{"id":1438,"date":"2009-03-15T21:51:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T05:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2026-02-18T11:45:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T19:45:05","slug":"a393-used-car-key","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=1438","title":{"rendered":"#a393 :: Used car key"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"031409\"<\/a>In all my years on this blog, I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key.<\/p>\n

It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation.<\/p>\n

But a car<\/i> key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member of the family that lives in mostly silent service – a portable id, a means of self-projection from one existence to another – rarely complaining and seldom causing trouble on its own.<\/p>\n

And that’s about as far as I’ll drag you down that<\/i> rabbit hole.<\/p>\n

My wife’s old Volvo S70 served us faithfully and well for 7 years, but with 104,000+ miles and a bad case of accelerating decrepitude, its time had come to an end.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, we went out and bought a newer used Volvo – a tight, gorgeous bottom-of-the-line S40<\/a> with only 10,572 miles on it for more than a third off original sticker).<\/p>\n

And there it sits, in the garage’s place of honor, while the old one sits on the street awaiting its fate.<\/p>\n

Which as much as anything – and better than anything I could say – explains this meaning of this<\/i> key.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In all my years on this blog, I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key. It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation. But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4,11,8,9,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fetish","category-part","category-symbol","category-tool","category-toy","category-weapon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1797,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions\/1797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}