Nurse the Hate: Hate Cars

 

I spend many hours on the road.  This is the plight of a man that drives a band van and works in sales.  Much like a truck driver, I believe that these are my roads.  The rest of you are dabbling out there.  I see you not knowing how to merge.  You are confused about the left lane’s purpose.  You might not know that you have a rear view mirror.  Oh yes, I’ve seen what you are up to…

I pay attention to things.  I am always watching.  There are some sweeping generalizations, which can be made about certain automobiles and their owners.  This is not some wild rant from a crank.  This is based on absolutely on target scientific samples and astute observation.  These are the solid facts.

Buick:  There must be a steering mechanism on these cars that make them shoot to the far left lane so as to smushily drift along serving as a “jam car” for the rest of the drivers.  It is hard to explain why there is always a dire looking senior citizen creeping along clogging up progress in their Buick.  Maybe it’s a button on the dash called “Jam Car Technology” that when deployed auto steers the vehicle into the worst possible lane for everyone else and reduces the speed of the car to 5 mph slower than the limit.  This is also a good car to display patriotic baseball caps in the back window.

Ford F-150:  If you have a barbed wire tattoo on your arm and backward baseball cap this is for you.  When you sign the papers a goatee immediately starts to grow.  The sound system comes ready to go with rap and metal that can be played only at 11 with the windows down.  In fact, if you put the windows up I believe whatever terrible shit that is being played goes off.  This is the premiere vehicle for macho dudes that haven’t come to grips with the fact that they are no longer on their high school football team or in the military.  The key to owning this vehicle is to never actually haul anything in the back or use it for its design purpose.

Jeep Wrangler:  This is the vehicle that their drivers think says “I’m all about freedom and adventure!”.  Instead it is a total piece of shit that can be counted on to break down at the most inopportune times.  For 98% of all Jeep owners, their biggest adventure is finding a plum parking spot at the upper end shopping mall.  This is an excellent vehicle for a recently divorced woman in her early thirties that just took up yoga.  She can drive around in it with her yellow Labrador retriever.  These are like buying a Nordic track.  It seems like a really good idea until you own it.

Escalade:  Once the dominion exclusively of rap stars, drug dealers, and boxing champions, this has now become a go-to option in the suburbs.  There is a mathematical formula which dictates the smaller the woman, the larger the vehicle.  The seven square miles around my house are filled with these enormous vehicles being driven by petite women that are almost invisible behind the wheel.  They are deemed as necessary because they need to drive their two pre-teen children to soccer practice.  I find it odd that as a child my family of four took a VW Bug filled with luggage halfway across the country on vacation whereas a 105 pound woman and a 7 year old need something as large as a tour bus to drive five blocks.  Times change I suppose.  Suburban Moms like these to feel “safe”.  I look forward to being killed when one of these ladies rear ends me at 65 mph while putting on makeup. 

Ford Taurus/Chevy Malibu:  When you have decided to extinguish any sliver of personality and have completely given up, this is the car for you.  It’s a great car to drive exactly at the speed limit on the way to a dead end job you hate.  If you commit a crime in this it is impossible for eyewitnesses to identify you.  “Officer… The man that robbed the liquor store… He was in a…  a car… A sedan I guess?...  I can’t really remember anything about it.  It might have been blue.  Or brown.”  This is a company car when The Company wants to passively aggressively snuff out any spark of life you have remaining.  This would be an outstanding car to drive off a cliff when you just want the pain to stop.