restless wind inside a letter box - thoughts on the art of sedan maintenance, part ii.

photo: flickr

We had two windows down, one in each car, and we applied our ghetto-fabulous packing tape solution to them both.

After several reapplications of the tape, we learned some reinforcing tricks that kept the windows up higher for longer amounts of time. That's right, we upgraded to ghetto-fabulous 2.0.

Though the noisiness created by the unsealed window annoyed me thoroughly at first, it offended less after a few miles - thank goodness for the cocktail party effect. The air conditioner and stereo system worked a little bit harder, and life was fairly easily managed.

Somewhere along the line, the cars started popping headlight bulbs like they were champagne corks at 50 Cent's birthday party. Then soon after, my car became an exhibitionist, letting loose some of its molding and showing off far too much undercarriage.

I was getting worked over by the Chaos Theory, and I had neither the cash nor the mechanical expertise to fight back.

Southern California's sickeningly thick haze of smog lifted for a couple of days a few weeks ago. Lindsey and I decided to take advantage of it and drove with the windows down whenever we were not on the freeway.

We arrived at our frequent date-night destination, and I walked around the car to greet Lindsey at her car door. Noticing a gap, she asked if I had forgotten to roll up the windows. I had not forgotten. Yet another window motor had died before our very eyes.

Now, having one window taped up is a perfectly acceptable symbol of shrewd newlywed economic resource management, but having two windows taped up is just plain sad. Not to mention, my poor, little factory stereo felt the stress and had trouble keeping up with the noisy competition.

I scoured eBay the next day in search of cheap replacement parts (and free shipping), filled my virtual shopping cart, and let PayPal do its thing.

Entropy had crept a little too far into my sphere, and I determined to return some order to the world.