17 October 2010

Down to Earth by Peter Gabriel

The hippie in me fell in love with this song instantly after watching Disney's Wall-E.


Down to Earth
by Peter Gabriel

Did you think that your feet had been bound
By what gravity brings to the ground?
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
Well come on down

All these rules don't apply
When you're high in the sky
So come on down
Come on down

We're coming down to the ground
There's no better place to go
We've got snow upon the mountains
We've got rivers down below
We're coming down to the ground
To hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We send the seeds out in the breeze

Did you think you'd escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it
you're always afraid of the change

You've got a lot on your chest
Well you can come as my guest
So come on down
Come on down

We're coming down to the ground
There's no better place to go
We've got snow upon the mountains
We've got rivers down below
We're coming down to the ground
We'll hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We send the seeds out in the breeze

Like the fish in the ocean
We felt at home in the sea
We learned to live off the good land
We learned to climb up a tree
then we got up on two legs
But we wanted to fly
When we messed up our homeland
and set sail for the sky

We're coming down to the ground
There's no better place to go
We've got snow upon the mountains
We got rivers down below
We're coming down to the ground
We'll hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We send the seeds out in the breeze

We're coming down
Comin' down to earth
Like babies at birth
Comin' down to earth

Redefine your priorities
These are extraordinary qualities

We're coming down to the ground
There's no better place to go
We've got snow upon the mountains
We've got rivers down below
We're coming down to the ground
We'll hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We send the seeds out in the breeze

We're coming down to the ground
There's no better place to go
We've got snow upon the mountains
We've got rivers down below
We're coming down to the ground
We'll hear the birds sing in the trees
And the land will be looked after
We send the seeds out in the breeze

07 October 2010

An Accident Within the First 18 Hours of Owning A Vehicle: The Beginning of the Era of the White Whale (Summer 2009)

One of the best (and worst) decisions I made last summer was trading in my 2004 Nissan Xterra for a 1993 Ford F250. The X, surprisingly, was on it's last leg. Having blown a rear main seal twice in a year and not to mention the fact that I put well over 110,000 miles on the thing within 5 years, I was having some major doubts it would make back to the DC area at the end (well my end) of the 2009's fire season. So I decided to trade it in for whatever 4wd vehicle I could find that would match it's value. Now, Xterra's depreciate pretty easily after you buy them. Maybe it was just how hard I had ridden the poor vehicle over the decade...either way it wasn't worth shit when came time to trade it in. I was looking for other Xterra's or diesel pick-up trucks withing an 8 hour radius of Cedar City, UT. After a little over a month of searching I found the perfect truck for me: an all white 1993 Ford F250. The truck itself was located on a used car lot in Twin Falls, ID 6 hours away. Since I had been planning on visiting my daughter that week I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I took all the essentials out of the X and started making my way up I-15 for Twin Falls.

The truck itself was not for the faint of heart. The diamond plate running boards had seen better days. At one point the bed had been lined (very cheaply). Then, it was peeling and flaking like it was going out of style. The cab had a funk of chewing tobacco and body odor. To me, however, it was perfect. The bench seat in the front fit me comfortably. With an inch to spare on either end of me, I was able to lay completely stretched out across the bench. Fabulous! No more reclining my driver's seat to sleep at rest stops. It had a back bench seat that was accessible only by reclining the front bench seat. The truck came with 31" tires and a hell of a V8 diesel engine with an aftermarket turbo. I was sold. After some paperwork and a test drive, I transferred everything from the X to the truck and took a moment to say good-bye to the X-Terra. I still miss it to this day but I don't know if I'll buy another Xterra...but that's for another post all together. After a few hours at the dealership, I pulled out with my new [by ownership] truck and hit the road for Boise.The truck was pretty damn big...easily the biggest vehicle I've ever owned. Right away I dubbed it the White Whale.

I spent a day and a half in Boise. Things were going great with the truck. My first purchase was a truck box I got from a Home Depot in Twin Falls, ID. After that I bought a head unit in Boise which installed in the Best Buy parking lot on Franklin Ave. I left directly from Maleigha's mother's house to head back to Cedar City which is about a 7 to 8 hour drive [Note: many a woman I have come across has turned their nose up at the White Whale. Maleigha on the other hand fell in love with it when I let her crawl in and around on it...or at least that's how I interpreted her...]. I was making good timing as far as how early I left in the afternoon. I had expected to be in Cedar City late in the evening. Everything was going great until I got to Ogden, UT.

