Last week, I said goodbye to Funeral Suit. Several months ago, I started the engine and a hazy cloud spewed from the A/C vents for a couple seconds. Later that day, I found out that the A/C was no longer as cold as before. In fact, it felt like it was blowing air hotter than it was outside, which I believed should have been scientifically impossible. Turns out the A/C had just died, a crack in something or other as the mechanic explained (I don't really remember, I started to tune him out after he said it would cost $2000 to fix). Plus, the car had been making a weird, unexplained grinding noise for ... probably over a year. I tried to have it diagnosed, but no one could figure out a cause, so I just accepted and ignored it. So, after a month of procrastinating, and tolerating my increasingly hotter car baked by the afternoon sun, I began looking for a replacement car. After another month or so of actually searching, I finally said goodbye to Funeral Suit, traded-in for another car for surprisingly more than I thought anyone would pay. And now that I've said goodbye, how about some stories:
First off, Funeral Suit? I did choose the name after the band Funeral Suits (I think I'd been listening to "Colour Fade" a lot at the time). Plus, it also fit the car well: it's black; it covers my body; and, at the rate I'd been drinking and driving at the time, I legitimately believed I would die in it (along with whatever unfortunate souls that happened to be on the road).
As my co-workers told me within the first couple days of me getting the car, black isn't a good color. Unlike the way I choose clothes, black doesn't hide dirt but instead makes it stand out even more. And unfortunately, I didn't have the time to wash my car as much as I wanted. Eventually and reluctantly, I gave up and began taking it to the car wash instead of washing it by hand. On a positive note, I got to relive my childhood wonder of the car wash: your locked car rolling, not under your own power, through a darkened tunnel as water and foam cover your car, blinding you to the outside world, kraken tentacles slapping at the hull of your ship, banging to let them in, searching for any weak spot to exploit, and just when you see the light at the end, hope and escape close enough to touch, hurricane winds threaten to push you right back into the fray. Then the shame of sitting comfortably while some guy goes around the outside, giving your car a once over. Sometimes I feel like I should be getting out to help, after all, that used to be my job for several years.
One time, when driving on my way to work in the morning, a guy in the lane next to mine put on his blinker to cut into my lane. It felt like it was too early to be a dick, so I took my foot off the gas pedal and let the car slow on it's own to let him into the lane. I also needed to give my brake pedal a slight tap to slow down enough. Apparently, this pissed-off the guy behind me and he honks his horn to let me know just how mad he is about this slowing-down slightly situation. At the same time, the other guy had not only finished cutting into the lane, but also heard the horn honk. I guess thinking that I honked at him, instead of a wave or shaka, the guy decides to flip me off instead.
Funeral Suit also helped me to haul rock to fix our backyard/under the house. Candy, in an attempt to avoid the rain, decided to start squeezing herself over this short wall to get underneath the house. To give herself more room under there though, she started digging up the dirt, which also started exposing the stilts holding the house off the ground. So, I headed to Home Depot and started loading up a flatbed cart with bags of gravel as well as those large, smooth river stones. Well, 10 bags through the checkout line later, I'm pushing the cart through the parking lot and the worry finally hits. I'm driving a sedan, can it handle this much of a load? Well, doing some quick math (5 people at 200lbs is 1000lbs which is greater than the weight of 10 bags of rocks) I figure I should be okay. But then again, that weight is meant to be spread throughout the car, not all stuffed into the trunk and, at the time, I'd yet to determine just how many adult bodies I could fit into the trunk. So I put the first bag in the trunk and the car dropped. Then another bag and it dropped further. Finally, with all the bags inside, it looked like the car was barely an inch above the wheels. Deciding to tempt it, I started up the car, moving slowly at first, no problems, then a little faster, no problems, I slowed as I thought I heard a scraping noise going over the speed bumps, then just started going and I managed to haul it all home without incident though driving slow enough that I watched everyone cut around me the whole drive.
Living up to it's name, I did have a couple of memorable, intoxicated drives home (though not as many as you would expect). And by that I mean that I don't remember really driving home, just getting into the car and then being at home, with a very brief section in the middle that I spent arguing with myself about driving home. It was kind of like those "Don't Drink and Drive" commercials you know, the one with the guy arguing with himself in the mirror... except in reverse. I was the one saying that I was fine to drive home, and my haggard-looking reflection in the rearview mirror was the one telling me to stop. "We're going to jail," I vaguely remember him saying before I started the engine. I probably just laughed and drove away. Then I got home and everything worked out, though I did remember to check the front of my car for blood. It's the responsible thing to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment