Paramedichron #3

Consider the noble astronaut.

In the NASA space program, astronauts are selected from the ranks of extremely capable, intelligent, and disciplined professionals. In the early days of space pioneering, the hiring pool was primarily military, primarily pilots, primarily the best of the best. John Glenn, for instance, a decorated Marine pilot, was the first American to orbit the Earth, and returned to space at age 77 on the space shuttle, Discovery. In between his bookend space voyages, he managed to fill his time as an Ohio senator from 1974 - 1999. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon, was a test pilot, who flew the X-15 rocket plane to the very edge of the atmosphere, at an amazing Mach 5.74 (3,989 MPH). The X-15 proved to be a farm league for aspiring spacefarers. These men were undeniably the best of the best. Of. The. Best.

Today, in an age of almost-routine space flights, and after thirty years of shuttle missions, the pedigree of astronauts has blossomed to include geologists, climatologists, meteorologists (pick your favorite Ologist), teachers, researchers, and, as mentioned, a retired astronaut-senator. The shift from get-it-done, proof-of-concept space flight to nuts-and-bolts space science demanded a wide variety of educational credentials, in addition to the ability to function in a dangerous environment, under stressful conditions, and the ability to improvise and make critical decisions. Make no mistake - contemporary astronauts are still highly-trained primates in a rocket, but now they need to do more than just push the right button, at the right time, and not freak out. They have extra-primate gifts, talents, and training that benefit the goals of NASA, and, ultimately, all of the other primates down here on this globe, plus the other animals and plants that share this cosmic oasis.

While there is considerable status in being an astronaut, everyone understands that the mission is the priority.  Decisions about safety, weather, or equipment trump the personal aspirations of individuals in the program, and it's expected that if something goes awry, the launch may be delayed or scrubbed.  For someone who has devoted a considerable amount of their life to the barest chance of space travel, I can only imagine that such an occurrence is a crushing disappointment.  But the mission dwarfs the tiny (yet highly-qualified) monkeys that strap themselves into the seats of an immense and exquisitely exotic vehicle that roars skyward on a plume of fire, only to glide home when the work is done. 

The Driver and I have heard that there is a storm coming. There is no doubt that it will pass very close to the our launch pad, but we continue preparing ourselves, hoping that our launch will not be aborted.  We chat about the consequences of a delay in our launch window, hopeful that this is wasted conversation.  The storm will certainly impact our command base, but it is unknown whether the mission will continue, or if it will necessarily be affected.  We do not know.

We're buckled in, ready, skeptical, hopeful.  The countdown continues.

Paramedichron #2

If your talk to a dietitian for any length of time about the American Diet, eventually the subject of nutrient density will come up.  The idea is that certain foods are nutrient-poor and that certain other foods are packed with vitamins and minerals.  Your goal, as a health-conscious American human, should be to maximize the nutrition of the foods you eat.  Sounds obvious.

Unfortunately, many of the toothsome items that we expect to be part of our day-to-day diet are packed with nothing but calories.  Evidently, you can apply the "yummy test" to any foodstuff, and if you really, really like it, it should probably be hidden on the top shelf, out of reach, out of view, or - better yet - left on the shelf at the grocery store.

Take, for instance, a cookie...  A delightful little nugget, consisting of sugar, simple carbohydrates, and fat, it offers little in the way of nutrition - even if packed with oatmeal, raisins, and nuts. It's a calorie bomb, specifically designed to tickle discreet receptors in our mouth and brain that respond to easy energy, a remnant of our hunter-gatherer origins. 

Once upon a time, buying groceries was extremely hard work.  Someone, probably the womenfolk, would have to traipse across the savanna, poking at the landscape, scratching in the soil, rattling the bushes, to fill the larder.  The menfolk, meanwhile, took part in ritual hunts that occasionally resulted in meat over a fire, but provided ample grist for tales of the One-That-Got-Away. 

Survival was hard, but evolution was kind, in time, to the early peoples who developed a taste for the sparse sugar or fat-laden "cookies" of the day.  Perhaps fruits, avocados, or rich fatty meats constituted the fortuitous treats to be had.  Regardless, our bodies evolved a mechanism that rewards calorie-dense consumption with a tiny chemical neurologic prize. Eat something sweet or rich, and you feel inexplicably good, even happy

I bring all this dubious anthropology up because I am suddenly immersed in studying Anatomy and Physiology.  The foundation of pending weeks of scholarship will be my understanding of basic biochemistry and microbiology.  I studied geology and chemistry in college, but I only have a sixth-grade biology education, which I dredge up from decades-old synaptic memories.  I am amazed that I remember anything, and, more amazing, is that what I remember is still relevant. 

