Alright, so you have your basic toolset, and you have your consumables, and you’re looking for the next big upgrade to your project handling capabilities. Trust me it’s not a bottle-brush hone and it’s not a tubing bender. It is an angle grinder. This thing is good for dozens of otherwise impossible fixes, like hacking through rusted in place bolts or putting a wire wheel on to clean up nasty undercoat. This thing is gonna run you like $50 if you shop around and you’ll end up using it everywhere. Be careful with grinding stones and cutoff wheels, you can very easily fuck yourself well past being able to fix, but sometimes it’s invaluable to be able to delete metal from a part or delete a bolt head from something that’s truly stuck. If you don’t have a quality drill, get one now, find one with a keyed chuck, and get the following accessories: a set of drill-to-socket adapters, a set of step-drill bits. You also need a good plumber’s torch (you already have one you pyro, but this isn’t JUST for you, OK) because heat is Doctor SpaceJesus’ magic blue/yellow wrench, and you will end up burning some rubber bushings clean before it’s all said and done. A vacuum gauge (and a vacuum pump/brake bleeder), and an oil pressure gauge and sender are pretty invaluable. This is another couple hundred bucks in tools that will multiplex your capabilities hugely. Still have money left over after smokes and beers? Lets take care of that now.

Build yourself a workbench. Set the top of it right around your beltline, make the top out of two layers of 1/2″ plywood. If you can find an old laminate countertop or something to use for this, so much the better. Make sure the legs are sturdy — stop looking at those 4×6 timbers, some 2×4′s will be fine, and adjustable, so you can level the damned thing. Then go out and get ready to spend some serious money on a vise.

I know, I know, a vise is just a big pair of channel locks you can’t stuff in your pocket, but it is SO much more. It’s the key to drilling and cutting stuff square and not, for example, tearing off your thumbnail, snapping off drill bits and dulling their ends, or gouging a hole in your palm while you do it. It’ll help you install all those seal savers straight — you are installing seal savers on everything, right? And a high quality one, with some creativity, can do everything from driving out balljoints to bending tubing. If you want to do these jobs regularly, and right, what you really want is a 20 ton press, but that thing is HUGE LIEK XBOX (do you… I don’t know if you get that or not. The Xbox really is quite big. Oh and the cords are gonna catch fire? So keep an eye out for that recall.) and will not be friendly to your free wheeling lifestyle. It’s a great tool, and one you’ll want eventually, but right now for intermediate-level car repair, you want a bench mounted vise in the “large cat to small dog” size range. Don’t cheap out on this one, get something with a warranty that isn’t written in crayon.

Want more? Of course you do. You don’t have Smokey’s Speed Shop Mobile yet, so you’re still looking for more capability. Well, look no further than a compressor. This is another one that will weigh you down, so get something in the 3 gallon range and recognize that you’ll never be able to run a DA or body saw full time off it, this is strictly for filling tires, running a small paint gun, and short blasts of power like the impact gun for loosening stuff that you can’t quite get leverage on with the cheater and the breaker. Know that with this increased torque and impact, you are gonna shear off more bolts than ever, so always start with the tools from 101: penetrating oil, then wrench, penetrating oil, then breaker; before moving to 102 tools: oil, then torch, then oil, then impact, then grinder. Grinder don’t need oil. Grinder don’t care. Get a long hose and quick connects for whatever tools you have. Learn the maintenance schedule for your compressor, and pay attention when it’s leaking. Upgrade to a bigger one when you feel like you can swing it (I am at 20 gallons now and it’s just a teensy bit small for full time use but as long as you wait for it to catch up it’s fine).

Now, this is the biggest, most important lesson for 102. Documentation. Write down what you’re doing. Take pictures or draw diagrams of what you disconnect. Don’t count on your memory to save you, don’t count on hoses pointing in the right direction, take the extra couple of minutes to tape a label to some shit. Trust me here, this is going to save you some serious embarrassment and frustration down the line. The “there’s always parts left over” joke is good for a chuckle, but that turns to a groan when you hear a terrifying PLING on the freeway and you lurch to one side, or can’t ever get a carburetor to idle right. When you’re doing little shit like replacing a shock or an alternator, you’re gonna be fine just winging it but once you have to dismantle two or three major systems to get at your repair, you will wish that you had a little note that told you which of two wires was on the 12 o’clock stud on the alternator versus the 3 o’clock one instead of trying to divine position from where the crudded up things hang.

And while we’re on the topic of wires. You’ve not jumped into too much electrical, just because the systems are complicated and you hate trying to learn, but mastering the art of wiring replacement is critical. You’ve already got a cutter/stripper/crimper, now it’s time to add some smart accessories: a soldering iron, some flux, some solder, some heat-shrink tubing, and a variety pack of wiring connectors, along with a cheap digital multimeter. This won’t cost you more than $30-40, buy four or five different colors of wire and take the time to learn how to use it, and you will transform from the guy who can replace his alternator to the guy who can fix the car that mysteriously turns off when you hit the dash in this one place. IF YOU CAN’T FIGURE IT OUT, READ A BOOK. IF THAT DON’T HELP, TAKE A CLASS. Find somebody to teach you. This is a stumbling block for you now and unless you fix it soon it’s gonna leave you fed up and out of patience for cars altogether.

About the wires, and the documentation — if you can, find the factory service manual. If you can’t, buy a Haynes or Chilton, but don’t expect much out of them. FSM’s are precious like gilded Angel eyebrows. Hayes are like… listening to the guy at the parts store tell you how to do something over the phone. It’s better than a kick in the balls but for the most part you can figure out whatever the H/C is gonna tell you by just staring at the part you need off. Remember, these are SUPPLEMENTS to your documentation, not replacements. They tell you how stuff “should” be, your documentation will help you realize how stuff currently IS. And with those docs and some troubleshooting methodology with your multimeter, your vacuum gauge, and your oil pressure gauge, you will be able to track almost any problem down to its root within an hour or so. Knowing what is wrong before you start disassembling the motor is always a good thing.

That’s basically it, that’s all I can offer. Welders and benders and fishmouthing and metal work and all that crap? That is off in the distant future. You need a place to work on your cars, and then you need to build up your toolbox, you need to work on your patience, and everything from there on up is cream. It’s building experience and confidence on a solid foundation of tools and techniques, not just running to the tool store every time trying to buy the biggest, most badass thing you can find and then manufacturing a reason to use it. Trust yourself to find people who can do what you want, learn how to ask questions and judge answers. (serious about the therapy too, you need it)

What are you driving right now? The Lincoln? Or is that guy already gone, that sucks dude. The Honda ain’t a bad car, and you should have taken better care of him while he was yours. You’re in a bad period, though, and it’s about to get worse. You’re about to take your fucking show on the road (you know this, already, in your heart. Arizona doesn’t get any better. It doesn’t change to magically be an OK place for you. Just go.) and you’re gonna drag a bunch of cars halfway across creation while you do it. Do it. Love them. Hate them. Throw wrenches, it’s gonna be great! (you’re gonna bust sooo many knuckles you dipshit) But anyways, here’s a list of worthwhile things to think about before you pick up a leaker and try to make it into a looker.

This is basically rule number one. Never trust that guy about the motor. It is not put together right, it wasn’t recently rebuilt, nobody went through it, it didn’t roll in purring like a kitten, it’s currently fucked, waiting to get fucked-er, and the longer you ignore that the worse a situation you will be in both financially and physically when it fails. Don’t trust that guy about the brakes, either. Don’t trust him about the carb, or the electrical. Assume you’re gonna have to tear into it early, or have somebody you trust tear into it. You are not going to have anybody you trust for quite a while, so here’s some big ass things to do, IMMEDIATELY.

Do you have a garage? Not a driveway, not a dirt lot, a garage, like a place with your tools and shit in it? No? You need to consider finding a place with a garage. Spend your precious time and learn how to deal with strangers and haggle enough to find one you can afford. If you can’t afford a garage, and you don’t have a driveway… you’re kinda screwed. I’m not saying you need to go buy a Tiburon (but you totally should turns out those Hyundais are fine! Despite all the ko-cars-are-crap talk. Who knew? No matter what Grandma Mickey says, don’t buy a “Kiva”. Not OK.) but maybe nothing French or pre 1950, OK? We’re not trying to buy up all the Francophile toolchest bits on, where the fuck are you working now, the school district? Yeah, you’re not buyin’ 2CV parts on you janitor bucks so calm the fuck down. Anyhow, my point is, you need a place to work on the car. So get working on that now.

In that garage, you need many tools, but the first tool you are going to need to buy is this. Yes, it costs more than a torque wrench, but trust me you’re going to need to use it thirty times more often. Don’t be tempted to get the little one, this packs down pretty small when you put the legs in it so it won’t get in your way (for example when you move to California next year with no plan and no money, smaaaart. No really it’s totally fine you needed to get out of there, it’s fine. God you dipshit.) when packed up. As a matter of fact it would store most of the tools you are gonna need right inside (since you will never, ever own or maintain a cohesive tool box or tool chest). Clean stuff. It takes more time than wrenching ever will but the difference between a fix made with clean parts and a “fix” made with parts that are soaked in grease will make a gigantic difference in how much you enjoy the cars you love. Add to this a giant bottle of the cheapest degreaser you can get for it, the big can of WD-40, some brushes and rags, a spray can of penetrating oil, a bottle of Naval Jelly, and an aerosol trio of paint stripper, black engine paint, and silver exhaust paint along with some masking tape to cover gasket surfaces. If you wanna really set yourself up right, go buy a box of nitrile gloves AND USE THEM. DOUBLE GLOVE FOR SPEED. KEEP A DOZEN IN YOUR POCKET. CHANGE THEM FREQUENTLY. This whole package will set you back about $200 and it will change the game as far as car work goes. You won’t have to snap off bolt heads (but you’ll do that plenty, dummy) or bolt rusty parts back on to an engine ever again. You won’t have black crap jammed in your cuticles. (And while we are at it enjoy that fucking hair buddy, grow it the fuck out and put some product in there, you have some great hair and I’m not gonna ruin the big surprise of “when” for you but it does NOT last forever, tiger) Gaskets won’t leak incessantly, things won’t rust into place, things that ARE rusted into place will be removable. You won’t cringe when you open the hood, and it’ll make it EASIER to identify leaks and track down problems. Tools you can borrow beg or buy, but having the right chemicals makes everything easier.

