You are sat on day after day until your seats are worn and often times ripped or otherwise devalued. You are forced to talk or sing constantly (oftentimes at unhealthy volumes) just for the musical entertainment of your dwellers. You carry people from place to place until your feet are so worn they have to amputate them and replace them with new feet altogether, which despite their quality could not possibly ever feel quite the same as the ones you were born with. When the weather gets nasty and you just want to relax by the fire, you are expected to endure the conditions and trudge through them. You surely resent the day the speed bump was invented and tremble whenever you catch one in your sights. You unwillingly kill harmless animals everyday and watch as their limp bodies stick to your skin for days, weeks and sometimes months. This is the case for each and every vehicle on the road regardless of owner. Just think about the cars who REALLY got the short end of the stick.
Now if you are my car, there are even more unfortunate conditions that you must suffer. You are only fed when you are absolutely starving and you have to turn orange in order to remind me that you may just possibly be hungry. You are not entitled the regularity of bathing, and are sometimes forced to go months without a single scrub. You are bumped and bruised for two and a half years by the other vehicles in the UC Davis parking lots on a daily basis, without a soul to witness these discretions and offer consolation. And we won't even begin to discuss what it was like when I was learning to drive stick...
Well, in the past few months this tortured little Jetta has begun to fight back. My Jetta has a personality, it is a trickster for sure. Over the course of our three year history together, it has played some nasty jokes on me. While living in Davis, it up and decided one day that it would continually rev the engine, even when stopped at a red light or other controlled intersection. This little joke caused many glances from passersby, as I sounded like I was preparing to tear down the road at the first opportunity leaving behind a trail of rubber and smoke. On a drive through San Francisco, my Jetta decided to play another nasty little trick. My passengers and I jumped as one of the rear windows plummeted into the greatest depths of the door frame with no hope of being raised without professional help - this little episode caused me to run a red light on 19th Avenue. This Jetta has also abruptly halted the air conditioning during the hottest months of the summer (during which time I was forced to always carry a second shirt in the car to change into after I had sweated through the first on those 100 degree summer days in Davis). And these past few months have been no exception. During a rainy weekend, I rolled down all four windows quickly to clear off the foggy glass, at which time my Jetta decided it didn't feel like rolling the windows back up. That was a wet weekend for us both. It no longer allows me to lock or unlock the doors from the driver's side, so I am forced to walk around to the passenger's side to unlock the doors before entering the vehicle.
Well, yesterday proved to be an especially rough day for this little Jetta of mine. It took quite the beating as an older man in a pickup in front of us threw his car into reverse and smashed into the front end of my dear little Jetta. Its hood sticks up in a teepee shape, its teeth are looking a little buck and some are broken, and it has a handful of scrapes covering its face. All the other cars are looking at it and laughing, not to mention the pedestrians and other drivers. My poor little Jetta looks pretty pathetic. But, this tragic event has forced me to forgive my Jetta for all of its practical jokes. For all that my little car has put me through, yesterday's events made me realize that my car has suffered much more than I have.
After these most recent wounds have healed and the bandaids have been removed, I am certain that we will rejoin forces and get back on the road in harmony, at least for a few months.
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