System Woes!!! UGH!

By the FYI way... I crashed my MacBook last week and O IT WAS A MESS!  I changed permissions on it and BOY O BOY it didn't like that------> AT ALL <------- (sound).  Meanwhile, when I went to restart because it started acting... uh FUNNY... to say the least, it wouldn't start back up.  Then I started logging in - in Single user mode and trying different commands at the command prompt root.  (sound from up there again) MAJOR FAIL!  I ended up screwing it up worse by trying to use the exit command in the middle of a chmod.   I felt like a piece of me just died.  I ended up with a Kernel panic, a LOOPING START KERNEL PANIC (the worst one in my opinion).  Thank the Lord for Mac's inexpensive operating systems and other upgrades.