Today Victor and I were walking to subway when we realized that #1 it’s actually cold out here (low 50s / high 40s) and #2 nobody else has to work today so the tiny subway parking lot will probably be easy to park in today. So, we hopped in my car. The first thing I noticed was that my side mirror was jiggling a little more than normal. I speculated that someone must have bumped it yesterday.
Why yesterday? Because yesterday Victor and I had lunch at the nearby Persian restaurant and when we were leaving my mirror was facing the sky (not literally – my view through the mirror was facing the sky).
I also thought I heard a faint whistling when I was driving today and last night. I still wasn’t connecting all the dots though.
As I was pumping some gas tonight (I tried to pump iron too, but the gym was closed – I guess their employees just work out – but not hard) I looked up and noticed that my mirror was (slightly) hanging off the door. Where the mirror assembly would normally be flush with the door (by the lower left corner of the window) there was a noticeable gap and obvious internal organs were on display. Also a plastic piece had now broken off and started peeking out from behind the mirror. In fact, the entire mirror body panel had been knocked out of place. That was easy to pop into place, and as I did that I saw the big white scrape where the mirror must have received a beating (there was of course a giant white SUV parked next to us when we parked at the restaurant yesterday). The mirror assembly itself, however, could not be pushed back flush with the door.
Can’t say I’ll be replacing it any time soon – although there is the chance that if I don’t do anything it’ll eventually just pop off and bounce into someones radiator when I’m doing 95 on the 101.
I used to have an ongoing series “the most beat up (insert number of months I’ve owned the car) year old car in the world” (or something like that). A lot of stuff has been breaking lately but I’m not sure I bothered blogging about it. Originally I thought I’d be some rich fat cat in LA by the time the car was five years old – but now I’m looking at probably driving it for another 5-10. Disheartening that it is slowly falling to pieces. Other notable repairs are the broken dash top storage container that pops open when you go over a bump and won’t close – and the console LCD is burnt out – causing extreme confusion with some of my passengers sometimes. Also the change area/cigarette lighter lid refuses to stay propped open.
The reason all that is disheartening is because I used to be extremely happy with the car. I used to feel good driving it around. I used to wash it a lot. This past November I realized I hadn’t washed the car in a year and went to the carwash. Of course it started raining the next day and hasn’t stopped for weeks! Women actually used to compliment me on the fact that I had a decent (and somewhat unique) automobile. One even told me that geniuses choose green cars. Maybe she just wanted in my pants, I guess I’ll never know. Anyway, the point is that I thought this sucker would hold on a lot longer than it has. People seem to be able to drive other Japanese cars into the ground, but if the 33% of this car that is American is going to keep failing apart on me I can’t drive it “into the ground.”
Or maybe I’m just feeling a little sad that I’m all alone on Christmas Eve in a big empty (cold) condo with high ceilings that aren’t echoing any jubilant voices.
