hereissomestuffiwrote

[hereissomestuffiwrote]

2020 Hyundai Elantra

Rental cars are so great- it’s like getting to sidestep your daily driver for a car mistress, or car gigolo. Not that I have any desire to do such a thing, as I’m in a perfectly healthy relationship with an older Volkswagen. But she needed a few days off, and with this virus business I didn’t wanna Uber, so a rental it would have to be. Wanting to save money to put towards the Jetta’s possible costly maintenance, I first checked Turo, which was crazy cheap, but all they had available were a bunch of 2012 Fiat 500s. Fun fact- when my Honda got stolen in 2012 I tried to rent a car from a company through my insurance- all they had available was a then brand new Fiat 500, but they couldn’t let me rent it they said, because it kept breaking down on them. Back in 2012. So no thanks on the same car eight year later. I moved on to Enterprise, and I decided to go with the lowest-priced deal possible, which promised a Mitsubishi Mirage or similar. I’m furloughed at the moment, so this thing would just have to get me home from and then back to my mechanic’s. I could deal with an economy car just for that. 

The plan was to meet the rental agent at the repair shop where I was leaving my car, sign some stuff, and then take off in the Mirage or similar. Wanting to socially isolate as much as possible, I decided to wait in my car until the rental agent and the employee who was driving them back to their office both showed up. First, I saw a brand new Hyundai Elantra with out of state plates and a barcode on the windshield pull into a spot. I figured that was the shuttle back, so I got out of my car, figuring my rental was right behind the Hyundai. And sure enough, moments later a Chevy Sonic pulled up. A Sonic is similar to a Mirage, right? I immediately noticed that the Sonic was absolutely filthy and kinda dented up, which, whatever, I’m renting from the bottom shelf, but also that the driver was an elderly man with no face mask. Huh. Well, okay. “Is that mine?” I cheerfully asked the man, who looked back at me completely bewildered. “No” he said gruffly, and then started taking some boxes out of his back seat. Oh man, should I have upgraded to Compact or Standard? Could Economy really be this bad? But just then- “Excuse me, sir?”, I heard from the direction of the Hyundai, “I’m with Enterprise! We have your car right over here!” It turns out they upgraded me two full vehicle classes- score! So the Elantra was mine, the rental agent’s shuttle was a Chrysler Pacifica that rolled up a few minutes later, and that dirty Sonic was a parts delivery guy. Oops.  

Even though I have a perfectly valid credit card and a perfectly legitimate checking account, when I signed the Enterprise agent’s iPad iFelt like Preston in Blank Check pulling off one of his many bullshit “Mr. Macintosh” transactions. Like, handing over a piece of plastic and scribbling incoherently with my finger on a tablet screen = unlimited access to a brand new motor vehicle? Whaaaat? But it seriously was that easy! Plus, COVID-19 precautions meant my agent just straight up left the keys in the ignition with the car running- one less point of contagion. He was super nice though, and wiped down everything before leaving the car to me. Of course, I pretended that we were both criminals and he was cleaning his fingerprints off a getaway car before handing it over to me for disposal. I also kept thinking about the rental car scene in the awesome buddy-comedy My Fellow Americans in which a little Hyundai is used as a punchline-

Spoiler alert- things go really, really well with the Lexus-

Jesus, what was it with abusing rental cars in 80′s and 90′s comedies? The poor things got less than no respect. 

Insane that twenty-four years later, the two brands really aren’t a whole lot different anymore. Side by side, my brand new Elantra and a Lexus IS don’t even look particularly dissimilar from one another, save for the latter one’s more pronounced gaping O face. Even with a more staid design, the Hyundai certainly doesn’t at all appear notably goofier or cheaper in comparison.

