car analogy

The fol­low­ing is some­thing I found saved among the un­post­ed drafts of my blog. Un­post­ed, I imag­ine, be­cause I was still ac­tu­al­ly in the mid­dle of the re­la­tion­ship I was de­scrib­ing, still try­ing to make it work some­how. One night over the phone, my dad asked how we were do­ing. And I did­n’t re­al­ly know how to give a straight an­swer, be­cause it all felt too close to iden­ti­fy clear­ly. So in­stead, I of­fered this anal­o­gy which, feels so much more dire in ret­ro­spect. If you feel this way about a sit­u­a­tion, you should prob­a­bly just cut and run.
 

I’ve spent most of my adult life dri­ving ve­hi­cles which served most of my prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es, but were slight­ly cramped and sort of em­bar­rass­ing to be seen in.

A par­tic­u­lar mod­el has had my eye for a while. There are shinier ones on the lot, but they’re not re­al­ly my style. I don’t know what the in­side looks like, only that my last car was half-paint­ed in primer and I’d look hel­la fly ar­riv­ing to any­where in this thing.

I ask the deal­er for the price, and it sounds very rea­son­able. How­ev­er, each time he re­peats the the num­ber it seems to get just a lit­tle bit high­er. He shows me in­side the car and I no­tice right away that it’s a man­u­al — al­ready sort of a deal­break­er. I start to walk away when the deal­er re­minds me of all the feel­ings and fan­tasies I had when I saw it from the out­side. Don’t I still want to look hel­la fly? Okay, yes. I sup­pose I still to­tal­ly do. It’ll take some se­ri­ous ad­just­ment, but so far that seems to be the only thing.

I ask the deal­er some ques­tions about the ti­tle and how many miles are on the car. He man­ages to com­plete­ly evade my ques­tions while fo­cus­ing on the prob­lems of my pre­vi­ous ve­hi­cle, as­sur­ing me that it has none of those. This isn’t that kind of car. It’s a much high­er class mod­el than I may be used to, and frankly, he doesn’t think I should have ever set­tled for less in my en­tire life, even be­fore this car was man­u­fac­tured. In about the same breath, the deal­er also tells me that I don’t re­al­ly look like this model’s usu­al cus­tomer base. It’s a lot of car, and I will need to keep up.

By the time I have fin­ished sign­ing the pa­per­work, the price has more-than dou­bled. I don’t know how this hap­pened. I’m 110% cer­tain of the first price I was quot­ed, but the car did not have a price tag post­ed, and no one else was around when he’d said it. I’m look­ing at these pay­ments now and re­al­iz­ing that I prob­a­bly should have backed out much ear­li­er in our con­ver­sa­tion. The deal­er re­marks to me that, while the pay­ments may seem steep at first, I will have more than enough mon­ey once the im­pres­sion I make in this car ad­vances my ca­reer. It sounds in­cred­i­bly stu­pid hear­ing him say it out­loud, but some­how I imag­ine that sce­nario and only want him to be right.

I get the car home and there are so many fea­tures! All kinds of awe­some shit I nev­er need­ed or would have even no­ticed if it wasn’t here. I turn on the satel­lite ra­dio and the stereo sounds fuck­ing per­fect. I go to roll down a win­dow, only to dis­cov­er that none of them work. I try to turn on the air and it doesn’t work ei­ther. Now it’s 101° out­side and I feel like I’m lit­er­al­ly dy­ing.

I take it back to the deal­er­ship and ex­plain to the deal­er that he sold me a car with­out work­ing win­dows or air in the god­damn Cal­i­for­nia sum­mer­time. He says that’s stan­dard. “No it’s not.” I say. “How can you be so sure?” he asks me.

“Be­cause,” I say, “There are but­tons in­side clear­ly in­di­cat­ing that they are meant to roll down the win­dows and turn the air on. And every car has some mech­a­nism by which to do these things, be­cause stan­dards, and what you just said is not a real thing.”

“This is not every car.” he shoots back, launch­ing into some ir­rel­e­vant spiel that I don’t care about when I just near­ly baked to death. As I start to talk about trad­ing the car back in, he fi­nal­ly says some­thing like, “I’ll see what I can do.”

I leave the car with the deal­er and on my re­turn he an­nounces that he has heard my re­quest and come up with a so­lu­tion. He has had a mini­bar in­stalled.

I ex­plain that I give 0 fucks about mini­bars and would like to have work­ing win­dows please, that I think that is a ba­sic thing that al­most no one ever ac­tu­al­ly has to de­bate when buy­ing a car. He as­sures me once again that he is not try­ing to op­er­ate like oth­er deal­er­ships, and also re­minds me of my price range.

“Look,” he says, “I can’t pro­vide you with any­thing fanci­er than a mini­bar. I think you are ask­ing too much.”
 
 

—bwargh von mod­nar

Flom­mist Bwargh von Mod­nar is. Copy­right © 2016 Bwargh von Mod­nar. Im­age from 27 fan­tas­tic col­orized pho­tos of clas­sic Amer­i­can au­to­mo­biles.‬

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