Had to fire up my old raggedy Nissan Frontier Farm Use truck
today, to haul off a couple months worth of trash to the landfill. This is a
vehicle that had the front driver’s side wheel fly off last year while I was on
the interstate, which oddly enough was not as bad as it sounded because most of
my adult life I’ve envisioned what I would do should a wheel fly off a vehicle.
My subconscious seems to be in survival mode most of the time for whatever
reason (probably survival).
Firing up the old truck (which is only a 2001, but man it’s
taken some abuse) entails finding a vehicle to jump it. Currently that is a
Volvo sedan with its battery in the trunk underneath self-published books and
giant posterboard freestyle sonnets. Our family minivan (rapidly getting ragged
as well) has a weird battery set-up that doesn’t allow for good negative
terminal connection to enable a solid boost. Once I get it fired up, I have to
wait for all the mice to jump out of the engine hideaways and glove compartment
where they’ve built little mouse lives while it just sat at the back of the
yard for months, and then I’ve got to fill it with whatever gas is left in the
lawn mower gas can (or siphon from the lawn mower in case of emptiness inside
like me), put enough in it to go about 15 miles, or else I’m gonna have to stop
at the country store and leave it idling (because once it jumps that’s it, you
leave it running or game over unless you want to jump it again) while I go in
to pay for like $15 of gas. It’s a gamble putting gas in it too because I
always assume it might catch on fire of have the wheels pop off again and make
itself irrelevant, thus wasting the gas. This vehicle is beyond ever getting
“fixed” again. But it did the dump run nicely, and it was fun to gun it a
couple times because who the fuck cares, although I did find one of my bags of
trash on the side of the road on the way back. (Yes, I picked it back up,
though I left the empty Natural Light tallboy can that was beside it sitting
there because duh, I don’t drink.)
On the way back, there was this old dude with like a ’47
Chevrolet out by his garage, hood popped, fucking with it. Made me think of my
shitty Nissan, because honestly, though it already has 262K miles, I had kinda
hoped to get to 300K with it, and I’m not driving it that much, so there’s no
reason for anything mechanically to fail on it so long as I keep firing it up
now and then and running it to the dump. It would be nice to see this truck
make it another 20 years, just for the fuck of it.
I didn’t bother finding the cord to plug in my ipod for the
dump run, but some shitty radio station that it scanned to was having an ‘80s
weekend, and after tossing my trash with the chill ass guys that work at the
landfill – the younger chill ass dude at the crusher of trash, and then the old
lounger who sits inside the barely air conditioned trailer that is literally
coming apart at the seams and operates the scale and takes your $8 (I am always
at the minimum unless we are cleaning scrap up, but now I have a scrap metal
pile so that doesn’t really count any more either), as I was driving out, the
stupid radio station with their stupid ‘80s theme weekend played stupid “Funky
Cold Medina” by Tone Loc and man, that shit was about fucking perfect.
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