The text I am reading, highlighting, and transcribing as notes, is nutrient-dense.  The information packed in its pages is the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, and absolutely up-to-date. It is broccoli printed, bound, and delivered to my hands, and ultimately my brain. There is so much information on any given page that I frequently read it several times, before selecting the key facts that I will endeavor to commit to memory. I duplicate important diagrams and images, in the hope that recreating it will burn it into the fabric of my cerebellum. 

I am chewing, chewing, chewing, digesting the information with my note-taking hand, but the information is so mind-boggling, so arresting in its awesomeness, that I can't help but feel a tiny little tickle in my cortex, an electrochemical reward for understanding even a thin slice of our biological mechanics.  If I were a religious person, I would classify the feeling I get as reverent. As it is, the more I understand about the minutia of cellular biochemistry, the more dumbfounded I am. 

Life is amazing; learning is hard.

Paramedichron: #1

The Anatomy and Physiology course starts on July 26th. We have text books in hand, if not an actual syllabus.  We have met with the Honorable Doc, and he has drawn his private conclusions from the meeting - filed away, no doubt, only to be produced during our Most Heinous Moments Ever.  We know (approximately) Where to be, When to be there, and little more.  At least for Day One.

During the course of the pre-amble to this adventure, The Driver and I have been told many things, most of which have evaporated in a swirling cloud of vapor when exposed to department chiefs, critical examination, or the light of day.  As we approach the zero-hour of immersion in the first chapter of this endeavor, the tales that we have heard have crystallized into wishful thinking, best intentions, and tooth fairies.  These misunderstandings fall at our feet, singing like tiny shards of broken pane. 

The Driver and I discuss such matters; we share a jaundiced disappointment in the Bureaucracy, and a small disgust at the petty skirmishes that stand between us and our year of scholarship.  We look at each other, exchange silent nods, and turn our tired bodies back-to-back.

Our swords may be corroded, long un-used, dragging in their sheathes, but we simultaneously draw them forth.  Even so, they flash wickedly in the glare of this mid-July afternoon, his low, mine high.  At some unspoken cue, they align, extended and opposite to one another.  A biting reckoning awaits. 

We are ready.  We are in hostile territory. We are EFD.

Like a Frosty Beer, But Completely Different

I must have been in, perhaps, sixth grade, and I was bringing a monstrous creation to life in the woods behind the Harvest Gold split-level on Willow Road. I had ached for a tree house my entire short life, only to move into a suburban, verdant neighborhood, with my own private Sherwood Forest. A perfect triad of hemlock trees waited in the back yard, beyond sight of the house, hidden by spirea and thimble-berries. Being an indifferent, under-achieving sixth grader, I had ample time for this project. The only obstacle to beginning construction was matériel.

Like a shed-roofed addition for growing family's house, Halley Plat was squeezed into a parcel of woods between the moneyed vistas of Edgemoor and Chuckanut Drive (well before it worms south and becomes the Most Scenic Highway in the world). Like the aforementioned domestic expansion, the craftsmanship of the modest homes being built there was slightly frantic.  Contractors steadily swarmed over foundations, erected studs, sheathed it all inside and out, and - Lo – a house popped into being, mushroom-like.

I made twilight visits to homes-in-progress, tromping across damp plywood floors, scaling the treadless stair risers, taking in details of framing, nostrils awash in the tang of sawdust, the musk of curing concrete. Pallets of plywood and two by fours slumbered under the dark sky, tools lie where they landed at five o'clock. Building my tree house could have been trivially easy. A trusty accomplice, some midnight skulking, and all the wood that we could chuck into the trees could be ours.

Fortunately, as regards my character, my compass pointed north to scrounging, not the southern bearing of theft. Unfortunately, as regards the quality of my tree house, I found it necessary to patch together scraps and odd remnants in my arboreal endeavor. The timbers running between the trees I sourced easily enough, but the plywood decking bridging these joists came from discard bins at construction sites. Luckily, I happened upon a piece large enough to cover half the triangular floor. The balance of the empty space I bridged with a tilting stair-step arrangement of smaller and smaller bits of exterior plywood, riveted together with the abundant sixteen-penny nails that littered the mud surrounding the concrete footing for the new houses. I had become a necessary combination of Doctor Frankenstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Artful Dodger.

