2022-06-09 — Pensive

Life was a lot more straightforward when I solidly believed in God and what I thought I knew about life and eternity and whatnot.

It’s not so straightforward now.

I don’t really believe or disbelieve anything that I used to believe, I just have pretty much everything up in the air, and in the midst of it all, I find myself wondering what my purpose is.

For what do I live?

If I believe in a life after this one, that there is something more… that I as me, my personal, individual, self-aware entity continues to exist, that informs or affects my perspectives and focuses. I don’t know if it should or not, but it does at the moment.

Man, talk about a midlife crisis. 🙃

I find myself wanting so much more than what one life has to offer. I want to see way into the future, I want to experience all the amazing things that humanity will accomplish, or I hope will accomplish. I want to see the incredible technologies come to be. I want to see space travel and exploration come to pass. So many things.. so many exciting things.

We really are at such a crazy time. I don’t think, in the grand scheme of things, that we’re that far away from being able to overcome many if not all diseases. We’re just years away from technologies that will change the way we learn, a la The Matrix and uploading information to our brains.

But we’ve also designed weapons that with a few clicks of a few buttons in just a couple countries around the world, we could pretty much destroy 99% of all living things on this planet. We’re not that far away from creating artificial intelligence so powerful it really could do what our science fiction movies portray, where the artificial intelligence takes over and runs the show, subjugating or exterminating the human race.

So much is right at our finger tips, right at our doorsteps. It could be constructive. It could be destructive. It could be both.

What do I want out of the rest of my life?

Having lost my trust in a world after this one, I find myself much more concerned about whether or not I’m enjoying the life I am living. I forgot how to enjoy life.

I’ve simply forgotten.

And with my loss of trust in what I once believed, I find myself much more afraid of the end of this life.

Yet, at the same time, mine is a temperament that says, if life really is meaningless, if there is no life after this one, if this really is one huge accident in a meaningless universe, they… why put off the inevitable? Why not just be done with it?

So again I ask myself, what’s my purpose? What do I want from the time I have left as a mortal here on this lonely planet?

So much I’d want to do, to cram in. Part of that is fear based, afraid of missing out as I watch the inevitable clock tick down the days remaining in my life.

Part of it is just wanting to experience as much as I can.

I want to be able to enjoy life again.

I’m trying to figure out how.

Anyway…

I did go out and fix some cars today. I had two on the schedule, and I added a third while I was working. First one was a 2017 Jeep Wrangler that just needed a battery. Nice, quick, easy. The second one was a 2008 Honda Civic that wouldn’t start, and as you can probably guess from all the other Honda civics that I’ve worked with that haven’t started, yes, it needed a starter. The job went reasonably well, and I’ve done it so many times that it’s a known quantity.

The third job ended up being a heck of a lot more than what I originally thought. It was a 2008 GMC Sierra that the kid had driven until not only were the pads worn through, but the brake pad backing plate wore so far down that it was ejected out of the caliper bracket assembly, and so it was the actual caliper Pistons pressing against the rotor stopping the truck on the one side of the passenger side rotor. So I replaced the pads and rotors and the passenger side caliper. As I was doing the brakes on the driver side, I noticed that one of the guide pin boots was torn, and I didn’t have the part, so that will be done another day.

When I first got to the truck, I noticed that the brake fluid level was very low, but I didn’t know why. That all changed halfway through doing the front brakes, when I went to seat in the brake pads I just installed on the passenger side. The brake pedal just kept going to the floor over and over and over again, and I figured that was because he had let the fluid get so low that it got air in the ABS module, but when I went back out of the truck and started working around on the brakes again, I noticed a big puddle underneath the truck. At first I thought it was water because water had been leaking out of the bed onto the ground when I jacked up the truck, but I realized that this new puddle was because brake fluid was pouring out the rear driver side drum assembly.

So not only were the front brakes blown to smithereens, but the rear brakes also.

So many people put off doing basic maintenance and end up spending so so much more money. Brake pads are cheap rotors are expensive, and rotors and calipers even more.

Anyway, so I did three jobs today. A little over six billable hours I think. Something like that.

So it’s been a good couple of work days money-wise. I don’t know if I’m going to work tomorrow. It’s going to be raining most of the morning, I think. I’m going to drive down to Oklahoma and pick up an engine for my Dodge. They’ve got one with 80,000 miles coming out of a 2013 Dodge truck. So that’ll hopefully be a good thing. I’d like to get that put in in the next few days or so and get the truck back on the road.

Anyway, that’s been the day today. Mostly working on cars all day. Time for bed.

Love to all y’all. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen