love cars.
I mean, public transit is great, and we should use it more often. That way, there’d be less of you people in the way when I get on the road with my car.
As you an see from the list on the right, I have owned 12 different cars in my life. Well, the Studebaker was my brother’s, but I ended up with it. The Impala was my Dad’s, but I drove it most of the time. The Beetle never made it to the road.
Not one of them is a mini-van. I am trying to round up pictures of all them just so you can see how wonderful they all were.
That’s a quite a pile of cars. Where are they now? Oh, just anywhere. I got rid of them. They have disappeared from my life. It was easy: you tow them off somewhere and leave them. Someone else takes care of it. It’s not my problem anymore. Two tons of rusted, decaying metal and rubber and plastic— poof! Gone! You try to get rid of a gallon of toxic herbicide like that! Forget it. They make you fill out a form at least.
When my 1964 Dodge Dart, a car I dearly loved, broke down for good, in Calgary, I called the Ministry of Fear and told them that though the car was registered in Illinois, I would like to junk it in Calgary. They nearly had a fit. You couldn’t do that, they said. You had to import it first. When you import a car, you pay taxes based on the assessed value of the car. But the government liked the car a lot more than I did. They thought it was still worth thousands of dollars. A government official warned me that there would be dire consequences if I didn’t pay up.
I didn’t want to pay a lot of money just to tow it to a junk yard. We argued for days. I was ready to try to fix the thing just so I could drive it down to Montana and ditch it in the first Forest Preserve I could find. I got an estimate for fixing the broken starter motor and the transmission and the door. Then I realized it might be cheaper to import it after all. I called the government back.
Then I read an article in the paper about a man who had bought some golf clubs in the United States and then smuggled them into Canada without paying duty. You know what the police did? They seized the golf clubs.
That was good enough for me. I called the government back: seize away, it’s yours. The government official said, well, we’d rather not have to tow it. Could you drop it off at the compound? So, my friend Sid came over with his Malibu and we towed it to the government compound and left it there to be seized. Gone. Poof.
If you put all twelve of those cars in my backyard today, it would make a pretty cool tower of jagged steel. It would stand about 80 feet high, towering over the houses in the neighborhood. It would tell you something: this is the kind of monumental mess a single human being can create in only twenty-five years here in the affluent West.
I never paid a cent to dispose of my old cars. Usually, I got a few bucks. Think about it. In our society, do people ever do anything for you for nothing? Would your neighbor like it if you dropped five bags of leaves onto his driveway? Does he want your old stereo? Your old freezer? No, never! This leads me to believe that there are people out there who want your old car. Old cars are so good for the environment, that the government doesn’t even charge you to dispose of them, the same way they never charge corporations to clean up their big polluted dumps or poisoned rivers. I’ll bet there are lots of people out there just crawling over each other for a chance to have a wrecked car. And that’s where my next wrecked car is going to go.
But in the meantime, here I come! Out of the way, you slow-moving eco-baby freaks! I’m coming by at 120 kilometres per hour! I don’t care where I’m going: I just want to drive!
My Cars and the Years I Owned Them:
1960 Mini Morris [1970]
1961 Studebaker [1970]
1965 Peugeot [1971]
1965 Chevrolet Impala [1972]
1965 Volkswagen Beetle [1974]
1964 Dodge Dart [1975]
1967 Plymouth Valiant [1978]
1972 Plymouth Valiant [1979]
1971 Dodge van [1981]
1983 Lada [1983]
1978 Ford Fairmont [1987]
1983 Chevrolet Malibu [1989]
1987 Toyota Camry [1998]
1987 Toyota 4Runner [1998]
1999 Honda Accord (1999)
2004 Toyota Corolla (2007-11)
2001 Honda Accord (2005?)
2002 Honda CRV (2010-11)
2010 Toyota Corolla
2012 Toyota Rav4