Chevette memories, Part 2

In '94 I got my second car, a 1979 gray Chevette. Billy had bought it off a little ol' lady who never drove it, so the mileage was actually pretty low for a late-70s car. He had gotten into some trouble and couldn't drive, something about driving without a license and getting into an accident. He said I could have it for $375. I didn't have that much so my girlfriend paid for most of it. I think I paid her back. I can't remember.

My first Chevette was just rust pretending to be a car, a stack of paper clips waiting to fall apart. This one... this one was a tank! I couldn't kill it no matter what I did. I'd be driving down the road and on a whim decide to swerve off and try to flip it on the embankment, but nope, it wasn't having that. It'd keep trucking on, forty-five miles per hour at a forty-five degree angle, and I couldn't flip it for nothing. That surprised me too because Chevettes are really light vehicles. At school, about five of us got together and lifted Steve's Chevette and put it on some cinder blocks, as a prank.

In parking lots, when there's tons of snow they scoop it up into big piles that become solid ice eventually. I ran my little gray Chevette straight into one and, nothing, just plowed right over it. The thing was a pure tank. Mail boxes, railroad ties, street signs, mud, nothing stopped it.

It actually caught fire once. I was driving back from Columbus, smelled gas, and saw some smoke coming from the engine. I pulled over to the side of I-71 and lifted the hood to find the carburetor on fire. It was just a little fire, and I was able to pat it out. Got back in and kept driving. Like a tank, the car just kept rolling.

[Note: Hey Kaitlyn and Padrick. Skip reading the above. Your uncle is an idiot.]

Don't get me wrong, the car wasn't perfect. For one thing, it had the baldest tires I've ever driven on. There was this one corner over by Blue Rock Road where every time it snowed, no matter how slow I took the corner, the car decided it would keep going straight and run into a telephone poll. Every time. I can only imagine what the people in the house across the street thought when they'd see me come down the road, slide into the poll, get out to push the car out of the snow, come back a few hours later and slide right into it again. And again. And again. Not even on purpose.

The other problem with Chevette 2 is that the ignition system eventually went out. I tried to fix it but, again, I don't know anything about cars. The only way I could start it is by popping the solenoid, that is, taking a screwdriver and crossing two spokes to make a spark. This is done in the engine and the key needs to be turned to start when you do it, so you need a friend to turn the key for you while you damn near electrocute yourself. Luckily, Billy, license-free, was always palling around with me. But when you're by yourself, you have to come up with elaborate ways to keep the key in start while you're doing it.

Eventually, the ignition thingy didn't work at all and the car wouldn't start for me whatever I did. But, here's the thing, it did not die! Still! I couldn't kill it, but rather, it just got tired of me I guess. I got it towed out to my parent's growing car graveyard and left it there thinking it was dead-dead. But no, I learned later that my younger brother got it up and running and drove it, too, for the longest time. In fact, I don't know exactly what ever became of it. The tank is probably still out there plowing over stuff for some kid that just got his license.

Believe it or not, there's a part three.

Chevette memories, Part 1

My first car was a 1982 blue Chevette that I got in '93, I think. I was a late driver. I got my learner's permit at age fifteen, like everyone else, but I didn't get an actual car until I was 17. I didn't have any money as a kid, didn't have an evening job, worked a summer job once but blew all of the money on stupid stuff, and was one of three military brats in a single-income family. We weren't poor, really, but an E-8 pay grade isn't as much as you'd think it should be. My dad bought this car for me, but it was only $250.

It was my senior year at a Cincinnati high school and my dad had just retired from the military and bought a house out in rural Ripley, Ohio, which is basically the sticks. I didn't want to go. I really, really didn't want to go and got into so many fights with my folks about it, it was crazy. My dad (love the guy) thought it would cheer me up if I had a car, and found this ol' beat up Chevette a neighbor was selling. Out in the sticks, the rumors are true, everyone has three or four broke down cars in their yard for sell. We test drove it down 763, a hilly and curvy rode which is actually perfect for test driving cars. It made a lot of rattling that we thought we could fix, so we bought it.

I didn't give us a chance to fix it. A few days later I was missing my girlfriend and got the itch to get back to Cincinnati. I packed all my shit into the Chevette and "ran away". Downhill it was fine, but on every uphill the car would start ticking -- a tick, tick, tick, tick -- just like a bomb, I swear. It was something about some rods or something in the engine. I didn't and still don't know anything about cars.

