Raccoon Toons

I have a car. It’s a wonderful little car, and I like it. It’s also old. And kind of falling apart. And kind of held together by duct tape…

I inherited my little gold sedan from my father who drove it to and from work everyday. It’s been a good car over the years, despite it’s increasing age. Little things have started to fall apart. The first thing to go was the visor over the front passenger seat. It falls off. Usually into the lap of whoever is my date that night. It scares the crud out of them and isn’t a bad little conversation point which is probably why I haven’t bothered to fix it.

The next thing to go was the sunroof. It use to open AND close. Truly a marvelous piece of invention. These days it will only “vent” and close. It only opens or closes completely if you use one hand to put constant pressure on the glass while the other hand continuously presses the open button, which by the way, I’ve decided isn’t a good idea while driving.

Interestingly enough, my sunroof’s permanently closed state doesn’t seem to prevent it from leaking water on me. It always comes as a bit of surprise, and only happens when I make left turns. The point of drip of course, is right in line with the driver’s left eye, so if you’re not careful you’ll get a flood of dirty rain water in your face just as you’re turning left to go buy more milk from the grocery store. A towel in the backseat is good preparation.

The next part of the car to collapse was the handle in the passenger seat. My friend Jeff is a rather large man, and accidentally pulled it completely off when we were headed to Spanish class one morning. He felt pretty bad about it. I just laughed. But repairing that proved to be a simple fix, so that one is no longer an issue.

The interior roof sags like your grandmother. Sometimes it almost reaches the driver’s temple, but I’m not a terribly tall man, so that is less of an issue for me. It also has some holes in the padded ceiling, due to when I accidentally scratched it with my music binder during that time I was taking singing lessons. Yeah, I took singing lessons. What’s it to you??

The next little disaster was when my driver side mirror somehow magically jumped off of the car (I’m sure that pillar had nothing to do with it). It took some creativity and a healthy dose of Shoe-Goo, but I managed to readhere it to the side of the car. There was also some duct tape involved.

Finally, someone decided it would be fun to break one of the back passenger windows while my car slumbered in the driveway one evening. It has since been replaced with a sleek and sexy piece of cardboard which I glossed with packing tape to weather the infrequent California storm. I drew a cartoon on it. It looks lovely.

So you may laugh at my car when you see me driving down the road. Dates may think twice about entering its domain, or cringe at the musty smell of wet interior. You may find my car laughable. You may poke fun at its lack of power windows. You may think it’s dingy, or just plain old. But I would disagree. It gets me where I need to go, and I think it has character. So there.

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We have a contest winner!!! Drum roll please! ………………………..

Congratulations to Robert Slye of Los Altos, CA! Robert is our randomly selected contest winner and will be featured in an upcoming Raccoon Toons comic strip!!