Maybe I’m afraid now. I might just be calling it the wrong thing anymore. Anxiety, stress. Anger, I say, it’s frustration. Something kept me on my back, drilling holes through rusted patches of metal.

My car’s not working right. The transmission, it’s bucking into gear—second gear the hardest. On the way to the post office, I tried kept the gear stick in second. A groan followed my pressure on the petal. I decided to let it shift on its own. The broken way.

That didn’t scare me. Just a small change, feeling it miss until suddenly it hit. Of course it didn’t. It frustrated me, worried me, bothered me. It’s a bad thing.

It’s an easy fix. Just buy a new transmission. A transmission from the factory so my car can drive me the Giant Eagle to buy my jug of milk and rent my movie about a future with smart robots or bad things that seep up from the ground.

I can call that fear. The wild things that race our hearts because we are designed to remember a time in which we were eaten. But this isn’t about that. This is about my transmission. The money. That’s what I’m bothered about.

At least I think it is. There’s something different here and I can’t decide what it means. If it changes everything, or if it’s what keeps everything the same. Maybe it’s all there to keep everything looking the same.

There is the way it looks, too, primer in spots, already rusting around the new scrap metal riveted to cover up the old rust holes. We are very worried about that. I spent an afternoon over winter break in a dirty garage sanding the dried putty off a car I hadn’t noticed or cared was already breaking.

In a way, I knew. I’ve heard of this before.

My brother once ripped aluminum siding off collapsing job-trailers at an abandoned mining site in the woods. He did it for some money. He was court ordered to hang new siding on the trailers. My father helped him.

“This is an act of pure discipline,” our father told him. My brother needed that. Discipline to keep the fines from coming, to keep order. He needed to nail long plastic strips to rotting wood. Absurdity to keep the peace. Absurdity to protect life, safe foods, music.

It’s healthy; we are congratulated for getting promoted to regional sales manager and directors of shame and irony. Paychecks to pay off the absurd cars we pull into absurd garages. All while we celebrate lordship and send family invoices to Christmastime relatives. And why shouldn’t life be this way. It is what makes us happy. Right?

Smiling because we really don’t know a lick different, we couldn’t.

And now in my gut I know I have to do something about that car. I’ve got to this the part of myself figured out or this fear just won’t go away. There’s nothing else to do.