Philosophical Roadkill

I believe that creativity begets creativity. I like the word “beget” because it reminds me of my days as a young teenager when we would encounter the word during bible study and it gave us something to snicker about. All the while waiting for the next appropriate passage of time to ask, “Can we go outside yet?” I require fresh air. Not just the exchange of fresh air coming through a ventilation exchange system, but the whole experience of fresh air: to see the day/night cycle, bugs, birds and to hear the sounds of life around me. I’ve worked in big factories during all hours with no windows, just huge noisy machinery in a cavernous warehouse space. It always made me feel disconnected. Like a flower cut from the stem and forced to live in a windowless vase. A biological entity consumed to keep the heartbeat of a great mechanical beast going. For what? A paycheck.

Those types of jobs can cost you a body part or more if you don’t pay attention. I’ve always had a good mechanical aptitude. I can often see how individual components make up a larger system be it mechanical, biological, or social. When I got my first car there was a whole lot of pavement underneath the hood. I often joked it was powered by a hamster and a couple of rubber bands. It was a 1978 Ford Mustang II with T-tops. After taking it to auto mechanics for this problem or that I discovered that they were taking advantage of me. They advised me to replace parts they had replaced only two months earlier. They’d wrongly assumed I wasn’t paying attention. How many alternators does a girl need? Only one and it shouldn’t need to be replaced so often. Then I discovered a clean knife cut 1/3 through my radiator hose shortly after getting my car back. Fortunately, the radiator hose had been long enough I just finished the cut and clamped the hose back on. Problem solved for free, by my hands.

I whirled into automotive garage like a tempest, a 16 year old girl, and threatened to rip all their balls off and wear them as a necklace. The guys panicked. It was comical to see a bunch of big guys with beards and tattoos forced to scurry about like mice caught in the pantry. Just short of turning into a full force hurricane the Manager offered to take me for a ride while the guys fixed my car, free of charge this time. I took his keys and drove his car around for about an hour while he sat in the passenger seat and apologized profusely. After about an hour I got my own car back and never returned there again.

Shortly after that a boyfriend convinced me to leave my car parked in a shady part of town for the night. Against my better judgement I did. When we drove back the next morning my car was there but the passenger window was broken and the ignition switch had been sawed off. It appears the thieves didn’t know how to drive a stick shift. So sad for them! They ended up taking my car battery. “You owe me a new battery.” I said tersely. He agreed. I was grateful the thieves hadn’t damaged any of my library books in the back seat. Then I’d have felt obligated to hunt them down and beat them up for disrespecting books and libraries.

There weren’t any cellphones back then. So while my boyfriend paid for the battery I borrowed the auto supply store’s phonebook and found a listing for a junkyard. I went alone to see if I could replace the window and ignition switch by myself. The key worked, but you could take it out while the car was running if you wanted too.

The junkyard was fantastic! I should have tried to get a job there! Sweetest junkyard dogs you could possibly meet and the guys were really nice too. They’d drive me out to the section of the yard where we’d find the right vehicle to strip for parts and take them back to the front office for checkout. I’d fix my car right there. They would lend me their tools and tell me how to do it. The guys would hang around like old friends and tell me stories while I worked when they weren’t busy. Unfortunately, with the T-tops, they didn’t have a model exactly like mine and the best window we could find for replacement left a little gap where the window top and T-top met. I drove around with a complimentary towel for any poor passenger stuck riding with me when it rained.

So why is this post called “Philosophical roadkill?” Well, it was beget or inspired by another blogger’s post who likes to do a “Word of the Day” and the word for that particular day was Sumpsimus.

When I first started entering the waters of social media I had a desire for being sumpsimus about grammar and writing etiquette. It didn’t earn me many friends. I learned to adapt and embrace that this is a living language; with each generation and social revolution language changes and so does the acceptability of the norms. This doesn’t mean that I’ve swung to the opposite side, mumpsimus; but that I accept in ways my opinion doesn’t matter and it’s not a battle worth fighting for as far as I’m concerned.

However, I do not let my husband off the hook so easily! First, he knows better. Secondly, he’ll do it intentionally to mess with me. Whenever we see roadkill, usually a dead squirrel, he’ll call it an “ex-squirrel” because he knows I hate it. I always argue that the squirrel may have become divorced from its body, but it probably has a little squirrel spirit floating about the æther somewhere. I propose that the squirrel of matter is now the squirrel of anti-matter. Some essence of squirrel carries on in that spark of energy that once gave it life in the form of matter. Some Scientists argue that the æther doesn’t exist at all. I would argue that its just not well understood and no one should take mythology built around the natural order too literally anyways. We continue to unlock so many mysteries about the human mind and the universe itself. I see us as cogs in many wheels: within society, within nature, within the universe. I believe this is the dimensionality of our existence. You matter not because someone else says so, but because you belong to a larger order. Squirrels who forget about a cache of nuts and grow new trees. Insects who avoid predation and insecticides to breed another generation as food, as composters, as a ripple effect in the larger sea of climate change. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it transitions.

Maybe I passed through this physical world as a squirrel once before. Why could such a thought be so impossible to believe? I have yet to discuss Disaster Preparedness on this blog, but when I see the squirrels hiding caches for winter it reminds me to check my own cache of disaster supplies. I live along the Pacific rim where we’re expecting a really big earthquake within the next 100 years. Even if I should become divorced from my body before or during the big event, if my supplies help others survive then I feel I’ve fulfilled part of this niche for this cycle.

What do you think? Do you have a sense of purpose you’d be willing to share? Other thoughts?

For reference:

Try Working This One Into a Sentence | Schingle’s Blog (wordpress.com) April 26^th blog post re: sumpsimus.

My mustang wasn’t as fancy as this restored and upgraded one, but it still has the original body. Blue 1978 Ford Mustang Cobra II Hatchback – MustangAttitude.com Photo Detail