Second step… you need to learn where your local car wash with power wands is. Or you can borrow a pressure washer. This is where you’re gonna do your big degunking projects. And yes, you need to degunk that car. Unless you can see all the bolt heads and not just bolt-like-shapes beneath oil and dirt cake, it is not clean, and it sucks. Pressure washers aren’t quite cheap enough for me to mandate them like a parts washer, but for a couple bucks in quarters down at the car wash you can take care of whatever you need taken care of.

Third, start with a simple set of Craftsman tools. The warranty is great (now, not so great. Kobalt maybe.) and the tool quality is better than that dollar store home fix it kit shit you stole from Dad. As long as you stick with an American car, a basic set of SAE sockets, 3/8 drive ratchet with a few extensions, set of box/open end combo wrenches, screwdrivers, and a good pair of needlenose pliers, channel locks, and wire-cutter/crimpers will basically let you take apart any portion of the car and put it back together with confidence. If you go import, buy metric. If you buy British… (just… just don’t buy British right now. Wait till you have a shop with a welder and stuff man those guys… don’t buy British yet) Once you’re into bigger projects, get a 1/2″ drive set with a breaker bar and a torque wrench — do not confuse these two. There are some special tools you’ll want to buy — go cheap on these, don’t think Matco, think… the lobby of the Ace Tools on a rack — a harmonic balance puller, a steering wheel puller, a three arm/two arm combo puller. You are now equipped, plus or minus some cheater bar leverage to do basic repairs on a car.

Fourth, and this is important, so pay attention. Get a bike with fat tires. Put a basket on it. Trust me nobody cares if you have a basket on there (in the future it’s actually cool to have a bike with a basket. I mean, not in Arizona, I don’t think, but where you’ll be) and you’re gonna have to get to a parts store and back with some fairly heavy things. (Plus it’ll help you lose some of that chub there, Chubs McGubbs. Put down that Burrito Supreme and listen to me please.) It sucks to be stuck without your car. It sucks MORE to have to rely on some dickhole to run you to the Napa.

Fifth, and finally. Find a good parts store. Your local parts store is not only a highly efficient warehouse operation capable of bringing parts from across the country in just a few days, but also a tool library for stuff that you use so rarely or cost so much that you can’t justify it yet, THIS IS CRITICAL. FIND A GOOD ONE AND IT WILL PAY DIVIDENDS. Shopping online is great, and you can save a lot of money (especially as time marches on. Holy crap I can get anything delivered now hahaha sucker), but sometimes when driving — or specifically not driving — a project car there is a time factor which cannot be denied. This isn’t something you’ll ever regret doing.

That’s it. Every car is different, every project is different, they all have foibles, and they all have character. They’re all gonna require some kind of creative thinking to figure out. You’re gonna need power tools eventually and instead of just being in break/fix mode you should really be planning out maintenance in advance but that’s kinda 102 level shit so lets leave that for 22 year old us, OK?

So I am balls deep in motor right now, I haven’t the foggiest idea how or why I worked on cars before having a parts washer. How did ANYTHING ever hold oil? Oh, right they didn’t, for the most part. This motor has been a sludgemonster for quite a while, seems to have been weeping out of the hand-tight intake manifold bolts and down from the four-different-flavors-of-RTV valve cover gaskets. Dribbling down the back of the timing cover, and out of the back of the intake manifold by the distributor. Everything is gently preserved in a quarter inch of dusty sludgegrime. Stripped and scrubbed the valve covers, the intake manifold (what a mother fucking boat anchor holy jesus christ), timing cover, and crank pulley. Used Naval Jelly to strip the rust off of the exhaust manifolds and heat shields. Scrubbed everything as best I could, and then shot it with some engine paint. I’m into her for about $120 (and $23 worth of ibuprophen) now, gaskets and timing chain along with the paint and the stripping stuff. Here’s some progress pics.

Valve covers getting stripped

Timing cover after paint

This shit is taking forever, BUT, it’ll be the last time I have to do it for a long while. I’m going to do the motor mounts (and the transmission mount) while the manifolds and shit are off, only makes sense, because I have plenty of time. Why do I have plenty of time, you ask? WELL. At the very end of the night, I tried to pull the choke shaft out of my Carter BBD to do the Idle Tube Fix ™, and lo and behold I managed to shear the heads of BOTH the screws that hold the choke butterfly on. Turned over the shaft and lo and behold my screws were staked into place after tightening. FUUUUUUUUUUU.

I doubt highly I can remove those screws, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you where to go for Carter parts in town, I could find brass screws but that shaft? Maybe if I go dig around in the pull-a-part for a few hours. Plus this carb has been a royal pain in my balls (and the balls of thousands of others, if the insanely high number of forum hits on a google search for “carter bbd issues” is any indication), and a rebuilt from the parts store is $240. Frankly, I’ll be fucked if I spend a fucking DIME on a newly rebuilt Carter BBD when I have a Road Demon Jr 625 waiting on the bench for a thorough cleaning and an electric choke, and a 4bbl aluminum “Crosswinds” intake being shipped to me like… Monday. There’s the slight possibility that the stock throttle cable and kickdown lever assembly won’t fit right with the new intake, but a fix for that (which will very nicely transfer over to the new motor when it is ready) is $150 worth of Lokar shit away, and was very much on my list for the engine swap anyways. Sigh, it’s just money, right? Anyhow it’s stuck me in a very minor carman’s funk. I didn’t actually want to spend the money on this Lokar shit (and some brackets and shit from FBO Systems), or Bouchillon but at least it pays forward.

Well the devil is in the details and as soon as I got her charged back up and started, she had a nasty miss on the passenger side. I was thinking maybe fouled plugs, but then it got a little ticky, so I was thinking collapsed lifter or low oil, pulled the dipstick and lo and behold we have the gooey brown foam of a blown headgasket. Fuuuuu, etc. I swore her a blue streak for a minute then she hit me and we started to have hate sex and got into another argument and then I just made a pot of coffee, went out to the garage, and started running the numbers on my options. This is gonna get long so unless you’re into cars and numbers and hypotheticals, you can probably “tl;dr-Aaron’s stupid zebra car broke down” the rest of this post.

I could just re-gasket the top end. Doing it up with super overkill Cometic MLS gaskets is still only like $200 (regular type gaskets $45), which has a 70% chance of being “just fine” (meaning it seals and doesn’t knock after the hours I’ll throw at it). Say $200/350 to be safe with all the gaskets and a timing chain like a good boy. This is both very cheap and fairly risky, with zero residual benefits except like… a fresh timing chain to put on the next motor I build and some fancy head gaskets.

Re-gasketing without getting a good measurement on the head and block surfaces is a little bit like sharting into the wind. And deck measurement, well – I’d have to buy some quality surface/depth gauges and a magnet block, which could run me another couple hundred easy. Admittedly, good tools are good karma and pay for themselves in the long run, but bleh. What if I spun bearings? Flattened a cam lobe? Since I’m gonna have it apart anyways it would only make sense to throw a somewhat more modern cam in it, Summit has some RV/Tow cams which will make for a real dependable grocery getter smooth idling ride, even Crane has some sensible sticks that will give me a fat wide torque curve down in the cruising the city streets range, so tack on a couple hundred there between the bumpstick, lifters, springs, retainers, stem seals/valve guides. And if I’m doing a cam it would be kinda irresponsible after having water in the oil NOT to do the cam bearings, which is a machine shop trip unless I wanna “eyeball” the cam bores are OK and also trust myself to drive em’ in straight. Throw in $150 for water pump/timing chain cover gaskets and a timing chain/tensioner. Also it’d suck ass to pull the motor, take it to a shop and trust THEM to check the deck and flatten the surfaces on what amounts to an ancient economotor with small-valve heads with ultra malaisey 7.8-8.1:1 compression. Decked block means machining the intake manifold. Decked block and decked heads requires finding a machinist who has some pretty good triggeronometrical thinkulating, and guessing at WHO to trust is the door to seven types of dealing with bullshit like a fresh motor that can’t keep gaskets in it or has weird vacuum leaks. Plus I’d be $200 into the heads to get bigger valves ground in and it’d still be a shitball malaise head. Aftermarket aluminum heads are out of my budget, admittedly, not FAR out of my budgetary range but 1) I’d rather spend that money on handling and braking than on power, and B) I like shit I can get replacement parts for at the Napautomotivezone, y’all. I give up ponies for “holy shit I’m stuck in New Hicksburg At The Sea” parts availability 9 times out of 10. There’s RHS Magnum heads ($300 a side bare, throw another $300 for springs and retainers, $200 for stock stamped steel rockers and hardware or $375 for roller rockers) which are nice and iron and use parts-counter parts and will bump my compression up and add a nice quench area — if I swap in some KB pistons. Tacking in, another $300 or so, the stockers are so far down in the hole there’s no quench to be had, and if I’m going to modern compression ratios I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be $1500-2000 worth of parts and labor into a non turbocharged rebuilt 318 that detonates unless I’m running high-test. Homey don’t play that. Magnum heads also means new pushrods, another $150 or so. Throw in some new valve cover gaskets (and some fucking nice valve covers, I hate drippy motors), may as well do the oil pump while you’re in there, freeze plugs, main bearings, it’d be stupid to do all this work and not paint it so another $200 for a pro job or halfass with $40 worth of rattle paint. Down this road lies madness, and a $3000 318. I could probably pick up a core 360 to do all this same work on for $125, so it would only really make sense to go down that route instead of reworking the 318. It’ll require a new flexplate and oil pan but big fucking whup. $3000 318 or $3250 360. I waste more than $250 on junk food in a year, it’d be stupid to leave 60 ponies and 70 lb/ft on the table (probably more like 80/100 if I’m buildin’ right). And this motor would need a new carburetor and intake manifold to perform, pitch in another $300-500 for that or cheap out with a $40 rebuild kit for the shitball carb. We’re up into $4000 nose-bleed country and we’re still at stock strokes and shit. That’s fuckin’ silly. It’d purr like a little kitten and be fresh as hell, giving me thousands and thousands of miles of reliable streetable performance, but it’d make me pay through the penis to get there. Proper LA 318 rebuild is basically off the table. Proper LA 360 build is still pretty unappealing at the price point.