I relate all this prepubescent acquisition, lurking, and attendant hammering because the production of a tree fort necessitates the employment of a certain simple machine. Swinging a hammer at found fasteners, into salvaged lumber was all well and fine, but the mechanics of climbing ten feet with hands full of supplies and tools required a pulley. The origin of this pulley is lost in the mists of my recollection, but I can state with confidence that when it fell into my possession, I immediately knew it would serve one day as the supply line between Terra Firma and my future, fantastic lofty fort.

If you give any thought to the problem of hoisting something, anything, aloft, in the process of building in the trees, you'll see the fallacy of using a pulley. A rope, by itself, is sufficient for the task: secure your load, clamber up, hoist as you may. A pulley, however, allows you to stand on the ground below, and, courtesy of the noble wheel and axle, converts your downward pull on the rope into an upward vector for the work you exert upon the mass of the burden you are lifting. A completely superfluous, yet delicious, exercise in mechanics.

This tableau of Oregon Grape and Salal is where I may have received my radioactive spider bite. I'm not entirely certain from where my peculiar power came, but I recall a certain event, in a surging ocean of well-recalled, crystal-clear life experiences, that may be the genesis of my particular gift. I still bear grudges against kindergarten classmates, and I assure you that my memory is excellent. Based on what I know about cognition and the nature of intelligence, I can conjure only one possible etiology and I remember the events vividly, like a landscape frozen in the strobe of a lightning bolt.

I was fixing to nail an irregularly-shaped fragment of half-inch ply onto the previously-secured random chunks of laminated wood that constituted the crazy planes of my burgeoning elevated garrison. I had tossed the lumber up and onto the existing surface, but decided to utilize the pulley to freight the hammer upwards, an antique owned by my late grandfather, Amos – a blacksmith. I have since learnt the value of a handful of useful knots, but at the time, my ignorance called for improvisation. The turns of frayed cordage, like a lashing of writhing snake, tightened and clutched at the hickory shaft, the coils slipping like the stranglehold of a python on the proverbial greased pig.

I replay this tiny drama in my head, and I'm amazed that I possessed not the sense to stand beyond the probable trajectory of a one-pound chunk of steel set to fly by gravity and a shitty knot. When the rope was fully hauled, I bent to belay the line to a makeshift cleat comprised of a pair of nails driven into the bark of one of the hemlocks. The twining and looping of the rope around the nails must have tickled the snake's hold on the hammer's handle and potential energy proved kinetic.

I remember a wave of nausea hitting me like a crashing breaker, slapping me down against the hard sand of a littoral abruptness. I may have blacked out for a time; I was alone and don't know for sure. I clutched at my senses, reeling between the roots of the second-growth adolescent trees, who were audibly laughing at me in their quiet manner. I fought down the rising gorge in my throat and abandoned any thoughts of swinging a hammer, much less climbing trees, that afternoon. The hammer had fallen a minimum of seven feet only to land squarely on my crown. I never told anyone about the undeniable concussion I had suffered that day. My interest in the tree fort, my ugly platform in the woods, waned rapidly after I summoned the fortitude to finish the final bit of half-assed carpentry that defined the realization of my secret desires.

Long before I picked up a hammer (millions of years actually), lemur-like ur-primates, our forebears, were engaged in an evolutionary arms race in the wake of a some very bad luck at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Actually, the situation might be better described as a biological game of RISK. Eighty-five per cent of Earth's species were snuffed out, like so many birthday candles, after a well-understood cometary or asteroidal impact (the account of paleosleuthing by Luis and Walter Alvarez reads like fine detective mystery) in the Yucatan region of what we modern humans have decided to call Mexico. The species that survived this archetypal nuclear winter woke up to a world in which only fifteen per cent of the available environmental niches were occupied. If you allow that there may have been a selection for species with similar habitat needs (mouse-like burrowers, for instance), the Tertiary sun may have risen over an even emptier planet. But I digress.

So profound is the devastation in the strata laid down on day one of the Paleocene, that the absence of late Cretaceous fossils (dinosaurs, ammonites - the list is long) define the boundary. In college, I had the dubiously envious job of Paleontology Research Assistant, and I have seen the sediments from the Brazos River section in Texas with my own eyes. Indeed, it was my job to pick through carefully-collected zip-lock bags of mud, looking for macro fossils, and seining the remaining grit for the minuscule survivors called Foriminifera,  amoeba-ish creatures with elaborate and distinctive tiny shells. The post-grad financial certainty of performing similar paleontological analyses for oil companies discouraged me so that I abandoned paleontology as a major, and floundered in both direction and scholarship for the next couple years.

