Oakie McDoakie Podcast

Oakie McDoakie Podcast

How I Learned to Stop Panicking and Deal With Car Trouble

7 min · 12. Mai 2026
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Episode How I Learned to Stop Panicking and Deal With Car Trouble Cover

Beschreibung

Free to Read [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Pay if you want [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Tips welcome [https://ko-fi.com/oakiemcdoakie]. Wisdom cheap. I’m amazed at myself! Somehow, despite great reluctance and a bitter aversion to automobiles, I’ve managed to become a semi-competent fleet manager for one old van. Not a Mr. Fixit, mind you, but a manager of the van and its complications. See, I didn’t grow up learning about cars. Wrong influences for learning by osmosis, and no interest in seeking the info out. If I’d lived in New York or San Francisco, I might never have gotten a driver’s license. But I didn’t. I grew up in Dallas–Fort Worth, a modern American highway sprawl. I delayed getting my license until I was 18, but since then it’s been all driving, all the time. Even so, I somehow managed to stay ignorant for years. Oh, I learned a few things—how to change my oil and air filter, how to change a tire. But that’s about as far as I got. I got away without knowing more. I bought new cars, paid for AAA and mechanics to handle problems, and moved on to the next vehicle when the current one got too long in the tooth. Even with all that help, mechanical problems terrified me. Driving every day felt like the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head. When my car inevitably had a breakdown, I couldn’t decide whether to call a tow truck or a suicide hotline! That started changing about a decade ago, when I hit the road in my then-new campervan. As I put on the miles and took off-road chances, problems crept up one by one—and I had to deal with them. That’s because I was out in the sticks. No AAA when you get stuck on a desert sand dune [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/p/stuck-in-a-hole-where-no-tow-truck] or crack an oilpan 10 miles down a forest road with no cell signal. You just have to deal. A few weeks ago, the van overheated while climbing a long escarpment. Near the top, the dashboard started beeping wildly as the temperature needle swung toward hot. I pulled over immediately. My friend and I hopped out to see if coolant or oil was leaking. One thing I’ve learned is that engines need both to stay cool. Nothing was spraying or steaming. The coolant reservoir still had fluid in it, and the oil level looked okay too. As we waited for the engine to cool, I got online with ChatGPT—yes, the Devil Himself! After some back and forth, it gave me a list of possible causes, with a failed thermostat the most likely culprit. It strongly suggested getting a tow. Well, that was a problem. We weren’t in suburbia, or even near an interstate. We were 32 miles from Taos and 22 miles from home on a Sunday afternoon. Even if a tow truck was available, we’d probably wait hours. Then what? No rental cars in Taos on Sunday. Home is 20 miles from the mechanic. No public transportation. Didn’t seem wise for two people and a pit bull to start hitchhiking. So I made a calculated gamble. I figured that if I drove slowly, watched the temperature gauge carefully, and stopped whenever it started heating up, we’d probably make it home. ChatGPT didn’t approve, exactly, but admitted it was a reasonable risk. So I rolled the dice. We got home fine. The next morning, ChatGPT helped me work through some basic diagnostics simple enough for my limited tools and knowledge. Again, the thermostat looked like the likely culprit. Now, the van is old and I’m not made of money, so I briefly wondered whether replacing a thermostat was something I could handle myself. I remembered seeing it done on my mom’s late-1970s Dodge Duster as a kid. It had looked simple back then. Not on a modern Promaster City. I found a YouTube video, and the repair looked more like heart surgery than part swapping. I even showed it to a mechanically inclined friend. His response: “Wow! That’s complicated!” So I made an appointment with my mechanic. Getting there presented another problem. AAA won’t cover an “off-road” tow, and I live seven miles down a dirt road. Only a couple tow companies in Taos will even come out where I live, and it would’ve cost me about $500. Again, I made a judgment call. I drove slowly, watched the engine temperature, and made it to the mechanic without incident. Having a little experience, a little knowledge, and a little confidence—as a junior honorary fleet manager, at least—saved me days of hassle, hundreds of dollars, and possibly a ruined engine. Once the mechanic dug into it, the problem turned out to be bigger than just the thermostat. There were leaks elsewhere in the cooling system too. He fixed all that. Then he discovered the van was still underpowered because of exhaust and sensor issues. So now I had two jobs: fix the problems, and manage the van safely in the meantime. That part would have sent the old me into a panic spiral. Instead, I researched the issues, figured out which repairs were within my limits and which weren’t, ordered one part myself, and outsourced the rest sensibly. Meanwhile, I drove the van carefully for a couple hundred miles in imperfect condition, learning how to baby the engine on hills and manage heat buildup without freaking out. The next week, the muffler shop repaired the damaged exhaust section for about $250 instead of replacing the entire MOPAR system for an absurd $2500. That alone was a major victory. Now it’s mostly fixed. The remaining bad sensor has defeated me for the moment—not because replacing it is theoretically difficult, but because heat and corrosion have effectively welded the thing into place. After nearly stripping the bolt head, I decided to stop before I made things worse. That, too, is part of what I’ve learned: know your limits. In the meantime, I’m still driving the old van around just fine. I recently got back from a thousand-mile road trip to Arizona and back, over mountains and through remote canyon country, without causing myself either a breakdown or a panic attack. And that’s what’s really changed over the last decade. There was a time when any car problem sent me straight into terror. Now I perform a strange kind of alchemy by combining a little knowledge, useful tools, outside expertise, and a lot of hard-won patience into something resembling competence. I still wish I had the means and fortitude to go carless. But in the meantime, automobiles are a tool I’ve somehow learned to manage with some sanity. Free to Read [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Pay if you want [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Tips welcome [https://ko-fi.com/oakiemcdoakie]. Wisdom cheap. Get full access to Oakie McDoakie at oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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Episode Why Sacred Spaces Look Like Houses Cover

