Tuesday, May 14, 2013

When I rolled off the lot in my then-new Saab, almost eight years ago, I remember being impressed by how smoothly the car drove. Waxed and shiny and black as night, my four-wheeled chariot hugged the road through Lake Bluff like it had grown out of the pavement, gliding quickly and soundlessly. It still runs relatively well, I suppose, with nary an incident in the past few years, but the cracks are starting to show.

Dutch warned me about days like this. He warned me particularly about the Big One–catastrophic electrical system failure–that has yet to happen. What has happened, however, is a fuel gauge prone to wild swings of inaccuracy. It drops to empty after I top it off, every time. Reads three-quarters full, when truth would place the tank closer to a gallon. To fix this issue would call for a few hundred dollars, which doesn’t seem like a good use of a few hundred dollars. More than the incident itself, though, is the potential for other incidences, greater misfortune portended by a fuel gauge on the fritz.

I know what the real fix is here, plain as day. I should get a new car. I wouldn’t want, like, a Beemer. Something slightly snooty and quirky instead. Hell, I’d probably get another Saab, were they not bankrupt. This time, too, I’d negotiate far, far better. But I choose to ignore the new car option, and in place of a malfunctioning fuel gauge will be a greater reliance on my odometer to determine my distance to empty. Deep down, a part of you wants to believe that your vehicle is different. Yours is the one that will last forever, even as the delusion erodes and you ride it into the ground, hand on the wheel, gaze to the horizon–the Captain of Decay, the Lord of Rust.