ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Well, tomorrow we’re going to go pick up the new Rabbit. Which means that we are trading in my old car and I will never see it again after tomorrow unless something crazy happens like they are offended by it and won’t take it. And it’s not like it’s a freaking Daewoo or something, so I should be fine. We expect to get around $500 for it.

My old car used to be rather nice until I worked for the payday loan company and transferred to Kansas City and had to park on a busy street where people rear-ended it on a regular basis and side-scraped it around twice a year. And for that reason, I’ll admit I’ve been horrifyingly lax when it came to keeping it clean. I guess I kind of felt like, what was the point?

Well, now I have a point. I want it to look cosmetically as good as possible to counterbalance the fact that it could begin to have major mechanical issues, like, any minute now. So Wednesday night I went through it with a trash sack and started pulling freaking everything out of it, shopping bags, shoes, books, CDs, Jimmy Hoffa’s cremains, etc, etc. And I found some stuff I thought I’d lost. Like $5.45 in change. And my David Bowie greatest hits two disc set. And this Hello Kitty pen someone gave me a long time ago. Then last night I took the upright vacuum outside (since we don’t have a ShopVac and I’m offended at paying the carwash to get to vacuum my own car) and my boyfriend helped me hold it up so I could vacuum like 150 pounds of crap out of it. And I scrubbed out every nook and cranny with a wet rag, too.

Tonight was the night I was most looking forward to, however. Carwash night. My car is a bit crappy by now, so I haven’t bothered to wash it in quite a while. Like a year, maybe. But my boyfriend and I decided to take it to the automatic carwash down by 26th & Merriam to give it a good cleaning up before its final sendoff. We paid $8 for a deluxe wash that intimidated the hell out of us. And when I say this, don’t mistake my meaning. It was the singularly most terrifying car wash I have ever experienced. And it was all in the brush. But really, when I say brush, I mean tentacles. It was some kind of faux chamois rubbery thing with a lot of big fat tentacly looking things and the way the mechanical washer worked was, it would slap this thing down hard on one end of the car and drag it fore to aft, and when you are sitting inside looking up through the windshield you can almost imagine that you are being digested alive by a giant squid. Except for the part where in real life you would be screaming in pain from all the neurotoxins and stuff. But it was kind of cool in that scientificicky nerd way. Like if you are the kind of person who would go into a museum and think it was cool to get to walk through a giant replica of a human colon, you would have enjoyed this experience. If you’re that type of person, I highly recommend this car wash to you. Don’t use the bays where you have to do it yourself. Pay $8 for the deluxe wash. You won’t be sorry.

Talkin bout the car wash yeah!