitter. And now I’ve posted this.

-Jack

Some people at work had even begun to admire the car. One of my older coworkers asked me to pop the hood one afternoon as I sat warming it up. I got out, opened it up and watched him look under the hood. After a few seconds, he said, “Are you gonna fix that exhaust leak?”

“What exhaust leak?”

“Right here. “ He pointed to the right side of the engine.  “Put your hand there.” I put my hand there and felt the exhaust hit my hand. “There’s supposed to be an exhaust donut right here between the exhaust pipe and the exhaust manifold.”

On the way home, I called my brother. He said it’d be a relatively easy fix and we should just do it at his house some Saturday. Saturday rolled around and I pulled into my brother’s driveway. We got the car onto a couple of struts and crawled under the car. Not only was this the first time I’d been under the Galaxie. It was the first time I’d been under a car. I was enthralled.

We decided to do more than just work on the exhaust pipe. We checked fluid levels, checked and replaced the spark plugs, and while we were at the auto parts store, we bought a new air filter as well. Now it was time to deal with the exhaust pipe.

The exhaust pipe did not want to disconnect from the exhaust manifold. One of the two bolts was stripped and it wasn’t in the best angle to get at anyway. By the time we were done with it, one bolt was completely unusable and the other was stubbornly hanging on. We realized that in addition to the three dollar donut part, we were going to need some new bolts. The stripped bolt would neither loosen up enough to come off nor retighten. This was going to take tools and time we didn’t really have. My brother called a mechanic friend of his. He was out fishing, but could look at it Sunday.  My brother found another bolt and we decided the best thing to do would be tighten the bolt on there and I’d bring it to his guy tomorrow.

We got the bolt tightened back on and I started up the car. My brother told me to rev it a couple times just to make sure everything was working. I hit the gas and suddenly my brother yelled, “TURN IT OFF!!!”

I turned the key and took it out of the ignition. It didn’t help. I could hear something splashing on the pavement. It turned out to be all of my water. A freeze plug had blown. My car had gone from loud but drivable to completely undrivable.

We laughed at our luck and then spent the next hour or so trying to find an auto parts store that hadn’t closed. We were not successful. We decided the best thing to do was to take it to my brother’s guy tomorrow and get it dealt with then.

My brother’s guy turned out to be a good guy, but the whole mechanic thing was sort of a weekend thing with him and he didn’t get it done on Sunday. So it was another week before I got my car back. My brother gave me a ride out to see the guy and pick up the car. He’d put the donut on with new bolts and replaced two freeze plugs. He’d checked the other freeze plugs and when he tapped on one with a screw driver, it blew out. He charged me $150 for his trouble and my car was back up and running.

The first thing I noticed was that as soon as I started it, it was back to that low hum it had before. It suddenly dawned on me that the morons I’d taken my car to a couple months earlier had probably just taken the donut off when they were replacing the gaskets and never bothered to put it back on. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what they’d really done was put on some gaskets and then a bunch of things to make a guy who doesn’t know any better think they’d fixed up his car. The paint and the sound were just there to distract me from the fact that what they’d done probably shouldn’t have even cost half as much as I paid.

It turned out to be one of the last times I’d have my Galaxie at the mechanic’s shop. It was becoming clear to me that working on cars is just like working on websites or any other skill. If you don’t know how to do it, it seems complicated. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s fairly simple. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was learning and I was smart enough to have people around me who knew more than me.

A few weeks later my car didn’t start. I called my brother over to help me troubleshoot it. He found that the starter was okay. We replaced the solenoid and the battery cables. This seemed to help. About a week later, I was having trouble getting it started again. My brother took a look at the battery. It had 425 cranking amps. My brother said, “Let me guess, you have trouble starting it on cold mornings.” I nodded. He said, “This isn’t the right battery for this car.”

I flashed back to the jerk at Napa who had told me I’d gotten a bad deal. The asshole had actually sold me the wrong battery. I wanted to go back and throw it at him. After making some calls, we went to a place my brother was familiar with called The Truck Shop. A hundred dollars later we had a truck battery that had 900 cranking amps at zero degrees.

We got back to the house and hooked the battery up. The Galaxie started instantly. There’ve been a few problems over the past few months, none of them major, but with the new battery, the car always turns over.

As fall turned into winter, I was afraid that something major might break on my car. I don’t have a garage and the weather is not always kind. It turned out though that I was right. The first year of owning a Classic Car is a learning experience and it’s expensive. The next year has so far been very good.