The foothills of the Appalachians east of Cincinnati are all hills. So it was like, smooooth... tick, tick, tick, tick, smooooth... tick, tick, tick, tick, smooooth [smell of something burning]... tick, tick, tick, tick... tick... tick... TICK, TICK, TICK BOOM! Just like a bomb, big poof of smoke and everything.

I had made it to just outside of Mt. Orab and had to call my dad to come and pick me up, which was just demoralizing. It's hard to make your great escape when you end up having to call the prison guard to come and pick you up. We strapped some tow cables to the Chevette and dragged it back to my parent's farm, where it sat in the yard for a few more years before someone bought it for $25 as scrap metal. I think I may have put at most 50 miles on that thing total.

So ends my first car, my first Chevette, RIP.

Latte with a shot of ectoplasm

I just recently learned that a coffee house I frequent is home to the ghost of a man who shot himself in the head in 1929. This happened in the bathroom, and apparently the bullet hole is still there today. It's hard to say "cool" considering the circumstances surrounding the man's death, but I must check this out!

From the web:

The Lock and Key Coffeehouse can be found at 201 Main Street in Georgetown, and it's located in a building with quite a checkered past. Built in 1899, it was originally John McMeekin's Furniture and Funeral Parlor, then went through a number of permutations over the years, including a bank, a food stamp office, and an antique mall.

In 1929, during its incarnation as the Georgetown National Bank, president George T. Hambrick committed suicide in the bank's restroom by placing a pistol to his head. It exited through his skull and lodged in the wall, where the bullethole is framed today as a historical curiosity.

A farewell to Bushisms - Top 10

As George Bush left office today, so, sadly, did the unique form of humor we call Bushisms. In honor of this passing, here are the Top 10 preserved for posterity:

10) "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

9) "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." —Greater Nashua, N.H., Jan. 27, 2000

8) "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004

7) "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." —Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

6) "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." —to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

5) "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." —Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

4) "They misunderestimated me." —Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

3) "Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" —Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

2) "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

1) "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

They'll see us waving from such great heights

I had to give a website demo at the Hilton Netherland Plaza in front of forty or fifty people today. That was interesting, but just business. The fun part is that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and visit the observation deck atop the Carew Tower.

The Carew Tower (pictured below) was built in 1929, in a French art deco style, and still maintains many of it's original art deco charms today. It's also Cincinnati's tallest building, but only gets to claim that fame for a few more years. In 2011, the new Great American Insurance building at Queen City Square will be 86 feet taller.



It was cold outside, overcast with snow flurries. I was surprised the deck was open today. Actually, the last time I had been to the top of the Carew Tower was exactly ten years ago, pre-911, so I wasn't sure if people were still allowed to go out there. Cold, but happy, I found that at least some things don't change. Still $2.

To get to the 49th floor is kind of interesting. The main elevator doesn't go that far. It stops at the 45th. You have to get off at the 45th floor and round a corner to a service elevator and take that up the remaining four floors (or take the stairs). The service elevator smells like old grease, or body odor, I couldn't tell which. It's about as large as a porta-potty and you get the feeling that it should have been decommissioned thirty years ago.



The actual observation deck is open-aired (cold air today). No bars, barely a rail, and I was wondering what velocity a penny might drop if you tossed it over the edge and resisted the urge to do so. It takes a minute to get your bearings. Though it's perfectly safe unless you have the actual intention of jumping off, you still get a little vertigo from just being outside that far up.



It's cliche, but the people really do look like ants.



That's my car circled in red. I parked on top of the garage just so I could take a picture. By the way, driving down the corkscrew to leave the garage is fun too.



It's a strange perspective to you find yourself looking down on other tall buildings.

They'll see us waving from such great heights.
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away.
'Come down now,' but we'll stay...

Life is art

Art imitates life, life imitates art. Not surprisingly, artists tend to say that art has more influence on life than the other way around.

As Oscar Wilde put it: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life... Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by a painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction."

Dostoevsky put art on higher pedestal: "At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts."

I've tended to go with "life is art", or at least a life lived fully. But even in saying that, I'm suggesting that one has some creative influence in their own lives and that life isn't something that merely happens to them. There's no room to be artistically creative in a deterministic universe.

But... I was surprised to find that many of the guys who would think of life as deterministic, ie. not something you create in any sort of artistic way, physicists no less, are profoundly influenced by art. Example, one of my favorite physicists, Niels Bohr, who applied his love of cubism in creating his model of the inner workings of the atom. Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." [Read "The Future of Science... Is Art?"]

So there you have it. If the people who delve so far into how the universe works are forced to come away describing it in poetic terms, I guess life and art are so intermeshed as to be indistinguishable after all. Life is art.