Such a suddenly-empty planet is great laboratory for the biological forces that blossom as diversity through the processes of evolution. Some browsing creatures opted for immensity, as plains of newly-invented grass went to seed and needed mowing. Others, like the ground sloth, existed largely on the fruit of revolutionary flowering trees we have labeled “Avocado”or “Ficus”. Terrible predators, all scimitar teeth and raking claws, pounced on the meaty herbivores when their backs were turned. Elephants (well, their great x 10² grandparents) experimented with various dental configurations and an elongated, useful proboscis. Our ancestors, however, in a desperate board meeting, decided that the problems of their continuing propagation hinged not so much on hardware, as software.

The notes of that conference, if the secretary had yet been invented, are lost in the annals of hominid history, but the marketing strategy and production schedule have manifested in the latest version of Homo, as testified to by the extent to which we have colonized our hostile planet, and embarked on polluting it with our garbage and exhalations. The secret sauce in this global domination scheme was not a better set of armament or sheer bulk (but props to venomous insects and whales), or any other specialization. What makes Humans the dominate species on Earth (as measured by effect, not biomass) is that we generalize. And we do this with a tremendously flexible information-processing organ behind our binocular eyes, between our stereo ears. “I'm cold”, “I bet that Mastodont is tasty”, “I want to fly to the Moon” - these are problems that the brain can solve where sharp claws or a penchant for Bamboo would definitely, ultimately fail.

The brain is so astoundingly complex that it boggles the mind. Grok that – As smart as we are, we are only beginning to understand the basics of how we understand. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a way to isolate and render images of the cogs in the brain:

“In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies. ... In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.” 

The most complicated information-processing structure on Planet Earth is the result of cosmic chance and the combined efforts of millions of monkeys. And there are almost seven billion of them in production. To be sure, it is easily the absolutely best problem-solving technology available, and it can be assembled by unskilled labor.

As you recall, objects accelerate in Earth's gravitational field at approximately 9.8 m/s/s. To clarify, for each second spent falling, an object's velocity increases by roughly 10 meters per second (disregarding Earthly effects like the friction of air on the object). In round numbers, at one second, the object, starting from rest, is plummeting groundward at ten m/s, another second later, and it's falling at twenty m/s. Three seconds: thirty m/s. The speed is increasing, even though the rate of speed change (acceleration) is constant.

Suppose that we suspend an object (say, a sixteen-ounce [0.5 Kg] hammer) about seven feet (2.13 m) above another object (say, a human cranium containing a 3-pound [1.5 Kg] brain). Suppose also that the hammer object is secured by an inept lashing of parachute cord, such that it releases its tenuous hold on the handle of the hammer just as it reaches an altitude of a previously-mentioned 2.13 meters above the previously-mentioned brain. The word “Oh...” is all that is muttered before the hammer impacts the frontal bone, superior to the upwards-tilted forehead of the muttering fool, who gapes upward, at the falling hammer.

In the interval of time between the hammer slithering from the clutches of ill-tied cordage and cranial impact, the brain of the target subject had to recognize that the hammer was both falling, and falling in a predictable path that intersected the subject's head. That the eyes could, in this brief moment, transmit this information to the brain, that the brain could pluck an appropriate response from its banks of synapses, that the mouth and tongue could begin to form a verbal oath, is testament to the flexibility and power of the human brain. Arms were, undoubtedly, moving to fend the missile, but inertia and a complicated neural connection prevented the intended blockade. An observer would marvel at the situation, probably doubling over with laughter, as the truncated, but implied “...SHIT!” was appended by the synapses of his own brain.

I leave the specific mathematics as an exercise for the motivated reader, but suffice it to say that more altitude (thus more acceleration) might have rendered the author a drooling idiot, provided he even survived the impact. A lesser impact would have hurt, well, less. The miracle is that the hammer fell precisely as hammers do, precisely as fast as necessary to have exacted the mechanical alteration of brain tissue that I'm convinced happened on that afternoon.

As we know, the brain is fabulously intricate, like a mantel clock fabricated from cement trucks, driven by penguins, in a landscape of fried rice, awash in a sticky fruit cocktail. Or not. I don't believe that the electrochemistry of my injured brain was altered, which would demand a fundamental alteration to neurological functioning – and where would these new chemical compounds come from, anyway? A new organ might need to spring into existence, secreting the Pixie Dust that powers the cognitive energy of my altered gray matter. Even an alteration to an existing structure is so unlikely as to be statistically impossible, like an aerial giraffe. But if this supposed, newly created apparatus did exist, it would need a snappy name. Perhaps the Canal of Schlem - but alas, that's taken. 

