For those of you playing along at home/keeping up with my blog as a way of reminding yourself that your life could be worse, my car wasn’t in great shape last week.

 

Long story short, it was sitting unused, taped together in my garage for the weekend and it needed attention from someone with more qualifications than being competent at using a hot glue gun to make it legal to drive again. After explaining to my co-workers my predicament, I had roped in the only male-type person in our department to make calls on my behalf so to avoid the mysterious uterus surcharge that sometimes makes its way on to an invoice statement. The Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague kindly obliged and gave the wreckers staff my brief which is best described as: “mate, I don’t care how it bloody looks, just as long as it’s road worthy”. After this, Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague has since tried to tell me to get a new car. Which I balked at for a number of reasons:

 

Reason Number One: The sole purpose of a car is for transportation needs. My chariot is still able to ferry me and my perpetually over-packed overnight bag from A to B so it still fulfils its purpose.

Sure, it doesn’t exactly look brand new. The ceiling of the car is held up with thumbtacks. There’s a weird brownish smattering of gunk on the inside of the door that I can’t explain. The bonnet has so much hail damage it looks like cellulite. It’s missing a hubcap.

But while there may be some exterior imperfections and the occasional quirk in the mechanics, it still manages to get where it’s going. My mechanic George tells me it’s the best advertisement for Toyota that could ever be created. Throwing something away when it still does what its supposed to do wasteful, and it this kind of throwaway, keep up with the Joneses culture that is going to be our country’s undoing one day.

 

Reason Number Two: There’s a girl with the same car as me (right down to the 300,000 plus mileage and the missing hubcap) and I am determined for mine to outlast its rival. I thirst for the day my vehicle stands over her car’s decomposing body as it is lowered into the ground like a scene from Pretty Little Liars. My sensible family mover is A.

 

Reason Number Three: I’m quite poor. I’m in no state to be making financial commitments – I put chicken nuggets on my credit card last week.

 

Reason Number Four: Even if I had a sackful of dollars, I’d be wanting to trade that currency for more chicken nuggets. I’m not wasting hard-earned nugg-dollars on buying a car when I already have a working one in my asset portfolio – it’s called economic sense.

 

Reason Number Five: I have formed a strong emotional bond with this lifeless object, and after being scarred by what can happen to disused machines in The Brave Little Toaster as a child, I’m not about to let that happen to one of my oldest friends. They say that if a friendship reaches the seven-year mark, you’re friends for life. I’ve had this car for nearly eight years, so it should technically be a candidate for one of my bridesmaids by now. It’s so intertwined in my life, it made it into my Year 12 yearbook:

*

 

I’ve been through a lot with my slightly dented metallic mate. There was that time we accidentally sped into raging flood waters and were nearly swept away; a lighter, sportier car would have been literally up the creek but my heavyset lady’s big bones weighted us down and by some miracle allowed the tyres enough traction to take us to safety (note: if it’s flooded, forget it). There was that time I needed an impromptu platform to dance on for a friend’s video; a smaller model would have crumpled under my intensive thrust work, but the wide roof provided the perfect podium for my powerful gyrations. It may have the roof held up by thumbtacks, but it has a boot big enough to support my borderline hoarding insistence of having a swag, a tent, a beach cricket set and half a carto of Tooeys on me at all times – just in case of an emergency. This emergency situation crept up on me before, when My Curly Haired Friend and I went on a day trip and found ourselves stranded on top of a mountain with nothing but warm tinnies for dinner. When it got too cold to hang out in the tent, we drank within the warmth of my noble steed and things got … emotional. Some would say the stinking hot piss we were sinking loosened our lips, but I like to think our raw, tear-soaked heart-to-heart crying-so-hard-snot-comes-out session was encouraged and nurtured by the innards of my fraying interior like the flabby arms of a kind grandmother.

 

My car has been a boat, a bed, an esky, a go-go dancer stage, a campsite bar, a Splendour mule, a portable wardrobe, a literal shelter from the storm, a metallic blue feelings container and a reliable friend for nearly eight years – I can’t just let all that go because it needed a little cosmetic surgery.

 

I started to explain this to my Man-Sounding Voiced Colleague but by the time I got halfway through explaining my first reason, his head was shaking and he was reaching for his headphones.

 

Apparently there is a shorter way of explaining my decision making process, and that is simply saying “I don’t want to”. But that kind of caper would make for a very dull blog post.

 

*The chocolate smear did eventually come off the back seat. Now I can walk into my 10 year reunion with my held held high!