Battery

It is getting cold. It is starting in with the snow. The wind is at the stinging stage. Nothing bothers melting. Bootprints of ice are pressed into the sidewalks. Icicles extend like teeth from cars’ bumpers and buildings’ eaves. My car refused to start on Tuesday. It was my own fault for not going outside and starting up the engine at all on Monday, as I’d pledged to do every day, even when I don’t have to drive anywhere, in order to keep the car from sitting too long idle in the cold, in order to avert just this sort of thing from happening. I turned the key and the engine made a strange non-sound, a series of clicks and a faraway whirr, not even a sputter. I kept trying, turning the key in the ignition again and again, suspecting that I was somehow doing irreparable or expensively-fixable-only things to my car’s aging engine block, but optimistically thinking that perhaps through sheer tenacity enough attempts would bring the moribund battery back from the dead. This was right outside my apartment. I was impatient. I had to get out and go. Newly-released Return Of The King Hyperextended Editions waited by the British bushel on groaning store shelves, their smartly-packaged tetrads of shiny movie discs murmuring my name seductively in the Black Speech, demanding to be purchased and viewed today, the unit street date, during daylight hours, none of this wait-for-after-work nonsense. I coughed up fifty dollars for some bored-looking beady-eyed no-necked goon in a van to jump-start my car’s battery with what looked like a bright red dinner tray sprouting alligator clamps on the ends of inky tentacles. Said goon actually hit me with a You new to the area or something? line — why yes I am, thank you, is it that obvious. I did not put on airs. I was the person sans clue in this scenario. He regarded me with justifiable beady-eye-rolling disdain when I admitted I didn’t belong to Triple-A. I will soon belong to Triple-A. I will also soon have a new battery put in. My poor car has not yet begun to truly give out on me. Someday it will strand me properly, and not at home, and not during the day, and when it’s quite colder than Tuesday’s cheerful noontime 19 Fahrenheit. The goon’s alligator dinner tray tentacles did their thing. The car revved back to life then, worked again in the evening, and started twice today as well. Successfully obtained and screened the four-hour third part of the Geekerdämmerung that night while consuming an entire bottle of Black Tower. A good healthy engine-gunning warmup once or twice a day, every day, we’re looking at for the whole of the season, be it rain, shine, or blizzard; so much for the Dickinsonian not-leaving-the-house routine I’ve gotten used to. The clear sharp snowy air has a fine scent and feel to be out in, for short spells. Tonight I am chilly-footed, static-shocked, oversugared, and all hobbited out.

The Festival of Waxes

I was alarmed and bewildered to discover that I had in fact purchased candles and lit them both last night and tonight without it ever occurring to me that last night and tonight were the first and second nights of Hanukkah, which I technically don’t celebrate anymore given that I haven’t practiced Judaism in years, I’ve long since abandoned my belief in the man upstairs, and I’m unable to recall the last time I consumed applesauce-slathered latkes. Admittedly the candles in question are not exactly synagogue issue, nor are we talking menorahs or shamases here. The candles I bought were seven Yankee Candle sampler-size lumps of assorted aromatic frou-frou, to help combat my apartment’s pretty much constant bouquets of sludgy coffee, unwashed laundry, atomized broth, and furnace-scorched dust-bunny.

The ones I lit last night were a) a periwinkle-blue bathroom-soap-ish number entitled Storm Watch, and b) a home-frankensteined combination involving the hollowed-out remains of an old Yankee scented votive entitled Harvest melting miserably around a shrinking unscented IKEA tealight, which combination I privately refer to as Harvester of Sorrow, w/ apologies to Hetfield.

I lit Stormy and the Harvester for atmosphere as I prepared dinner, drank wine, sliced my finger on the Saran Wrap box, and spilled several kinds of food on the floor. Then tonight I re-lit Stormy here in the office to make my workspace smell more like a French cat house and also to work on using up all this excess oxygen I’ve got lying about. I.e. all very secular and none too reverent in terms of Judaic significance or holiday spirit.

I did not realize until about half past ten tonight that I’d gone and accidentally celebrated the first two nights of Hanukkah, though of course I’d neglected to accidentally cough out the traditional Hebrew candle-lighting prayer. The closest I got to religious texts were, firstly, my stopping behind a pickup truck at a traffic signal on Niagara Falls Boulevard earlier tonight, which truck had grandly finger-written in the grime on its rear panel FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE WASH ME (with a large skewed NO! finger-appended to the upper right); and, secondly, my reading Anne Carson telling the Paris Review that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.

In any case I feel that any inadvertent Hanukkanian tendencies were probably offset tonight by my indulging in a bout of bonafide Naziesque boot-polishing. One of my Doc Marten boots’ laces snapped a few months ago and this evening while out looking for replacement laces I got suckered into buying this whole package of Doc Marten boot-care schwag — laces, dustcloth, sponges, a tin of balsam wax, a tin of some mysterious lardy goop called “dubbin” — and I sat down at the kitchen table and cracked open the wax and gave those Docs a shining they won’t forget. They now gleam Reichishly, ready to tread on the oppressed in steel-toed high style. The whole time I was working on them I couldn’t help but keep inwardly hearing Woody Allen’s line from Manhattan about beating down Nazis: It’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots.