Games, Laws of Thermodynamics, Community Property, and Hoarding

So, The Other Guy moved out a while ago so I could clear out the 30 years of hoarded crap, first of course carefully pulling out anything of any worth.  Which includes the iconographic piece of expensive crap – a classic sports car lovingly and expensively restored 30 years ago and then covered and left on the carport to succumb to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, mice, stray cats, and - one memorable summer - bees.

This car – if restored - is listed as having a retail value in the range of  $48,600 to $162,000, with an average retail price of $78,300. I will be lucky if I can get $8,000 for it. For the 27 years we’ve been married I’ve asked him to fix it or sell it, and he repeatedly promised that this would be the year that would happen. Actually, that’s not true. I it took me about 10 years to realize this was the Ignore It and It Will Go Away Game, and I’d never win and I gave up asking. So, like all his problems, if he leaves them alone long enough, they become mine. I think that’s a sub-sub-paragraph in my state’s community property laws: Problems created by one spouse after marriage must be resolved by the other spouse after the problem-causer ignores them long enough.

So, over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to put together a few paragraphs and photos to comprise an eBay ad. We’ve been texting about info I need for the past month or so. I provide excerpts below. In the course of this exercise, I have discovered what I call the First Law of Hoarding: The more sacred the hoarded item is to the passive-aggressive old hoarder, the less cooperative the harder will be and the less forthcoming with information. A corollary to this law is that the hoarder will delay, misunderstand,  misdirect, provide false information, and fail to disclose important and easily-available information until well after the responsible adult has wasted time following the misdirect.

ME:  Did you ever e-mail me a few paragraphs on the make, model, history and provenance of the car like I’ve asked several times?

TOG:  Asked? Several times? What is it you want?

ME:  See above.

WISIMH:  What do I want? An airtight plan, a foolproof alibi? A time machine? A lobotomy? I want that piece of crap out of my driveway and some money to paint the house so I can sell it. As I may have mentioned several times over the years. He wants there to be a Law of Selective Dementia where he only has to do stuff he claims to remember, and then only after repeated reminders and requests. But I refuse to recognize this stupid law, insisting instead he is playing the Let’s See How Quickly I can Piss Off My Spouse By Playing Dumb Game. I usually lose this one too.

TOG:  Did you get the urls I sent?

WISIMH:  Ah, so instead of researching the value, writing down some numbers and texting me the summary like I asked, you invested 5 minutes using the google – in a stupider way than I would – to find some cars of your make and model that are selling for high retail in fully restored condition. Never saw that coming.

ME:  Looking now. Summarize for me.

TOG:  Looked on bymost as an investment. Unrestored running $12 to $20. UNRESTORED!

WISIMH:  Yeah, no. The “unrestored” ones in your links aren’t filled with mice shit and shredded paper mice nests, rust, dirt, cracked paint and all plastic or rubber parts dry rotted or covered with silver tape.

ME:  I can’t find any narrative about your car. Did you email me w more detail and provenance?

TOG:  Will do so again when I get back….

WISIMH: Right! You generally enter the wrong dates on your phone calendar for lunch with friends and then go down the street to the restaurant on the wrong day. Of course this would be the day you’re out on your go-go instead of home watching Bait Car.

ME: Great. Say when you got it restored and about that badge thing. … Also what’s special about this particular model.

TOG:  Your cloud should have more info from me.

WISIMH:  Ahh, my cloud! I would escape to that legendary cloud where everything you do is correct, responsible, proper, timely and mildly helpful. I believe it’s full name is Cloud Cuckoo Land and it exists only in your mind. In my imaginary cloud I would have sold this house by now and moved to something I can afford - in an different zip code from your cloud.

I received a two sentence e-mail with make year and model number which I already knew and which later turned out to be partially wrong. Meanwhile, I spent the afternoon on the web researching history of car and value like I'd asked him to do. I also took the nasty dirty car cover off and took some photos but didn’t have the heart to open the tonneau cover and look into the passenger compartment, the engine or the trunk. The car looks so rotten and messed up is made me sad as well as dirty.

Yesterday, I got three different e mails with over a dozen pictures. Each picture is 34 by 45 inches or something ridiculous, and has to be substantially fixed in photoshop as well as resized. That took another afternoon. The pictures are 10 years old and the car now bears a slightly different resemblance to the pictures: like my high school graduation pictures to my current driver's license picture. 

TOG:  I’m sending pictures taken when it was restored in 1979.

WISIMH:  Ahh, more pictures all bunched together and in need of editing and captioning as out of date. Thanks big guy.

ME:  The website lists original paint colors and your car isn’t painted in original colors. And what’s with the British-shaped license plate. Was that a genuine British License tag?

(I’ll skip you the suspense and say right now that this second question was completely ignored. Short, Attention, and Span are TOG’s middle names. But to be fair, what was I thinking asking two questions at one time?)