Once inside, the Elantra seemed like a nice enough place. I went to grab a CD out of the Jetta (Yes, like a grandpa I still listen to compact discs in the car, don’t judge) and then realized upon closer inspection that the Elantra didn’t even have a CD slot. Since I couldn’t understand the deal with the satellite radio- it seemed to me like the previous renter had only activated five stations, and they were all Catholic talk radio stations- I just defaulted to my favorite local FM channel. Whenever I’ve been given a rental car in the past, I compulsively have to see how loud the volume on the stereo will go before it starts hurting my ears. And I’m happy to report that the Elantra was capable of boosting “High” by The Cure to an acceptably window-shaking volume. With that important business out of the way, I could see what else was up with this car. It had a sportshift kinda gear box, I guess Hyundai’s is called SHIFTRONIC®. 

I messed around with it, it seemed responsive. Downshifts really did slow the car considerably, and upshifts seemed to make it go faster, but I don’t know, my foot was also on the gas, so maybe it was just a placebo effect? Either way, I’m a big fan of manumatics- it’s always good to look down and see the little S and the plus/minus. It’s a welcome bonus touch, like when a deli sandwich comes with a pickle. Even if you’re never going to want or use that pickle, it’s just nice someone made the effort.

Next, I needed to push this “Drive Mode” button and see what that did. Sadly, hitting it did not cause toothpicks to dispense from the sun visor and “Nightcall” by Kavinsky to boom over the sound system, lame. But, instead, it pulled up this dope TRON-esque graphic of the Elantra on the touch screen-

I just love it when digital renderings of cars appear on their dash screens. Second only to visual equalizers, they’re my favorite completely unnecessary yet supremely cool thing that a display can offer me. The fun cartoon in the Elantra explained that I had the choice of three modes- Smart, Normal and Sport. The Catholic talk radio renter had been driving it in Normal, no surprise there. I was on the highway at this point, so I decided to get crazy and punch it into Sport. And believe it or not, it made a huge difference! I once drove a Mini Cooper S with a manual, and while Elantra Sport Mode certainly wasn’t that vivacious, it was much, much more fun than Elantra Normal or Elantra Smart. Okay, full disclosure- I didn’t even bother to check out Elantra Smart- I spent too many years driving a Prius to care to see what the “nerd setting” felt like- I can imagine vividly, thanks. 

It wasn’t until I arrived home that I even bothered to see what the key situation was. Like I said, they were theoretically in it, as the engine was on, but not until pulling up near my house did I think to make sure that they were actually in the car. They were though, dangling from an ignition cylinder the way car keys are supposed to. I myself hate proximity fobs, push starts and such- they make me feel too disconnected. I have too many years of the muscle memory of my fingers gripping a physical car key, turning it, and feeling the vibration of the engine starting to ever get used to anything else. To me, that sensation also turns a key in my brain, and once that’s turned, it is like “Okay, we’re operating a car now, pay attention”. Without that ritual, I can’t focus on my driving quite the same way. I would imagine it would be similarly disorienting if suddenly all cigarettes just came magically lit right out of the pack, long time smokers would say “What the hell? I enjoy the act of flicking my Zippo, that’s part of the whole thing!” You know? Lucky for me, the Hyundai had keys-keys, albeit surprisingly budget looking ones-

My friend’s mom had a 2004 Elantra that he’d borrow and I’m fairly certain the keys for that thing looked almost identical. A quick Google search proved me right.

C’mon Hyundai! This thing was a two-thousand and twenty! And it wasn’t even the base model. Not even a switchblade? Or a buttons-built-into-the-top-of-the-key type deal? Nope. Key and separate fob, 1995 style. Oh well. Since I’m on furlough at the moment, I didn’t really have anywhere I needed to go, so I just left the Hyundai to sit until the Jetta was ready. When I got word that the VW was all put back together, I headed back into the countryside in the Elantra.  

Enhance! It’s hard to tell, but that’s a genuine Passat W8 all-wheel-drive wagon in front of me. 

When I got closer, I noticed that it was full of yard work equipment, and getting pretty beat looking. Sitting behind it at a red light, I noticed the two young guys in it were rocking out to music. It was warm out that day, so since we both had our windows down I could immediately recognize Kid Rock’s “Cowboy” slapping through the Passat’s Monsoon speakers. The two guys nodded along with it enthusiastically for a few moments before starting to laugh and changing tracks on either a mix CD or a Spotify playlist or whatever. Ohhhh, they were rocking out to it ironically. The plot thickened. If it was a mix CD, were they driving a borrowed car and laughing at someone’s taste, as my friends and I did when we commandeered a dad’s Lincoln LS and found “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins deep within the trunk mounted CD changer? Or were they a couple of Gen Zs cycling archaeologically through a Woodstock ‘99 playlist on a streaming device of some sort? I’ll never know. Anyway, bawitda-back to my story about the Elantra. I had to put a bank-busting $3.12 worth of gas into it so that it would have a full tank before dumping the keys into my mechanic’s after hours slot and happily reclaiming the Jetta. Not that there was anything wrong with the Elantra- as has been stated endlessly elsewhere, it’s truly amazing how far Hyundai has come over the last twenty or so years. I guess the rental company wasn’t as enthusiastic about the little car’s innovations or maybe they were just used to them, as I got a call from my mechanic a few days later telling me it still hadn’t been picked up. I called the rental people who assured me they would be coming to grab it, they had just been busy. Since my mechanic has plenty of land, and since my credit card had stopped being charged, I left the situation at that. I’ve heard nothing further, so for all I know the car either got collected or it’s still just sitting out there in the fields, now in use as the nicest chicken coop in all of the Amish Country. If that’s the case, those chickens are in for a real treat! Hopefully they’ll have more luck figuring out the satellite radio than I did.  

[hereissomestuffiwrote]

Three Cars From Something Wild

For Easter 2019, my family and I went to New York City- whenever possible, we kick conventional holiday celebrations to the curb in favor of new and unorthodox observances. Since we were raised in the mid-atlantic, we’ve taken innumerable school trips over the years to New York to see all the usual major attractions, so now we’re niche tourists when visiting. I don’t like making travel plans for a group because I worry that whatever I want to do will end up sucking, but when we found that the REI store in Manhattan was closed, I offered up a Plan B to visit a nearby landmark that I had been quietly thinking about all morning.

For some reason, similar to a future priceless antique being carelessly dumped into a bargain bin before eventually blooming with value, Jonathan Demme’s finally considered a classic 1986 film Something Wild found its way into near constant and indifferent rotation on Comedy Central back in the mid to late 1990’s. And I watched it, a lot. At the time, a major reason I loved it so much were the vehicle choices, all of which are as distinctive, vivid, and deliberate as the characters driving them. If you’re a car lover, and have never seen this movie, go watch it on Amazon Prime right now. I’m not kidding, reading this can wait. It is possibly the best road movie, with also the best soundtrack, ever. It’s the kind of film where the director went completely out of his way to include an insert shot of a 1961 Corvette zipping by while blasting the sick 7″ version of New Order’s “Temptation” just because he could. 

 If you insist on checking it out later, then for now I’ll just entice you by discussing three of my favorite hero vehicles from the film. Starting with...

The 1968 Cadillac DeVille Convertible

This thing is nuts. Matte black over black leather, a block long, stolen, and thus sporting Arizona license plates in Pennsylvania, the Caddy is a mysterious and intimidating character just on it’s own, let alone with Ray Liotta’s Ray Sinclair behind the wheel.

Ray showing Charlie (Jeff Daniels) and Lulu (Melanie Griffith) where he’s been hanging out lately- judging by the hearse and the trash fire, an abode for the damned.  

It’s also an interesting choice for his alpha-male bad boy character as it isn’t a particularly traditionally masculine vehicle- in fact a year later, in Mannequin, Hollywood Montrose would drive a similar, older model, albeit in a glossy pink.

Given Ray’s menacing persona, a lesser director and production designer would have given him a noisy, rumbling muscle car, like Frank Booth’s Dodge Charger from Blue Velvet. But I think the quietly malevolent Cadillac suits Ray’s particular brand of brooding psychopath perfectly. Ray is the type of villain, who, unlike Booth, doesn’t need to scream in your face that he’ll send you straight to hell if you get on his bad side, his approach to intimidation is more subtle.

