If failure was adventure I’d be the most interesting guy in the world

Man do I get down about just trying to get shit done. Task… directed effort… accomplish… satisfaction. That’s for congenitally successful people not rolling failures comme moi. Grand scheme; one could say “who cares?” You did your eighteen plus years incarcerated now just live until you’re dead. Hmmmm…that sounds like the protocol for doing time inside, not outside.

Inside is: get a routine, stick to it. So, now outside there is what I feel is the “macro” routine of a job, meals, and maintenance of whatever (yard, house, cars, pets…). This, of course, neglects building up to the yard, car, dwelling, pets…all the accouterments of an actualized American; which is everything lost to incarceration.

The frustration of the lost building phase comes in, for me, by the little schemes — which keep following a failure pattern. The latest that has me torqued is trying to put mounted snow tires — full wheels — onto my car.

I had purchased the rim/tire set last spring from a person who did the same thing I was scheming: swap four wheels on the hubs of the car instead of the tire shop swapping tires on rims. Similar model of car and the rim specifications checked out — bolt pattern and offset. Thus I was following in a trod path. I got the wheels out of storage and balanced ($50) then last Sunday did the wheel swap: jack up the front left, remove, replace, torque bolts sequentially, let car down, repeat three more times and it’s getting dark and starting to snow. Just in time Jason puts all the equipment away, starts the car to drive it out of the woods back to civilization and … .[mechanical seizing screech sound]. The front brake rotors are seized. Something is egregiously wrong!

Abandon the car and walk back to the house. Eat something and think. Recalculate. The front rims have to come off, so back out with a head lamp and maximum frustration to swap back the radials on to the front. Take the below pictures and still leave the car because the front and rear wheels may not have the same circumference and it is an all wheel drive car. This frantic wheel swap is where the back pain starts.

The mating surfaces are the same “offset” into the dish of the rim, but the newer generation requires the one inch of clearance for brake pad assembly!

Drive not inspected truck to work Monday and order spacers ($85) to push out the rims the one inch to give the brake pad assembly clearance for the rim to turn. Get home before dark and swap the rear wheels. Back feeling more tweaked. After twisting and lifting plywood at work Wednesday back is blown out.

Here is where I’m thinking of the continuous failure of everything I try. I often use the expression: not getting any traction. Perfect fucking metaphor. Car, like my life, will not have any traction for winter weather.

Oh yeah; one of the front lugs snapped during the second wheel change. It paradoxically tightened in the loosening direction and just flat out broke off in the lug nut. Who knows what the metaphor is there, but it added $90 to the oil change on Tuesday. Tally is $225 and if my back is still nonfunctional when the spacers arrive the tire shop labor will bump that to $285.

The constant feeling of no traction belies all the effort. Maybe everyone is caught in their own failure loops…big, small, and in between. the only solution is to not mourn the failures and to acknowledge the occasional success. Often though, when there is a quantum change in the seasons from one day to another and I spin around in the woods to relish the moment it occurs that we’re mostly working for a tortured retribution false satisfaction fuck you moment before death, so why not make all moments such and be always ready for the final fuck you disappointment.

Happy Holidays
Justin Free 27 November 2022 17:50

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