Dammit.
I was going downtown today to pay off the remainder of my speeding tickets. I had just pulled onto the highway after getting a full tank of gas. About ten miles up, one of my spark plugs started to pop. I was like “Damn. Now I’m on three cylinders,” but my car is small and sporty, so I had enough pep to keep going at highway speeds until I could stop and fix the cap. Then I started losing more power. Then, a second plug started to pop. I was barely pulling myself at this point, so I pulled off on Eastwood Trafficway, and was crawling down the road looking for a nice place to pull over. Suddenly, a muffled Boomf! Smoke billows out my exhaust, and out of my hood. I pull into a driveway and open the hood and take off the oil fill cap. Smoke pours out.
Yes. I blew my engine. Those weren’t plugs popping, no siree. Thems was rods knockin something awful.
Lesse… I sunk fifteen hundred bucks into rebuilding that engine only TWENTY THOUSAND MILES AGO! I spend two hundred bucks last month on new struts, and four hundred on new tires. I spent countless man hours, me and my dad, working on this thing, building it from the ground up. Custom install on the stereo. Bra. Blackouts, front and back. New everything. Battery, alternator, starter, ignition coils, O2 sensor, thermometer, valve job, ring job, new clutch, new ignition cap, every sensor, every gauge, every detector, every piece of electronics or electrics in that car was new. What can I get for all this? Like a hundred bucks, salvage.
Fuck it. Every time I think I’m going to get out of debt, EVERY TIME, something else freaking happens. I pay off my parents, my clutch goes out. I pay off my parents, my engine goes out. I rebuild it, and I pay off my parents, I get two speeding tickets. I pay them off, my tires go bad. My stereo gets stolen, the interior gets trashed, and the igntion goes bad. I fix all that, and I pay off the new tires, I need new struts. I pay them off, now my damn ENGINE BLOWS AGAIN! What do I have to do to get ahead? I though I was DONE fixing this car. I could start saving and get a new one, a nicer one. Dammit. This thing is a freaking money pit. I love the car, but I cannot keep sinking money into it. My parents won’t cosign for a loan. I have no credit, and I refuse to spend ANOTHER three months and fifteen hundred rebuilding ANOTHER engine. So I’m fucked. WHY can’t anything ever go my way? I just want a nice Talon, or Eclipse. Maybe, maybe, an older 3000GT. Shoot, I’d settle for a 91 Z24 convertible, or an 89 Mustang GT convertible. Even coupe! I make enough money to pay off at LEAST a two fifty a month car payment, I could pull three if I had to. I get twelve hundred back a semester from scholarships, and I have a huge tax refund coming in a few months. But I’m eighteen, and I haven’t deemed it necessary to get a credit card. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been with the same bank for four years. It doesn’t matter that they see how much money I have moving in and out of my account. No, I don’t have a damn number with a damn agency that says “He’s good, boys. Let’s shove cash his way.” And my parents won’t cosign, they have five kids. Why do they need the burden of making sure I am up on payments. So I’m up a creek.
Why me? That engine, that car, has been meticulously maintained. Car go boom. Money ga down-da hoe-wl. I have to go to work again starting Wednesday. The eleventh is when classes start. So my smart deadline is two days. My fatal deadline is a week or so.
So go ahead, pull out your slings and arrows folks, attack the big spoiled racist whiny baby who doesn’t get his way. Karma, they say, it’s all karma. I’ll just sit here and cry.
–Tim