Cheapest swap, overall, would be a $225-350 Craigslist 318. They’re pretty readily available, some of them even promise they have low miles. Big gamble with almost no residual benefits except maybe they’ll have a nice aluminum 4bbl intake, add on $150 for a used 4bbl and we’re off to the races (hoping that the head gaskets on this one don’t blow too). Sinking even this small amount money into a slightly different low performance used motor is un-appealing, and I think the price difference between this and the magnum swap is a false economy.

So… magnum swap. There is of course a cheap, an expensive, and a mega expensive route here too.

Cheapest low-effort swap with best residual benefits would be – buy a 5.2 or 5.9 magnum, put in a cheap magnum-drilled 4 barrel intake, and bolt on a carb. I’ve seen magnums for $400-750 pretty consistently (both on craigslist and through car-part.com). Admittedly, they have miles on them, but if forum swap reports and magazines are to be believed the modern moly rings can leave sparkling, straight bores well into early six-digit mileages. Throw $250 in for a timing chain and the gaskets to do the job. Decent carbs that would suit go used for about $150/new for $350, magnum-drilled manifolds go for $150-300. Requires a 360 car style oil pan ($60 for steel vs $300 for milodon – guess which way I’m leaning). ~$1100-1750 ish for a pretty good gamble on a motor that’s 23 years of engineering newer than the old block (including a free swap to a hydraulic roller cam and 1.6 ratio rockers) is WAY more appealing than a $4000 LA. And if I want the thermonuclear overkill build detailed above on a magnum, it’s only 10% more than the LA360 option anyways. If the heads aren’t goofed, it might be CHEAPER. And the motor made 235 horsepower and 300 lb/ft (all in the “seriously streetable” rpm range) with the factory efi and manifolds farting through fuckin’ catalytic converters. Tuned right, a straight carby magnum swap would match that or beat it. And the motor would take all my stock electronic ignition (and benefit exactly the same amount from an HEI swap, which I could build on the engine stand), this would be a “hook up the vacuum lines and choke wire, time it and set some lean best idle” shit. I might be able to do it all on the engine stand and do a one-weekend beers and a buddy engine swap. This is, frankly, the option to beat, and most likely where I’ll start. Lets me resell my LA in parts to recoup some dough, and already comes with a power steering pump (I’d probably have to figure out how to temporarily delete that unless I feel like doing the power steering box at the same time – And I probably don’t. One fucking project at a time and she steers just fine, just sucks to park).

Cheapest high-effort swap would be a factory EFI swap. The magnums on CL come with all the wiring and the computer, and even if they don’t I bet I could find a harness and ecu at the LKQ for a Franklin. The part that will suck about this is wiring. EFI means wires, wires, wires. Wiring is hands down my least favorite thing in all of the automotive hobby, so I tend to do it slowly and with lots of swearing breaks. I’d have to find a good place to mount the stock ECU and figure out the ignition relay wiring to get it really soundly situated. Drill some bigass holes in the firewall, find grommets, but still, this is dirty fucking cheap cash wise, basically just the $550-700 for the engine and wire harness, the standard $250 timing chain and incidentals, and maybe $50 for various connectors, and of course the $60 oil pan, and I’ll have to figure out an EFI pump and hoses(and decide whether to modify a new tank (money)or modify the old one(effort/risk)). Say $1500-1750 for dead nuts Late 90′s OEM style reliability. $175 worth of beer to deal with the headaches from the wiring. Only caveat here is while I know the engine and the transmission will hook up “just fine”(tm) I don’t know how the factory ECU will handle not being able to control the transmission. Probably “just fine” but I’ll probably be leaving ponies and miles per gallon on the table.

Most overkill price AND effort option is Megasquirt. I’ll not dignify the idea of assembling a megasquirt myself from scratch on a deadline car-down engine swap except with a scoffing noise and eyeroll, so we’ll be doing calculations on the complete kits from DIYAutotune. Megasquirt 1 will run me $500 over the price of the OEM efi swap by the time I’m “all in”, and I’m wiring in all my free time for a week of vacation, probably twice the PITA factor of OEM EFI (but ultimately cleaner packaging), and I’ll know for sure that the ECU doesn’t give a fuck about what the tranny is up to inside. Megasquirt 2 is same effort but $130 more expensive (for poorly documented benefits I still don’t quite “get”, I’m still learning about MS). Megasquirt 3 is same effort but $250 more expensive (than the 1) but then it gives you 8-injector sequential firing instead of batch mode. All megasquirt options feature a pretty easy path to go to distributorless ignition/EDIS coilpacks. That much I do know. Also annoying about the MS series is that it doesn’t appear you can “wire once and upgrade later” from a MS1 to 2 or 3, they all have different connectors on the ECU. Stupidgineering there, you guys. Really fuckin’ weird choice for a project based on the idea of being able to tune every parameter and update the source code on demand. There are a ton of success stories out there and a pretty active support forum so I feel confident I could wring every last erg out of the motor with tuning. This has serious appeal, but it is a big financial AND time commitment to get set up right. I don’t think this is the right way to start on the swap.

Right now, the real fight is between the cheapest head gaskets/timing belt and an oil change hail mary out in the yard with a case of beer and the carb’d magnum swap. Lots of motors get shadetree head gaskets this way and work just fine for many more miles, but if I do that and THEN end up finding out the bearings are all fucked out or the valves are bent, I will be many types of angry and out a weekend of stooping over an engine compartment and $300 cash money for nothing and staring down the exact same choices I have right now. With the magnum swap there’s approximately the same risk of swapping in a pre-blown motor or blowing a head gasket pretty soon after I swap, but then I’m already at magnum heads, 1.6 rockers, roller cam, and I can reuse all the sensors and accessories, letting me just freshen a $200 junkyard 5.9 shortblock/longblock to the tune of probably $1200-1500 and have a zero-mile modern motor and a buildable spare core for the same price some people want for a bucket-and-box 340 or, christ forbid, one of those meth fiend listed “4V 318s” which they “know was a drag motor” which look suspiciously like regular old truck blocks that are returning to the elements in a corner of a backyard. This plan runs $1500-2000 less than a fresh mainstream builder magnum motor (which are all seemingly unavailable without rumpity rump car alarm triggering drag cams that would strangle on my fuddy duddy old man manifolds and want a holeshot torque converter), and EIGHT TO FOURTEEN THOUSAND than Ma Mopar wants for her new crate motors, all of which feature single digit potential gas mileage, and create extreme chassis compromises/complications that range from “pretty ridiculous amount of exhaust and suspension fabrication which will cost $3700 to truly fix” to “completely ruins weight distribution and requires offset master cylinder and no more power brakes or power steering ever”, and several interesting combinations of the two. Plus without chassis and drivetrain work they’ll tear the rest of my car apart in weeks.

The nicest part about going for the carb magnum swap is that I can always retain the EFI parts and eventually bench-build a Megasquirt (I could even do it from kit and get in for much cheaper), buy a new gas tank and prep it for an in-tank EFI pump, then when I’m ready bolt it in – after I’m done with some other reliability/driveability projects (suspension bushings/balljoints, new wiring harness/gauges, explorer rear axle swap, subframe connectors, weather stripping, interior jesusgodwhatdidigetmyselfintoohfuckohfuck) – it’s a weekend project. Then resell the carb and intake to somebody else in need, and motor on into the next decade in my EFI updated hot rod Dodge. This is pretty appealing, it’s got good residuals on investment at every step, with plenty to be recouped at the end, and a very high bang to the buck ratio on total investment even if I just take all the spares and throw them away at the end.

Sorry this was crazy long winded, but it’s a complicated problem with a lot of factors. But I think the final cost benefit analysis I’ve presented here is fairly clear. Excepting a bizarro-world gift-of-luck like a free recently rebuilt 318, nothing else comes close. You’ll excuse me, I have to talk to a Vantuckyite about a motor.