Why Sacred Spaces Look Like Houses

Free to Read [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Pay if you want [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Tips welcome [https://ko-fi.com/oakiemcdoakie]. Wisdom cheap. I’ve noticed that people like to meet the sacred in houses. After all, what is a church but a house of God? It’s not always true across religions, but it seems to be a common trend, even here among the Native cultures of New Mexico. Some weeks ago, I met friends at Sky City Pueblo, an ancient mesa-top village on the Acoma Reservation. Many people consider it the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, having been established in 1144 C.E. (Taos Pueblo is a contender. The current village isn’t that old, but the settlement may be.) We met there for a tour, which included visiting the 17th-century San Estevan Del Rey Mission Church and the outside of a men’s kiva, a traditional puebloan religious meeting house. Many Acoma people are both Catholics and practitioners of their traditional religion, a synthesis that makes total sense to them. Many citizens of New Mexico’s pueblos do the same. I assume you have a sense of what old New Mexican adobe churches look like. They’ve been photographed and painted a lot. If you don’t, Google will help you out. Kivas, though? They’re a bit different, and the one we saw at Sky City was unusual even among their kind. Your typical kiva is a round, basement-like hole in the ground. I mean completely round—a circle. The nicer ones are lined with stone or adobe. There’s a roof over the whole thing, though at archaeological sites the roof is usually long gone. Traditionally, you enter by climbing down a ladder through a hole in the roof, though some have side entrances that require you to stoop or practically crawl through a short tunnel. The men’s kiva at Sky City, though, is square-ish, just another adobe house butted against other family adobes. But where the family houses these days have street-level doors and windows, the men’s kiva has a huge ladder made of white-painted pine trunks against the wall. That’s to climb onto the roof. And then a second, similar ladder leads down into the kiva through a hole in the roof. That’s how all Pueblo houses were accessed in the old days, but only the kivas keep the tradition. We didn’t get to see the inside. That’s not just a limit of the tour, either. Only the men of Acoma Pueblo are allowed inside. Maybe not all the men, either. I’m a little fuzzy on this point, but it might just have been specific Acoma men initiated into that particular kiva. Reminds me of Masonic lodges—religious or ceremonial societies with their own membership and traditions. Oh, our guide did say Acoma’s women are allowed in once or twice a year. Didn’t say why. “Maybe to clean?” I snickered under my breath. The women on our tour were hilarious. They were desperate to know what went on inside that kiva and peppered the guide with teasing questions for a long while. He demured. I can only imagine the reverse. If someone told us men there was a women-only kiva and we weren’t allowed inside, I suspect most men wouldn’t be curious at all. “Sounds like a damn hen party,” they might say. Anyway, what I got to thinking about later is that kivas, in a sense, are ancient-style Pueblo houses, or at least descendants of them. The round, pit-style kiva is the oldest form. Before New Mexico’s Pueblo peoples started building the squarish, interconnected structures you see at Sky City or the apartment-like stacks of Taos Pueblo, their ancestors lived in round pit houses. Like kivas, they were partly underground and often entered by a ladder through the roof. What fascinates me is why one of those old pit houses survived after people stopped living in them. Why did it still feel like the place where ceremony belonged? A few years ago, I had to appear in court. Now, I’m a super-casual dresser. I wear a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals pretty much every day, year-round. But when I had to appear before a judge, I