The Trouble with Cars, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Style

Cars had a way of disappointing you. That clunky old beast of a Dodge Aries, year 1989, that often acted like a grumpy old woman: all blue hair, refusing to move when it was cold outside, grunting and wheezing when prodded, and occasionally emitting sparks of rage when pushed too far. Some days you had to hold the door shut while driving because ice had a way of building up inside the latch. Then, the passenger side door stopped opening altogether. Eventually it decided that life wasn't worth living anymore. You agreed, and sent the old biddie off to the junkyard, now $50 richer. A long deserved death penalty for the deer it heartlessly murdered 4 years prior.

Then the devil took the blue dress off and showed its red side. The Jetta blazed into your life and all was good with the world. The car you'd always dreamed of, complete with a CD player just as they were becoming obsolete. For one summer, you felt like you were actually driving a vehicle instead of a continuously malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine. Then the water heater exploded over 100 miles from home. After that, the Jetta became a fickle contraption, stranding you in the middle of parking lots, highways, bridges; simply stopping and refusing to start up again for what felt like hours. You cried on the phone to your mother. Mechanics were baffled. Finally, a miracle happened -- the death trap was repaired and a nice man from South Carolina took it off your hands for a pretty penny. You even found yourself the next car you'd always dreamed of -- a cute little Saab with a sun roof.

You soon realized, however, that you should learn from your mistakes, and that for some reason you have a strong attraction to completely unreliable vehicles. After pouring hundreds, near thousands of dollars into this new piece of machinery, it came time for inspection. You put it off for months, not wanting to know the extent of the damage -- to your car, your emotional well-being, your wallet. It sat dormant in your driveway, looking like a lost explorer, frozen and buried in the arctic tundra of western Massachusetts. After deciding to be responsible, you drove the sputtering car, illegally, to the repair shop, and were unsurprisingly unsurprised at the cost of owning a shitty vehicle.

But something wonderful had happened over the past few months. You discovered that you didn't need a car anymore. That you were tired of spending your money on things that were continually disappointing you, shooting flames into your face, and trying to murder you by stranding you on public highways, like one of those villains that ties pretty women to train tracks. You knew what you had to do, but weren't sure how to do it:

Do you:

1) Sell your car for whatever its worth, which is probably only $500 or less. Go to page 53

2) Trade your car for a woman's classic cruiser bicycle on craigslist. Go to page 100

3) Just donate the damned thing and try to get some good karma for once. Go to page 84, and probably to heaven