2.04.2006

Death Cab From Ali

Death Cab From Ali

I am hours away from a motorized two months. My friend Ali is headed out of the country for a couple of months and I am the lucky recipient of her vehicular largess. Specifically, this means I'll be driving a late 90s Mitsubishi with no power steering and manual door locks.

Alison's generosity comes largely because we've basically adopted one another as siblings and because a previous car steward destroyed one of her cars to an amazing extent - the front driver's side window was held up with a large splinter of wood (else it would simply slump downward and disappear into the door) and the back doors only remained closed/attached to the chassis because they were bungeed together. I could actually blog all day about this person, but that's not nice, is it? I will simply refer to her as "Cyanide" because it is a word that both resembles her name phonologically and reflects the general toxicity of her person.

None of this is to say that lending a car to me is by any means a smart move. In my two previous car-sitting tenures, one car was stolen two weeks before Ali's return only to be found months later, the parts not even worth stripping (this is the bungee/splintermobile) , and the other car, a Dodge Neon bought for something along the lines of $37 and a green bean casserole, was returned to Ali in tact only to have the engine attempt to exit the vehicle several weeks later on the highway.

Beware the Dodge Neon: Engine is a flight risk

But the real problem is not that I may lose, have stolen, or abet the demise of, another of Ali's cars. The real problem is that I may stop using the CTA. And this is not a fear of an anti-environmentalist turn in my behavior - becoming a gas guzzler. My fear of abandoning public transit stems solely from my love of sitting near, though not next to (call it gawker's NIMBY), crazy people. C'mon, lunatics brighten our days. Don't lie. They give us stories to retell over wine and cheese. They parse the monotony of everyday life and show it for what it really is...monotonous. And some of them are quite wise. I've seen man-on-man blow jobs during the morning rush, heard urban nursery rhymes from (and into) the mouths of babes ("Put your dick in my mouth / Give me head 'til I'm dead"), and sat in on a stirring lecture about how the vacuum testing industry is the bane of homelessness in America. You just don't get that kind of knowledge from listening to NPR when parked on the Dan Ryan.

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