To the owner of the tricked-out Geo Tracker I encounter on my evening 7th Street/Broadway commute:

What in the fuck did you do to your car.

I’m willing to let the “Showtime! Hydraulics” plastic you’ve got for a back window slide because hey, if you’re willing to shill some company in 19-degree weather, I am not the one to tell you any different.  I am moderately less okay with the bizarre scene you have airbrushed on your hood.  Is that a nebula?  A coral reef?  A jungle at twilight?  What could those blues and purples wreathed by inky black and bursts of starlight twinkles be?  Please don’t tell me its an abstract vagina; I know they come in all shapes and colors, but that’s a shade I’d rather not imagine.  Shockingly, your declaration of preference in hydraulic mechanics and your choice in vehicular art are not what most concern me about your obviously very hardcore Geo Tracker.  They are merely cosmetic and, besides giving me something to sneer at after work, do not affect my drive home.

What concerns me most are your wheels.

I don’t even know the technical term and I’m reluctant to Google it, but it’s like…they’re tilted?  It’s like you stole a set of pencil eraser wheels from a Bulgarian Yugo knockoff and shoved them onto your Geo Tracker all wrong.  The tops of the wheels are closer to the center of the car than the bottoms of your wheels.  It’s like you’re driving some sort of trapezoid!  A janky, ghetto, cross-eyed trapezoid!

Your wheels most certainly affect my drive home.  Probably it has something to do with the fact that your wheels do not sit flush with the road, and instead (and I assume it’s their fault, because what the fuck else could it be) are put-putting along at a wonky sort of lean, and this causes your Geo Metro to never exceed speeds of 22 miles per hour.  Trust me: I’ve been stuck behind you several times now, so I’ve had time to test this.  From the time you chug onto 7th from Sidney to the time I turn off Broadway at Osceola, leaving you to piss off the entire line of people trying to get onto I-55, you remain an almost impossibly slow reminder that some aspects of automotive construction should not be modified, no matter how many problems Xzibit has with his taxes.

And it looks like you’re bouncing around in there!  Is it the Showtime! Hydraulics?  Do they make it impossible for you to remain firmly in the driver’s seat while cruising along at a cool 20mph while everyone else is trying to get home?  Being forced to watch the back of you drive home is like watching a mentally challenged kid on a go-kart track.  It’s a little bit sad, a little bit amusing, but mostly I just want to shove you into the passenger seat and show you how to fucking drive.

I’m not trying to be mean.  I once owned a 1987 Volvo that refused to go above 35 mph and died when making complete stops.  Dude, I know from shitty cars.  I know what it’s like to have some jackass in a brand new Explorer bear down on you while you beg your car to just get up the next hill, and please do it at more than a crawl.  But my Volvo was shitty because it was old – your car is shitty because you paid someone to make it that way.

My request is that you find an alternative route.  Broadway is wide with relatively few stoplights; it was made for the smooth flow of traffic.  As your supafly Geo Tracker was customized to impede this, I wonder if maybe you could maybe hang a right on Chippewa and travel south on the state streets?  I seriously doubt you’d get carjacked.  You can just put-putt along from stop sign to stop sign, bouncing in your seat and thinking about what an excellent investment you made.

Seriously buy a bike or something.

Sincerely,

Erin

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Since I doubt anyone obsessively checks my blogroll for new additions, I thought it prudent to notify you of the newest addition: French Letters Music dot com, the new site for my friends’ band, the French Letters!  3/5ths of this band are my friends from St. Louis who moved to Seattle, met a talking boy and another guitarist, and recorded an EP available for free download.  FREE DOWNLOAD!  I highly recommend being cool enough to own it.