Allow me to draw on Roadhouse for a further analogy- if Jimmy from that movie was the kind of tough guy who had to explicitly inform you about what he did to guys like you in prison, Ray on the other hand, is the kind of tough guy who you explicitly know did unsavory things to guys like you in prison, just by taking one look at him.

And he knows that you know, and thus he needn’t assert his dominance any further, electing instead to kick back, light up one of many Marlboro Reds...

and cruise in his guiltlessly pilfered vintage land yacht. 

The 1984 BMW 318i

This little black over tan Beemer makes two appearances in the film, first as a background vehicle in a scene where Charlie and Lulu speed away from a dine and dash...

...and then as the car belonging to Charlie’s perfectly nice and wholesome co-worker Larry and his wife, Peg. 

At first I thought it was just a production mistake that the BMW made it so prominently into the background of the first scene considering how it’s featured later, but from what I’ve read about this movie, Jonathan Demme painstakingly kept his hand in every design aspect of it, so I theorize that it was a deliberate choice. En route from New York City just like Charlie and Lulu, Larry and Peg were heading to the same high school reunion as the main characters, so it’s entirely possible that they stopped at the same restaurant and just happened to barely miss each other. That means the mere presence of the little Bavarian chilling in the parking lot provides an added level of danger to the dine and dash as later in the film, Charlie nearly defecates himself with anxiety when Larry recognizes him at the reunion...

...while Charlie is doing nothing more than mingling. Just imagine if Charlie had recognized his co-worker recognizing him while committing a brazen theft?

Aww, look how excited Charlie was for pizza! 

See ya, squares! 

Like I said, as a kid, on a surface level, I loved this movie because it had cool cars and cool adult characters who lied, smoked, stole, and mated with reckless abandon. As an adult, it’s now easy to see another reason why I was so engrossed- though not a gay film in any conventional sense- save for some chilling, vaguely homoerotic moments between Charlie and Ray... 

...the movie nonetheless has a distinctive queer, outsider versus insider sensibility to it. Once Lulu pulls Charlie out of his boring yuppie bubble and into her orbit of booze, amazing music, and uninhibited thieving, there’s at first the constant looming threat that now that Charlie has allowed this part of himself to roam free, that he may lose his “life” (in the sense of his family and established professional status) and then later, the more terrifying threat, especially once shit gets real and Ray chains him to a faucet and tries to murder him with a hunting knife that he pulls from within his cowboy boot...

Holy shit, it was just in there the whole time?!

...that Charlie may lose his actual life just by being honest with himself for a few days. I was born exactly two months to the day before this movie was released to theaters, so I was at an impressionable stage in my personal development when I started seeing it all the time on television. And in it, I saw myself, in all three major characters- I was Charlie, an outwardly boring, cis-gendered white boy dying for a chance to live life on the other side of the looking glass. I was an aspiring Lulu, a free, artistic spirit who flew the coop from Pennsylvania (where I also grew up!) to Manhattan in search of self-reinvention. And I was also, honestly, mostly Ray- outwardly, a sentient vessel of libido and rage, kicking it’s cowboy boots violently and repeatedly through innocent drywall...

...and paneling...

...and side tables...

...and this under sink cabinet...

To this day, I can’t go to get something from underneath the sink without imagining this exact shot. 

...but with, upon closer examination, intelligence, pain, and a very real human heart underneath it all.

Spoiler Alert- Charlie, in self defense, eventually sticks that aforementioned hunting knife into that very real heart. 

Anyway, the movie bookends at what back in 1986 was called Felice Hero Shop.

Like I said, even the background vehicles are amazing, check out that sweet, bouncy, Brady wagon!

I’ve had semi-religious experiences visiting filming locations for other shows and movies that I love, so I knew that since we were just a few blocks away, that I had to check out what was now known as Lupe’s East LA Kitchen.

We found this laying in the sidewalk on our walk there. Look at it compared to the Something Wild soundtrack art and tell me that it wasn’t kind of a sign?

And there it was!