TOG:  The color is definitely wrong on my car because… (who cares?). However a number of Healys with LeMans kit were single color and mine was a total red inside and out.

WISIMH:  See? This is what he does? He ignores the question and answers another question you didn’t ask. This usually leads to the Twenty Questions Game, where I try to dumb down my actual questions, give up on two-part questions and put them in yes/no format. But to be perfectly honest I give up after about three tries these days.

TOG:  Did you find the manual the keys in the plaque that says it’s a Lemans get

WISIMH: Yes. That’s exactly what he texted. I call that the Let’s Guess what Spellcheck Changed and What You Really Meant Game. To be perfectly honest, I usually give up before guessing. Spellcheck often makes more sense than TOG.

ME: Orig color was Reno Red. Got it. Looking for key. Can’t get into back room until X is home and I can climb over boxes without worrying that the cat will get into the hoarding room and disappear. (Notice I said “back room” this fact will be important later).

Now comes the good part. The game I’ve been playing off and on for 27 years about putting more money in to get more money out. The game TOG refers to below as the Who Wants to Invest Game. I should mention that last month after months of nagging he found the only local reputable guy who restores these cars and he said he’s simply not interested – too busy and not worth it these days. He promised to drop by and at least take a look at the car. You’ll never guess this: he never showed up! TOG never followed up! I never saw any of this coming!

TOG:  Okay with the gentlest hands my car should end up looking like that $159,000 one. Want to invest???

WISIMH:  Proceed with caution. Don’t put words into text that might be admissible in evidence at your murder trial.

ME:  There’s no way I’m going there. You had 25 years and that ship sailed… I’m thinking advertise as a “project” but I’m not even willing to wash it inside and out and try to make it look prettier in pictures.

WISIMH:  You had 27 years my love. TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS! Just now, if you were motoring toward me on the street riding your go-go calling for help I would run the other way, run up to some stranger's front door and pound on it until they let me in and then slam it behind me and pretend I lived there. 

So I took pics and drafted an ad with results of my research on history of this model and comparable pricing. I was just about to send the 3 page document to him for review. You know, the one he should have put together…

This morning I decided to open the top to get pics of interior. Couldn’t master snap closures. It took several pictures and texts to get instructions because we played Twenty Questions and Misdirect by ignoring the question asked. Then I couldn't figure out how to open the engine compartment and complained about the rat poop.

  

TOG:  All rodent stuff is new since (November)…

WISIMH: Liar liar pants on fire. No. An elementary school book on archeology would provide instructions on how to unearth layers old enough to carbon date.

TOG: Hood latch I think is “T” shaped. That know near heatee I think is choke.

(Yeah, I don’t correct what he texts, it’s more fun this way)

ME:  (Including more pics) still not seeing hood release. Is hood release on dash or under?

TOG:  Under and up.

ME:  (Including more pics further under and further up and more treacherous to the photographer who is, let’s just say, mildly pissed by now) It’s purely nasty in there. No way this crap has only been here since November. OK I see pull knobs saying Choke and Air. Nothing else, no T pull.

TOG:  Sure. Pull

WISIMH: WTF?

ME: Pull What? Air? Choke? …

WISIMH: …Your wee-wee?...

ME:  ….And I’m pretty much done. I don’t want to get yersina pestis in the cut I just opened on my thumb. Just send me your pics of the engine.

TOG:  OK I think if you put your right hand thumb at the highest point of the dashboard the thinnest point – you would be right under your fingers.. Left of the theater and up.

ME: Nope. Done playing. (For the record, his text immediately above was the Agree on a Plan Then Change It Game). Feeling resentful that you left this mess for me to clean up.

TOG:  Ok sending picture.

There’s more but telling it makes me hear voices that might be telling me to harm myself. Possibly my own voice screaming very loudly and profanely.

I spend a few more hours with new pics. The ad is almost ready and it's up to 5 pages now.

Then he reminds me the shop manual personally autographed by Donald Healy is not in the back hoarding room but on a bookcase more easily accessible. Which he’s known all along but simply missed my references to the back room. Or not. But why did he wait to specify this location? I may have actually won a round here, saving myself from climbing over boxes in the hoarding room looking for something that wasn’t there.

This nevertheless adds several hours to my job as I have to find the book, take pictures, convert, resize and add them to the draft ad. This is where I find a certification with a gold seal that specifies a different model than he has been claiming this is for however many years this farce has gone on. The ad is now 7 pages and he's not responding to my texts because he had wine for lunch.

So there are two theories here. The man is the most passive aggressive gentleman in the universe who is intentionally gas-lighting me to drive me more insane than I think I am. Or, he is ready for the “memory care” unit and is no longer capable of communicating with his fellow men. In either event, this experience has left me slightly deader inside than I was, and possibly in the early stages of death by bubonic plague. 

In which case, I want my last words on this blog to be “Either this car goes, or I go”.