Cinemorphosis

Tag: cars

  • The Great Honda Uncoupling

    The Great Honda Uncoupling

    A car crisis has entered my life and sent me down a rabbit hole of angst and distress. Honda has a major engine problem affecting many of its models. The problem involves the cylinder-head gasket losing its seal. This can result in coolant loss, overheating, engine misfires, and coolant entering the combustion chambers. The affected engines include Honda’s 1.5-liter turbos, 2.0-liter turbos, naturally aspirated 2.0-liters, and naturally aspirated hybrid models. Eight models are affected from 2017 through 2026. Honda has extended the warranty on these models to ten years or 150,000 miles.

    My 2018 Accord with the 2.0 turbo is not on the list. While I’m relieved, I’m not exactly brimming with confidence either. It is more than eight years old with only 29,200 miles on the odometer as I write this twenty days before my sixty-fifth birthday, October 28. I no longer look at my Accord with confidence. I look at it with mistrust.

    And this leads to a painful fact: I am afraid that Honda and I may be uncoupling.

    I take this breach of trust personally. Having a car divorce after forty years is heartbreaking. Honda was always my cozy companion. Honda was my trusty sherpa, taking me to work, medical appointments, Trader Joe’s, and Target. The Honda service center is within walking distance of my home. I know the staff. I joke with them. I tell them how much I love Honda. They smile back at me tenderly. Like me, they own Hondas. They are part of my extended family.

    But the breach of trust resulting from faulty engines has forced me to look elsewhere. Honda’s only competition for me is Toyota because, like Honda, it has a reputation for reliability. However, while the Honda service center is only one and a half miles away, the Toyota service center is an intimidating four miles away. Yet a little research offers some consolation: Toyota offers a pickup and drop-off service, which Honda does not. More importantly, Toyota has a clean bill of health on its engines, which Honda does not.

    In my risk-averse mind, I’m uncoupling from Honda and moving toward Toyota. For me, this is far more than a rational consumer decision. The change has emotional weight. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. It’s like selling your house and moving across the country. It’s like making a career change. Imagine working as an engineer for twenty years and then opening a yoga studio. I am entering foreign territory.

    But Honda has left me little choice. For years, its engineers had a massive engine problem growing right under their noses. This degree of negligence and incompetence feels like the automotive equivalent of marital infidelity. A massive breach of trust has occurred.

    And this points to yet another problem: If and when Honda fixes its defective engines, regaining my trust could take at least a decade. I would need long-term data to be convinced that Honda reliability is up to spec again. I don’t want to be the car buyer who provides the data. I want to be the car buyer who studies the data after the fact and then makes his decision.

    Buying a car is like choosing a bride. I don’t want some thirty-six-month dalliance with a car lease. I want to commit for the long term. Till death do us part.

    The holy sacrament between Honda and me has dissolved. Unless Honda does something as dramatic as moving a few mountains and parting the Pacific Ocean to win back my trust, I am afraid the uncoupling is upon us.

    I am looking over the horizon.

    I see a beaming light.

    It reads Toyota Camry.

    Preferably in Dark Cosmos.

  • The Collection You Don’t Wear but Can’t Survive Without

    The Collection You Don’t Wear but Can’t Survive Without

    After decades of horological torment, you finally reached a fragile state of mental stability: seven Seiko mechanical divers on straps, each a gleaming monument to discipline, restraint, and the lie that this was the last one.

    Then, one afternoon, on a whim, you bought a G-Shock Frogman.

    It never left your wrist.

    The atomic time spoke in a language your mechanical watches never could. No drift. No romance. No negotiation. Just cold, sovereign accuracy. Precision not as craft, but as authority.

    Later, you noticed the numerals were slightly small at night. Not a real problem—just enough of a problem to justify research. The Frogman’s cousin joined your G-Shock team: the Rangeman. Bigger digits. Cleaner read. Perfect.

    And since you were already there, you finished the trilogy with the GW5000U—the square, the legend, the watch that doesn’t try to impress because it already knows it has won.

    Now you rotated three G-Shocks in quiet contentment.

    Meanwhile, the Seiko divers sat untouched.

    After a year, you asked the logical question.

    Should you sell those lonely mechanical divers?

    No.

    You told yourself the mechanical itch might return—like a dormant fever waiting for the right conditions.

    Five more years passed.

    The mechanical divers remained untouched. Still sealed in boxes like museum artifacts from a former civilization.

    You asked again.

    Now am I ready to sell them?

    Again: no.

    Because you remembered something.

    Friends with old cars that ran perfectly—until a well-meaning mechanic convinced them to do an oil change. The service was supposed to extend the car’s life. Instead, something shifted. A leak here. A vibration there. One repair triggered another. Soon the car that ran fine was on a tow truck, headed for the graveyard.

