Discovery

Yes, of course.

 

Elephant_Car_Wash

 

For years, I used to think that my grandparents had written their own nifty doorbell tune, trademarked as The Bellamy Doorbell. That’s what Nana told me. Her and Popsi had come up with a clever melody that went “doo doo doo doo. Doo doo doo doo.”

 

It was a timeless tune: it just felt doorbell-appropriate. “What clever grandparents,” I thought. “Coming up with a tune that good after retirement! I guess that’s where my creativity comes from!”

 

One day I mentioned this to my friend Caro, and sang The Bellamy Doorbell tune to her. She paused, laughed a bit, and went “Jess? Those are the bells for BIG BEN.”

 

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Recently I discovered a car wash I love in Melbourne named Grand Wash Auto. I love it for these reasons:

 

  1. It’s in an isolated industrial area and is always deserted. (EDIT: I wrote this in 2015. Now the area is BUSTLING. Good work, GWA and neighbourhood!)
  2. There are many shoe outlets nearby.
  3. The name is genius.
  4. You get to vacuum your own car for as long and as passionately as you like, without judgement.
  5. You don’t have to speak to another human being even once.

 

Until the day I discovered Grand Wash Auto, I maintained a more rustic car-care regimen of “wait til it rains and the problem will go away, unless it’s bat piss, sticky from the figs that this bat is pilfering and noshing on illegally from your garden, in which case, you should just sell the car.”

 

After my first Grand Wash Auto experience, I waxed lyrical to another friend about the lyrical waxing job that this clever machine had done to my automobile.

 

“It’s such good technology!” I gushed. “They have this clever system where you drive your right wheel onto a conveyer belt and put the car in Neutral and then the conveyer belt pushes your car through the jungle of sprays, mops, wipers and dryers via a logic that only it can command! What sort of robot genius invented this? Grand Wash Auto should patent it, stat!”

 

My friend paused and put on the same face Caro did when she tore my dream of Bellamy Family Musical Genius to shreds. “You know that every car wash ever does that? It’s standard. Across the board.”

 

*

 

It took me a little while to work out a theme for this Would Jess Like It post. It’s not doorbells. It’s not cluelessness. It’s not “this is what happens when you don’t get a real job”.

 

The closest I can get is “discovery”. The world is bigger than we understand it to be, pretty much always. So it’s nice to surround ourselves by smart people who pull us through an unfamiliar haze of global machinery, scrub off showerings of fig-sticky confusion, and wax the big big world slightly clearer.

 

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Speaking of “discovery”: the Wikipedia page for “car wash” is two hours of joy that you will never get back, because those two hours will be clutched lovingly to your chest forever more. Enjoy the discovery.

 

 

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