my neighbor had this dead van in our parking lot. he has been pulling parts off it for the last month and when the time came to dispose of the corpse he found a guy named Alex that offered him $125 for the privilege of hauling it off to a scrap yard and collecting the bounty on the steel. so Alex shows up not with a tow truck, but a stake bed and a gas cutoff saw, and proceeds to spend the day – by himself - cutting this thing into pieces and loading it into his truck. Alex didn’t speak english so i couldn't find out why he was doing all this work when could rent a tow dolly down the street for $25 and just take it in one piece.

it was a fascinating and intensely frustrating process to observe. it was like the application of entropy to the intellect… the devolving of thousands of years of discovery and the end of working smarter as we know it. It was (and not "just like") watching a once great civilization take four perfectly good wheels off a heavy object and then proceed to drag it up a steep incline.