Mirror

[Fiction, obviously --ed.]

Shoving back the shower curtain, I grabbed for my towel and dried myself off. Groaning slightly, I lurched towards the sink and toweled the condensation from the mirror. Through the haze of alcohol and sleep deprivation, I miserably wondered why I had drunk so much the night before, and just how terrible a hangover I should expect to deal with for the next eight hours.

I leaned in close to the mirror, and blearily eyed the familiar scars on my right cheek and eyebrow. They were, respectively, the results of a childhood neighbor's fingernails and an unprovoked attack by a drunk. I rarely notice them anymore, but they seemed more prominent this painful morning.

I brushed the hair back from my forehead. Then, disapproving of the results, brushed it back down. Sighing, I concluded that nothing short of a haircut was going to improve its appearance and resigned myself to looking at bad as I felt. I turned to open the door, intending to eat some of last night's delivery pizza before driving to work.

I turned back, stopped for a moment, and stared into the mirror.

I'm not sure what caught my eye, exactly... perhaps a gleam I didn't recognize in the eye of my reflection. Maybe it was a slight difference in the way I looked back at me. Perhaps the person looking back through the glass didn't seem as familiar as he should have. I don't know what it was. Something just felt out of place, different...

I leaned in again, staring into my reflected eyes. Wondering how many brain cells had drowned in whiskey the night before, I grunted and stood up straight again.

It was nothing, I thought, trying to convince myself. It has to be. I've just got a case of the alkie stupids.

But...

I slowly reached out to the mirror, my index and middle fingers extended. I pressed them against the reflection.

I felt flesh. Other fingertips. My fingertips against other fingertips. I gasped and jerked my hand back, rubbing my fingers with my other hand in disbelief.

"What..." I whispered. "What the hell was that?"

I reached out again, this time pressing my entire hand flat against the mirror.

Nothing but cold, smooth glass. A trickle of condensation slid from my outstretched thumb to the countertop below. My familiar reflection looked back at me through bloodshot, half-lidded eyes.

My hand still pressed against the glass, I muttered "But... I felt it... I know I did... they were there..."

Carfuck follow-up

I called Meineke back today to calmly and politely explain the problems I was having with my brakes. (When you're complaining , never start by screaming. That just pisses off the other person and makes them not want to help you.) The manager, Tad, offered to take another look at my car. I brought it in, and he fixed the problem that their brake check had created yesterday. He apologized for needing to bring my car back in.

So, will I go back to Meineke? No. While I have to admit that their customer service was quite good, that doesn't make up for the fact that they screwed up my brakes, charged me an arm and a leg to do it, and it required two return trips to fix the problem.

I kicked a large dent in my car...

Added to my list of businesses never to patronize again: Meineke Car Care Center.

I brought my car in to be repaired today, due to the fact that something had gotten lodged in the left front disk brake a few weeks ago. (It nearly started on fire, and I was in Milwaukee. I ended up having to burden my friends with my car problems in order to get to Madison and back. Thanks, Danulai!) In the process of removing the smoking chunk of debris, I accidentally stripped one of the lug studs. This left me with only three lug nuts holding the wheel on. As you may imagine this (in addition to the smoking wheel) doesn't make for the most terror-free driving experience.

So, today, I finally brought my car to the Meineke down the street from my apartment. I knew that it would be more expensive than taking it to a small non-chain store shop, but it was close enough to my place that I could drive there and walk home while it was being worked on. Plus, I don't know of any small, non-chain shops on my side of town. Around here, it's corporate chain stores or nothing.

Predictably, they found $700 worth of recommended repairs, far more than the actual value of the car. I had them evaluate the brakes, do an oil change, and replace the lug stud and lug nuts. That was it. They didn't even touch the brakes.

Yet, somehow, they managed to fuck them up so completely that I was afraid to drive it a half mile back to my apartment.

As I left the Meineke parking lot, I was surprised and terrified to learn that my formerly squishy brakes were now my very-nearly nonexistent brakes. I went across the street to Taco Bell for some drive-through and pumped on the brakes while in line. It was possible, but unlikely, that the grease monkey hadn't pumped up the pressure before returning it to me. Predictably, this didn't work. I drove it back across the street and walked back to complain and make them fix it.

A mechanic took the key, and I munched my burritos and read The Onion while they pulled it in to take another look at it. Fifteen minutes later, a man with "James" embroidered on a blue workshirt slouched into the waiting room.

"Black Tempo?" he said, dangling the key in front of him.

"That's me." I reached out and took the key from him.

