Disco Dilemna

Fun evening tonight.

For someone who thinks they would rather live NOW, for all their admiration of our our tough and clever ancestors and their achievements, than at any other time in history it's been a toughy. While living NOW means I can read, have had an education, anti-biotics, the right to free speech, the ability to treat women as equals, procreation-free sex and the ability to say fuck off and die to any religion crazed loon I care too, living (right) NOW also means being skint. Not swede eating, child selling medieval skint, when being a serf dude meant hanging by your thumbs for the amusement of some inbred frog speaking member of the middle classes, but still, relatively and quantitatively, skint.

Among other things this means that my choice of personal transport (another NOW plus of course) is limited to vehicles from the recent past, a chronological upper limit of around 12+ years old. This can be cool, as I get to drive around in a small nostalgia bubble, lose no sleep over the depreciation (V = P(1-R)^n, like you didn't know) and am often on the right side of the component failure bath tub curve*.
Often, not always.

Tonight my old Land Rover Disco decided it was time to remind me that NOW is not some white clean i-pod shaped, photo-shopped vision of instant seamless gratification, however the consumer pornographers might try to convince otherwise, but that all the things we use and count on are fabricated from matter, and while it may or may not have a soul, it is most definitely base.

A couple of times lately I've waited for the coil to heat, turned the engine over and nothing has happened. Like any other shape-shifting killer primate with thumbs in the same situation, I automatically glare at the switch or key that has failed to initiate my desire and do it again. Sometimes it works and the monkey brain shrugs and gets on with Taking It All For Granted, something this generation more than any other seems to find very easy, gorged as it is with the surrounding media pap that waves stuff and aspirations at it, and tells it you can have it all and it always works. Bunch of arse.

My Dad and his generation would have been straight out with a spanner and a bit of bent wire fiddling and learning what had happened the first time, being a lot closer to the nuts and bolts of how stuff works. Sadly, I'm not and paid for it.

So, on the way back from fisherman bothering in St. Ives, did some shopping (fags and vodka, natch) jumped back into the 1990's turned the key and the sucker wouldn't start. No matter how much I stared at it. Swore like a deckhand in a wine bar for a minute (which did nothing) then got my Dad head on and lifted the bonnet. Lights didn't dim when I turned the key, so battery fine, starter not turning, ipso facto, current not getting to starter. Wiggled wires in that 'bloke who knows nothing but wants to look like he does' way for a while, then sat down and thought for a minute.

Being a werewolf from Essex has its pluses. One of which is having connections to (allegedly) Dodgy Geezers. Belled a couple of people who know people who know how to get pretty much any motor going whether the actual owner wants it to go or not and found out more than I need to know about the vagaries of the Disco ignition system. Turns out there's a sinister sounding module called The Spider, part of the immobilising circuit, which is prone to immobilising when you want it to be mobilising.

One way of bypassing it (allegedly) is to "beat the shit out of the fucker with a claw hammer 'til it falls out of the dash under the radio and boost the left input and output tabs with a bit of foil or a chewing gum wrapper", another is to "jump the coil 'though you'll have to stall it to stop the engine and leg it from there". After pointing out the beast was mine and that I wasn't in that much of a hurry, Crimepedia finally came up with the suggestion to pull a fuse, put it back, click alarm on and off and try it again. Which worked. Amazingly.

Moral of this story? Well, Take Nothing For Granted is sound enough, but It's Good To Know Dodgy Geezers opens up a whole dustbinful of relativism even for a half-arsed left-leaning libertarian like this particular werewolf. On the other (sinister) hand, at least I can chew it over with my strangely sharp canines, at home, Martini in hand, thanks to exactly that moral relativism.
Cheers!

*Also cool is being able to take my son back to Essex and show him What Cars May Come in our future...