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2004-03-15 @ 12:32 p.m.
checking out my trunk

So on Friday afternoon, when we were having a stretch of good weather, I decided to go clean out my car, since I knew that I was going to have an ad running in the newspaper shortly.

I don't have much storage in my house, so my car, has become somewhat of a second storage unit for me. A storage bin on wheels. A storage bin up over a gas tank with a gas leak. I like to live life on the edge. As in Whee! Bump! Kaboom!

No more storage problem!

But there was a lot of shit in my car. The whole floor in the back seat was completely covered with junk. Bags of books that I kept promising myself I would take to Goodwill, but never did. I had sold some of them to a used bookstore last Fall and had hoped to take the remaining ones to a different store but never did.

I really think an archeologist would have gotten a kick out of the various layers in the back seat of my car. I had the book layer. The clothes layer. The pottery layer.

I've actually been carting around some antique pottery in the back-seat...some Bauers, and some Halls since last summer. All in perfect shape.

I also had one hand painted pot which I had painted over at Married Guy's house last summer. I had surreptitiously used wifie's paints one morning when I was feeling creative, and painted a funky design on the outside of this rounded Spanish pot I had found at a garage sale and it looked pretty cool. Unfortunately, I had never unloaded it from my car.

There were also lots of papers and bills and receipts from my shrink and from graphics jobs I had did and from car repair work. And coins. Lots of coins! I do believe I've now gathered enough pennies and quarters to buy me a new Volvo! Yeehaw!

Of course, I hadn't opened the trunk yet. OY! The trunk just truly looked like someone had flipped the entire contents of junk yard inside the back of my car. It was horrendous.

And I'm not a dirty person. In fact, I'm actually rather clean-living, and obsessive about vacuuming. But the trunk was overflowing with so much stuff that I decided that I had to go get my out-to-the-curb garbage can. There were clothes from high school, more pottery, sheet music from Broadway shows, beads, overturned bags of birdseed, dirt, cat litter, old license plates, q-tips, cotton pads, tin plates, a survey about loneliness, baskets, a multitude of car fluids, about 4-5 snow brushes, a spare tire, an 8X10 photo I had taken of Robin Williams in San Francisco, a bamboo cane, binders, books, broken umbrellas, weapons of mass destruction, Jimmy Hoffa's body.

I don't even know how I was able to shut the damn thing. It took quite a while to clean everything out. I even drove my uninsured car over to the car wash place nearby and vacuumed the rest of the dirt out of the crevices.

Of course, cleaning my car, was sort of like dressing up an ugly girl for a prom. We still basically have a really crappy, damaged car with rust, a broken fender, a popped gas cap, a large damaged area where the CVS joint smashed through the wheel well, a hole worn through the back seat, two broken door locks, one door that won't open at all, air conditioning that doesn't work, a damaged gas line, an oozing radiator, but hey fella....will you give me...

FIVE HUNNA DOLLAS!!!

I have already started getting calls on my ad that "A" put in the newspaper last week. And I was a total wreck just before the first guy came over. I called my mom.

What am I going to tell him. I have to tell him the truth about everything, right? What do I do? I have a stranger coming to my house.

(there are actually multiple layers to this whole thing by the way)...anxiety about strangers coming to my house...anxiety about selling somebody something that I know isn't worth the amount I'm selling it for...anxiety about them not being happy and demanding their money back...anxiety about not really knowing what to do exactly, since I've never sold a car before.

My shrink did give me a general list about what happens if I should sell the car. The only thing I worry about is how do I get down to the DMV... without a car...to turn in the plates and how do I get the paperwork to my insurance person....without a car...and what if the person wants to drive the car away right then, when they first buy it...WHAT DO I DO? I don't know!

I want my Daddy!

Hard to believe I'm 46, huh?

I have had two men look at it so far. One guy just left. He rubbed his finger on the radiator and said "Your radiator is leaking, that's too expensive to fix. Bye."

Well, allrighty then!

The guy yesterday, was a little spookier. Kinda looked like the kind of guy you'd see biting heads off Rottweiler puppies. He arrived with a large smear of fresh blood on the back of his hand. (possibly the last girl who's car he looked at??)

He looked at the car pretty thoroughly, although he didn't finger the radiator. And I was standing there babbling like a freakin' idiot, mainly out of nerves I think. I tried to be as friendly as possible. But he didn't ask to negotiate or anything. He said he was looking at another car for $400.

So, I don't know "A". This selling my car for $500 thing, just doesn't seem like a good idea. There are too many things that can go wrong with it. Married Guy had suggested about a month ago that maybe I could sell it to a junkyard for parts and maybe get around $100. And then I wouldn't have to worry about explaining about the fact that my car got rear-ended in January...and the fact that my radiator may soon start leaking again...and the fact that my car may explode if a rock hits the gas tank.

With all this explaining I have to do or as I like to think of it...borderline lying, I'd rather just grab the $100 and run.

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