Howdy folks, “Honest Donny” here, and we’re really excited about the new car dealership I just opened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C.
It’s easy to find – just look for the big white house! If that doesn’t work, maybe we’ll add one of those floppy people with no backbone. No, not the Republican members of Congress – although I understand your confusion. I mean one of these:
This month, we’ve got a great deal on some electric cars and tanks… er, I mean trucks.
These babies will really protect you when the rioting starts! (The bad kind, not the tourists visits the J6 folks did.)
Now I know in the past I’ve said some disparaging things about electric cars. Like:
“Electric cars are good if you have a towing company.”
And I said electric car makers “are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” And that President Joe Biden sold autoworkers “down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax.” And promoting electric vehicles “was the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists.”
But that was before I met this fascist. I want you to meet my new manager, Elon.
He’s a great American… well, he’s South African, but potato/po-tah-toe, right? And he’s making these Teslas – it’s a company he founded! (Oh, sorry, actually, he didn’t start the company, he just invested in it, then wrested control from the founders and tried to claim credit for starting it. Hmm, that’s a situation that could never happen with our government.)
Let me tell you more about these beauties… they’re red, of course, to match my tie, and my hat. And Elon took inspiration from the German automakers to design them. You know, he takes a lot of inspiration from Germany… you might even say he spends most of his time doing a German salute.
And if you put these automobiles into self-driving mode, they’ll take control of the wheel and do all the driving, so you can focus on putting on your orange tanner and combing your hair into a nice cotton candy shape that covers your bald spots.
And the tires, they’re fully inflated… because just like with the economy, inflation is good!
I can put you into one of these babies for just $35,000… or five dozen eggs. You’d better lock down this deal before you get locked up for saying anything bad about me.
We also take trade-ins. Just push, pull, or drag Chuck Schumer down here and we’ll give you a real sweetheart deal, without any sort of negotiations at all, just like Chuckie did for me.
And if you buy now, I’ll throw in a free* pair of gold sneakers. (*you’ll just need to pay the fealty fee of $400… it’s standard for deals like this).
Come on down to Honest Donny’s car lot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You can take public transportation… wait, I probably defunded that because it’s “woke.” Maybe take a Cybertruck Uber. Unless it’s snowing.
A week ago, a winter storm dumped about 10 inches of snow on our fair city. Friday we got a couple more inches. Much to the delight of an early 90s one-hit-wonder Canadian reggae musician.
And much to my dismay.
I’m not a winter person. Never have been. Maybe it was growing up in Arkansas, which is warmer most of the time… combined with the fact when it DID get cold in the foothills of the Ozarks, our home’s only heat sources were three small propane heaters (one in the living room, one in the back bedroom, one in the bathroom). We couldn’t leave them on all night (for both safety and economic reasons) so when we got up in the morning, we had to strike a match, turn on the gas flow, light that sucker up and huddle around it.
Oh, and the bathroom only had a tub, not a shower. My dad paid a buddy to put one in, but it was installed in a different, uninsulated room at the very back of the house. Sometimes the water coming out of the shower head would turn to icicles (exaggerating a bit, but it sure felt chilly back there).
Never learned to ski. My few attempts were always on Midwestern hills with man-made snow, which turned to ice, which made falling a real treat. And I fell a lot!
But there’s a special place in hell reserved for those folks who say “If it’s already cold, it may as well snow. I like snow. It looks so pretty!”
Yes, it looks pretty for about an hour. Then you realize it’s all over your driveway. And the sidewalks. And the roads. And then turns into a gray, ugly mess that sticks around way too long. (BTW, “gray, ugly mess that sticks around way too long” is what Mrs. Dubbatrubba calls me.)
Yeah, snow in the winter is a real treat. The shoveling. The chance of busting your butt on a patch of ice with every step you take. With dogs, it’s even “prettier” when their pee turns half of your backyard yellow… and their poops are magically preserved in the snow. You never see that on anyone’s Instagram feed.
Oh, and you “just bundle up” people? You can join the “I wish it would snow” people in hell. Yes, layers help you stay warm. But it takes 20 minutes to gear up, and you wind up looking like the little brother in A Christmas Story.
I’ll take shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops any day of the year. (Yes, I know, I live in the wrong city.)
But the top reason I hate snow is this:
That’s my friend Vinnie’s wife’s car. Or it was her car. She’s OK. They live in Maryland, on a country road. Without snow, it’s two lanes wide. But when snow falls, it turns into single track… and when you turn a corner and there’s a FedEx truck barreling down the 20 m.p.h. lane going 40, there’s not a whole lot you can do.
