Near-Death Adventures
First of all, a quick thank you to the subscribers of this Substack. It’s been a challenging summer with a lot of twists and turns, ups and downs. I’m actually looking forward to my final semester of college because it will provide a scaffolding to the ramshackle structure that is my life.
I’m currently sitting in an outdoor Starbucks, doing some work, starting to wonder if they have a bathroom. Yesterday, I made a decision to give an afternoon over to relaxation. To take a drive out to Zuma Beach and fall asleep on a towel on the sand. To let work worry about itself, if only for a few hours.
On the approach to the beach, driving on a small road that winds around the canyons off the 101, my car decided it would be a great time to lock up the steering wheel, to turn half the warning lights on in red along the dashboard, and quit accelerating.
And look, I can’t blame my car for breaking down. Everyone in this town does it at least once a week.
The thing about Malibu traffic is this. There are a lot of people driving that road in nice, expensive cars. In Europe, nice, expensive cars are sleek little sports cars. The Porsche, the Ferrari. In the United States, on the other hand, the more expensive a car the more likely it is to be a gigantic impractical armored vehicle, allowing the driver to sit a comfortable six feet above traffic.
Along with that comes the belief that if one sits six inches behind the bumper of the car in front that car will then feel obligated to go 80 mph like the driver of the bigger car would like. Which is always interesting when it’s heavy traffic, because this comes with a belief that the only thing keeping the car in front from going faster is a lack of belief in themselves to pass like ghosts through the vehicles in front of them.
What made this nuttier, though, was that this section of road had two lanes and no traffic anywhere in sight. The truck behind me must have seen my rapidly decreasing speed as a challenge to get me to really believe in my ability to hit 90mph while hitting hard curves on a canyon road. Like if he was right behind me rooting for me, then I could find it in myself to rise to the challenge.
Meanwhile, I started hitting the horn, hoping it would work. Then it did, and I was able to nudge the car to the right by grabbing the steering wheel and moving with the force of sheer panic. I slowly eased into a truck brake check area, and eased into park.
Then all the warning lights turned off and the car operated normally.
Anyway, I just spoke to my mechanic and he said the alternator is busted, even though I had it replaced six years ago! (Turns out this is a perfectly normal amount of time in a car that is used as heavily as mine is.)
So now I’m at a Starbucks down the road catching up on all of the work I’ve spent the summer avoiding, waiting to hear about how much it costs to replace an alternator (HINT: It’s expensive!). In the meantime, I’m going to be a lot more regular with this thing and if you want to support, well, there’s a paid subscription option. I can pretty much guarantee I won’t clutter up your inbox.