I think that, perhaps, the hammer bruised an area of my forebrain, a humble region responsible for cross-checking imagery and verbiage against some synaptic check sheet of understood comparisons. For a healthy brain to function, it must necessarily catalog every experience and idea into the context of previously-sorted information. A myriad of neural connections are made, and, after a long life of meaningful and orderly thought, if your mind should unravel slightly in your autumn years, surprising expressive and perceptual glitches might manifest. It's possible that the disruption in my cerebral cortex reworked certain critical housekeeping routines, such as help govern the protocols of human communication.

Wielding even a minor super power is an awesome responsibility. I must flex my mental muscles carefully, lest I unintentionally launch someone through the plaster and lathe of the cognitive reality in which they reside. The nature of my ability is such that I cannot simply discard a frayed overcoat of normalcy and assume the über-persona, turning back time, for instance, by dragging the Earth backwards, in a cape and tights. It's much more subtle than that.

I must live in a portable Fortress of Solitude, where I filter my inner thoughts through a complicated colander of social algorithms that prevent my friends and associates from reacting to me as if I were a rabid badger. True, it's partly for their protection, but my own safety calls for discretion. My associative gift might easily be misconstrued as a flavor of mental illness or a “cry for help”. At times, it's a lonely existence, a social wilderness, but the occasional metaphorical connection is worth it. I heft my similes and gauge their power like dangerous automatic weapons.

I bring adventure like a brakeless lorry descending a serpentine mountainous highway paved in cinders and broken glass. I am the Blue Screen of Death.  I live in the shadows of polite conversation and well-intentioned homily.  I swing my mace of reckoning through slap-dash windmills of superficiality. 

I am... ANALOGYMAN!

(Happy Birthday, MC)

Paste Tree

This is the ancient recipe, as told to me by my secretive and somewhat accident-prone elder, Shirlee. NOTE: There are no cake mixes of any kind in this pastry. Use fresh, high quality almond extract. Butter or nothing! This is a distillation of process, Shirlee may not have done things exactly in this manner, but do not question the method nor madness. This is how I do it. Follow these simple steps and all your dreams will come true, you will feel better about yourself, people will love you, your hair will look better, your house will be clean.

One must attain the proper mindset prior to attempting this delicacy. Prepare thyself by washing and you must have a meal. Touch no animals. Remove your shoes. Set out the butter to warm. Play some music you love; pour yourself a drink.  Begin:

Shirlee's Secret Almond Magic

All goodness comes in threes:

Bottom Layer

1 stick butter (4 oz)

1 tbs water

1 cup flour



Middle Layer

1 stick butter (4 oz)

1 cup water

1 tsp almond extract

3 large hen fruit (not XL)



Frosting

1 box powdered sugar

1 stick butter (4 oz)

milk or cream as needed

1 tsp almond extract

Slivered Almonds


Preheat oven device to 350 F (177 Celsius; 450 Kelvin)

Mix components of bottom layer. Divide into two spheres. Pour yourself a drink. Name the spheres (one masculine, the other feminine). Imagine how the perfection of these spirits (not your drink) might be manifested. Pick up the feminine sphere (ladies first), holding her image in your mind. Mash her round ass into a flat pancake 12 inches by 3 inches. Get a cookie sheet and lay her corpse down one side. Smirk. Grab Biff, and with his dashing wit and perfect teeth foremost in your thoughts, pummel him into the same two-dimensional shape as Buffy. Lay him out cold next to the chick. Gloat.

Pour yourself a drink.

When your adrenaline subsides, begin making the middle layer by bringing the water to a boil. This water shall represent really hot water. Pop quiz: Who, at work, makes you the craziest? He or she shall then take the form of the stick of butter. Undress your coworker, noticing how, as the trappings of status and authority are stripped away, nothing remains but pure fat. Pity this unfortunate soul and apologize as you push the body under the boiling water with something blunt. Listen carefully... when it's over add the almond extract and flour to cover your crime. Beat until smooth. Beat a little more just to be sure. Set aside. Pour yourself a drink. Assemble the eggs. Flatter them. Promise them fame and glory. Keep a straight face. Tell them you have an important job for them. Name them if you must, but if you are perceptive they will name themselves. Position two eggs such that they cannot observe. Break the lone egg in a deep and cold bowl. Laugh maniacally. Repeat with next egg. Laugh some more. Show third egg the fate of the other two and politely request some changes in attitude and behavior. Disregard protests and groveling and break egg into bowl with comrades. Remove the evidence of the shells to pre-arranged hiding spot. Beat those eggs with intensity. Add the eggs to the flour mixture. Reflect on the cold irony of life as you mix it all up until smooth. Remind yourself that these were not good eggs.