Update: Decided to shadetree some gaskets into it and source/build a 5.9 to swap in later. $120 for a full gasket set and roller timing chain, even if it only runs for another ocuple thousand miles that’s a cheap stopgap that will let me “do it once, do it right” on the magnum (with a 5.9 instead of a 5.2). Plus I can probably throw the “freshly head gasketed 318″ on craigslist for a couple hundo when I’m done swapping.

* The way I determine a car’s gender is by analyzing the style of its failures. “Boy” cars tend to have stubborn, impossible to track down problems which rarely leave you completely stranded, simply perpetually baffled. To own a male car is to forever be replacing parts, tracing wires, checking sensors, and replacing bulbs to absolutely no avail. It’ll run forever – except for how it sometimes dies at 45 miles per hour and you have to restart it in neutral… which it always does without complaint. My family’s old Honda Accord was a boy – he slowly seeped power steering fluid and gently disappeared engine oil for 200,000 miles, as was my Pontiac 6000 (which I got for free because of the baffling, un-solvable-by-conventional-means stalling) which was remarkable only because it drizzled copious amounts ATF but was 100% reliable to get to work. Boy cars do tend to mark their parking spots. The Datsun’s a bit of a boy, at first glance. Starts up first time every time, gas gauge works, wiring has been fucked with by a team of six specialists in the field of “screwing up wiring” then gently soaked in salt water and let to crystallize. It blows fuses all over the place, but even though nothing ELSE electrical works, the pee wee engine is ready to go every time. It doesn’t overheat or care what type of gas you put into it, it’s always ready to go to the dump or the hardware store (as long as it’s daytime and you don’t need headlights) even though he’s overdue for an oil change. Dependably flawed. Girl cars though, they have attitudes. When you have a problem, she lets you KNOW, immediately, by simply turning off and refusing to start again, making horrible screeches, throwing fan belts, killing batteries, ballast resistors, and voltage regulators – until you coax the problem out of her and fix it — and so help you you better not halfass it. My Corvair was a girl, I swapped to an alternator and she’d drain the battery if you left it hooked up overnight. After a particularly punishing freeway run, I got to experience the gut-wrenching terror of watching her barf raw gasoline onto searing hot exhaust manifolds. Two mechanical fuel pumps later I learned she really wanted an electric fuel pump for her birthday. If you didn’t use just the right belts, she’d throw them off at speed and start to overheat. She knew moving back to Phoenix was a mistake, so she jammed her transmission in reverse 9000 miles from Nowhere’s Butte Crossing, Caliazona, let me pop it right into gear as soon as I got it to Phoenix and dropped it — then immediately jammed in reverse again as soon as I got it back into place. Turns out I forgot our anniversary, and with car-girlfriends a year is “new transmission” instead of paper. Run the wrong brand of gas and she detonates, grab the wrong type of spark plugs and she’s sluggish. Change the tires and a bushing starts to creak. Pay attention to her, give her all of what she needs and a little bit of what she wants (and sometimes a gift from the heart just because), and she’ll treat you right. Forget, ignore, fuck up, or halfass, and she’ll make your life hell. Maddening, but such personality, such charm. This zebra car, after her three way night pukeys? She is a Princess, confirmed.

Lets face it. Human beings are animals. There’s no way to fake it when it comes to what we want, and what we like; no sustainable way. At some point in living a lie; we crack — and our lies crumble down into temptation, temptation to delayed gratification, until MUST becomes the only refrain. And when I saw this car in the flesh, and drove it down the street? WE MUST BE TOGETHER I MUST HAVE THIS IT JUST NEEDS — ok, so the last part is probably only applicable to tinkerers but we’ve all been there, seen a thing and had to have it, desired it completely. An object of desire is more significant, in my mind, it has a story, a personality – character. A character you want to discover, a story you want to learn. I’ve always been able to do this with cars. With cars it’s easy, you’re not a stalker you’re an enthusiast, you’re not crazy you’re… the guy with all the cars in his yard. Well, you’re the crazy guy with all the cars in his yard.

Anyhow, it’s a real solid driver, original as could be under the hood after I removed a PO’s duct tape insulation job and a seriously fried starter harness. While I was fixing some broken seat springs, I removed an ugly as fuck cheap ass 80′s nylon seat cover and some loose-fitting zebra-stripe headrest covers, I found a fairly solid stock seat cover both front and back, some corner-muched headrests, and because of a slipup on my part, a good sized slice on the back of the front bench. Whoopsie. It’s got no carpets, just a pair of rubber floor mats, and even after finding a secret stash of body plugs, I’m missing a few, so stuff dropped onto the floor at speed is sometimes lost forever. The door seals are pretty much ornamental, they leak air like a sieve, so I ordered a set from Restoration Specialties. It showed up marked 70-72 4dr Dart so I am anxiously awaiting seeing if they fit. The window felts are not even ornamental, all gasketing material has drifted away to dust and left a rusting steel window scraper on one side and a pathetic inch or so of cracked whiskers on the other, and the window runs haven’t had felt in them since Reagan was in office. I ordered a set of these from Restoration Specialties too, but I’m backordered on something or other. Bother. And it’s the first year for shoulder belts so it has these insane, painful, unlikely to save from injury three part shoulder belts. I tried some aftermarket bug jobbies but the reel just ain’t quite right and the high anchor presses the belt into the roof, adding too much friction, so we’re “ridin’ dirty” on the seat belts to one degree or another. I’m always lapbelted in but I’ll be god damned if I put that cantilevered-for-max-torque collarbone snapping device on my shoulder. So obviously, it’s a work in progress, but it has some niceties because of the year. First and foremost there’s no emissions in Oregon for a 73, so I can swap and bop to my heart’s content with any small block mopar on the planet, including the fuel injected serpentine belted 5.2/5.9 Magnums from any Dodge truck and V8 Jeep made from about 92 to like… last year, as long as you find a proper 360 LA car oil pan (stockers are out of stock most places but there are always Milodon big capacity pans). It was the first year for collapseable steering column, standard 11 inch power discs up front (drilled/slotted rotors and high performance pads are all pretty much available on the aftermarket for Civic head-lamp money). Rad racey shit like tubular control arms, tubular k-members, rack and pinion steering, coilover conversions are all outside of my current budget, but READILY available. Shit, it even came with a rear defroster fan (that is noisy as all fuck and doesn’t defrost worth a mouse turd but that’s fixable).

There’s a heater/defroster hose that needs clamped up under the dash which just drapes on the floor right now. The gas gauge and temp gauge don’t work (already have the 5V regulator to fix that problem). That’ll hopefully fix the fact that there is ZERO internal illumination as well. For some unknown reason the reverse lights are wired to a switch and if the switch is left out/off, the reverse lights stay on in drive, if it’s left on, they don’t come on at all. Still trying to piece together that mystery, it almost sounds like a bad neutral safety/reverse switch on the trans. Easy and cheap enough to swap it and see. It stumbles off idle, especially at speed (the Carter BBD two barrel has a whole host of enthusiast fixes for what amounts to designed-too-small-prone-to-clogging idle emulsion tubes), it uses the weather/temperature/ghost sensitive Chrysler electronic ignition (a big step up from points but I have a nice HEI coil/bracket I’m gonna do this fix on her soon). Three separate retard previous owners have wired it for sound, each using their own retarded unique perspective on wiring, alternately using speaker cable for power and ethernet cable for speaker wire, but I’ve gotten a nice amp and iPhone cable setup that should tuck nicely into the glovebox and under the seat to provide 300 some odd amps to a pair of 6″s up front and some 6×9′s in the back and a good spool of real speaker wire that’s already run through the channels. I somehow collected a set of 7″ H4 housings a while back which will be getting some hi/lo HID’s (in the human visible light spectrum thanks, no pinkies/goldies/blueys for me) as soon as I get a nice mountable relay holder. Ma Mopar, in her infinite wisdom, continued using the Model-A esque “everything runs through the ammeter” wiring ethos well into the late 70′s, but it appears that I have “fleet/taxi wiring”, which at least runs a decent gauge cable through the firewall instead of hitting a big fire-prone bulkhead connector, so I think I can step up the alternator to a Denso/mini, which will give me two to six times the amps (depending on how ambitious I am and how difficult the bracketry/pulley is). I already picked up some 17×7 steelies from a 2005-on Dodge Magnum, which are getting outfitted with some 205/50R17 Federals as I type. Along with some Amazon chrome trim rings and some ebay NOS center caps (or some more expensive Wheel Vintiques center caps, depending on if I win this auction), I will have some 17″ rallye-alikes with 50 series rubber for under $200 a corner (seriously, these 17×7 steels are the shit, check the center cap look out here and imagine these on the outside lip). I already have my graphite-impregnated motor mounts and transmission mount, waiting for a sunny day to get put in. I have my heart set on a narrowed Explorer 8.8 (which are about Optima-yellow-top priced from a yard, complete with bigger-than-the-front (might have to fix that I guess) disc brakes and a limited slip in a variety of gut-wrenching gear ratios), but that will probably have to wait a minute, it’ll require a custom drive shaft (Denny’s Driveshafts is up the street and as long as I measure twice I think I can get a good deal) and a custom e-brake cable (gonna tap a local 4×4 shop to see if they have an ideas). One of the bigger things you can do to improve handling on these guys is tie the front and rear subframes together (there’s a subtle difference between unibody [which your civic is] and unit-body [which my dodge is], the short version is back in the 70′s we were pretty dumb and didn’t realize how to brace stuff good, which made a bunch of cars that started off loosey goosey and got looser and goosier with age), which is likely something I’ll want to do before I get too serious about an interior or the rest of the body work (dig those wicked kinks in the rear doors BOTH SIDES). There are a bunch of options, from bolt-in kits (which are probably just fine for anything I’d do but I hear they can creak. I hate creaking.) to shit you have to trim floor pan out to fit (NOT my cuppa), but I think the coolest option is these weld-ins from US Cartool, which tack all down the bottom of the body and bridge some of the gap between the unit body and what amounts to a convertible unibody chassis. No floor cutting, no dippy bolts. Probably not something I’d want to weld in myself but I can’t imagine it would be too dear to get done at a body shop. I’m also giving some serious thought to buying a 5.2 Magnum now, setting up a Megasquirt on the bench, and then doing a one-weekend swap to fuel injection. Ambitious but you must understand that when I say one weekend, I mean I’ll take a whole week off and do it at some point in the week. If I keep my budget real strict and shop smart for the engine, I bet I could get into a programmable EFI motor with a nice little cam in it for under $1500. Shit, at that price I could take the motor and the car to a shop and just have THEM swap it in. Even if I stick with manifolds I bet I could get a real sleepy grocery getter manageable 250 horses, and 17-18 miles per gallon. And I do feel like sticking with manifolds. If I could find a set of 360 manifolds for the car I’d do it, I hear they’re a little bigger and flow a little better. Then I’d just get some 2.5″ downpipes made up (I hear that’s a good match for the stock manifold outlet, but I’ll measure when I get ready to do the exhaust, if I can run dual 3′s that’s great too. Mopar headers are either expensive as fuck and screw up starter access, expensive as four fucks and hit steering components, or cheap and you smash them the first time you go into a parking lot. Oh, and some are expensive and you smash them the first time you go into a parking lot. And you always have that clangy exhaust sound, pating pating. So headers are fucking out. I’m keeping an eye on the Craigslist and some forum for-sale for a 360 or 340 header. I’ll get my die grinder out and gasket match them/clean up as much flash as I can, and that’ll be that.

