WhimsyLand

I'm having car trouble.  That's not much of a problem, as I drive about 3,000 miles a year, and most of that is back and forth to DIA.  Still, a guy has to have a car and both the old Lexus and the bashed-up Subaru are limping.  I bought the Subaru from my parents after they were done using it to make ski trips (they moved up to one of those monster SUVs with onboard microwave ovens and 7-speaker surround sound).  Then, Derek drove it in high school and managed to put a pretty good dent in the passenger door.  Then Kyle borrowed it and his significant other pretty much tore off the front bumper exiting a gas station.  The Lexus is 17 years old and any repair to it costs the equivalent of Estonia's GDP.  Luckily, it's been up to snuff for a year of so, even with its 220,000 miles, which by the way, is probably only 70% of its engine life.  It's silent on the road, does zero to 60 in 7 seconds, and has a top end of about 130 miles per hour.  The speedometer goes to 160, but I can only confirm 130 because I don't live in Germany, so there aren't that many chances to find out where she tops out.  About 3 months ago, the Lexus started getting flat tires.  I had a new tire put on, but one day in February I looked in the garage and three tires had gone flat.  I started thinking about changing out the rims ($200-300 apiece) and decided it was cheaper to just use my compressor to pump them back up, which actually I never got around to since I have the Subaru.  Until today, when the Subaru started kicking up steam under the hood about a mile from the house.  I drove slowly back home with my heater on high and poked around under the hood and found that there was a tear in the hose from the radiator to the engine block.  Now, I had two cars that didn't work, so I pumped all the tires on the Lexus and gave it a 30-minute charge on the battery and drove over to Advanced Auto Parts to get a new hose, which was too long but with a hacksaw and some adjustments on the clamps will work just fine.  I could get a new car, I suppose, but I like the little Subaru and love the old Lexus, and why should I sign up for three or four hundred dollars a month for something actually reliable?

When I first found out the Subaru was running hot I was on my way to the local Longmont used book store. I thought I might find more books by Jonathan Lethem, who writes weird detective novels like Motherless Brooklyn and just won a MacArthur "genius" award.  Yes, I know it's not a genius award, but that's what everybody says, and it's always in caps.  Anyway, they didn't have any of his books, so I settled for old Spenser mysteries (as the protagonist says, it's spelled just like Edmund Spenser, Renaissance poet and author of Faerie Queene).  That's no surprise either as Robert Parker received his PhD in English Lit from BU on the strength of his dissertation which compared the work of Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.   Hawk may be a cold dude, and Spenser may be a literate thug, but what the latter does a lot in Spenser novels is throw together good meals, usually while Susan is in the tub dolling herself up in some pre-coital ritual.  The recipe in Looking for Rachel Wallace sounds pretty good, if a little sketchy:

Spenser's Broccoli and Pistachio Pasta

Boil 4 quarts of water in a large blue pot and a cup of water in a smaller saucepan fitted with a steamer rack.  Put a pound of frozen broccoli into the steamer rack, and set the timer for nine minutes.  While that's going, put "two garlic cloves, a handful of parsley and a handful of basil and some kosher salt and some oil and a handful of shelled pistachios" in the Cuisinart that Susan gave you for Christmas, or any kind of food processor if you're not Spenser.  Process until smooth.  Put one pound of pasta (your choice, but I prefer spaghettini) in the boiling blue pot and take it out when it is still a little too firm to the bite (it will soften in the next couple of minutes).  Toss the broccoli (now just perfect) and the oil-and-pistachio sauce with the pasta and serve.  Eat in front of the fireplace with Syrian bread and Soave Bolla and make intimate small talk.