Burnout Sanders, the automatic burnout-performing robot that campaigned and won the presidency, was busy trying to make the Presidential Seal golf cart leave some elevenses in the White House lawn with three-fifths of a horsepower while I dealt with Syria.
The last stack of $9.93 thirteen inch tires sat between us, a deal so great that it bent the limits of imagination. I thought of the message I had sent to my once-friend about it, before leaping in the car. What I never considered was that he would be in the area, which was bad enough, and might even have a little…
When you raise a child, that child learns your biases, your preconceptions, your patterns. If you’re not careful, you can repeat the mistakes of the past in perpetuity, drifting hate forward into future generations. It should have come as no surprise that the same was true with the other sentience that we had birthed.
I was an ordinary person once before, I yelled through the woven-Kevlar window net at the wide-eyed librarian. Some sound tried to escape her mouth, but it was muted into nothingness by the pounding exhaust note of the zoomies. Explaining myself was pointless but I had to keep trying, I told myself as I slotted easily…
When I was a child, I thought I knew what truth was. It laid in science textbooks, it laid in order, it was embedded in a glorious structure that one day man would know whole, forwards to backwards. Then I fell in with the snake handlers.
When you love your work, you never work a day in your life. I definitely loved my work: I felt a pull toward it. Helping people had always been my jam, and I guess this fell out as a natural consequence of that. Today, the phone bank was busy, and the call centre could not keep up with it. I had to step in and handle…
I was firmly in the grip of Cressida Madness. Reaching from deep within the bowels of Toyota City, their rangy fingers latched onto my hesitant heart with a combination of aspirational luxury and the common-man’s oh-so-desirable reliability.
They told me when I put down the rubles for a gently used Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise-missile submarine I couldn’t make any money off of my investment. But they were still stuck in the old economy, before the advent of our Holy Mother Airbnb.
When I was a kid, just fresh out of school, I got a job at a local vending machine company. My job was to track down the non-compliant vending machines and retire them. I liked to call myself the Blade Runner, but my boss later told me that there was a corporate policy against giving yourself a bad-ass science fiction…
The Viper has actually done us a major service in removing the kind of people who would own a Viper from public society. When the car was announced they appeared unbidden at the gates of Dodge dealerships across the country, rubbing their blood-stained hands against the immaculate window glass until a salesman came…
I could see a thin wisp of smoke rise from the ECU, and it smelled like victory. I released the alligator clamps from the battery terminals and sank to my knees. It was over. The final chapter had been written, and good old-fashioned humanity was victorious in the end.
On my tombstone they will carve, IT NEVER GOT ECONOBOX ENOUGH FOR ME. I was a slave to those small engines, those dizzying peaky horsepower numbers lower than the fuel economy sticker, those Macpherson Struts. I’m getting sweaty just thinking about it. But mopeds? That was a bridge too far, or so I thought.
“The moms of soccer are yelling to me, do not like how my race car shopping trolley handles in store,” said Mr. Cho, grimacing, pronouncing soccer with a hard K. “In home country, soccer mom are happy to have all organs.” I was never able to figure out just what Cho’s “home country” was, but over the years I came to…
Wikipedia defines the 4-53T as the single most delectable engine to ever be devised by human hands. I’m not one to argue, though I will get a little bit salty once that jerk bot reverts my edit again. You could say I had a long running love of the Detroits, but that love was about to be put to the test.
As you may already know, I worked with a brilliant inventor for many years, and I once slaughtered his sentient self-healing tires in an unthinking orgy of burnout bloodshed. But there’s another story about him, and I feel like it’s prudent to share it at this time, before this preliminary hearing ends. Please ignore…
When we were at the self-service junkyard last, I checked in the trunk of a Camry. I’m a snoopy sort by nature, and I like to imagine what the lives of the people who owned these doomed hoopties were like, present when the cars took their last compression strokes out on the road, as free vehicles.
It was true what they said. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. Sometimes the abyss is an aftermarket axle manufacturer. My ears rung and my vision swam as I lifted myself out of my six point restraints. I probably had a concussion, but you should have seen the other guy.
Some things you see never leave you. They settle down deep in your marrow, inform your worldview. Your experiences push you through the rest of your life on a trajectory of fate that you can only see in retrospect, the stunning clarity at last possible when you are no longer able to correct the mistakes, make things…
The Ramcharger and I had somewhat of a bond, I guess you could say. It would tell me secrets of the car world, the behaviours of steel, the state of tune of each of its eight copious cylinders, the crisp taste of cold, dense air speckled with morning dew being hoovered down its long, straight intake runners. Today,…
The Civic next to me is filled to the brim with high school kids, bristling with excitement about life and their potential as fully-formed adults in our glorious society. However, the driver has made one fatal mistake, which on this night will alter the course of their lives forever.
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