    You observe the reason for the car’s demise: Old machines develop a private ecosystem, a delicate equilibrium of wear, grime, and negotiated compromise. Sludge plugs the gaps that worn seals can no longer manage. Thickened oil cushions parts that have learned to move together like an aging married couple—no surprises, no sudden demands. Then comes the well-meaning oil change. Fresh, detergent-rich oil floods the system like a power washer through a century house. It dissolves the gunk that was quietly holding things together, exposes seals that forgot how to seal, and restores pressures that aging gaskets experience as a personal attack. The engine, once stable in its gentle decline, now leaks, ticks, hesitates, and protests as if a dam has been opened upstream and released a torrent of mechanical demons long kept asleep by dirt, viscosity, and mutual resignation. Nothing was “broken” before. The oil change didn’t create the problems—it simply removed the sediment that was hiding the truce.

    That’s what selling the Seikos feels like.

    An oil change on your soul.

    A rational act of simplification that might disturb the delicate machinery holding your psyche together. One decision leading to second thoughts. Second thoughts leading to regret. Regret leading to obsessive re-buying, late-night searches, financial damage, emotional collapse.

    You’re not afraid of losing the watches.

    You’re afraid of the cascade.

    So you leave the mechanical divers where they are.

    The three G-Shocks run your daily life. The mechanical divers sit in darkness, untouched and unnecessary—yet absolutely essential.

    They are the cork in the dam.

    Pull them out, and who knows what pressure comes rushing through.

    This is Stability Hoarding: keeping possessions not because you use them, need them, or even want them, but because their continued existence reassures you that nothing irreversible has happened. They are emotional ballast. Identity reserves. Evidence that former versions of you remain on standby.

    You’re not preserving watches.

    You’re preserving options.

    Selling them feels less like decluttering and more like closing a door you may someday need to sprint through in a panic.

    Stability hoarding isn’t about objects.

    It’s about keeping your past selves employed as an emergency backup system—just in case the life you’re living now ever crashes.

  • Last Car Syndrome

    Last Car Syndrome

    I was nearly sixty-four, four decades of teaching college writing having corroded whatever patience I once had, and I found myself drowning in self-disgust. My life, once measured in lectures and essays, had narrowed to a single, grotesque question: Camry or Accord? I fretted over it as if I were choosing a confession—Catholic or Presbyterian—with my eternal soul dangling over the dealership lot. The absurdity didn’t escape me. I had real problems: blood markers creeping upward, a rotator-cuff tear ruining kettlebell workouts, bedrooms that needed painting, twin daughters who needed driver’s training, retirement forms stacked like little gravestones, and the scramble to joint bank accounts so my younger wife wouldn’t face probate nightmares. And yet I could not stop watching YouTube reviews and refreshing Reddit threads that compared the new Camry to the Accord.

    I vacillated like a madman.

    Driving to pick up the girls from high school, I’d spot an Accord and sigh: “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. Very peaceful. Not a bad car to die in.” A second voice—practical, bored—would snap back, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” So I’d argue with myself: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely it is my Death Car.” “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

    The next day I’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and melt. “Look how it fits that color—everything’s right. Under thirty-three K and it feels Lexus-adjacent.” My inner realist would applaud the improvement: “At least you’re not talking about death. Progress.” Then the skeptic: “But the Accord is quieter. I need quiet. And the Accord dealership is walking distance—drop it off, walk home. That’s handy.” Followed by doubt: “Wait—people say the new Accord looks like a Ford Taurus. Can I live with that kind of ridicule?”

    It went on and on. My wife learned to read my posture: the slight slump, the hand rubbing the back of my neck—the tell that I was about to launch into Camry-Accord hell. She would cut me off before I even opened my mouth: “Stop right there, buster. I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

    For a while I wallowed alone in the torment.

    Then one morning I woke up and declared I didn’t need a car at all. I’d driven, on average, three thousand miles a year for the last decade—hardly the mileage of a man who needed a shiny new vehicle. The decision felt radical: my daughters could take the older Accord, my wife the newer one, and I’d borrow a car when necessary. No purchase. No shiny new vehicle gathering dust like a suburban reliquary in the garage. Why buy something to admire between piano practice and Netflix binges? I told myself the choice was genius. 

    But after snacking on a virtuous bowl of buckwheat groats with unsweetened soy milk, banana slices, pumpkin seeds, cinnamon, and a dash of manuka honey, the energizing snack snapped me out of my delusion.. Suddenly the whole farce of my deliberation looked naked: I was suffering from Last-Car Syndrome: the unconscious understanding that in my mid-sixties, my next car purchase was essentially my Death Car, so I avoided the purchase like I avoided death. 

    Fortified by my power breakfast, I stood up, chest puffed like a man claiming moral clarity, and barked at the ceiling, “Who am I kidding? I’m buying a new car. I deserve it.”
    So now it’s only a scheduling question—six months from now, or next week.