Costings

British Summer Time ended on Sunday and I didn't notice as far as I can tell, the extra hour of sleep. I got up at eleven thirty at night and then again at one-thirty in the morning as I have been for the last few months. I fall asleep immediately and then wake up with start, often in the middle of a dream and feeling like I have been asleep for hours and hours. The other night, I apparently had a night terror as I woke up at the dormer in the bedroom, heart racing and shouting noise that woke Yoko. I couldn't remember what that dream was about, only another dream in which Yoko's mum had been with us in a place that I didn't recognise. I couldn't remember anything she said to me because when I am not in Japan, no one speaks Japanese to me. Yoko spoke to me in English in that dream and I could remember what she said exactly. When I woke on Sunday at my usual time, the sun had already started to come up and I could go running early without worrying about the darkness and some car careening over me. 

The unsettled spirit that overtook me this summer and convinced me that I needed, desperately, to make a change in my life, has been overwhelmed with the busyness of work and family life and this persistent inability to overcome my Evangelical commitment to a version of myself I only want to die. I did manage to kill him in a dream that spanned sleeping and waking, where I had moved into a studio apartment that was small and dingy but had good light and was close enough to the house on Elisabeth Road that I could still do everything I needed to do at home, that I could still be the head of the Pihlajas of Harborne in some way. I saw myself telling the girls that it was okay, that I would be just there at the top of the hill, that you could see it from the house if you looked hard enough. When I woke, I couldn't actually bring myself to do it. Someone told me it was good that I hadn't tried, that it would have been selfish and I let myself believe I did the right thing. Avoiding the sin of selfishness is something I understand, and having avoided being selfish is something I could feel good about. Or at least, I could say to myself, today, I can make the choice to stay, and I only need to believe it is the right thing for today. Tomorrow will take care of itself. 

The immediate responsibilities have been numerous and financial — tax bills, and violin lessons, and offshore trips, and calculators, the sort of expenses that pile up and you can never accurately predict. I wasn't paid when I was expecting at my new job, but the salary finally came and was swallowed up immediately by a credit card bill and some new, humming insecurity I've developed from being online, that I haven't saved enough money to retire and I haven't diversified my investments. Some pre-roll ad with a confident young person tells me that I could be doubling my money in an extraordinarily short time, assuming an annual return of ten percent, but all I can remember is being sold a mutual fund in May of 2007 before the crash and the years and years of guilt I felt that we had lost so much savings and had nothing to show for it, a kind of original sin in a relationship where something key went wrong and you never could tell a good story about it. We held on to that fund for years and years, hoping it would rebound: I had an Excel spreadsheet that counted dividends and said we would get back to a zero loss point if, all things in common, we held it until 2030. We sold it in 2021 to pay for the loft extension, which felt slightly more redeeming, and after several years, I eventually stopped checking the price of the fund, having finally, completely, given up on it. 

After the early string of expenses, for the fifth time this year, the engine light on the C3 Picasso came on, and instead of taking it back to the same garage where I had been getting the feeling I was not receiving the attention I deserved, I decided to take the car to a specialist in Citroëns, a guy called Dave. Dave's garage is right behind the high street in Stirchley, the sort of alleyway you miss if you are going too fast, as I was when I drove past it the first time. I dropped the car off with all the invoices from the various places that have done work on the car in the last two years and Dave said he'd call, so I ran in to work. Dave did call, while I was sitting in a seminar about AI authorship, and he didn't sound good when I picked up the phone. He said it was a tricky one which I immediately understood to mean I was completely fucked. The trickiness of the problem was that there was a permanent failure in the fourth cylinder, something the previous garage had said was due to the sparkplug coil. It was not, in fact, caused by the sparkplugs, but rather a build-up of carbonisation in the engine, something that could be fixed but would require removing the head gasket. 

Dave paused here, seemingly with the expectation that I understood the graveness of this work, but when I didn't respond, he said, unfortunately, we don't do that work here anymore, so I've called another garage and they've given you an estimate of £1,500 to replace the valves and the gasket. After letting that sink in and having a few turns of the conversation where I expressed disappointment and Dave expressed sympathy for my situation, I said, That seems like a lot, Dave, do you think it's worth it? And Dave, of course, couldn't really say. I ran back to the garage and spent the rest of the day thinking about how much I hate cars and trying not to revive the dream of my studio apartment with good light, and wondering how to talk about making a serious financial decision with future implications when you're trying to avoid any serious discussions and stress, and take things day-by-day. Meanwhile, in the real world, it turns out that not worrying about tomorrow is impossible when you're making a decision about an endless series of tomorrows.

The car has been the physical manifestation of my unhappiness over the last three years, and talking about it has become impossible, with everyone quickly sharing their opinion that my first problem was buying a Citroën, or buying a car that had previously had two owners, or taking the car to one garage rather than another, or even having a car at all. It triggers the immigrant anxiety of being at a party where you've arrived late, where everyone seems to know each other and the inside jokes have already been established. You don't know what to do in a particular situation when everyone else seems to know what to do, even when in reality, no one knows anything, really, because the narratives about cars we tell ourselves are all some capitalist myth about choice and responsibility. The truth is that the car is a terrible, irredeemable necessity in my life and whatever goodwill from the car gods I had when my last Citroën went six years with hardly any problems, was used up and I am now stuck in a Capitalist purgatory of grey Picassos for the foreseeable future.

On Wednesday, imagining for a moment I might double down on the Capitalist nightmare, Yoko and I and a couple of the kids dropped in to Trade Centre in Wednesbury, the West Midlands' largest car seller, and we walked around for an hour, sitting in various cars and seeing what other options there were. I sat in a Nissan SUV that felt immediately right, right in the way that American things feel right sometimes, and I had the feeling I did when I was seventeen driving a Ford Explorer or my Grandfather's F150, a kind of base, indescribable power and authority and safety, something I had forgotten you could feel in a car, having driven French cars with good visibility for so long. Dan, the Romanian car salesman, told me that my car was worth £1000 with the engine light on and asked me what I thought it was worth. I said two thousand, and he said we could get there if I found a car I liked.

We did find many cars we liked, but all were close to ten thousand pounds or more and when we got back in the C3 Picasso, and it coughed its way to the Wednesbury Ikea, I realised that if given the option of buying this car for a couple of grand, I definitely would, and now that I had started a relationship with Dave, the sort of Dave you can trust it seems, £1500 didn't sound as bad. The next day, I booked in the major repair, and punted, in the American Football sense: I decided to not take a chance, but to play defence again rather than risk something new or dangerous or selfish, the same sunk-loss fallacy that led me to hold on to the mutual fund, the same belief that things will turn around, or if they won't turn around, at some point I'll be willing to take the loss. What's another fifteen hundred pounds if nothing changes: what do you lose other than time from trying again. You gain Christlikeness in your suffering, you aren't selfish, you do what others need you to do, and you can, if you try, feel good about that as an investment in the future. You just need to try, actually try, to stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself and believe without evidence that the blessings will come, if not now, eventually.