I apologize for the lack of blogging the past few days, and if I said I’d been busy that’d be a lie- the truth is I just didn’t really get around to it.
So now that my laziness has been covered, it’s time to move on to other topics.
Sports Cars
In just a few short weeks, my brother will be turning 17. It seems like just yesterday that I was turning 17. How time flies. Anyway, when I was 17, my parents got me my first car, a silver Mazda Tribute V6. It was a great car, I named it Bentley, and we had good times until I rear ended Mabel on Halloween of that year. Now that my brother is that age, it’s time for his first car, and since he’s already been awarded his first speeding ticket, I don’t think there will be any V6 engine for him. The plan right now is for him to inherit Charlotte, the Honda Civic that runs like it’s brand new. That means, little old me will be buying my first car, and I have been looking into the Mazda RX-8. There’s a slightly used one I’ve got my eye on and it’s a real beauty. The great thing about this car is that even though it’s a sports car and you pay the price for that in gas mileage, it’s technically a four door car. See below.
The one I am looking at is black, just for the record- I’m not a fan of silver cars. Everything else, is the same though. So, those little wing doors are saving me about $80 a month in insurance. For you car buffs it has a 1.3L R2 rotary engine with a 6 speed manual transmission. It really is a true sports car. Wish me luck.
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Gad.
It’s midnight - on a school night, no less - and I’m just getting home from work. I’ve got 908 things on my plate for tomorrow, probably another 2 hours worth of work to do before crashing. The Official Wife® and Offspring® of Sedgewick are slumbering fitfully and I should be, but noooooo…. I have to check the various sundry blogs I frequent.
And into the abyss I go…
Dearest young Caitlin, you’ve opened the Seventh Seal of Judgements here; you’ve poured salt into the open, festering wound of male pride; you’ve put a lime wedge into the long graceful neck of the Sacred Mexican Beer Bottle of Testosterone. You’ve unleashed >insert drum roll hereGad, it’s great being an immature male at times…Sedgewick steps on his soapbox, clears his throat, and approaches the microphoneFeels good to finally get that out…insert lascivious grin here!<
Sedgewick hath opined.
Gad.
It’s midnight - on a school night, no less - and I’m just getting home from work. I’ve got 908 things on my plate for tomorrow, probably another 2 hours worth of work to do before crashing. The Official Wife® and Offspring® of Sedgewick are slumbering fitfully and I should be, but noooooo…. I have to check the various sundry blogs I frequent.
And into the abyss I go…
Dearest young Caitlin, you’ve opened the Seventh Seal of Judgements here; you’ve poured salt into the open, festering wound of male pride; you’ve put a lime wedge into the long graceful neck of the Sacred Mexican Beer Bottle of Testosterone. You’ve unleashed (insert drum roll here)…. Sports Car Talk! Don’t take this the wrong way, young lady, but I’m going to have to elbow you to the curb here… this is the purview of the male. This is our genre; this is our medium. Women can indeed own sports cars, but you guys are far too intelligent, far too responsible, far too everything-noble-in-life to think driving a sports car actually effects the impression formed by those around you.
Men? We’re knuckle dragging, supra-orbital-ridge-sagittal-crest-200cc-brain-vault morons that believe if we idle up to the stoplight with 500hp under the hood, the hottie in the Celica next to us will unsnap her bra RIGHT THERE!! and submit to drooly heavy petting with the smoldering volcano of virile manhood in the left lane.
We believe that!
So like a moth to flame, I’m drawn inexorably in to the topic, circling out of habit, being sucked into the deadly maw of opinion… it’s so late… I’ve got work to do… Must…not…opine….
Oh well. I fought it and lost. Sue me.
So sports cars, eh? Is there a more obvious metallic manifestation of the phallus on this American landscape than the sports car? (Okay, maybe the intercontinental ballistic missile… but I digress) Not that I’ve managed to rise above this petulant and immature expression of pseudo-manhood. Heck, guilty as charged! I’ve owned a couple and still get that tingly sensation in the nethers when I think of throttle-rocking something with more generative power under the hood than entire African villages can produce. But the honest, introspective side of me - the one that doesn’t watch Spice channel for the UFC reruns - begs to delve into the fascination with big engines in little cars.
Just like generations past, present and future, the goal was to seduce a mate on image over substance. You see, only a REAL man could handle 500hp. And like nearly every other male I knew, I believed (wrongly) that woman would naturally be seduced by the guy driving the loudest, fastest iron out there, mostly because she would know that his genes were strongest and he would rule the neighborhood much like the biggest baddest lion lords over the savannah…
For the record, I’ve owned Mustangs and sort-of a Camaro (long story… just go with me on this one). Further, a good friend’s dad had, at different times in his crisis-ridden life, a 911 Carrera Turbo and a Ferrari Testarossa (sweet merciful Lord above, thank you for Italian sports cars!!), the keys to which we would regularly pilfer for ‘cruising.’ The utility of these cars is murky at best. With enough cargo capacity to carry maybe a bag of Doritos, and ergonomics that could best equated to the Byzantine Era of physical torture, these things are, well, comical. The Porsche and Ferrari had no back seat, openly defying you to have more than one friend. Case in point - when we’d go cruising in the Ferrari, if we stumbled onto any nubile femme flesh that was dumb enough to be seduced by us, one of us had drive HER car (with HER ugly roommate riding shotgun). By the way, that was always him… he couldn’t drive an Italian stickshift. Sedgewick had it wired!!