I check all the fluids at least once a week. I listen for uncommon noises. I put fuel cleaner in my gas tank every three or four tanks. I start it at least once a day. Old cars aren’t maintenance free, but that maintenance has its rewards. Every car I’ve owned before this was just a means to get from place to place. It could be any car in the world and if it got wrecked, I wouldn’t care once I got another car. When it comes to cars, my Galaxie is my first love. I don’t just drive to get from place to place. I drive to drive. When I’m driving my Galaxie, I don’t always need a destination.

-Jack

Note: Thanks for sticking with me through this. When I got my car, I’d tried to find something on the net about the first year of owning a classic car and couldn’t find anything. I promised myself I’d write one for those who were interested. On another note, I’m planning on making some significant changes to this site. I hope you’ll stick around to see them. As always, you can write me at jackcameronis@hotmail.com .

Unfortunately, another part of owning a classic car is going to start it one morning and having it not start. This can be a problem when you’re doing things like trying to get to work. While it was still running fairly well, it didn’t seem to want to start as reliably as I’d like. So I thought it was time to take it in for a check up. It’d been over a month since I last had to do any work on it, maybe a fresh set of eyes might help.

I drove up to my mechanic’s garage and found that Larry, the old mechanic wasn’t there anymore. It turns out that he and the new owners didn’t get along. When I asked what shop he was working in, they said they had no idea.

The new guy at the shop had a 1969 El Camino. This gave me hope that maybe he knew what he was doing when it came to classic cars. He opened the hood and remarked about how incredibly dirty the engine was. He wasn’t wrong. I’d never washed it and I have no idea when or if the previous owner did. As he looked around at the engine, he said that most of my gaskets were going. He touched one and part of it literally fell off. He told me to go up the street to the car wash place and clean the engine, then bring it back and he’d take another look at it.

Looking back at this now, I see all sorts of red flags that I was just too inexperienced to notice. The problem with trying to learn how to do something like take care of a car is you need to listen to everyone in order to get good information. Eventually you learn to weed out the bullshit. I hadn’t gotten to that point yet. I’m pointing this out because a lot of what I write next is going to make me sound stupid. It’s not that I was stupid. I just didn’t know any better.

I went to the car wash place, popped the hood and sprayed the engine wash stuff on it followed by some water. It made a significant difference. I got into the car and tried to start it. It didn’t want to go anywhere at all. After trying for about ten minutes, I called the mechanic and said, “Dude, you told me to wash this thing now it won’t start. Get over here and help.” So the mechanic showed up in his El Camino a few minutes later. He fiddled with a few wires near the battery terminal and said, “It looks like it’s still got a spark. Do you have a screwdriver?” I had a whole set of tools in my trunk. I handed him a screwdriver. He hit it on something causing a big spark and burning off the tip of the screw driver. He handed my now mostly useless screwdriver back. He popped the distributor cap, took a can of air to dry it out, and started it right up. I then followed him back to the garage.

The guy told me that changing all the gaskets and doing a general check up would cost about four hundred dollars. I told him that was fine and to call me if anything came up. He told me the car would take about three days to finish.

Four days later I had a coworker drop me off to pick up my car. The mechanic I’d talked to wasn’t there. Some other guy was. He handed me the bill. It was five hundred fifty dollars. I understand that sometimes things get a more expensive, but a hundred and fifty dollars more than the estimate without any notification was insane. I told him I’d pay him four hundred now and the rest later because I simply hadn’t budgeted that extra money.

I popped the hood to see what work they’d done and was shocked. They’d painted the entire engine Ford Motor Company blue. It looked great. I started the car and it roared to life. Before, I’d start it and the engine would have this smooth low hum. Now it sounded like the Millennium Falcon. I smiled a little and drove out of the lot thinking yes, it had cost me more than I expected, but the results were pretty great.

I stopped by the Safeway near the shop to pick up some groceries. As I walked down an aisle I heard someone say my name. It was Larry. I told him that I wished I run into him a few days ago. I told him the whole story and asked where he was working now. He said he’d bought a new garage in the parking lot of the Safeway. Larry had moved exactly one block from these other guys. Larry told me to come by the shop anytime and that he wouldn’t be charging the sort of rates he had to charge when he did the brake job. I got his new card and decided that the next time I needed a mechanic, I’d call Larry.

To Be Concluded…

Next week is the final chapter of Year One of owning my Galaxie. You’ll learn what the new mechanics really did to my car and how a Saturday spent working on your car can turn into a week of working on your car.