Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Undercurrents

Undercurrents.

A person would think that working on cars and writing are two entirely differently things. I am finding more and more that they are more closely related than I ever expected. Plus I have a friend named Karen and to her the garden is what my shop is to me.

There is an undercurrent to what we do in the garden or the shop that spills over into how we think and what we write. That undercurrent is what we are thinking about concurrently with the mundane task we happen to be performing.

Others often say…. Why do you spend all that time working on that old junk, just the same as I’m sure they say to Karen, “A garden is a whole lot of work and it costs you in the end as much as you would pay in the store. This is simply not true however I think the point being missed are the undercurrents.

For example I am installing aftermarket gauges in my Studebaker. I just found a port to put my mechanical temperature gauge. It is right next to the port that sends the same information electrically to the ECM which monitors and makes adjustments to the fuel injection. So in installing this gauge I get to see what the engine temperature is and the computer can still do its thing in metering the fuel.

In writing I am a great believer in structure and outlines and an author needs to have his literary creation wired and organized before he/she starts writing. This allows the brain to write in “Baby Steps” without digressing into the huge world that borders the constraints of the outline. Hold that thought.

Meanwhile inside the cab of the truck I cut a strip of thick sheet metal with inch and a half holes to accept the gauges. Now I didn’t want to butcher the dashboard and wanted to retain that classic look. The original gauges are still beneath a two inch glass strip behind the steering wheel and while they no longer work they look cool, lying dormant, after all these years under the scratched glass, still showing their functions etched in a beautiful patina of rust speckles. So its not just the utility of the restoration I'm concerned with but the look and the ambience that surrounds it.

As I write and particularly rewrite I want to keep the good and make the rest better. In building a street rod the same philosophy holds. Next to the original glass gauge panel is an opening that was designed to hold a radio that was never installed. I used this space for the three new gauges. So I kept the cool vintage part and made a new fixture giving a mixture of the old and new…

In writing I try and do the same thing, blending the rewritten parts into the context of what I wrote earlier.

Now this is not as easy as it sounds because there are a lot of new transitions that have to be made in going from the original to the “improvements.“ I'll be talking about this process more in the days ahead.

So for those out there who could care less about cars or gardens be advised that there are undercurrents to the things we do outside the box, that apply directly to the continuing struggle to become a better writer.