As I had read online before bothering to see it in person, the storefront and building are largely the same as they were in the spring of 1986 when Something Wild filmed there. Which is a minor miracle, considering the building boom that has happened all around it. It reminds me of this wonderful children’s book. Anyway, in the movie, Lulu clocks Charlie as a closet rebel after he skips out on his lunch check, and then offers him a ride back to his office. It’s then that we’re introduced to Lulu’s spectacularly perfect automotive counterpart...

The 1967 Pontiac GTO Convertible

Like her, it is beautiful, edgy, and colorfully accessorized.

Also like her, it is incredibly dangerous. Later in the film, Ray crudely jokes to Charlie that Lulu looks like she could “f**k you right in half”. I’m no Ralph Nader, but I’m fairly certain that with no seat belts or airbags that her GTO could also f**k you up right in half, in the event of an even moderately severe collision.

I was very eager to see then, what, in the modern, safe, and sanitized version of New York, would be parked in the iconic GTO’s exact spot at the corner of 6th Avenue and Watts Street. The movie GTO, by the way, was evidently put into storage after filming ended and then offered for sale back in 2016. 

And in its place was a gold Honda Accord LX! Huh.

I’m not remotely old enough to recall New York City before the Disneyfication era- my only memories of that time are getting to see real live punk hairdos for the first time ever in Washington Square Park in late August of 1991 and then on the same trip my mom yelling at my sister and I for playfully kicking curbside garbage bags because “There could be needles in there!”, oh my. But based on what I do understand about that era, I feel comfortable proposing that this 2009 Accord sort of sums up Old New York versus New New York rather succinctly. Like Lulu’s GTO, the New York of Something Wild was old, visibly decaying, dangerous, fun and relatively cheap. New New York is safe, reliable, but lacks a certain magic that has been scrubbed clean by rapid gentrification. Hefty Bags of maybe needles have been exchanged for a clean and well lit CVS on nearly every corner. And while that’s surely an improvement, as noted frequently elsewhere, the cost of increased livability has been the removal of the numerous small and quirky institutions that couldn’t afford bonkers rent increases. And I find that sad, despite the fact that of course as an infrequent visitor and non-New York resident I can’t name a single shuttered storefront that I actually miss. And that includes you, FAO Schwarz- the only toy there that my father could ever afford to get for me was a piece of shit that broke almost immediately, so have fun with your giant piano- maybe Satan and one of his imps can dance “Heart and Soul” on it for you in hell. Still, as an at least somewhat culturally aware person, it bums me out that, like, CBGB isn’t a thing anymore.

But Lupe’s soldiers on! There’s even some nice graffiti on there, just like there was 33 years earlier.

 As I said, Something Wild begins and ends at this SoHo corner. For a conclusion, Charlie and Lulu are reunited in a near-mirror image of their first encounter and they ride off happily in a stunning 1941 Ford Woody Station wagon.

Where the Woody was docked in 1986 there was nothing on that afternoon...

  ...maybe it’s a No Parking zone now?

Wait, maybe it always was? I never realized until writing this that Lulu parked her Woody right in front of a goddamn fire hydrant. Good going, Lulu.

There was lots more to do, so I didn’t stick around too long. If I hadn’t been with family though, I would have gotten a table at Lupe’s and waited hopefully to catch some buttoned-down modern yuppie skipping out on his bill, so that I could ambush them on the street outside and then dually embark on a crazy weekend. I think we’d just Uber though, driving yourself around in New York City nowadays seems like a real pain in the ass. 

[hereissomestuffiwrote]

2002 BMW 325xi

“Excuse me, what’s that?! I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time understanding you over the auctioneer chatter and boots squelching. Would you like an egg sandwich? They’re selling them over there in the basement!”

“Want me to bid on these water-logged Laurence Welk albums for ya?That’s a pretty nice looking horse!” 

Sorry, I was pretending we were at a Mud Sale, a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania springtime tradition- a giant auction where waist-high piles of donated goods are auctioned off in muddy fields to raise money for the local volunteer fire companies. Since there aren’t going to be any this year, I thought I’d share my favorite find from last year, a 2002 BMW 325xi.

