and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

There is no end to me and car troubles. If it's not one thing it's another and if it's not that then there is one more thing. The worst of it, really, is that I have a vague sense of "the way things work". When I'm checking out a car I might buy I know enough to be able to check for uneven tire wear. I know enough to test the brake rotors out. I know the probable reasons for blue or white smoke out the exhaust and which one is bad and which one is worse. I can change my own oil and brakes and I've even been known to whip out the bondo on occasion. I can check plugs and wires. I can drive a standard without a clutch. I can limp home on 3 cylinders..

Yet there is no end to my bad luck with automobiles. My last car was a Honda Prelude. Hondas are generally reliable cars and are known to go well over 200,000 if you take care of them and so I thought my little auto would be racking up the miles for quite some time when I bought it with about 130,000 miles on it. Not so. Within a few thousand I lost an oil seal valve - some $2 piece of rubber that was actually recalled on all years of my model except my year - and all the oil drained out onto the ground. Luckily I caught the problem before I destroyed the engine but I still had to replace the timing belt since it got covered in oil. Timing belts, for those who don't know, are generally expensive to replace (a few $100 or so) because it requires a fair amount of labour to get into that part of the engine, depending on the make and model. So after my timing belt incident I figured I'd earned myself some care-free miles but oh no.. within a year I was back in the garage with a blown ignition switch.. Not just any old switch but an expensive electronic ignition switch and, come to find out, a lot of fucked up wiring. Turns out the previous owner's boyfriend was a Best Buy shmuck who thought he could install his own radios and security systems and this, of course, resulted in another few hours of labour for the boys at honda to sort the mess out. And is that the end of the prelude saga? Not even close. A Broken master cylinder, a blown gasket, a full exhaust system, full brake system replacement, and one tire that almost fell off TWICE later and I'd barely managed to put 30,000 miles on the damn thing despite a maintenance bill of well over $3,000.

I only bought the damn thing for $7,000.

Fast forward to this last summer and I just wanted to get rid of the damn thing so when I was offered a free car from my uncle I jumped at the idea. I passed the headache of the prelude on to my father since he seems to like to play used-car-salesman and I headed down the Mass. to get myself a brand spankin new... 17 year old Saab 900. I didn't know exactly what sort of shape it was in but I knew there wasn't much visible body rust, it only had 120,000 miles on it, and I remember my uncle constantly pouring money into it over the years so I figured it to be fairly well maintained.

Boy was I wrong.

It has it's fits and starts when warming up but in general the engine just loves to run. In the last few months she has been from Mass to Maine to Montreal to Toronto to Montreal to Maine to Montreal to Maine. She's got brand new snow tires. I thought she was going to be good to go for awhile.

Boy was I wrong.

On my way across the Pont Champlain bridge heading out of the city of Montreal on my way back home last week I blew something in the exhaust in the middle of stop-and-go rush hour traffic. By this point I was ready to just get the hell outta there and so I just grinned and bore the rumble. It sounded like a tractor with no manifold. By the sounds of things I figured the pipe had come disconnected from the manifold itself.. but I just kept on driving. I crossed the border in northern Vermont and the Customs agent just laughed at me. I roared through western Maine in the middle of the night, covered only by the darkness of the early winter night. I cringed. A lot.

When I got home I discovered what seemed to be just a pipe disconnection but a look by my local mechanic proved it to be the catalytic converter.. another pricey part.. but not only that, he found a section of the frame practically rusted right off. "I," he said gravely, "wouldn't trust this car 10 miles". I decided not to mention that it had just come all the way from Canada.

So, it would seem, even free cars for me are lemons and as much as I squish and squeeze I just can't seem to make myself any lemonade. I'm gonna see if I can't weld up the frame and hack the converter with some soup cans and drive it anyway, risking life and limb to save a buck, but this time at least I'm not going in too hopeful. Just make sure that next time you have to replace a $2 wingnut that you keep your curses to yourself.. cause I probably won't have much sympathy for yah.