"We couldn't find anything wrong with it. That's the way it was when you brought it in."

"Oh, no it wasn't," I replied angrily. "My brakes weren't great when I brought it in, but they worked a lot better than that."

We continued in this vein for a few minutes--I, insisting that my brakes had been serviceable as recently as the moment I left it in their care; and he, falling back on that old chestnut, "It was like that when you brought it in."

Eventually, he just shrugged and made it clear that he had nothing to say other than his new mantra. I gave up and left, and called my dad from my car. He's on his way with $75 in parts to do about half the recommended repairs. The rest can wait. Probably until Armageddon. If it's not immediately life threatening, I'm not fixing it.

I can understand if someone accidentally screws something up in the process of working on something; I do it on a regular basis. But the incompetence required to trash something as critical as my brakes, have no idea how, then refuse to admit a problem is staggering.

I have no intention of ever going back to Meineke. Keep this in mind next time your car needs work done. I know I will.

Bike Messenger

I'm planning on applying at Scram! Couriers tomorrow for a part time bike messenger job. I basically do nothing on Mondays and Wednesdays before work, so I think it would be a lot of fun to have a reason to bike all over the city. Not to mention getting in great shape, having fun doing it, and hopefully making enough cash to buy myself a new bike.

The bike I've got now is a Giant Sedona ST, and I love it. It's a great bike, and it takes the abuse I throw at it, but it's not made for road conditions. I don't do any mountain biking, and it's a mountain bike. With a top pedaling speed of around 15mph, it's not exactly made to break any speed records--when I go out on a long ride, I like to be able to fly. This bike simply wasn't designed for that.

So, wish me luck. I hope I get the job.

Journalism

I was just watching 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace was interviewing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I saw something there completely foreign to American politics. Wallace asked questions of a sitting head of state, and Ahmadinejad predictably attempted to dodge the questions.

However, Wallace refused the evasions as par for the course and persisted in his line of questioning, asking questions three and four times until he got some sort of answer from Ahmadinejad.

Can you imagine a reporter having this sort of tact interviewing President Bush? For that matter, can you imagine Bush answering a difficult question posed to him?

It's a sad reflection on the state of American politics and journalism when the idea of forcing an elected official to answer a question with any degree of honesty is a surprising event.

Comments

I disabled comment moderation. I thought it worked differently than it does. I'd rather get the odd comment spam than discourage actual human beings from responding to my drivel.

When I Grow Up

I finally realized what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I've always been fascinated by abandoned, lost, places. When I was young, I used to go exploring the woods surrounding my house. I discovered an illegal junkyard with a dozen cars in it. Most had been there for decades, and I investigated every one of them. It wasn't the cars themselves that interested me; every single one of them had a story. Every one had something that they could tell me about who had been in them, what kind of lives they had led. Surrounding them on all sides was someone's junk, the heaped and forgotten detritus of an anonymous life. Baby carriages. Bird cages. Long forgotten toys. I knew that everything there had meant something to someone once.

Less than a mile away, I also discovered the remains of an old homestead. Almost nothing remained of it, just a clearing overgrown with long grass. In the center stood the crumbling remains of a foundation and an electric pole, sans wires to the power grid. I wanted to know who had lived there, when, why they had left, and when they had gotten there.

This interest in the forgotten never left me. For me, there's mystery, dignity, and an exciting sense of uncovering the unknown. Christine and I biked out to an abandoned hotel to poke through the ruins. Megan, Mike and I toured the underground tunnels in downtown Seattle. I would love to become an urban explorer, but it's a dangerous hobby and not the sort of thing one wants to do on his own if he values his life.

I wish that I'd realized that there could have been a future and a career for me in archeology and exploration. I think it would have been a far more interesting and rewarding life than the one I'm leading now.

I Dream of Being an Underwear Model

So, you know that dream where you're somewhere important, but you're in your underwear? I had that dream a few nights ago. Normally, this wouldn't be such an odd thing, except for the following:

• It was at my old job, a department store in the mall. I was hiding next to the shoe department and hoping no one would see me.


• An stodgy, uptight, Jehovah's-Witness-type-religious friend from high school was with me. I haven't seen him in seven years.


• He was also in his underwear.


• Being in his underwear didn't phase him one bit.


• Once someone gave me my winter leather jacket, I no longer felt embarrassed about my junk being a sixteenth of an inch of fabric from public display.


• I haven't had one of these dreams since I was in fourth grade.

I'm going to chalk this one up to a sore back and a rude awakening by a gasoline-powered pressure washer sitting in front of my windows. Hopefully it won't repeat itself.