Idling rough

I'm supposed to be back in Texas right now, recovering from a long drive, yet I'm not. Instead, I am still here in Kansas City at my parents' house. Car's in the shop...again. Last year I was stuck here for four weeks while mechanics endeavored to replace my transmission, spending several weeks attempting a rebuild before just putting a new one in. By that point I was ready to grab someone by the lapels and tell them to GET - ME - OUT - OF - HERE.

Cars have been the boon and bane of my existence virtually since I started driving. Always key to me getting what I need, always dying at the worst times (although this time at least, I was home, rather than in the middle of nowhere). I take after a writer I like and name my vehicles after Star Trek starships. The first thing I drove with any frequency lent its own name to that, an 84 Plymouth Voyager that met its end at the hands and pickup truck of a drunk driver late one night while my parents were driving.

The first one I was in for any length, though, was a 90 Ford Aerostar that came about as a result of that accident. I dubbed it the Enterprise; it was old and beat up, fast and relatively sturdy, way past its lifespan, yet when it did finally go it still felt like it had gone before its time. I always imagined it as the original Enterprise after the rebuild job in The Motion Picture, kept around because there was too much goodwill attached to it for it to be scrapped. I drove it into the ground, not only around Wichita but to two seasons of drum corps before the thing finally would take no more.

Its replacement was a 96 Dodge Grand Caravan I christened the Enterprise-A, and like its predecessor it was sleek, pretty, had nice modern features, and was a lemon. We picked it up for a fourth of blue book value and spent the remainder of that value or more fixing it. Every time I'd have to have something else ridiculous done to it I'd imagine Scotty cursing in the bowels of the ship at the beginning of the fifth movie: "'Let's see what she's got,' said the captain. And we found out, didn't we?"

Yes, I'm a nerd. No, it doesn't bother me one bit.

Right now, it's the Defiant, a 97 Chevy Lumina that I recently learned has a history as a cop car before it made its way to my family. It didn't surprise me; it has the sort of tenacity and feel I would expect from such a vehicle, which makes it ideal for sliding around town with pizzas or punching through rush hour traffic on the way to a gig.

Ack--Just now I accidentally clicked some random button on this godforsaken toolbar-ridden browser on my parents' computer and it whisked me away to Google. Thank goodness for autosaving.

Anyway...hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get out of here, and get back to some semblance of a routine. Being away from Denton for a while is nice, but one thing is for sure: the length of time I spend here is inversely proportional to how relaxing it is for me.