As you probably remember from my last blog (unless you have like, the shortest memory in the world like some guy in an artsy movie or possibly a cocker spaniel), Hitler has ganked a radiator hose in my van, and as such, I have had to seek out another form of transportation.  Unfortunately, since my sister wasn’t able to sneak a yak through customs on her way back from Mongolia, I’ve had to settle for the next best thing - my grandmother’s car.  “Why is that less cool than a yak?” you may ask.  Well, her car happens to be the oldest Ford Tempo ever.  Like, its so old that Gerald Ford himself made it in the very fires of Mount Doom (because of course, that’s where Gerald Ford lives).  To make matters worse, this car clearly hates me with a burning passion not felt by a car since the part of General Lee in the movie “Gettysburg” was given to Martin Sheen instead of to the General Lee.  On the bright side though, my grandmother doesn’t drive anymore, so her car is free whenever I want it (Fun Ben’s Grandmother fact: when she was growing up in Kansas, her uncle’s phone number was 9).  Still, since it lives right next to my van, it always sees me paying attention to my van; changing it’s oil, putting air in the tires, and occasionally giving it a piece of rawhide to chew on when it does tricks.  So yeah, my grandmother’s car is extremely jealous, and as a result takes it out on me by being all passive aggressive.

            For instance, it always stalls out at traffic lights when you first start out, and the only way to keep the engine running until the light turns green is to throw it in park and gun the engine.  This all works pretty well in isolation, but to the casual observer, it appears that I’m trying to challenge everyone else at the light to a drag race or something.  So I’ll be sitting there, right next to some guy in a rice rocket, revving my engine like crazy, looking all manic and stuff as if I can, by the very power of my mind, force the car to keep running, and then when the light turns green, the guy next to me totally peels out of there, while I’m usually pleasantly surprised if I can attain a speed of over 15 mph.  On the bright side, at least the guy in the ricer gets a little self esteem boost out of the whole tawdry affair.

            Also, as you might well have already inferred, it has a tiny engine.  I mean, when you look under the hood, there’s a lot of junk in there that looks like an engine, but I’m pretty sure that if I could get a good look at it from underneath, I’d find like, a hamster in one of those little hamster purgatory wheels, and a rubber band, four AA batteries (Hamster Purgatory, by the way, would be a band name so awesome that it almost justifies the existence of my grandmother’s car in the first place).  Now, I’m used to driving a car with a tiny engine, but at least in my van, all the sound insulation in the firewall is worn out and it always feels like I’m really going until I look at the speedometer.  Not so in my grandmother’s car, where even when you floor it, it just makes that sound like one of those little toy cars that you pull back a ways and then they crash into stuff, go into reverse for a foot and a half, and then smack into a credenza or something.

            To make matters worse, the engine light keeps coming on to tell me the car is overheating.  At first this really freaked me out, since I prefer the cars I drive to not catch on fire and explode more frequently than can be helped (yeah, I’m just old school that way).  But then we took it the repair shop where the guys has like, +7 to Jalopy Mastery, and he said that all the repair parts to the car have gone extinct and we’d just have to live with it (I suspect that Hitler was probably somehow involved in this debacle as well.  One of these days I’m gonna drive out to the middle of nowhere, put the child-safety locks on, and then stop the car, jump out and close the door really quickly so he’ll be stuck in there in the heat and melt like a bag of delicious invisible Nazi Reese’s Peanut Butter cups) (The Invisible Nazi Peanut Butter Cups, by the way, would be an exceptionally awesome name for a band).  But anyways, I’ll be driving along, and the engine light will be all blazing mightily forth from it’s place on the dashboard, glowing with an unholy fire like the Eye of Sauron or something, just tempting me to drive the thing back to Mount Doom, and see if Gerald can do anything about it, or at least put a piece of duct tape over it so I won’t have to be taunted by it’s seething and nameless evil power.

            Finally, it’s just a goofy looking car, like it was what the future of old lady cars was thought to be back in the early 80s.  Maybe if I had a monster truck conversion done on it or something, then it would look really cool, but I don’t have enough money to do that right now, so I’m just gonna have to settle for driving it around places where everybody is really tiny so I can still enjoy that much sought after monster truck vibe, like the Midget Quarter of Richmond, or maybe even Safetytown, home of the only completely ornamental Ukrop’s in Virginia.

            So, I guess what I’m really trying to say here is, I really don’t like Hitler messing with all cars, and we probably ought to pass some sort of a law against it, instead of just giving him community service every time like we’ve been doing up to now.  Also, if that hamster dies in there, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to find a proper replacement one for it unless I go all the way out to Zordak and Anastasia’s Domestic Auto Rodent Junkyard and Fashion Bargain Warehouse in Goochland.