My big brain move was saving Breaking Bad for "the right moment" for like three years and then watching half of season five on a plane to Spokane. You are right that the phone screen fear is mostly in our heads. The Wire is all talking heads in rooms anyway, so a small screen loses almost nothing, and those bus chunks match the pacing way better than trying to binge six hours on a Saturday. My couch rule just meant I never actually watched anything, which is a pretty bad system. Slow burns like The Wire or Deadwood almost play better in 20 minute bites because you sit with each scene instead of drifting off.

The part that gets me is how fast the math changes once you're standing in that lot. A $14 line plus a borrowed ride turns into a whole afternoon on your back in gravel, and if you strip the fitting or round off the flare nut you're calling a tow anyway and you still own the parts. Your grandpa had two things you don't have in that Wendy's parking lot, daylight and a bench vise and a parts store that knew him. The real loss here isn't the truck, it's that the knowledge died before the truck did. Could you have done the job with a YouTube video? Maybe, but doing it alone on cold ground with traffic rolling past is a different animal than doing it in your own driveway with the right tools within reach. Was the frame still solid or was the brake line just the first thing to go?