went out and bought myself a new collared shirt and a pair of long pants. I wasn’t about to buy a suit or even a blazer and slacks—and definitely not a tie—but I was at least going to wear a collared shirt. It had nothing to do with impressing the judge. If one of the court staff had assured me the judge couldn’t care less what people wore, I still would have done it. Why? Because it just felt right—though I’d be hard pressed to justify it. That’s how tradition works. In certain places and at certain times, especially when they feel important or sacred, some things simply feel proper. You can come up with practical reasons or symbolic explanations afterward, but I suspect most people follow traditions for a simpler reason: doing otherwise feels weird. So maybe when the ancestors of today’s Pueblo peoples began shifting from pit houses to adobe homes and apartment-like pueblos, it simply felt right to keep holding ceremonies and important meetings in a big pit house—only larger, nicer, and more permanent. And our churches and temples? Much the same. Long ago, Greek villagers built little houses for statues of their gods—statues they sometimes regarded as the gods themselves during religious ceremonies. As those societies became wealthier and more technically sophisticated, they kept the tradition, only making the gods’ houses grander and grander. When Christianity came along, it built on that architectural tradition. Christians don’t include a statue of God, which would be blasphemous. (Somehow, a sculpture of Jesus on the cross is okay, though?) But it still feels right to meet Him in a special house set apart from ordinary life—and big enough for communal gatherings, of course. Humans build houses. Some of those houses become associated with important rituals. Centuries pass. The houses get bigger, grander, and more specialized. Eventually nobody lives in them anymore. They’re just for meeting the divine. Anyway, that’s my layman’s theory. It’s probably all more complicated. It usually is. But it seems close enough for government work. Something similar seems to be happening out in the Navajo Nation, at least from what I’ve seen along the road. From the little I know of Navajo religious life, it seems more family- and household-scale than the big communal feel of kiva traditions or Christianity. Instead of gathering in a dedicated community building, many ceremonies are conducted in a hogan to this day. Hogans are traditional Navajo homes. In the old days, they were built from logs packed with earth and shaped either round, octagonal, or conical, depending on the style and era. They were practical dwellings, but also places where families gathered, stories were told, and religious ceremonies were performed. These days, relatively few Navajo families live in traditional hogans year-round. Yet it’s common to see a hogan standing alongside a modern American-style house. The hogan might be built with modern lumber and plywood rather than logs and earth, but many families still want one available for ceremonies. I would guess that performing certain sacred rituals in a single-wide would just feel wrong. And so perhaps a new tradition is being born. Over time, we might see ceremonial hogans become more specialized and stylistically distinct, less like everyday homes and more like houses of worship. Which brings me back to my original observation: a lot of cultures seem to meet the sacred in houses. Why? The only answer I can come up with is that it feels right. That’s how it’s always been done, after all. The ceremony changes, the building materials change, sometimes the scale gets grander, but the building pattern persists. Free to Read [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Pay if you want [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe]. Tips welcome [https://ko-fi.com/oakiemcdoakie]. Wisdom cheap. Get full access to Oakie McDoakie at oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe [https://oakiemcdoakie.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

23. Juni 20268 min