Pour yourself a drink.

Remember the two corpi delilcti on the cookie sheet? They have metamorphosed into your flaws and mistakes. The egg and flour goo is treacherous backstabbing; with it, hide your flaws and mistakes. Lay it on thick. Cover every last little bit. Make someone work hard to see through it. If they do, eliminate them. Slide your camouflaged defects into the oven. Set a timer for 35 minutes. Enough time for a drink. Or two. When timer goes off, check pastry. If necessary, continue to bake 5 minutes more until golden brown and puffy. Remove from oven and set aside. It may flatten somewhat as it cools.

Take a nap.

Later, look carefully at the pastries on the cookie sheet. No, look closer. Take your time, your eyes may not focus well at this point. That's the best you can do? Pathetic. I thought you were paying attention. I thought you were going to try harder this time. Why do I even waste my time? You don't want anybody to see this; you better put something over it. If you mix up another cube of butter and maybe the powdered sugar, that might hide the bland ugliness you have baked. Put in the almond extract to help mask your ineptitude. For God's sake, put down the food coloring - are you mad? Do you want to go to jail? Good, now spread it on the pastries - do be careful and try to make it look appetizing. A flourish with the spatula might come in handy here. No, use it all. Not enough frosting and people will retch. Still looks horrible. Sprinkle on the almond slivers. Don't eat that, you need all you can get. Geez Louise... Now they look like flat white turds with nuts on them. Do you have a knife? Weeeell, you could kill yourself with it or cut the pastries into strips, bars, whatever. A platter, a plate? Arrange them somehow. Like a flower! Or a pyramid! Something besides flat white turds. That's gonna have to do. Uh, plastic wrap... don't want them to dry out - Duh!

Not bad for a first effort. Don't you feel better? You better have a drink.

Stay Tuned For Further Information

click --> This is not a test. <-- click

Rat Race

My wife is busy, busy, busy. She's in school and studies almost every waking hour - when she's not in class. It's finals week and all weekend she has ladled obstetrics and natal development into her over-full mind like a desperate, sour stew.

This morning, she left for class, only to return to the house immediately. I assumed she forgot something.

"I need to take your car - there's something wrong with mine." Her car is not old, but I have a deep-seated mistrust of Subarus, and I take this as confirmation of my prejudice. "The steering is stiff," she says. "I'm gonna be late!" Why do these things always happen when you're pressed for time?

She shuttles her books to my truck and, barefoot, I retrieve some tools and boat parts from the back seat. As she roars away, I struggle to wedge myself into the front seat of her car, reminded of one of the reasons I will never own another Subaru.

I take it for a quick spin around the block, and she's right - the steering is far too stiff. Normally, the Outback is nimble, but I have to crank the wheel like a bus driver to make a ninety degree turn on the street. Even then, I swing into the opposite lane a little bit. I have a grumpy right shoulder and I feel the same discomfort that visits me after too many push ups.

Somehow I park it back in the driveway and pop the hood. A wide, grooved belt lies in loose coils behind the radiator. Crap. The belt looks brand new, so I doubt that it merely snapped. Perhaps a pulley has broken, or maybe the alternator is loose. If it's just a belt, I could fetch the part on my bike.

A quick search on the Internet reveals little. The few hits I get from "Subaru Fan Belt" lead to members-only forums or Slavic web sites. I'll have to dig into it, trusting my mechanic's intuition.

Back under the hood, there's a piece of trim on top of the engine hiding the upper portion of the belt's serpentine course. The intake manifold arcs through a pair of holes in this trim plate, like the backs of a pod of silver whales. A duct of some sort crosses over the right corner of the engine compartment, affixed to the radiator support by two bolts. It's all in the way, and I'll have to remove it.

I fetch a metric socket set and remove the bolts from the obstructing plastic parts. I lay them in the grass, arranging the fasteners on top. I turn my attention to the belt. A cocktail of relief and revulsion floods my veins. I can fix this, but... gross.