The economy of driving one of these things is equally chuckle-worthy. His dad’s Ferrari cost him about a hundred bills - and two marriages. The monthly insurance bill on my Mustang was more than the car payment. It got ELEVEN miles to the gallon. Tires were like $130 apiece. So there I was, a college graduate (TWO degrees, mind you), just opening my bank account to the world, dumping currency everywhere for the ‘privilege’ of driving the beast. You can almost hear the stupid, can’t ya?
By the way, Caitlin, the RX8 is the mullet of sports cars, in my studied opinion. The mullet - an underrated hairstyle from the eighties (see also, Wikipedia) - had this great little ditty with it: “Business in the front, party in the back.” So it is with the Mazda product. Sexy and seductive body lines, sleek shape and angles all scream “I’ve got just too much for you!” But you open the hood and instead of seeing pipes and blowers and intakes, you see…
A Wankel.
Flashy body, responsible engine. The carmullet!
Aside: The word ‘Wankel’ cracks me up, mostly because it’s only two steps from ‘Wankel’ to ‘Wanker,’ and that’s just another word for ‘weiner.’ (Gad, it’s great being an immature male at times…
The idea behind the Wankel engine is pretty much genius - an EXTERNAL combustion engine with few moving parts is much more efficient and offers greater longevity. The practical application of the engine is, uh, difficult at best, especially for the young male who must compare his junk with all the other guys, mostly because efficiency and longevity just aren’t signs of a guy on the edge. Imagine yourself at the ‘hangout’ with all the other guys and you’re talking cars. When guys talk cars, it inevitably boils down to what you’ve got ‘under the hood’ (I know, I know… veiled sexual connotations abound here). This guy over here says he’s got ‘a Hemi’ and this guy says his 351 is ‘blown’ (Hehehe… he said ‘blown’). This guy has nitrous injection so “she really purr when I stick it to her…” Then they look at you and you proudly say, “I’ve got a Wankel!” You might as well have just said, “I wear lacy panties” for all the respect you’ve just earned. In fact, in male lingo, you’ve just admitted to having a tiny weewee and that your testes never descended into the scrotal luggage. Your friends now strongly suspect you are gay. Or at least transexual.
The sports car is the anathema to logic. It’s transportation, but limited to two people and no stuff. I know this now, benefitting as I do from many years of life experience. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want a big-engined rocket in my garage, but that lust is tempered by the need to have a car seat for the little one and room for groceries (a liberated man, I do the shopping and cooking in our nuclear unit). Oh, and I drive a lot, so I need some good mileage to keep me from selling my ever-loving-soul to the Arabians for a crude oil fix ever month. I say that now, but I didn’t say that then. So why didn’t I just wise up and trade the Mustang (or the Camaro) in for a sensible car, you ask?
–Sedgewick steps on his soapbox, clears his throat, and approaches the microphone–
The sports car allowed Sedgewick to be someone different, powerful, even DANGEROUS. At that point in my life, I wanted - needed - fellow humans to look at me and file me in their “There’s-no-telling-what-THAT-guy-will-do” category. (Feels good to finally get THAT out…
…except this is suburban America, and torquey, loud cars suggest atrophy of the brain parts, not endowment of the crotch parts. And as I have become sage with time, I have noted that the average female is less titillated by how fast you can drive, or how she must contort in the car to allow your fumbling hands to reach the bra clasp (oh, the joy of the ‘front loader’…), and is more seduced by the fact you don’t drive like an Andretti and your car can actually idle without setting off seismographs.
The sports car represents a male ideology that is equated with men desperate for attention, either to achieve their first mate or, later in life, to reclaim something they believe they’ve lost. Oddly, the older guys driving sports cars always seem to have hair extensions, tans and are undergoing botox treatments…
Confession #1: I drive a ’sensible’ car. Good mileage, good utility, and no threat to the sound barrier. I am at ease with myself, content to know that I won’t be scoring the 24 year old babes any more (The Official Wife® would be violently angry toward me if I tried). Oh I still love sports cars - on my desktop right now, I’m staring at the seductive lines of a Lamborghini Murcielago, a car that is worth almost as much as my house! - but I know I’ll probably never own one again. There’s a hint of wistfulness there, yes, but gas is $4 a gallon confound it! and I’ve got a mortgage to pay…and a kid to take to dance lessons…and groceries to ferry home….
Confession #2: In Bay Three of the Sedgewick Garage is a motorcycle. A liter bike. The speedometer on that puppy goes WELL past 150mph… but that’s another diatribe for another day… (insert lascivious grin here!)
Sedgewick hath opined.
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