cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entropy The bearing was bad. I could hear it and feel it through the steering wheel and the pedal. The car tracked straight, but there was a load of vibration and noise. From the front driver's side wheel. That's a bad wheel bearing. It got worse and worse over the last few months. I bought a new wheel hub with bearings packed in a few days ago. Three days ago I jacked it up, took off the wheel, disassembled the brakes, and determined that there is a bolt to remove the existing hub that I couldn't get off without completely disassembling the control arm and some other stuff, which would take me many hours without a proper lift. So today I took it into a shop and reluctantly had someone else deal with it. I also had them install a new splash guard under the car, which I'd ordered over the summer after ripping it off on a broken piece of curb in the street in DC and hadn't gotten around to dealing with. Hours of killing time, with the coffee shops and libraries closed what with it being the day after Thanksgiving. Harry and I cooked for two days straight to make Thanksgiving dinner. He made vanilla custard ice cream from scratch using duck eggs and all real vanilla bean (no extract), and black garlic mashed potatoes, plus he was in charge of the turkey. I made an 1870's stuffing, 1890's Fanny Farmer P@rker House rolls and various other things. We banged that shit out hard core, very smooth the whole way, and served it on the collection of fine silver plate that I've been amassing for months. I picked the car up just before 5 pm. Paid almost $700. Less than an hour later I was driving home and thinking about how nice it was. How quiet the ride. The joy of having confidence in one's automobile. BANG! The front left corner of my car seemed to explode and I felt the impact through the wheel. I kept the car on a straight track and braked slightly as I watched a buck whitetail careen off into the opposite side of traffic to be hit by yet another car going the other way. I pulled over about a quarter mile down the road where it was safe, shut off the engine. Emergency lights blinking. The front corner of the car looked like a bomb went off, with a clump of hollow-cored hair from a whitetail stuck between body panels. The fender twisted outward. Headlamp assembly dangling and broken. Bumper dragging. Less than an hour after I paid to fix my car, it was wrecked. I carefully disconnected the shattered light assembly. Removed pieces of it from over the tire. Listened to the radiator with the engine running. To pay for this to be professionally fixed would run around $4,000. I'm not doing that. It might not be as bad as it looked. I can buy a salvaged front fender and bumper with the same factory paint. Those are simple, bolt-on parts. Same thing with the front light assembly. I'm a bit worried about a fiberglass mount for the brackets but I will look again in the morning. I think that I might be able to fix this for under a thousand dollars. Including driving to North Carolina to a specialty business that sells used Infiniti G35 parts. It's a moment that is entirely out of our control. Everything is fine and then a deer runs into the front corner of the car (it hit me, not vice versa). Nothing to see or avoid, nothing that I could do or prevent. Entropy reached in and did something which could have killed me, could have totalled the car, could have been a near miss. Whatever your planning, whatever your instincts and preparation, BANG. I almost wrote "fate," but I don't exactly see it that way. It's a thing that happens that is out of my control. The deer could have paused before running, or not paused if that was what it did. or the wind could have shifted before blowing the scent of an estrus doe right into his nostrils during the rut. There are probably alternate versions of me and of Earth in this universe where something else happened that resulted in my driving home unmolested. Physicists calculated the odds of every particle in this solar system being exactly replicated anywhere else in the volume of the known universe and determined that there are at least hundreds of them. Hundreds more of me, and of you. And there are the hundreds, or more, that existed in the past instances of this exact arrangement of particles, and in the future instances of this. I have lived before. Literally, an instance of me, not in another dimension but in this physical universe but somewhere far away. There are other instances of me right now. There are others that will exist. I am and I will be again. Other instances of me will write these same words on other instances of Diaryland. That is what this shit with the arrangement of the particles in the solar system being replicated means. I think a lot lately about the other instances of me. How many versions of this solar system are close, but not quite? How many are identical, but then an observation of a phenomenon, like a supernova or maybe just a distant star, changes a phd student's dissertation and her career and she moves to another university that offers her tenure based on that and then she meets and marries someone else and has kids and everything diverges? The version of me who Trish or Helenah stayed with. The version of me that ran with the TV show with N@tional Geographic. The version of me who got hired by the NYT after doing a year of civil rights journalism instead of being blacklisted for being a potential magnet for violence. There is not a version of me who won the lottery, because I do not play the lottery or gamble at all. This time, the buck hit my car. I suppose that most instances of me have had this happen. BANG! We can't control it. We plot our lives. We make investments, we drive carefully. Sometimes entropy intervenes and there is nothing that we can do but search ebay for car parts and try to put the machine back together. 12:55 a.m. - 2022-11-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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