by Lionel Baldwin
My mom always told me that I did everything the hard way. She was right. It held me back for most of my childhood. I would remember my textbook word for word instead of skimming for facts. I would take three times as long as I really needed to write an essay. My thoroughness was killing me. This held me back all through high school and college, making my social life more difficult and my academic life less effective. However, it did do one thing for me: it gave me a career.
No one should be surprised that Western philosophy began in symposia, drinking parties, nor that the philosophy with such roots has always had as its central assumption the existence of an objective universe to which individual speculations must conform. The whole West, divided on everything else, unites to shout the great axiom, that thinking does not make it so. This is not an axiom congenial to marijuana. The pot-smoker re ceives his “insights” by peering into himself, not by fixing his attention on the world, and he regards his inspirations as private truths. He rejects any notion of objective verification. Generously, he will allow other persons to have other truths, all these private revelations being not so much contradictory as incommensurable. No wonder there is such hot warfare between the followers of Bacchus and the worshippers of the hempen gods of the East. The subject of their quarrel is only the universe.
—E. T. Veal, U. S. author. repr. In Orthodoxy: the American Spectator Anniversary Anthology, ed. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (1987)
You see, fixing salvage title cars requires a certain kind of perversity and masochism. You can make a lot of money buying and fixing repairable autos, but you need to have a real love of doing things the hard way. The reason, you see, a car is labeled totaled when it gets into a bad wreck is not because it is literally impossible to fix – almost no car is literally impossible to fix. It is simply because it is too much bother and too expensive to put back together. Someone like me, however – someone with connections to an auto parts store, a knack for fixing severely broken cars, and an incredible tenacity – can make a handy profit on repairable autos. I can get a car for a tiny fraction of what it is worth, and turn it into a gleaming, purring machine.
You'd be amazed at what you can find it is used car auctions. As a matter of fact, I don't always buy damaged cars. Sometimes, salvage title cars work completely fine. People aren't confident in them because they know that they may have serious and undiscovered damage to the frame. For a guy like me, it doesn't matter. If there is damage anywhere, I'll find it and fix it. I'll install replacement engines, rebuild transmissions, and do any other work that I need to. Fixing repairable autos can be quite a hassle, but it is still a labor of love. And because I love to do it, I do it well.
he dreadful darts
With rapid glide along the leaning line;
And, fixing in the wretch his cruel fangs
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
A lot of my customers are so impressed with the work fixing repairable autos that they decide to try the business for themselves. Although this can be a great idea for the right kind of person, in general I don't recommend it. Even seized government auction cars can have hidden problems that will result in huge expenses if you do not know what you are doing. Leave fixing repairable autos to the experts.