I know you're getting old, and that I haven't taken the best care of you as I am primarily a public-transport rider. I know I let a little too much time pass between oil changes, and I let your shocks go bad, and let my dad replace your broken back window with plywood rather than forking over the cash to deal with these things properly. I know that it's not your fault the EPA started testing environmentally-friendly paint sealers in 1993 and it was a bust and caused your fair, white complexion to peel interminably right after your warranty expired. I'm sorry I only had the patience to repaint your hood, and gave up when your roof and doors caught the virus,
giving you the appearance of having vehicular leprosy. I respect the fact that you got me to the Gorge and back recently for Sasquatch without giving out. I know you are feeling your 248,000 milles.But what the fuck, man? I put a lot of time and $250 bucks into personally replacing your radiator when you sputtered and died after a long, hot ride to my mom's house last month. Somehow it's my fault this new radiator and its hoses sprung a few leaks. But now you give out again, dramatically, at rush hour at a scary intersection in the city (on a birthday-cake delivering errand, no less), and I have to spend eleven hundred bucks to fix what appears to be the same radiator issue, all over again, and immediately when I get you back home you do it all over again?
Understand that I am at my wit's end with you. After all of the crap I've had to deal with lately, and the things I'm paying for on my shitty architect's salary, I barely had eleven dollars to fix you, let alone eleven hundred, and now you insist on going back to the car hospital for the same issue, rendering that thousand dollar bill pointless, and setting me up for an additional repair fee. Do you understand that aside from your age and medical conditions, the current economic/political climate is rendering automobiles with giant, eight-cylinder engines and very low gas mileage to not be looked upon favorably? You are not in a good position to act like a princess right now. I know you were hot stuff when you came from the factory- good soundsystem, AC, burly engine and all, but you've faded. It's time to play like a team, because your moody, passive-agressive, deceptive behavior has me about ten steps away from selling you, sending you off to a fate which likely could be dismemberment with some of your parts heading to a grim fate in industrializing nations.
Since my father bequeathed you to me when I passed my driver's license exam almost ten years ago (and I'd been hoping for something more compact like the Civic I learned on), we have acquired some good stories. I have fond memories: messages written by male suitors in dry-erase marker on your windshield in high school; sleeping in in your bed on a roadtrip down the west coast with glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the inside of the canopy; hundreds of campus parking tickets found under your windshield wipers in college (many contested, most with late fees); numerous trash-can and light-pole-tapping incidents pockmarking your chrome bumper (accountable to your limited rear-visibility, esp due to the plywood back window); both rear-ending and being rear-ended on the Tacoma Narrows bridge (separate incidents); countless loads hauled moving throughout Seattle; intense singing and yelling sessions held within your soundproofed cab, and my cats destroying their carriers to roam around inside and wail neurotically during moving, to name just a few.
Nostalgia, the need to see my suburban parents without holding court in the city and expecting them to come to me, and the stubborn refusal to purchase a car before my anticipated departure to more metropolitan environs has kept me from forsaking you until now. But I'm very close to coming to terms with parting ways; you and Ron at the repair shop are going to have to come to some sort of terms before I put you back in my good graces and take you off probation.
It can go either way. I don't want to have to make the call that may cause you to end up in Truck Heaven, but it's in your hands at this point.
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