Oh, and it looks like this.

The ZebraCar

That’s with the 185/75 R14 and 205/70 R14 in the back (and the stock hubcaps).

This is with the 17×7′s and 205/50R17 Federals. Backs look like rubber bands but I don’t want asymmetrical tires, you can’t rotate them and it just sucks. Hopefully the trim ring makes it look a little less roller-skatey.

205/50R17s on Magnum/300C17x7's for the Dart

Trust me, when those trim rings and center caps are on it’s gonna be like a hot-wheels rallye rim.

I’m pretty excited about the future of this car, and the nice part about A-bodies is that if you’re not a prime-pony-years whore (and I am not) you can probably find a deal on a nice-bodied shell on Craigsbay, and all your swank parts and gee gaws just swap over. So while I’m modifying “just a four door” today, maybe these badass parts will fill up a Swinger or a Scamp some day. Or maybe just a four door with a better front end (the hyper badass bumper/in-bumper taillights are still intact in a 73, apparently they moved up to dork-squad placement in 74, but the front end of a 72 and earlier is miles and miles ahead of the kinda derpy predecessor-to-the-le-baron nose of the 73). HOORAY!

Update: Here’s a sneak peek of what the 17′s look like with the trim rings. Center caps won on eBay and being slow-boated to me soonest.

17" Trim Rings on my 17x7's

When I was young, I had faggot written on my gym clothes a couple times. Been picked on on the school bus, been called a queer at clubs, sporting events. My dad sat me down and asked me if I was gay, after I came back from college. My mom, in her mom-ly way, asked plenty of times. Teachers. Dad sat me down again like twelve years after college and asked me again (lol srsly tho, does u has the homos). One memorable time I had it spit in my face at a lunch table, and when I chose to pay up and find a less phlegmatic place to eat my fries, two more folks threw their (pro) opinion in on the Great Gayness Debate. I mean, _I_ knew I liked looking at boobs, but when you’re a young virgin with zero sexperience, life is a confusing, terrifying haze of insecurity. After the accusations piled up and mounted in direction, I started to wonder. I mean, this was like some kind of social signalling, right? This many people can’t all agree on a thing without some kind of significance to their accusation. They could site all kinds of reasons I was a faggot, from drivin’ in the fashion of one to liking “their” type of music, my disdain of the cocaine-and-cheap-vodka-pressure-cooker rapeshed atmosphere of dance clubs, my lack of proper bro-upmanship to male friends who successfully cheated on their girlfriends (regardless of how hot the chick was – this earned me a “giant faggot” I think that’s like the difference between Assault and Aggravated Assault), my clothes, my “faggy eyes” and my “soft little gayboy face”. Even my love of books was a significant statistical point, and what did I have to balance all this? My insatiable lust for vagina? Hardly enough, it would seem, to balance over such a huge pile of obviously reasoned opinions.

Clearly we needed more data. I catalogued all my interactions as I entered the adult world. Again, more data, again, no solution to the equation. I just kept having to assess. Did I have frosted tips? OF COURSE I HAD FROSTED TIPS. IT WAS THE 90S YOU GUYS. Did I keep my hair neat? Yeah, my shit’s all curly and it looks greasy unless I do something with it. Was I fat? Duh. Was I introverted? Of course I was, I was constantly trying to figure out why I was straight when I was CLEARLY gay. Did I tip even the ugly lookin’ strippers at the strip club? YES, DID YOU NOT SEE THE CHEWED UP DROOPY HALF-TAN ORANGUTITTY HOMEGIRL JUST SHUCKED OUT HER FILTHY GREY K-MART NURSING BRA? THAT WOMAN HAS CHILDREN TO FEED. LIKE EIGHTY CHILDREN OR SOMETHING — OF COURSE I’M GONNA DROP A FIVE. IF SHE DANCES FOR TOO MANY MORE SONGS WITH ALL YOU CHOADS SCRATCHIN’ DICK WELL OFF THE RAIL, I MIGHT BE FORCED TO GO BUY HER A FUCKING BREAST PUMP AND SOME VITAMINS AND A BOOK ABOUT BECOMING A DENTAL HYGIENTIST. I neither fell in love with a stripper nor believed one was secretly in love with me. I didn’t think joining the Army would be that much fun, I hadn’t shot a gun, stolen money from my parents, vandalized the school to stick it to the man, nor snuck out late at night to meet up with my “boys”, I’ve _still_ never caught a fish. I shouldn’t have to point here that Team Hetero is losing the numbers war in a big way, and I could keep on these completely un-straight facts about myself for seven more rambling pages, but you can relax, I won’t.

It took years of gathering this data and taking it to heart, amassing such a huge wide catalog of reasons I’m a faggot that it bordered on silly, accepting that there was simply something wrong with me that for whatever reason I couldn’t quantify. I accepted my faggotry. Over the years I toyed around with things. Had some awkward threesome makeouts with some very lovely couples. I called myself “Bi” in college. Maybe it was because I was confused, maybe it was because I wanted to be. Bisexual is still sexual, and that’s better than asexual faggot. Obviously the chicks weren’t diggin’ my whole faggy “situation” as outlined above, and while I still wanted to stick my weiner in THEM, many of them seemed quite convinced that I was looking for a penis to stick in me.

And so it went, for years and years. I dated, mostly online, I found people who were willing to talk to me despite my fagginess. I found women to date, and people to talk to. And I stopped trying to correlate other people’s “data” to my reality. It turns out that’s not healthy, you can’t try to live for others perceptions, and you can’t try to live for their validation. And back when I was trying to balance the sheets on my sexual preferences considering outside sources as valid as my own opinions? Every single accusation was terrifying, every time my dick was called to doubt it slayed my confidence and my mood. Now that I know better? I just look at the hater who is spitting his hate, and think, “Bitch, I know I’m fabulous! That homo hate? Old and busted. You need to upgrade your haterade to something fresh.” And that’s what’s up.

It does get better, in part because as you get older the accusations of others have less impact, but mostly because you learn how to make it better. You learn how to weed out the assholes and let them live their miserable lives as far away from you as you can. You learn how to be you. I’m 33 now. All official. And I’ve finally learned how to be me without fear and without shame. It’s magnificent.

I played the living shit out of Morrowind, a game that came for free with a motherboard I bought back in the day. It was fun fireballing the shit out of some necromancers and then flying around with my pants of +1000 flying and then being stealthy and stealing shit, but when it came to the last, say four hours of gameplay, the game was no longer playable as a mage/thief. As soon as you were in caves with guys who looked like the narc-lephant tubesteak from Mos Eisley, you were getting smashed in the face pretty regular. The way they “fixed” this, at the end, was to give you Sunder and Keening, which (along with the handcondom Wraithguard) turned even the most weenie bookworm magenerd into a God amongst Gods, physical stats inflated like a pro athlete on horse steroids, ready to stuff some Ash Vampire asshole full of magical artifact and slice the Corprus cure right out of their prostates. There were annoying parts, it was crashy for me throughout the time I played it, the Rock Gliders were fucking terrible and it was far too easy to accidentally smash through from Starter McEasy’s cruise to pick up a rock for some guy into Holy Crap there’s some Daedric shitstorm happening please let me escape. But it was a good game, and by the time I was done, I was just as happy to put Dagoth Ur into the big sleep with a hammer and a chisel as I would have been with some spells. This game was probably 20 or so hours (with some side questing), which at the time was epic beyond epic, and it had a bunch of expansions (that I never played through). On the whole, it was fun, engaging, and I never felt too much like the interface wanted me to hate it to death.

