The 2001 Ford Focus is equipped with a range of security features including front and rear crumple zones.
This is rarely relevant in day to day affairs, but becomes just outrageously relevant when you get mowed into by one of these.
Amy and I are fine. Stiff, accidents tend to do that to you, and we may or may not end up with seatbelt bruises. Basically fine. The car, on the other hand, has been described variously as totalled, wrecked, and my favourite: write-off. Witness:
So much like when we bought the Focus, we are in “must buy a car immediately” mode, which is undesirable, but on the other hand, we have our limbs and skulls attached so really everything else is secondary. Because of the high kms, we’re not expecting much – probably in the $6-8k range but I guess we’ll see.
The focus was amazing – totalled, but the cabin was undisturbed, and we were safe. There was glass everywhere of course, but just the safe break-away crumble. Other than that though, it did exactly what it should do when a ton of bricks runs into your ass – it absorbed the impact, and gave its life for ours. Even my laptop in the trunk managed to survive (can’t kill a thinkpad). Check out our seats:
The cops and tow drivers were quite impressed. Apparently the seats are always supposed to do that — absorb the shock, and angle you away from the sides of the car by buckling inward, but they almost never see them like that. Someone said something about “must have been hit hard.” Yeah. Hard is a word for it.
14
Sep 05
A Secret Passion
The smell of it, as I remove the shipping wrap is sharp. The paper smells freshly cut and printed. It is heavier than I remember.
I glide my fingers across the gloss of the cover, down the spine.
Like any good piece of literature, it is more than the sum of its parts. There are individual pages, individual passages which are artful, beautiful. But taken as a whole it transforms, it blends and mixes and unifies. It breathes. And it speaks. It speaks about a world of possibility and the search for substance over style. Of a lost generation’s yearning to understand what is real and good and pure – maybe of every generation’s need for that sense of solidity; of gritty, healthy profundity.
Of course I devour it. The anachronism, the self-contradiction, it does not engage, it compels. Every page makes you want to live up to it, to be worthy of what it offers. It would be difficult, and expensive, but you think about who you would be if you could really master and harness those forces. You would need no other god. You could literally reach out and grab the world and form it to your will and set it back and say “There. It is done. I have created. And I have done it with love, and with precision, and it is beautiful and it is real.”
The Lee Valley annual catalog is better than porn.