Pages, some stolen, some original

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Cadillac Dream #4


There is a motor home with a Cadillac front end parked at the house. It's an older Cadillac, from sometime in the 50's. The vehicle is pretty sharp, all done up in kind of a woodsy color scheme, orangish-brown and green. The brand name is PERCOLATOR. It is written in stand alone chrome letters, i.e. not written in script. Sitting there it looks normal sized, well maybe a little wider than normal, like somebody has stretched the image sideways. I go inside and go to the back and I am surprised at how big the room is. I am so surprised that I decide to measure it. I measure it with my shoes by putting one foot right in front on the other. From one side to the other is fourteen feet. That's huge, you are going to have a hard time driving this thing anywhere. I notice a normal interior house door opening out to the side and I think that's not a good idea, but I stick my head out the window and see that the door opens onto a little triangular porch that was made by slicing off the forward corner of the room.
    I knew I had recorded Cadillac dreams before, but I was surprised to find that this was the fourth one. Unrequited dreams? Subconscious fantasy? I dunno, kind of odd in any case.
    The problem with Cadillacs and all other big fancy cars is all the gimcrack gizmos they use. Nice thing about luxury cars is that they are bigger, faster and more comfortable than your ordinary car, and if that was all the difference, they would be just great. But someone has decided that big, powerful cars should also be fancy, and so they install all these gizmos that are fine and entertaining as long as they work, but eventually they fail, and they fail much sooner than any of the standard mechanical stuff, and they cost a fortune to fix, so nobody bothers to fix them and that leads to a cascade of failures that eventually make the car unusable, even though mechanically it is still very sound. I want to buy an older luxury car and rip out the dashboard and all the other whizbang gizmos and replace them with standard switches and dials, or a standard off-the-shelf computer if that would be simpler. I don't want to have to learn a bunch of new stuff to work on a car. I invested a good part of my life boning up on all kinds of esoteric computer crap and it was mostly a waste of time because the stuff all went obsolete before I ever got a chance to use all my hard won knowledge.
    It's kind of weird that we have been using the Otto-cycle internal combustion engine for over 100 years. People are constantly making noises about replacing it with this that or the other, but I think it is probably going to be around for a long time to come.

P.S. I looked around for a Chrome letter font, but I didn't find one I could just use with the feeble tools I have at my disposal. Plus, any that I did find had a price tag attached to them. How rude.

No comments:

Post a Comment