First, you make sure everyone is okay. That's the first verse of the car crash blues, the disclaimer that allows you to go from crisis mode to neurotic meltdown. When I backed my 1989 Mercedes into a parking garage pillar, my first reaction was shame. What kind of idiot goes that hard, that fast, straight into a stationary object? Especially a large, concrete one, in a space he's successfully maneuvered at least a hundred times. But it happened, and by the time I got home, I was feeling okay about myself.
Sure, I'd destroyed a bike rack and caved in the rear end of a well-maintained luxury car, but bike racks can be replaced, the trunk still worked and the car already had some dings and dents on the back when I bought it. It didn't occur to me to fix it and it was days before I really processed what had happened or what it had done to the car.
We don't just accept distortion and damage. We seek it out. It's authentic. It's earned. It's everything that's missing from our increasingly streamlined and impersonal society. This kind of imperfection is everywhere in music, from over-driven guitar sound all the way down to the ambience of crackling records. Movies play better in film, more organic and lively, but also more prone to visual hiccups. And in clothesland, denimheads go to great lengths to ensure that their jeans end up looking as close as possible to what would happen if they spent long hours working on a ranch or mining precious metals.
Wear and tear isn't an imperfection, it's closer to perfect. That is, if perfect means lived-in, "real" and personalized. Perfection goes from an ideal to a story, a way of indicating that you've been through some shit and understand what it means to feel something.
This is what was going through my head when I finally got past the denial stage and took a good look at my car. It was ugly, warped enough that the Mercedes logo was partially dislodged (fuck!) and crunched in a way that practically made my ride into a hunchback. I tried covering it with a bike rack in the summer, but come fall, that decision made less and less sense. Plus, who puts a bike rack on a Benz unless they absolutely have to? The answer is "Portland," but I'd like to think I haven't totally given in to the Northwest way of life.
I totally get that some of you have probably stopped reading out of disgust, or are fixing to make a nasty comment about #FirstWorldProblems and how many things are way more important than my stupid car and its stupid mangled steel behind. I also wouldn't be surprised if some folks are laughing at me for caring so much about a relatively modest automobile. When I started going to body shops for estimates—I just wanted someone to hit the thing with a hammer so it looked less disfigured—I was told by the first guy to sell the thing for parts. I know, upper-middle-class scoffer, I should go out and get a lease on an SL and then I can stunt like crazy.
I devised something called The Yeezus Test, which basically asked, 'Is this so fucked up looking that it affects my ability to enjoy it, or does being broken in certain ways make me enjoy it more?'
But this wasn't about an inability to accept imperfection, probably made worse by obsessive tendencies that medication can only partly keep at bay. It was about the fact that, for me, the car had previously been its own kind of perfect. It wasn't gem-mint and shiny, but that wasn't the point. It had character. It had stories behind it, some of them my own, some of them before it came into my life.
I devised something called The Yeezus Test, which basically asked, "Is this so fucked up looking that it affects my ability to enjoy it, or does being broken in certain ways make me enjoy it more?" Unless you're a tasteless moron, Yeezus (and Kanye himself) are examples of option #2. Push it too far (as Kanye has at times) and you go from something that's achingly real and human to a total mess that no one wants to fuck with. I'd taken my car past the point of Yeezus and ruined something that meant a lot to me. And it sucked.
Take the aforementioned denim, or—I know, this one's up for debate—a pair of shoes or boots. I'd even throw sneakers in there, though I get that I'm in the small minority of people who prefer their Nikes broken in. For each of these, there's a difference between damage and destruction. It's that Yeezus Test, where the pendulum swings from perfection (as currently constructed) to imperfection. We've embraced an aesthetic, but we know it has limits. Push it too far and you end up with good, old fashioned ugly. It's a gut thing. You know exactly when there's too much of a stain on denim or a rip that causes the jeans to lose their shape (if the crotch blows out, that's an automatic fail on grounds of public decency). On your feet, scuffs and creasing can be proof that what you're wearing is yours and fits you like it knows you. But, again, anyone who cares about how things look can tell when even your beater pair gets too wrecked to stare down at.
The punch line to the story is that the longer you agonize over an imperfection, the more it becomes your own, to the point where it becomes kind of rad. It's not just a good story, it's some shit you've spent time and energy trying to make sense of. If you're unfortunate enough to be hardwired like me, you've expended a lot of time and energy on it (don’t even get me started on my relationship with vinyl).
If you want experience, this is certainly one. You learn to live with it because you have lived it, which is more than can be said for a look achieved by walking around the city, sitting on your ass and possibly taking some steps to optimize the process. If you're wedded to looking absolutely flawless every day of your life, I wish you nothing but the best. I'll be tooling around town in a car that looks like it backed into the apocalypse.
Bethlehem Shoals is a writer living in Portland. You can follow him on Twitter here.
