Damage — Blog — Healy Chen

A touch of curb

It’s one of the most terrible sounds in the world: the wheel-rim of a car grinding on a sidewalk curb. Try as you may to be careful during parallel parking maneuvers, it only takes one moment of carelessness to ruin an otherwise perfect wheel. The feeling in the driver seat, the dread of getting out of the car to check damage, is uniquely dreadful to a car enthusiast.

We suffer greatly when we put too much value to things material.

It used to be that something as benign as curbing a wheel would absolutely ruin my day, though perhaps I am improving. Last Friday I had the unfortunate tragedy of tagging the M2’s right-front wheel on the curb as I was pulling off to the side to park. Thankfully, the damage isn’t too awful, but I just couldn’t help to bash myself with my own stupidity. Reality seems to always bite soon as you get too comfortable and complacent.

I quickly forgot about the transgression, however. I was on my weekly visit to see my friend’s kids. I owe it to them to give my undivided attention. Stewing over the mistake of curbing the wheel serves no purpose other than feeling bad for myself and showing a negative vibe to the kids. I was somewhat surprised then that I was indeed able to put the wheel damage behind me and devote fully to playing with the little ones.

I’ve come a long way from the intense obsessive compulsiveness vis a vis my cars that I used to have. Maybe if the actual damage was worse, I wouldn’t have been able to forget it so quickly. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t stress about something that I cannot turn back the clock to change.

Life comes at you fast

San Francisco has been experiencing some heavy wind conditions lately, and an unfortunate victim to the numerous debris being blown around is my brother. A few rocks that my mother have been collecting over the years flew off the balcony ledge due to the strong winds, and a particular one landed on my brother’s parked car, right on the trailing edge of the trunk lid. Obviously, as a fellow car enthusiast who is deeply passionate about cars, this incident pained my brother a lot, having to deal with a fresh imperfection that’s through no fault of his.

As someone who has a few years on my brother, and used to be just as obsessive compulsive about keeping his car as perfect as possible, I cautioned him that stuff like this is just the nature of the beast, and it happens to everybody. The only way to keep a car absolutely pristine is to parked it indoors under climate-control and never drive it. Our brand of car enthusiasm is actually driving and using our cars, so we simply have to take the lumps as they come. Damage can be fixed, and worse comes to worse, entire cars can be replaced. Merely objects, after all.

Of course, it’s easy to preach calm and stoicism when it isn’t you who is suffering the anguish, and as life would have it, I quickly got my own dose of minor car damage to deal with. I was out driving the 911 as usual this past weekend, and on an especially narrow mountain road, I dipped the right-front wheel off the tarmac while trying to avoid an oncoming car that wasn’t keen on keeping lane discipline - it was either that or crash. With the GT3 being super low to the ground, the lack of suspension travel meant the car briefly bottom-out on the section immediately next to the wheel. The scrape of plastic and metallic was the stuff of car enthusiast nightmares.

Luckily, the damage to the 911 is only a small road-rash to the underside of the front pan, and one broken bumper retainer, which costs $50 dollars to replace (For a simple piece of plastic! The Porsche-tax is real). The damage to my psyche however was a constant battle between dwelling on the mistake and taking the same advice I gave to my brother. Old OCD habits die really difficultly, and I had to keep reminding myself that one, shit like this happens when you put miles on the car, and two, the damage is superficial and completely out of sight once the broken retainer is replaced.

The moment you think you’ve matured enough to handle things properly that used to bother you mentally, life will throw you a test to find out for sure. As I always say, with anything in relations to mental health, it’s a work in progress.