When I heard that there was going to be TESIV: Oblivion, I was pretty excited. Hell, I could put up with some rock gliders again if it means I can stuff two enchanted ebony gauntlets into somebody’s nosehose and make their brain explode, right? Here’s the rest of my Oblivion review: Un. Fucking. Playable. Boring, unengaging, with a difficulty curve about as steep as a wheelchair ramp to a public library. Whereas wandering too far off your path in Morrowind could get your balls mounted on an Orcish mantle, wandering too far off the path in Oblivion was the quickest way to accidentally get mired down in some impromptu Clannfear population control “quest”, where you slowly start to wish you were watching Jurassic Park and masturbating instead of playing this shitty game. Never finished this one, despite FOUR attempts to go back and play it.

So, seven hundred years later, when I heard about Skyrim, I instantly ignored it. Who fucking cares, they’re gonna get good voice actors and it’s gonna have two well-modeled characters in it and then I’m gonna be beating up palette-shifted imps that scale in level with me for no readily apparent reason, right? Fuck off. Not interested. But then a ridiculous number of my friends started to play it and rave about it, so I decided to buy it. Good decision? Yes. Good game? Yes. Game of the year? SO FUCKING NO. NO NO NO. Now, I’ve dislodged like a full waking week’s worth of time into the game, so I can’t argue about the gameplay per dollar value proposition of the $59 retail price – Dollar for hour this game is an enormous bargain, better than drinking with my friends, movies, novels, or any other non-advertisement subsidized entertainment I’ve indulged in this year. So… why isn’t it my game of the year?

Lets talk, for a moment, about console porting. “Console port” is one of the nastiest phrases in PC gaming, usually spit out in a huff when gameplay mechanics are so kluged to fit keyboard and mouse play that it’s obvious someone’s retarded nephew headed up the PC port team. Lots of initially-console-only games that get released for PC three or four months later have this problem, the game is simply designed and tested for play with a controller, and using a keyboard and a mouse to simulate a controller input is frustrating and horrible. Burnout Paradise (and several other similar driving games like Midnight Club 3) is really pretty, fun to play and fun to drive in on the Xbox. On the PC it was horrific, almost exactly the experience you’d expect trying to use a mouse and keyboard to drive a car. GTA IV (a game I was very exited about before playing it) wasn’t exactly crisp on the console, but on the PC it becomes a bleary vague nauseating headbob nightmare. These “console ports” are usually hindered by graphical bugs, gameplay bugs, crashes, poorly bodged UI elements, and frequently a keyboard completely mapped out with random commands spread across the keyboard “intuitively” (press H for help, press P for put your dick in it, press Y for yes). Skyrim has ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS AND MORE. The person responsible for the dialog tree/system menu/inventory menu should be forced to play games with clean UIs for a fucking year for the sins of Skyrim. I can’t tell you how often I have scrolled down a list of items (Skyrim is a traditional TES game which means, basically, you’re going to have four million things in your inventory at any given time) and clicked, only to have the UI randomly decide what I WANTED to click on was the thing at the top of the list. I’ve actually had to develop a system of rabidly scrolling up and down with the mousewheel and then up and down on the movement keys to make sure my “selection focus” is on the right subsection of whatever I’m looking at. And even then it’s only like 75% certain I’ll click on the right thing. I’ve wasted many a black soul gem and listened to many an uninterruptable, interminable introduction dialog because of this. I get dumped out of sales dialogues sometimes because I clicked on some non-selective zone of the left hand dialog that happens to be in the crook of the N or whatever. I’ve listened to one Jarl or another talk about his area of the Reach like 10 times because I just couldn’t seem to click anything else. I’ve ended up skipping HUGE sections of story-enriching dialog just because I know it just doesn’t matter enough to put up with trying to get all the back story, it’s going to take twenty minutes of scrolling up and down and clicking and doing random shit to get it to click the right option. The system menu and inventory share this lack of click-zone cohesion combined with lack of comprehensive keystroke options to complete actions. Let me explain. To craft a dagger, you find a forge, go into the “Iron” menu, and select dagger. Then you either click it some random number of times and then click OK to each time, or you click and hit Y, or you hit “E” (intuitively selected as the keyboard shortcut for “craft itEm”) and then Y. Or hit OK. Every time. Ridiculously, this is the BEST crafting interface in the game, requiring the least retarded number of steps. Enchanting is a matter of selecting an object (by clicking), selecting an enchantment (by clicking), selecting an “intensity” for the enchantment (by clicking and dragging or using the left and right keys) then hitting enter, then selecting a soul gem (by scrolling down an interminably long list of gems), then hitting R (to (silent R)enchant) and then click OK or hit Y. Don’t even get me started on creating fucking potions because it’s just worthless. It’s past frustrating, even in “cheating by looking on the internet” form, seriously, look at this page and tell me what the fuck is going on. JUST SELECT YOUR INGREDIENTS BASED ON THE EFFECTS BUT DON’T END UP WITH TOO MANY EFFECTS! I wasted half an hour making healing potions to keep my elfwuss alive before realizing that the “Potion of Healing” was actually healing me for 52 points and then draining 40 points of magica. For… some reason. I’m sure. Recharging magical weapons, of course uses the keyboard shortcut T, for “recharge this Thing” and is the only area of the UI which doesn’t respond to the mouse wheel, and inexplicably doesn’t have a scroll bar to the right to indicate you can scroll down at all, you simply use W and S to go up and down. WHO THE FUCK DESIGNED THIS SHIT. Seriously, were you guys not allowed to talk to each other while programming this shit?

There’s a whole host of other problems I can mention but they’d all be excusable if the crafting and dialogue interface weren’t so fucking horrible. The map is 3D but for some reason you can only zoom from “looking at a topographical map from 10 feet above the table” to “looking at a topographical map from 6 feet above a table”. Travelling to an area doesn’t clear any fog of war, no, no, your map has active cloud cover that obscures the very, very vague paths that lead you through mountain passes (which are sometimes intentionally misleading, making it look like there’s a wide winding path up a face when in fact it’s a ski-slope of impenetrable rubble). Stealth is a joke, guards will regularly detect you even when wearing magical stealth boots and gulping invisibility potions, but it’s OK because only rarely will a mission involving stealth NOT be fixable by just murdering everyone in the current area code. I completed all the Mage’s college quests with a warhammer and the two default spells they give you at the beginning (plus the ONE spell I had to purchase to gain entry). There were two pretty cool puzzles (the big dwemer sphere that you had to “align” the crystal with fire/ice and the dungeon you had to use elemental spells to unlock doors in) but then there were 40 more dungeons whose only “puzzle” was to turn some pillars to the symbols CARVED IN THE FUCKING WALL BEHIND THEM. This is the ancient Nord version of putting your password on a post-it on your monitor I guess. The MOST interesting and engaging quests were completely optional Daedric shrine quests. And worst of all… I’m not done yet. I’ve got hours and hours in and no sense of completion. I’m the Archmage of a whole college, the king of thieves, the master assassin and not at any time has it felt like “woo, that was awesome”, it always just feels like putting a line through a to-do item and completely un-like, say… portaling Wheatley to the moon, or exploding an enormous, armor and laser encrusted RadScorpion, or even finally fucking killing a mob in minecraft — any number of other awesome gaming moments I’ve had this year.

Brad and I had a discussion about Skyrim in which he very astutely pointed out despite all his problems with the game that he had 80 hours of play in it and it “didn’t owe him anything”. It’s true, I don’t feel like Skyrim owes me anything. In fact I feel a little ashamed I’m not gamer enough to finish all the food left on my plate (there are gameless kids in africa who would LOVE to enchant just one dagger), but ultimately my time in Skyrim is going to go out with a whimper and not with a bang. Instead of a sense of ultimate badass completion, it’s gonna feel like quitting a shitty job.

PS I am totally moving another person to Portland even though you all told me to stop.

question… in general…

(disregard grammar, consider theme)

Well, that sentence is a natural paranoia/worry/fear manifesting as a chink in your artistic/professional self-opinion. There are literally dozens of very good reasons that it’s silly to think that about Portland, but they’re kinda complex to explain and very easy to just see, so I’ll ignore those and march forward into the “artistic/professional self-opinion” bit.

So, basically, leadership and true human “excellence” come from a very specific mental conditioning, it requires some intelligence combined with some humility in the early years, and then a very specific voice. God’s maybe, mom. A girl you think is hot or your priest, tells you that you’ve “got it, no sweat, you’re born to do this” and it emboldens you. You decide to DO SOMETHING in all caps don’t care what it is because that voice? It was right and you wanna hear it congratulate you when you’re done.

Now, that’s all fake. That never happens. What actually happens in that fleeting moment of inspiration is a stopwatch starts. That moment of actualization? It was a reset. Right at the moment? There’s only two voices in your head. Your own strong, familiar internal dialog, and the voice of someone who loves/fucks/titillates/nurtures you saying “You can do it”. And the stopwatch is now counting how long it takes for a voice of terminal doubt to get in there and jam up your shit.

For a depressingly large chunk of folks? THAT voice sounds just like Dad or Mom or themselves when they’re drunk and it just beats em’ before they even have a chance to think about what the “something” was. Afterglow is over and who gives a fuck what some stripper says anyways, fuck it. They’re done. Back to frappuccinos in the new reusable ultrachug with bonus drinkDiaper(tm) and trying to up the threadcount on the sheets.