Anything and everything gets sold at these auctions- livestock, buggies, antiques, everything. What’s most interesting to me though are the bargain piles. These are the cheapest things to bid on, and they’re sold by the lot, meaning if you see one thing that you like in a giant box of other crap, you have to buy the whole box of crap to get what you want. But fear not, as I myself have bought simply huge boxes of crap for less than $5.00. The piles are also fascinating from a cultural and anthropological perspective- imagine gold panning, but instead of dunking your pan into a stream, swishing the water out, and looking down at a container full of pebbles and silt and maybe some gold, you look down and see a little bit of literally everything from the last 100 years of humans existing in America with maybe one or two genuine treasures in the mix. Here are some of my personal favorite finds-

I don’t know if Babs was inside there or what, I didn’t open it.

This Pizza Oven was sweet…

...but the pictures on the back with, for some reason, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop modeling the other toys, were seriously next-level.

 There was a Barney Miller board game! Who knew?

An example of a live chat with a friend during bidding.

So yeah, I’ve seen and purchased a lot of crazy stuff at these sales. But other than a sad looking 1993 F-150 with a totally collapsed front suspension, and all the buggies, I had never seen any vehicles getting sold off. So I was thrilled to find this nice looking (from 20 feet away at least) BMW while wandering around.

Ambitious choice. 

The white Grand Cherokee next to it was also for sale that day, but having spent some time during the Cash For Clunker months poking around dealer back lots, I’m more or less of the mindset of “If you’ve seen one rode hard and put away wet first-generation Grand Cherokee, you’ve seen ‘em all.” The Beemer was much more interesting to me, especially in context. Nevertheless, here’s a few shots for any 90’s Jeep fans-

The headliner seemed fun! It was playing that parachute game that everyone played in kindergarten.

From what I could tell, this fender bashed into something at one point, was crudely repaired with spray paint, then bashed into again, then left to rust. 

Last inspected in June of 2010, which meant when I saw it it had been out of inspection for almost a decade.

Decent looking stereo though.

No matter that it’s sitting on the passenger seat. 

Anyway, back to the Beemer. I was especially excited to find it because I hadn’t been in an E46 or any BMW since ten years earlier in the spring of 1999 when a sibling’s roommate took us for a ride in his brand new Orient Blue sedan. He was only a year or two out of college, and this was his first big-boy car. I vividly remembered how sleek and modern that thing was, full of then-technological marvels like a transponder key and side airbags. All these years later, I still have the muscle memories of how the doors felt when I closed them, how soft the leather was, how hard the speakers thumped. It continues to be my overall benchmark for how nice and tight a new car can be. Because of that first introduction, I’ve always associated the 3-Series with youthful opulence, and because different generations of them were in so many movies that I watched growing up, from Pretty in Pink…

to Clueless…

  to PCU…

to I Know What You Did Last Summer...

These things were everywhere in teen movies!

I thought it was fitting then that when I first spotted the Beemer there were a small group of Amish kids of about driving age just lounging on it. Between the car and the kids’ conservative wardrobe, you could easily mistake the scene as a group of prep schoolers hanging out in their exclusive academy’s parking lot, circa Y2K. Actually, in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s coming of age saga set in a prep school circa Y2K, one of the characters drives almost this exact car. Here they are chilling on it in their exclusive academy’s parking lot-

At first I thought it was maybe the kids’ job to babysit the cars, but they soon wandered off. I guess they just thought it was cool. I’ve noticed that the Amish youth seem to use the Mud Sales the way every pre-smartphone generation used the local shopping mall- as a safe place to grab some soft pretzels, meet your friends, and cruise around in packs away from the prying eyes of parents. Now that I was alone with the BMW, I wanted to give it a closer look.

Everything that goes through a Mud Sale is assigned a little number tag just like this and is then sold off rapid-fire by an auctioneer. That means that a premium European sport sedan with an original MSRP of $29,495 ($42,318.52 with inflation) is getting the exact same treatment as a wooden crate full of old TV Guides.

