| Tuesday, June 21, 2005 |
10:41 - Get my car out of my dreams
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So it was that early this morning I was driving the car down a winding country road, two dogs in the back seat (we were coming back from a dog show), when the Check Engine light came on. "Oh great," I thought to myself. "Here we go again."
Then, to the left of that light, a fairly high-resolution red LED display—which had never before been active, it being a luxury feature only available on the GLX model, or so I'd thought—lit up with a three-frame animation of a turkey waving a handkerchief. This puzzling apparition cycled for a few seconds.
Then, in an intricate and filligreed (and yet low-resolution) Teutonic font that I haven't seen since shareware video games I used to play on my 386, the message APOCALYPSE IMMINENT appeared within the instrument cluster, on the central display above the turkey.
I'd been told recently that when this happened, my car's vacuum system—which is evidently the equivalent of Johnny Five's battery fluid in Short Circuit 2, the component whose failure indicates the complete and irreparable death of the entire machine—was on the immediate verge of collapse. And yes indeed, the apocalyptic warning was then replaced by a countdown: 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Then the engine sputtered and whined into silence; I put in the clutch and started coasting. The road and countryside faded away into black around me, with little chinks of light getting in here and there as I coasted on, like in one of those sheds you often are pulled through on a roller coaster just before it clanks its way up the primary incline. The roadway sloped up and to the right, curving away, hiding any possible exit; but in less than fifteen seconds, the car emerged—just as the last of its momentum ebbed away from it—into a parking lot, overgrown with eucalyptus trees, behind a shabby old service garage surrounded by the haunting hulks of dead Volkswagens, their grilles grinning at me like skulls.
Then Capri stuck his nose in my ear and whined for me to wake up and give him his morning walk.
This is really getting tiresome.
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Brian Tiemann
