Steampunk: An Automotive Repair Manual Love Story
There is a nephew of mine who loves manuals. His name is Hoyt. He is only thirteen but he is obsessed with them. He has a special kind of autism the name of which I can never remember because it is him I remember and not the way his brain had been wired. Besides, our ancestry, past and present, is spread out here and there throughout the world. There are small clots of us in locations that are always close military bases, but those bases dot the globe the way pushpins might decorate a map.
But this kind of autism, though it makes him kind of awkward in social situations not really because I always get what he is trying to say though the words might come out in jigsaw puzzle piece makes him a kind of expert in his interests. But he has a thing about manuals. The mechanical is his kind of thing, the automotive kind. He is a sort of steampunk with preference for things that are made with all the gears and guts visible, where you see where the hand that touched the small engine. Repair manuals from the old days are what he wants to read these days because those kinds of repair manuals suit him, demonstrating how baroque and yet seemingly elegant mechanicals things went together to make things make the road turn to an oil painting blur.
Manuals from the 1970s are his current thing. He says this was the last decade before we got detached from our technology. I always thought it was the Victorian era because of the whole steampunk thing, but he insists it was the 1970s. People still touched engines and gears and pipes and bolts in a fond way, constructing a mechanical artwork from the metal and oil. He wants an automotive repair manual for his birthday, which is soon coming upon me. I browse old antique shops hoping to find repair manuals to sate his automotive addiction of late, but I come up empty and I do not want his birthday to be empty. Because while others find his words empty and dislocated from logic, I find those same words maintain a fond touch and art.