The ultimate driving machine.  The beemer.  I hate when people say that.  We’re on our third one.  I mean I guess they do what they gotta do.  They turn on.  You go places and stuff.  But they ain’t cheap, and the only difference I see between a BMW and a KIA is that emblem.

We lease them every three years.  When the lease on our current machine ended, we decided just to buy it as our plans for the near future are in complete retrograde.  And wouldn’t ya know it.

Scraped the wheel and rims about ten times.  That’s on me.  I’m a curb hugger.  I think it’s safe, but there’s definitive ramifications.  Two new rims and a dead tire.  A couple of thousand bucks.

Got majorly side swiped while in the right lane of the middle of the George Washington Bridge by a semi.  The top level.  Trucks aren’t supposed to be on the upper level which is why I’m always on the upper level.  Well ain’t that a kick in the rump.  People asked if I pulled over and traded info.  Ummm I WAS ON THE TOP LEVEL OF THE GWB.  If I pulled over I’d be in the Hudson River.  Did he stop?  Of course not.  He would’ve been caught with his trucker pants down and not for that.  For driving a semi on the top level of the GWB. Total damages: $7,000.

Driving home just yesterday from Pennsylvania and the rubber guard thing that was replaced in incident number one just flies off.  I was going 55 MPH for once and was doing everything correct.  Then people say:  don’t go through your insurance because your rate will go up.  So these insurance swindlers say things along the lines of:  like a good neighbor, Statefarm is there.  Oh they’re there alright.  Hands stretched out for a payoff based on your bad luck.  And in the recent episode, what did luck even have to do with it?  A piece of rubber arbitrarily decided it had enough and split.  Now I have great neighbors.  Statefarm doesn’t make the list.

It was about ten minutes after that when I really started to justify a firm retirement plan.  Move back into the city.  No car equals saving an easy $2,000 a month and parking in Manhattan can run $1,000 a month.  So get rid of the machine.  Plus, either I do have bad luck driving coupled with I haven’t had a lot of practice since I lived thirty years in the city and never drove plus I learned how to drive … and this is 100% true … when my father pulled over to the side on the Major Deegan before getting on the GWB under the following circumstances:

A). He’d just forced me to inhale pot for the first time.  Well maybe the second.  Let’s just say he did it.

B). I was fourteen.

C). The car was a stick shift.  A VW Beetle that weighed ten pounds crossing a windy bridge.  Steady as a kite.

D).  The Major Deegan is in the heart of the Bronx and if your car is idle for ten seconds, you’ll literally see your tires carted away by someone.  And on a bad day, they’ll even torch the thing just for the hell of it.

E).  Oh lest we forget, it was the GWB.

In conclusion, I didn’t get off to a good start.  Now I’m not at all a nervous driver albeit I really should be.  I suck at it.  When we moved to New Jersey and I resumed my driving career after a lengthy hiatus, I had three small blips in two weeks while traveling under five miles per hour.  I waved to a new neighbor then crashed into his car.  I backed into a barber shop driveway which was ten feet wide with brick walls on either side.  I didn’t want to do it, but the barber insisted I could pull it off.  I didn’t.  

Blip number three:  I hit a deer and turned it into a three pointer.

Prognosis?  

Deer > Dead 

Car > Totaled