None of the info on the 2019 “window sticker” was particularly enticing. If you ran this thing’s VIN through Cherfax (which would be like Carfax, but it only uses quotes from Clueless) the report would surely condemn it as a full-on Monet, Hagsville. Pretty from a distance but a wreck up close. Despite this, if you could get it running, and with a detailing, you could easily park this in your driveway to impress some not-very-car-model-year-savvy neighbors who’d assume it was way newer than it was. The rough spots on the body didn’t show until you got up really close, and even then they were kinda charming. Check out all the rusty drywall screws holding the bumper on-

Aww, look at the sad, cataract-like haze over the hood emblem-

The driver’s side mirror glass was doing something very interesting as well- 

Doesn’t it kinda look like the border around a Saved By The Bell dream sequence?

I found this especially sad- two hopeful duct tape donuts to keep the rear trunk emblem affixed, lest anyone forget that it is a BMW. In the end, the attempt proved futile. 

Joyfully assessing this thing’s flaws made me feel like X to the Z Xzibit in the beginning of a Pimp My Ride episode. Then the slow realization that this Beemer would have been barely old enough to be certified pre-owned material when that show aired dawned on me and suddenly 2002 started to legitimately seem like a really long time ago. As much as I’ve worked to change about myself since I was a teenager- clothes, music taste, general hygiene- one area in which I’m truly stuck in the past is my reluctance to accept that the cars that I would have killed for but couldn’t even remotely afford in high school are now super old, and this thing in particular was brand-new the year I got my learner’s permit. I mean, I know it isn’t new, but I just can’t truly comprehend that as of my finding it last year that it was seventeen years old. The cobwebs in the backseat did not help this existential dread.

But, other than Charlotte taking up residence, smelling like Wilbur took a dump in it, and the missing stereo, the interior was in surprisingly good shape. 

From the German factory in April 2002 to a farmer’s field in April 2019, the dramatic riches to rags journey of this 3-Series calls to mind the horrifying scene in The Brave Little Toaster, where, in the last moments of their lives, a bunch of doomed cars in a junkyard sing about their sunnier, forever bygone eras. If you’ve never seen the film, the song the cars sing is a kind of mash-up of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”, if those songs ended with their protagonists being cruelly flung into an industrial crusher/shredder-

So what would this little guy sing about before getting granulated? Taking a valedictorian to an SAT prep class? Helping Julie and the gang dump that dead (but not really dead) old fisherman? I dunno, I can’t say anything for certain since I didn’t buy the Carfax. Whatever it did in earlier in life, here it now sat, parked mockingly downwind from a rotisserie chicken stand, thus engulfed in a constant cloud of thick, poultry scented-fog.

The last state inspection was in January of 2017 and the last service was in January of 2018. Even though this thing runs synthetic, I would hope that with the high mileage they were changing the oil at closer to 5,000 mile intervals and not 7,500 or 10,000. It is possible though that it had an oil change at 188,701 miles, was then neglected, overheated and died. Huh. Well, I wandered off for awhile, checked out the ox carts full of wares, found this-

Did not bid on it. 

Later, I noticed that the Amish kids had returned to the BMW. This time they all piled inside. The guy in the driver seat luxuriated with his arm draped casually over the steering wheel. His stance made him for all the world look just like the captain of some sailing team during the first Bush Jr. administration, or Steff stalking Andie from the rear view mirror of his 911-

Maybe I’m projecting, but I got the sense the Amish kids thought that old BMW was something special, no matter how far from glory it had fallen. Maybe they’d seen all the same teen movies that I had and made the same associations. For whatever reason, twenty years after I first got to experience an E46, that musty, chicken-reeking little Bavarian seemed to be making the same impression on them that that first one had made on me- something hard to describe, a certain je ne sais car- that this pile of metal, rubber and plastic, could, due to it’s brilliant engineering not just as a machine but as a pop culture staple, make you feel definitively young and cool just by being in its mere presence. 

Or maybe they seriously just needed a place to sit.  

Well, what about you? Do you share my affinity for the E46? Was this your old car? Or did you end up buying it from that Mud Sale? Were you born in 2002 and just see this as some crappy old turd? Sound off in the comments!