In the tail end of rush hour, I hit Ogden, UT on I-15. The truck was handling beautifully. Traffic was heavy but everyone was moving briskly at about 70-75 mph. As I was making my way through traffic I started coming up on the driver side of a tractor-trailer. Now, my dad had always taught me to be weary of traveling along side a semi at anytime. You never know if he's going to have a blow out or if he's going to lose control of the trailer. This lesson has always been stuck in my head since I was 16 so I waited for the car in front of me to gain a little distance so I could zip straight pass the trucker. I was about 20 feet behind the tractor-trailer in the lane next to him when all of a sudden I saw a puff of white smoke and a black object shoot sideways off the trailer of the semi into my lane directly in front of me. When it fell within range of my headlights I recognized what it was right away: his tire. "Fuck me!" was the first though that came across my mind when I realized that there was no way in hell I was going to dodge this shredded tire 20 feet in front of me all the while driving 75 mph with traffic all around me. The only thing I could do was put a death grip on my steering wheel and pray for the best. I remember feeling the front end of the truck launch into the air followed by the rear end. My hood buckled as if something hit it from the inside but other than that the truck kept rolling as if nothing happened to it. As I looked in my rear view mirror I saw several cars swerve to miss the 3 foot tall piece of rubber that I had shredded even more. I thought to myself, "Hell yeah! This is one tough vehicle!" High off of my new found confidence I started to regain my speed to catch up with traffic. After a few seconds of acceleration, I started to lose power and my accelerator was getting spongy. I took my foot off of it for a couple seconds and hit it again. My pedal was even spongier the second time around. Eventually, I felt a snap and the pedal went straight to the floor. At the same time, I noticed the needle on my tachometer start climbing as my engine started racing. Slowly I started to uncontrollably gain speed in the rush hour traffic. 75. 80. 85. 90. 95. Pegged out. The speedometer's needle stopped at 95 but I could feel myself still steadily accelerating. At this point, I had to take evasive action to not hit other motorists on Interstate 15. Never before up until this point in my life had I been more scared shit less. For a brief moment I started panicking. Once I remembered I had a horn and that I grew up driving on metropolitan Washington DC highways, I dealt with the speed temporarily as I started troubleshooting ways to slow down. I jumped on my brakes which helped only till about 40 mph at which point they started smoking and being overrun by the engine. I knew if I threw it into neutral at whatever absurd number of thousands of RPMs it was running, I'd probably blow up the transmission. My only other option was to turn the truck off and pray to God that I could main control without power steering. At that same time as if God was listening to the aforementioned prayer, I noticed a off ramp for UT 134 or W 2700 N St in the northern part of town. I cut off a few cars and another semi at a speed of over 100 mph and aimed myself to barrel down the off ramp. Once on the off ramp and straight I killed my engine. I soon realized how horrendous the manual steering was on a truck that size at which point I started the engine again to aim for a field near the intersection of the road below and the Southbound off-ramp. Once I had the field in my sight, I killed the engine and rode the breaks until I came to a stop on top of a Juniper bush near the intersection. Now I have no shame explaining to yall how badly I was shaking. I took a minute to gather myself and breathe. When I got, popped my hood, and cleared out the smoke, I found a piece of tire the size of a college text book sitting where an oil tube going into my turbo should have been and a snapped accelerator cable. For some God awful reason, the springs on Ford throttle assemblies will rotate the throttle 1.5 times backwards leaving it open without any tension being applied to it (i.e. a throttle cable attached to an accelerator). I gave AAA a call and had the tow truck driver tow it to the nearest Advanced Auto Parts. Now, this is why I believe in karma (again, for another post): after dropping my truck off in the parking lot of Advanced Auto Parts, I decided to sleep for the night and deal with everything in the morning. The tow truck driver, now off duty after having dealt with me took it upon himself to make sure I got to whatever motel I wanted to go to within Ogden. All I have to say is pay it forward people and it will come back to you! I made it to a Motel 6, went to a bar nearby for a much needed drink, and slept for several hours.

I woke to have my truck towed to a AAA approved shop nearby where I was told the only thing I needed to have done was get a replacement throttle cable installed. Perfect. $35 part, $85 of labor and I was back on the road. We found the breather tube for the oil behind the turbo. A hose clamp or two later and I had it back on within a couple minutes. Now this shop had no cables in stock so I had to wait till 1600 in the afternoon for the cable to get there and for them to take the 10 minutes to install it. So the entire day I spent walking around downtown Ogden on top of a couple rounds of pool with a Jazz guitarist named Jimmy I had met in a bar where I ate lunch. At 1700 I was back on the road. 2000 I was back in Cedar. I moved some things into the truck, checked under the hood to make sure everything was still OK, and went to bed early considering I had to work in the morning. Little did I know that this was only a preview as to what was to come with my ownership/partnership with the White Whale.

A New Approach

It's been a couple months since I last posted. Laziness can be an evil snare. During my hiatus I was discussing my blog with a friend of mine who's a poly sci major at Catholic University and an intern at a pretty reputable online media source. My friend is an avid writer both due to her course load and her recreational writing. She suggested that I write sometimes just for the sake of writing and not necessarily just because something major or interesting happened in my life. I had start to do that a little but I definitely don't write as much as I should considering how much I enjoy it which is the important thing. Another thing I kick myself for is not writing about a lot of the adventures I've manage to land myself in. So here's what I'm going to do. I'll write about my feelings and my interpretations one the events to which I'm exposed through out my day to day (or more realistically week to week) life. I'm going to write about the dumb things I do on a regular basis. I'll write about some of the more interesting adventures I wind up on as well. I'll even fill readers in on stories from the past few years that I've neglected to post here once or twice a week. I use the word readers as if I have scores of people jonesing for a hit on an RSS feed from tmbevans.blogspot.com. To be honest, I'm happy to share my experiences with those that wish to listen to me or actually care and want to hear about what I do throughout my day to day life but in all honesty I write this blog for myself. This is my digital diary. If someone doesn't like my blog google is only a few keystrokes away. Anyways, I digress. I hope to transform my blog into a more fluid one. Feel free to give me feedback on my writing.