People don’t wreck nearly as much in plain old “cold.” Snow creates all sorts of extra traffic issues.
I know I shouldn’t complain. Most winters, Cincinnati is pretty unscathed by heavy snowfall. That said, if you’re one of those snow lovers, you’re welcome to come to our house and take as much as you’d like from our driveway and yard. We’ll even throw in the doggie “presents” free of charge!
If you need me, I’ll be hibernating until I can play pickleball again.
You don’t even need a Mission Purse. You just need to take action.
Don’t take it from me, take it from my writing hero:
When you take action, you become the master of your universe.
“It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad… ” Damn straight! No one starts out as a master of their craft. It takes a lot of “bad” to get “good.” Don’t be paralyzed by the fear of “not good enough.”
“Action is hope”… and we could use more of that in our universe, to combat the Dark Side.
On Monday (“Festivus!”), I met a couple of friends downtown for happy hour. Because I’m a cheapskate, I parked at a spot off the grid, where there are no parking meters.
When I came back to the car, I found out my “Secret Santa” had left me a lovely present:
“A free upgrade to my car’s air conditioning? You shouldn’t have!”
“And a lovely glass mosaic too! You’re too kind!”
There was absolutely nothing of value visible in the car… and nothing of value in the glove compartment either, as my new friends soon discovered.
(I can’t believe they didn’t want my tire pressure gauge. Or the owner’s manual for a 2009 Honda CR-V. They’ll regret that later.)
Apparently this is the latest m.o. for “window shoppers” (per my new friends in the auto glass replacement business). They don’t have to see anything of value in the car. They just smash a window, quickly fish for goodies, then move on to the next unsuspecting victim. The car thief equivalent of a scratch-off lottery ticket.
So I saved about $9 in parking fees… and am out $250 for a new window. But tbh, it just as easily could’ve happened if I’d parked at a meter. Downtown was pretty much a ghost town that evening. And I’m not going to beat myself up when it’s the would-be thieves who deserve the punishment.
I hope your holiday season wasn’t quite as smashing!
Our “newest” car is 8 years old. Because I’m a cheapskate.
Our second newest was a 2014 VW Passat with nearly 110K miles.
For the past year or so, it’s been chugging oil like it was doing Valvoline keg stands at an Indy 500 frat party. Both the dealer and another VW repair shop told us we had two paths forward:
a. get a new engine (~$10K)
b. keep pouring oil down it’s gullet until we were doing it every week.
(So much for that vaunted German engineering… it’s pretty sad when repair shops say “yeah, that’s what happens with this model Passat at about 90,000 miles.”)
We chose Option B. But recently, it needed about $700 worth of repairs. I’ve been known to throw good money after bad before (never should’ve gotten swept up in that Beanie Baby mania…), but I do have my limits. This was the last straw. Time to dump the chump. But where? The thought of listing it on Facebook Marketplace made me break out in hives – I’m rarely on the Zuckerbook, I barely know how to use FB Messenger, and I didn’t want to spend every waking hour responding to queries. And I hate haggling.
I got on one of those “find out your car’s value” sites (Kelley Blue Book or Edmunds or ???) and plugged in the particulars. Given the car’s present state, it was probably worth about a grand. But the website also offered the opportunity to click a button and set up an instant appraisal with CarMax. I figured I had very little to lose, so I signed up.
Two days later, I was in their Cincinnati location. I sat down with a rep, answered a few questions, their tech took it for a test drive, and 20 minutes later I had an offer: $2,500. American!
I felt like this was the real-life version of Monopoly:
They did the paperwork, I signed over the title, and 10 minutes later I had a check in hand… and even though it was 17 degrees outside, I walked down the block to wait for my son to pick me up, as I was afraid they’d realize I’d sold them a lemon and want their money back. For once, I felt like the used car salesman, pulling one over on an unsuspecting customer.
I know CarMax isn’t in the charity business. I’m sure they’ve got some sort of algorithm that tells them they could sell our old hooptie (or, more likely, individual parts of it) for more than $2.5K. But when you go in hoping to squeeze a grand out of a beater, and wind up with 2.5 times that amount, it feels like winning the lottery. Especially when there was zero hassle, and it took less time than the last oil change.
Oh, and when I got home and was sifting through the detritus that I’d cleaned out of the car before I took it to CarMax, I realized I’d forgotten to remove my Band of Horses CD from the CD player. I called CarMax, they tracked the CD down, and my son picked it up on his way home from work later that week. Rock on!
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