If you make it all the way to “fucking around trying to think up what something to do is” without getting jammed, you’re now a doodler. You’re a tinkerer. You read a lot to try to get ideas or you learn how to run long distances or you get a job or you finish college or whatever. Stuff that’s easy to get into a track and push on gets completed. Things that are more free form tend to either not get finished or you run into obstacles. But you’re still young and nothing has stopped you yet and your great awesome young brain is just wet and hot with ideas, you’re soaking in em’! SOMETHING is in there just waiting to get out, as soon as you figure out what it is and how to do it.

So, if you manage to tinkerdoodle around enough and still not get upset and stop, and you get bored with all your hamster-wheel life progress meters, you develop some skills, and now you’re a journeyman. A person who can do. Not maybe SOMETHING in all caps but stuff, you can do stuff.

This is where almost all of the adults on the planet stop. They can do their oil changes and clear their toilets or they can take a pretty good wedding picture or they play guitar in a local band. They bake a wicked apple pie or they write a pretty good essay. They still dream a little, but they have enough “life lessons” that the voice of terminal doubt? It’s their own. And it comes in a cool breath of logic, yeah we’d all like to sing an aria at the Sydney Ampitheater but there’s a mortgage payment dummy! Or, in many cases, SOMETHING came to be. SOMETHING turned out to be a son, or hitting upper management or owning a muscle car just like the one in that movie except for the rusty muffler, and it just takes up the slack in any left over creative impulses. I’d write a symphony but Die Hard is on and that’s my favorite nap movie.

And then all that’s left are the artists, craftspeople, psychopaths, the sociopaths. These three groups have something unique inside them that tells them that they need to DO SOMETHING REAL BECAUSE THE REST OF THIS SHIT IS FAKE. Artists feel the whole sentence. Craftspeople hear “Do something real”. Sociopaths get “the rest of this shit is fake”. Psychopaths get “DO SHIT”. They’re intelligent enough to be bored by their station, have successfully avoided or defused internal doubt and external judgment, and the drudgery of day to day existence hasn’t curbed their intense need to externalize their singular vision. They’ve developed their skills through long practice and have developed exquisite “taste” in their particular fields of interest. This is where Rick Perry lives, and Churchill, Ted Bundy, Pablo Piccasso, Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen. It’s where genius and madness are stranded with each other when the masses return to rest. Which is unfortunately why you’re running into so many dickholes.

But I digress — there’s nothing to be gained from _thinking_ that sentence, unless you wanna go think it to you at… fourteen? That’s a “terminal doubt” of the kind that can only work when it’s integrated early. It’s an ineffective deterrent thought-scourge that you ran over your ego dozens of times like some kind of purification rite and it’s silly. You’re past that. It’s an emotional
damage-control device you’re using to preemptively prepare yourself for failure and it’s the sort of shit I do all the time. I do it less now. Because I recognize that forcing myself to a psychological low before starting a project is counter productive, the “net happiness” from a situation where I forced myself to live out every variety of failure before starting is a low gain proposition if I succeed wildly, and in every other case is a stone cold bummer followed by a halfass payoff. It’s a weak type of magic spell that you learn when you’re young and have no other use for all that beautiful brain that god gave you, like a really shitty computer program that just pulls up the pictures on your SD cards where it thinks you look “extra fat”, it does it very slowly, turns on all your fans while it does it, and when you agree that the picture is bad, it doesn’t do anything with it, it just finds another one to show you. Sometimes it just shows you the same one over and over for hours until you agree you look fat in it.

Quit doing it. Or, do it alllllll right in a big ass pile. Say it out loud to yourself, say it in words so you have to hear it. Say “I’m a fraud and a fake and nobody believes in me and I’m gonna fail.” say it in the mirror and cry about it, cry over all that wasted effort you gave to projects that went nowhere and mourn the innocent youthful you who squandered so many opportunities. Do it all the way out. If you have a relationship with god? Talk to him about it. Or just talk to somebody dead about it, it doesn’t matter, pick somebody who can hear you, and who most of all can effortlessly understand the emotions which are forming your words, and talk to them. Have that out. Get real stoned. Make fun of yourself. But only do this doubting out loud. ONLY do it out loud. Don’t write it, don’t let yourself do it in the car in your head. If you’re in the car and you start having this desire to dig down a sadness bunker to wait out the war? Talk it out. Talk to the radio guy. Talk to the commercials. No I do not care about five dollar foot longs all week mother fucker because I have a fucking problem here that you would not believe. Don’t let it live in your head. Because it’s a loop, it’s a computer virus, it’s like you looked at too many porn sites and eventually your computer starts running like shit (I mean a regular computer not your immunodepressedMac), and you need a reboot, but the brain doesn’t “do” that, so…

There’s a concept, in the new “cloud computing” paradigm, of having “tiered infrastructure”. Basically, you can run a whole computer and if part of the computer’s software is gonna be thrashing the hard drive, you can physically store that data on really fast memory, and all the boring text files and backgrounds on much less expensive, much slower hard drives. This is “tiered storage”, the hard drive looks like one big thing to the computer but it’s split up according to how fast we need access to it. I believe the human brain, having billions of years more R&D time, is like “tiered compute”. We have this big fancy new part, cerebral neocortex, which is capable of all kinds of neat “wide” processing. It can take really big ideas and think about them all at once, think about their relationships, we can hold dissimilar ideas and compare them. Then we have the paleocortex limbic system, which is just kinda “where the rubber meets the road”. It’s where we keep “what gunshots sound like” and “the sick feeling when you know you broke a limb”, and the fear of strangers. Interior logic fights, stuff that’s all hypothetical and never needs to interact with your sensor organs or limbs? The brain starts to run them as efficiently as it can, and the neocortex is waaaaay complicated and takes up a lot of kilocalories. Part of the brain’s survival-efficiency routine is to makes the loops smaller and smaller, and stuffs them further down the stack, if you can basically reduce a very complex argument to “you are dumb” and you iterate it often enough, the brain will try to just throw a “you are dumb” signal out from the limbic system on an interval to make you stop using the fancy part so much. So you get all the endocrine system triggers that come with feeling shamed/stupid on a regular tap and then it just lives as tension in your lower back forever. Forcing yourself to talk it out brings it back up to the fancy processing and lets you experience it fully, which will help the brain stop trying to simplify and automate it.

Here’s what you should be thinking about. How much stuff you can sell on Craigslist in the next three weeks, how to work the logistics of leaving and driving up, how many people you can find to take your lease. I have four days of vacation to use before the end of the year, two of them are yours if you need a copilot. Past that, it is in the chubby thick babyhands of Dr. SpaceJesus. Go have your freakout, take a nap, and then re-assess your to-do list when you’re done. It’s like jackin’ off before a date so you’re not all nervous.

I have always been very bright, and very very patient. This pairing was, until recently, what I considered my greatest gift. I wasn’t verry pretty, nor graceful; healthy; successful — But smart as a little monkey and patient enough to wait out the goldrush suckers and bamboozlers, wear out the brutes and the quick, until I could bring the powerful leverage of my monkeysmarts into play. And at each step of my social and educational journey, I was attentive, intuitively capable and intellectually open, able to make rapid leaps between active cognition, internal synthesis, and then re-communicate core ideas of lessons learned. I boil down the lesson very efficiently, I regurgitate it very convincingly, and I follow it very well. I did great on tests. Teachers loved me. I could not pay attention in class and finish all my homework before I got home. Other students hated me, but my ability to turn that blanket of attentiveness and communication to them gained me a small but insanely close group of friends. I excelled in almost all areas of academic study, I was taking college level math, english, chemistry (a subject which I hated and still loathe, but whose central concepts were so easy for me to regurgitate that after an all-nighter out dancing I managed to best all my classmates in a state chemistry competition), and had fully exhausted the physics program available at my school, instead spending the after lunch period idly toying with electronics while talking to my Physics teacher.

There are really two major crises which can arise when an intelligent person is made to believe at an early age that they are smart enough to not have to _learn_ things. One, it can make them into a sociopath. Learning how easy it is to dupe people around you is intoxicating. (Donald Trump is many things but he is not dumb. He is smart enough to realize he can get people to agree with _him_ and not his _ideas_ by using the right tone.) The other is that they get convinced that they are the smartest person in the world. Guess which one I picked (and I thought I had self-esteem problems! Hah.)

Being the Smartest Person in the World

Being so smart that people assume you know everything sucks. At first it’s fun because it’s titillating to impress people. And as a kid, I assumed eventually I would find some core group of competent adults that is out there running stuff while all “the idiots” meander. But eventually, the fun wears off and by the time I was about… ten I had become so nervous about ever NOT knowing the answer, about ever NOT having the solution, or being awkward at a task, that I was embarrassed about being taught. Embarrassed about learning things FROM other people. Because they were all dumber than me! How could THEY, with their slow moving brains and their chubby stupid hands, teach me! ME! The boy who was so smart his dad just _knew_ he didn’t need some gross “sex talk”. The boy who was so bright he just learned things by _being_! So without realizing it, I committed myself fully to the idea that I was the smartest person in the world. I obsessively collected “farcts”, specific details which belie deeper knowledge of a process or concepts. When I didn’t know a thing it was embarrassing, so when I found out about anything I needed to delve as “deeply” into it as I could as quickly as I could, just so I’d sound knowledgeable if somebody happened to want to talk about frost-damage on cactii or old tractors or South American regime changes. And each time I was rewarded for farctical information, it emboldened me further. I _was_ the smartest person in the world. Everyone agreed! Because they were always impressed by all the stuff I knew. And knowledge is power! So I knew I had power, and I was smart enough to know have read that with power comes responsibility. And being the smartest person in the world must be a seriously big responsibility. It meant I could never ever ever let other people be better than me.

