Oh, that's just great.

Okay, so I went to a candlelight vigil on Friday night, right? And it was nice, I guess, even though there were only three of us. And I spilled the candle wax a few times, which was fairly painful.

And on my way home, my car died.

I'm not particularly surprised. In fact, I'm surprised that my car (which I bought for $500 three years ago) ran as long as it did. But the fact remains that I'm now the proud owner of a non-working French automobile. And it's stranded a couple miles away from my home, which means I have to come up with some sort of plan.

Monty's Options

1. Get it fixed: This is the responsible thing to do. For all I know, it's a fairly simple problem that caused all the dashboard lights and other electronics to slowly fade out, followed by the engine coughing and dying. And after all, I've saved enough money by driving such an inexpensive car that I'm probably still ahead of the game even if it costs me hundreds of dollars to fix the car.

   On the other hand, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. The car has run fairly smoothly so far, but if things are going to start breaking, I don't want to be replacing transmissions and crankshafts every other month.

2. Get rid of it: If I tried hard enough, I bet I could find one of those cash-for-junked-cars places that would tow away my lousy car and give me a few bucks for my trouble. This would take away my immediate problem nicely.

   And then, of course, I'd have to get a new car. But I don't think I'd necessarily get one right away. I mean, I live two miles from my work, which I consider walking distance. And regardless of what people say, King County actually has a pretty good bus system. All that being said, though, I probably wouldn't make it more than a month or so before I got a car. But the important part is that I'd be getting a car when I wanted to, not when I was forced to by random circumstance. I'm not broke, but I really don't want to be shelling out the long green to either auto repairmen or salesmen right now.

3. Forget about the whole thing: You don't know how much I want to do this. One of my favorite lines in Stripes is "We're not parking it; we're abandoning it." There's probably a law against taking the license plates off the car and pretending it doesn't exist, but it would be so nice to look at a big problem and shrug and say "I'm sorry, but I choose not to solve this problem. Broken car? I don't remember a broken car."

   It's not practical. I know that. Tomorrow, I'll probably start making arrangements for moving my car from the residential street it's parked on (where I pushed it -- Peugeots are fairly light, and therefore easy to push) and get it to a repair place, where I have full confidence that they'll tell me that the car is irreparable.

I've had better weeks. But, you know, I'm sitting in a warm apartment with cable and Internet. I've got plenty of Coca-Cola (because I carried a twelve-pack a few miles from my downed car), and I'm thinking of making deviled eggs. I'm still ahead, overall. But that doesn't mean this doesn't suck.