(no subject)
The brain-fuzz has got me, so this is an old post, maybe from somewhere in July, that was never uploaded to lj. Seems a bit disjointed, and probably needs an edit, but I like the juxtaposition. Also I'm feeling lazy and a little sick.
"I enjoy the junkyard. It's the oddness.
Outside of the daily commutes and street crossing, the village malls and a world of new car leases, here you have x-ray vision under the car's shell as their guts are spilled out and facades smashed. They aren't neat or scratch-free anymore, or whole sum, but they are still holding on with knotty fingers of wires and metal to a society that used them. Here, in the junkyard, you are supposed to touch and unscrew them and flip them inside out. So they are re-planted in this little apocalyptic garden. I believe in reducing and re-using, even though I think recycling is a sham, and so the trench-world on the front-line of re-use has an appeal.
Here there is no idea about my life of tomb-raided literature, cultural and technological voyeurism, and a coffee shop history of habituating the university. That is a floating island theory-world far east from a rusty forest of practice.
By eight a.m. on Saturday morning, before I went to my Uncle's place to replace the radiator, I drove with a coffee to the wreckers looking for a valve for my Jeep. I'm told there are several Jeeps down the fourth and fifth row all the way at the back. I've been there before. All I needed was a box-cutter for the hoses but I brought pliers and a screwdriver in case back-up ingenuity was required. You can see the cars planted in various degrees of disassembly and wreckage on massive concrete blocks for display, more accessible than modern art, and they go on in rows and rows.
More interesting than seeing cars bent and dissected is the foreign bits of mater that once grew inside the cars. It's not just car parts, but actual Polaroid snapshots of people who lived in those machines up to the exact moment they were let go. One sedan has dozens of empty cigarette boxes and discarded coffee cups on the back seat's floor. In another truck there is a plush quilt in the front passenger seat that's now rain soaked. A few utility vehicles later a box of pulp paperback books is in a trunk. Past that there is a baby-doll left on the driver's seat under a smashed window.
Maybe he worked long night shifts and believed in evolution. Maybe somebody small kept warm in the quilt on a camping trip that he's too young to remember. She could have read them all in one summer before she phoned home. Maybe after working hard all year they went on a long weekend trip and I hope it's not how it looks so I keep looking for my part.
There are several Jeeps, but everyone similar to mine already has the valve cut out. Or, of the two that still had the valve, the valve is broken in the exact same place as mine.
Fortunately, later that day in my Uncle's shop, I learned that instead of the valve needle nose vice grips can be clamped onto the hose coming away from my thermostat and my air-conditioning will work again.
A few days later I wrote an email for a friend who was asking about first year research questions that a Classics department might have. In course of the reply, I wrote a satisfying description that aptly described how I spent several years of my reading time in Halifax:
Certainly Classics can have it's flavors. The Dal department focused a lot on the philosophy, specifically then genesis of thought from the pre-Socratics, to the relationship of Plato and Aristotle, to the following Hellenist philosophy (Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics), followed by the Neoplatonists and their influences in/by Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought and back. I think there was a split in Neoplationism too. The Dal department especially liked to look at how one generation's answers left problems for the next and how they attempted to solve them, and if there was an underlying unity between their thought despite the differences of opinion. Then there was a special place for the Greek Dramatists (Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, and Euripides) and the epic Homer.
I wondered that weekend how my book shelves and carpentry trade ever come together, and how my Jeep will look when it placed on a concrete slab near the back, what might be in the back seat, and who'll come looking for a valve. And if she'll puzzle why she found a pair of vice grips instead."
"I enjoy the junkyard. It's the oddness.
Outside of the daily commutes and street crossing, the village malls and a world of new car leases, here you have x-ray vision under the car's shell as their guts are spilled out and facades smashed. They aren't neat or scratch-free anymore, or whole sum, but they are still holding on with knotty fingers of wires and metal to a society that used them. Here, in the junkyard, you are supposed to touch and unscrew them and flip them inside out. So they are re-planted in this little apocalyptic garden. I believe in reducing and re-using, even though I think recycling is a sham, and so the trench-world on the front-line of re-use has an appeal.
Here there is no idea about my life of tomb-raided literature, cultural and technological voyeurism, and a coffee shop history of habituating the university. That is a floating island theory-world far east from a rusty forest of practice.
By eight a.m. on Saturday morning, before I went to my Uncle's place to replace the radiator, I drove with a coffee to the wreckers looking for a valve for my Jeep. I'm told there are several Jeeps down the fourth and fifth row all the way at the back. I've been there before. All I needed was a box-cutter for the hoses but I brought pliers and a screwdriver in case back-up ingenuity was required. You can see the cars planted in various degrees of disassembly and wreckage on massive concrete blocks for display, more accessible than modern art, and they go on in rows and rows.
More interesting than seeing cars bent and dissected is the foreign bits of mater that once grew inside the cars. It's not just car parts, but actual Polaroid snapshots of people who lived in those machines up to the exact moment they were let go. One sedan has dozens of empty cigarette boxes and discarded coffee cups on the back seat's floor. In another truck there is a plush quilt in the front passenger seat that's now rain soaked. A few utility vehicles later a box of pulp paperback books is in a trunk. Past that there is a baby-doll left on the driver's seat under a smashed window.
Maybe he worked long night shifts and believed in evolution. Maybe somebody small kept warm in the quilt on a camping trip that he's too young to remember. She could have read them all in one summer before she phoned home. Maybe after working hard all year they went on a long weekend trip and I hope it's not how it looks so I keep looking for my part.
There are several Jeeps, but everyone similar to mine already has the valve cut out. Or, of the two that still had the valve, the valve is broken in the exact same place as mine.
Fortunately, later that day in my Uncle's shop, I learned that instead of the valve needle nose vice grips can be clamped onto the hose coming away from my thermostat and my air-conditioning will work again.
A few days later I wrote an email for a friend who was asking about first year research questions that a Classics department might have. In course of the reply, I wrote a satisfying description that aptly described how I spent several years of my reading time in Halifax:
Certainly Classics can have it's flavors. The Dal department focused a lot on the philosophy, specifically then genesis of thought from the pre-Socratics, to the relationship of Plato and Aristotle, to the following Hellenist philosophy (Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics), followed by the Neoplatonists and their influences in/by Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought and back. I think there was a split in Neoplationism too. The Dal department especially liked to look at how one generation's answers left problems for the next and how they attempted to solve them, and if there was an underlying unity between their thought despite the differences of opinion. Then there was a special place for the Greek Dramatists (Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, and Euripides) and the epic Homer.
I wondered that weekend how my book shelves and carpentry trade ever come together, and how my Jeep will look when it placed on a concrete slab near the back, what might be in the back seat, and who'll come looking for a valve. And if she'll puzzle why she found a pair of vice grips instead."