RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 212 Making Cars The first time I ever saw a Tesla was in Princeton : the very early hours there would bring out these on-the-way-to- office types, stopping and  dashing in, to either Small World, or Starbucks, for their coffee. A veritable array of expensive cars set loose. I for some reason thought this was a one-off car that the guy himself had manufactured. I'd had no exposure before that to any of this Tesla electric-car auto manufacture stuff. After enough times I began talking with the guy, and we'd go over his car, and I learned the finer points of Tesla electric ownership   - range, charging, power, expense, etc. These were all big money people, and this guy was quite proud of his Tesla ownership. (Here's that moral-superiority riff again). After a while, roundabout conversations, we realized, (he, jokingly  -  me, to heart), that the entire idea of Tesla automotive design was essentially a

RUDIMENTS, pt. 211 Making Cars I've always liked things simple and I've mostly (tried to) kept things that way. I really can't stand pretension and complication. I like things in their purity of one; without all that 'this means that and this is therefore connected to that, which means this....' All the old-school loyalty and the pretending at social station. It really grates. When I got to Princeton, I had to deal with  all of that, as it was always  ongoing  -  a bit of a hum of haughtiness was everywhere. Emulated by others, the town had becoming a benchmark place to which other, lesser,  towns aspired. Whatever. The ambiance is of a piece, and really not worth the extra four bucks it probably adds to everything. My ways of living have always been in the 'poor' category  -  so little of any of those things had the markings of class or higher culture. Princeton sort of took the cake. With a well-e

RUDIMENTS, pt. 210 Making Cars Going like gangbusters sometimes gets you nowhere : everything ends up broken and you're licking your wounds. Frantic words of haste, and worries about demolition seem all around. One time, almost in despair, I took a job at a car wash. Yeah, like an idiot. It's an automated line, they hand you a rag, say stand at the end  and swab the cars down, and hope for tips. The car wash itself was a simple fee, like $2.50. We got a dollar and a half an hour, for working, and a 75 cents, say, three quarters, was seen as a monstrous tip. Shared in a pot, supposedly, to be split later for  everyone on that shift to be cut in. I never watched it close, never cared, and never knew if I'd been cheated. It didn't matter, and such were the ways  -  half the tips never made it to any bucket anyway, and I wasn't going to be the one to go up against any one or two of these clowns. Man, these guys invent

RUDIMENTS, pt. 209 Making Cars I used to think someone always had it in for me  - then that feeling went away, and I turned it around and started feeling that way myself towards others, and then it all got turned over again and headed back at me, over a course of years. And then miraculously I was a 'grown-up' and it hardly mattered any longer. Free-standing barricades, something always in your way. I'd talk to people, like even those NYCity draft guys. trying to drag me into their cycle of mayhem, and I'd see in their eyes that they were probably just as scared as I was, and perplexed too, about the whole idea of what they'd gotten into or were promoting. I'd probably busted up their entire picture by showing up as I did. Intransigent about my own goals and features. They, of course, didn't know it, but I'd further rubbed it into their faces by showing up on a bicycle and leaving it downstairs at the