Machining a new crankshaft pulley, my eyelid and a lame MLM scheme

I was working at YC Honda again last night. I ought to be getting paid, all the time I spend there in my dreams. I never seem to be doing good work, though. Last night was no exception. 

I was doing a new car Pre-Delivery Inspection, aka PDI. The car, being brand new, should have no problems, and these inspections are considered gravy. This car, however, had a problem. 

I don't know how I determined it, but apparently it was necessary for me to inspect the crankshaft pulley. I found it to be outside of tolerance, which was causing the car to run poorly. Something in my brain told me that it just needed to be "tweaked" a little. 

So off it came, and I set about machining off some extra grooves, which would allow the belt to ride in its natural position. Only I didn't think the whole process through, and soon I had machined off way more than the belt's width of grooves. Now the belt would be torn up or begin edging its way off of the pulley. 

I went around to the various parts of the dealership trying to garner some support for my actions. I got the guy in parts to look at it, but he wasn't much help. He just wanted to dance and lip sing to some girl song, like Cindi Lauper or something. 

Next, I went to see Sal, who had his own department, which was run like a pirate ship within the dealership. He was doing all the PDIs in an assembly line fashion, with minions performing the various tasks. I asked him for a little help, but he was preoccupied with the PDIs. 

"Don't forget the most important part," he admonished the crew. 

He held up a can of BG, a fuel system treatment designed to remove deposits from the intake manifold. Snake oil at best, it was completely unnecessary, since these were new cars and would have zero deposits accumulating anywhere at this point. I reminded him of this fact, but he jumped all over me with his defense of the product. 

"Have you ever tried it?" he demanded of me. 

I told him I had and that it had made no perceptible difference in how my car ran. When we would run it in higher mileage cars, it would put on a big smoke show which resulted in the car belching out huge clouds of the accumulated deposits in the form of white smoke from the tailpipe. After a period of running even worse, the car would clear itself up and eventually smooth out. My car didn't have enough deposits to do more than just burn up the can of BG, and so I felt it was an unnecessary additive. 

He stood by his position, and I basically had no support from him for my crankshaft pulley machining fix. I sought help from another guy in the parts department, who offered to machine me a brand new custom pulley out of billet steel. It was going to be all fancy and racy looking. 

I realized at this point that I'd gone way too far and should have just taken pictures of the anomalous pulley before I fucked with it. Honda engineering would know what to do with it. I assumed ordering a new pulley would have been the logical fix. Why I didn't think of that before I cut it all to pieces, I'll never know. 

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Now I have to get going with my day. I have to make an appointment with an eye doctor. I have a small growth on my right eyelid. I think I was bitten by a bug there over three weeks ago. The eyelid swelled up at the time and was painful. After a few days the pain and swelling went down, but now there's a pimple like nodule on the margin of my eyelid, inside of the lash line. 

To make matters more ominous, Sharon's LED has just now come on, as if to say: "Aren't you going to do something about that? You really ought to have that looked at." 

I've been missing her LED for a while now, wondering if it would ever come back on. Wondering about life, and death and suicide. I'm not getting any younger, and these health problems will just become more frequent and perhaps permanently debilitating. 

I think of my uncle and his solution. I wonder how long will I last before I choose that option. Then I think of Sharon and how she played her hand right to the bitter end. Would I be able to do that? Surely, not with such courage and grace. 

But do I have the courage to even end my own life, even when I'm dissatisfied with it? I'm like a scared child. I just don't want to feel pain or be in misery. The worry over my eyelid problem magnifies everything so much. I feel alone and frightened about the future. I don't get the kind of comfort from my online friends that I do from just seeing the little LED. I don't know what it means, actually. But whatever it means, I always take it as Sharon has a reason to be here, and I'd better pay attention. 

So, I'll try to make an appointment at Walmart Vision Center. Maybe I will email my provider at Ampla Health too. Would that be a good course of action, dear? I see you flickering. Meanwhile, perhaps another soaking with the warm compress wouldn't hurt.

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Another dream from two days ago which I forgot to write down. I was being recruited into some multi-level marketing scam by a girl who was peddling fake Oxycontin and other opioid-derived pills to homeless people. 

She had a profit sharing plan that included a strawberry cheesecake with which she illustrated the gist of the whole "top down" strategy. It was to be given to me upon recruiting my first member, a fellow who used to live down the block from me who I will call by his Facebook name, since that is all I know. 

Anyway, after bringing TowJam Hooker on board as a fellow pill pusher, she delivered the cheesecake and promptly sliced off half for herself. She then instructed me to slice the remaining half in two and give one half to my new recruit to do with as he wished. I started to get the idea of how the rich stay rich, and the poor keep getting smaller and smaller pieces of the pie. 

That's about it for that dream. I never made a good pusher-man. I kept having trouble getting the orders correct and spent way too long on the phone with my suppliers in Canada.