This interestingly idiotic assertion of intelligence wasn’t really conscious. Or not wholly. I knew I was separating the world into two camps, the competent (me and some unknown army of people who make the world work right) versus the incompetent (everybody I had met in my entire life), but it didn’t feel mean, it just felt like I was doing the retards a favor by not expecting much from them. I was angry at the world for not opening every door for me, in awe of my smartness. And I fed that burning anger, like it was ragefire that sustained me.

Into that fire, I fed five jobs, eight years. Countless friends. Unknown chances at bliss. I fed it my energy and my sadness and my hatred and my love and everything I had. Every single thing I had I fed into the same stupid fire, convinced somehow that I could make it burn so hot that struggle itself would cease to exist.

And one day I woke up and tasted the ashes in my mouth — the charred cumshot of a decade of masturbatory rage. I’m done with being angry that the world isn’t perfect. I’m done with being angry that I am not perfect. And I’m done with assuming I’m too smart to have to learn.

Next time: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dr. SpaceJesus.

– Talking Heads “Life During Wartime”

Feeling overwhelmed when the situation is bad is totally normal. When my life was a freefall of poorly placed faith, badly chosen partners, untenable, inconstant living situations, and marginal employment, I was forever swimming upstream at a feverish pace. Racing, leaping, grasping, waiting for the next big setback to smack into me and send me sprawling. When I remember my day to day struggle at the time, when I tell stories about it, it sounds (and _was_, in every sense) exhausting. But it was easy. It’s easy to come home so tired you don’t care where you live. It’s easy to shuffle from job you don’t care about to job you don’t care about. It’s easy to think of everyone as an enemy or an obstacle. It’s easy to dismiss all good things in your life as coincidence or happenstance, because then you aren’t surprised when they disappear again. After all, it’s not your fault, it’s just that life sucks forever and that situation NOT sucking was a part-time exemption. You had your vacation and now it’s back to the slog, sucker.

Well, my life isn’t a freefall any more. I’m no longer marginally employed. I choose the people I spend my time with and how much energy I expend on their needs with a more balanced and even hand. I’ve lived in my own house for two and a half years now. I own my car outright. I’m dating a wonderful person whose company brings me a lot of joy. I’m thinner than I’ve ever healthily been, I’m having sex regularly, I never really have to worry about money (day to day), and after weeks of PNR stretching, meditation, and plenty of swearing, I can almost touch my toes. I have friends and family who love and care about me, even my PETS are clean, healthy, and happy for god’s sake.

So that brings me to last night, when I was again sitting in my garage, endlessly fretting about whether or not my friends _actually_ like me. Whether or not my life has meaning. Whether or not any of what I have accomplished is “real”. Just a self-effacing pity cycle. Mope mope mope. I used to think this was OK, a defense mechanism for preempting disappointment. I encouraged it, even. I took snippets and misquoted Nietzsche and the Hakagure and pop culture. I cultivated a philosophy of pessimism. A grim hedge around my happiness — carefully trimmed to suit my mindset that I was fundamentally not worth attention or affection and that life is fundamentally unfair; a rigged game whose rules were either so unimportant I shouldn’t learn them or so ludicrously set against success that I should actively avoid engaging it.

This negatively weighted world is simple, and when things are bad, it seems to be a great philosophy. If all you know is self doubt and suffering, you are never surprised when you suffer. But I never knew what to do with joy, never learned how to trust my heart, and because of my overwhelming negativity, I never planned to live this long. It never even occurred to me that I might be 32, rested, well-laid, and gainfully employed some day. So, nonsensically, my biggest problem right now is learning how to be happy when I am _happy_. It’s harder than I ever thought it would be.

1. Fix garage roof
2. Front/back deck
3. Get Yamahahaha going
4. Rewire Datsun w/LED lights/new alt/fancy fan
5. Sell Versa
6. Sell Kymco
7. Chicken tractor
8. Raised beds for front yard
9. Tear down shed/build tea house
10. Fence front yard
11. Fix edge of driveway/complete earth ramp in yard corner

Fast forward to Monday night. I was sitting down watching a movie, and I felt a headache starting. It had been about 36 hours since the last one. They come on quickly, and present with watering eyes, my nose either plugs or just one nostril plugs (the right one), and then the headache starts: an eye-socket-to-hairline swath of unrelenting ant-bites-inside-my-skull pain. Monday night I would have done anything to make it stop. I had my shoes on and my jacket on to go buy cigarettes on the off chance THAT would help. It was probably a 9 on my pain scale. I couldn’t sit down, I had to be moving, I was rubbing my head and neck and nothing was helping. I took a hot shower and laid down on the couch and finally all I could do was lay in bed until I fell into fitful sleep. Thursday morning, when I got to work, I had another one. Exactly the same, another 9. Eyes tearing, nose plugged. I’ve never had a headache as bad at work. And people were visibly concerned. It’s disconcerting when I can’t even concentrate on a sentence long enough to get from the start to the end of it. And I recognize the discomfort, the nausea, and the “like a storm clearing” speed at which the pain recedes from headaches of my youth.

I’ve been having these headaches basically daily (or multiple times daily) for a month now. I finally stopped just ignoring the “if you have a bunch of these they’re not migraines” paragraph at the end of every migraine description and clicked on a link to cluster headache. It’s… undeniably what I’m experiencing. There’s no cure, just prevention. So… I’m keeping a headache diary. Trying to track all the triggers which might be causing it (all of them, aside from cocaine, are basically in the running, since I don’t do that yak). I don’t really have much to say about this other than I hope it’s not a tumor (knocking on your mom).

“Deeper in Debt than Mexico” – The button which hung on the overflowing bill-basket at my childhood home.

“Aaron, you’re a pretty smart guy. You have gotta be able to figure out this ‘stock market’ thing.” – My Father’s advice to 16 year old me on ‘Finance’. The first time I remember him discussing money with me.

Money and me have never gotten along. I like spending it. I like when I have a big pile of it and the excitement of knowing I’m gonna spend it. Sometimes I even like the things I spend it on. But for the largest part of my life, money has been more enemy that friend. The lack of it, the mismanagement of it, the expectation that it’ll be there when it isn’t. I’ve scraped together my first meal in two days out of couch cushions and I’ve floated checks for cigarettes. I’ve been fucked over and over by money, largely because I wasn’t ever taught about it. Not in school, not by my parents. TV pretty much told me what I already knew: having money is rad and spending it lets everyone else know about your personal radness level. Friends let me know that it was really fun when I spent my money on them. My parents shared plenty of lessons about (borderline psychotic) work ethic, integrity, personal responsibility. But as far as somebody who cares about me teaching me what it _means_ to have money, what “savings” is,  how to manage income? Hah.

There were times as a kid, that my dad was earning _excellent_ money and we were still having to time our grocery store trips to coincide with paydays. My room was adrift with toys, my parents would clandestinely throw away baskets of toys which I’d never even notice were gone. I wanted for NOTHING, but at the same time, there were last second runs to pay a bill and keep the electricity on. But as long as the fridge was packed with Coca Cola, pork tenderloin, and condiments, the cable TV was going, and we could drive anywhere we wanted to in our (many) cars, it seemed like we were living a lavish, comfortable life style.

Basically, my family took money for granted when it was present and panicked when it was gone. And for years I had no idea there was any other way to live.

I’m going to tangentialize here for a minute – Bear with me, it’s related. When I moved away to college, I had some severe social and personal anxiety. The way I masked my inability to introduce myself to others was by taking up cigarette smoking. I had smoked a little in high school, some cigars, two or three cigarettes a week when I could sneak a pack into the back yard shed. But when I went to college, they became my lifeline, a habit that I could quite literally structure my day around. By the time my second term came around I was at a pack a day pretty steady. By the time I dropped out it was more like two. It took years for me to try to quit the first time, it took years for me to try again when that failed. Five years of smoking later, I decided to quit for good. Six years later (about a year and a half ago) I grabbed a cigarette from somebody while out drinking, and a pack-a-day sized monkey was howling at my brain before I even knew it. This is how I remembered what addiction feels like, how completely it affects you. Here’s a small example of what happens when I’m quitting cigarettes: I wake up at 2am wondering where all the half smoked butts in the yard are. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever walked out there and taken a few stale drags. It doesn’t even feel like physical need at the time, there’s nothing in your lungs telling you that it needs some smoke, it is simply the all-caps-flashing-neon NEED, a general sense of impending doom, and the desperation to have that need quenched.

It is only fitting that so many of my monetary problems dovetail with smoking problems, because I was raised utterly addicted to money. I spend money to counteract bad moods, to celebrate victories, to impress my friends. I spend money when I know I shouldn’t, I sometimes lie about spending money when asked. I have put off work, friends, and family, in order to spend money. And as I have slowly made my way out of the pitch blackness of monetary despair, I’ve learned a LOT about myself, my relationships, and the responsible management of money. As you may have noticed in the upper right of this blog, there’s a box that has all my financial details in it. It’s not 100% up to date at all times, but it’s a good general picture of what I have going on. There’s no value judgments up there about what my debt was incurred for, there’s no talk about the decisions I make about where my retirement savings goes. It’s not all inclusive and if you believe for a second four lines is enough space to get even a basic picture of financial health, well, heh, you may be as fucked as I was when I started. But it’s an OK start. It helped me get on the wagon. Just like with any addiction, the road to recovery usually starts with the admission that you have a problem.