0.2% the Cost and 100% an Upgrade. From a Honda Accord... to a Cart.
Car-free life in Spain can still involve wheels.
Within minutes of listing our Honda Accord Sport for sale online, the phone rang.
What followed was a battle of wills that will be sung about in the beer gardens of Valhalla for ages to come. On one end of the arena, I present to you my chainmail-clad wife who was at the summit of corporate dispassion, grimacing with rage at the forlorn path now behind her. She clutched my mechanical keyboard with fury, which she’d confiscated for being “too loud.” On the other end, some guy in a polo… wielding a Big Gulp. A man who resold cars across state lines for reasons we’ve yet to fully understand.
With all due respect to the lady, I was ordinarily the one to fight and negotiate for our interests because I’m an insane person. She isn’t.
But by the end of the “conversation,” had you asked me if Super Saiyan Mike Tyson personally visited and beat the shit out of this guy, I’d have nodded in the affirmative. With a tremor in his voice, he offered a couple thousand dollars less than what the car was originally purchased for brand new. SOLD!
Oh, I’d miss that car. We had so many experiences in it, like the time when an impatient imbecile nearly t-boned us at an intersection. Or when a man with abnormal pupil dilation tried to merge into us, forcing me to swerve and correct out of fishtailing. Or… uh, the time when a haranguing lunatic barely sideswiped my wife and ran her off the interstate. You’d think gangstalking assassins were hunting us, but no. Driving is America’s techno-barbaric program for its subjects to let off steam.
As a former subject, I no longer have an outlet to express my indignation — presently fixated on European cosmopolitanism.
Yes, I admit my mistake of going “car-free” in a “15-minute city” after moving to Spain. I fell for the liberal propaganda. I feel so “owned” now that grocery stores, restaurants, cafes, pubs, and clinics are a short walk away. I must honor the social contract or my neighbors will remember my face. At least I can hop on a 300 km/h train to a new city once I’ve exhausted their good will — or take a quick shuttle to the airport and reach anywhere in Europe within hours to maximize my carbon emissions.
In this socially-cohesive hellhole, my cortisol levels have plummeted to life-threateningly low levels. Without constant activation of my adrenal glands, how else will I channel my Orgone energy outward? I know of no other means than by chronic and disproportionate stress responses to arbitrarily unharmonious stimuli. These don’t exist in Spain other than in its bureaucracy.
Requesting appointments is unfortunately restricted to a secret cabal of magicians called gestors who pawn them on a black market known as Facebook Marketplace, so I’m suspended in limbo, unable to interface with one of the most irritating aspects of living here.
I’m in a state of crisis over the lack thereof.
Wait. Is this my one-third life crisis, then? Probably mid-life at best, based on how things are going so far. From what I learned in America, when a man has determined his future to be devoid of any meaningful impact or joy whatsoever, there is only one thing left to do. That is…
Buy a hot rod!
You can take a man out of America, but you can’t take the America out of a man. That’s why a certain convertible appeals to me. A vintage-style dedication to Aphrodite with all mechanical controls. That said, I’m the kind of man who cares for the environment. As you know, I spend so much time outside, enjoying all things Mother Nature: from the rocks upon which I could sprain one of my dainty ankles, to the spiders watching me with their multitudinous eyes, furtively grooming their neurotoxin-laced fangs. I wouldn’t want to recklessly disrupt the ecosystem.
That’s why, at first, I considered buying a Carice. Car-Reese. Get it? That’s how narcissistic I actually am.
This is a Dutch-made vehicle that Austin Powers would drive if he were thawed out again to save the world. (I wish he would.) Better yet, the Carice must be environmentally friendly, because there’s a huge lithium battery installed between the seats. Plus, whatever ecological impact is potentially involved in manufacturing this car would be limited to the Netherlands, not Spain. That’s how ecology works. Anyway, these stunners can be shipped all over the European Union, and they’re certified to drive in all of the member states.
I broached the subject of buying a Carice with my wife, but unfortunately she told me she’d take away more than my mechanical keyboard if I went through with the purchase.
A cheaper alternative was in order — without a battery.
We did in fact replace our Honda Accord with a cart. In Spain, this is called a carro, or the alternative cutesy naming is the carrito. The word used seems to depend on function and mood. To expand on that, carrito tends to describe strollers for bebés. Carrito de bebé literally means “cart of baby” — a baby cart.
Allow me to further confuse the hell out of you: I’ve heard Spanish speakers in Galicia sometimes describe my carro, which is for not-babies, as a carrito. From what I can infer, this is a casual choice of words. Teasing? Maybe. The diminutive ending “-ito” means smallness, but connotations can go beyond that. Meanwhile, much of Latin America invokes carro to describe a car, but not everywhere. In countries like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, auto is more common, or so I’ve read. There’s a lesson here: integration depends on internalizing the living nature of language.
Whatever nomenclature you prefer, for 1/1000th the cost of a Carice, I can now transport a grocery cart’s worth of frozen seasonal depression bites between my apartment and the store in a matter of minutes. There’s no fee for a parking space, insurance, or energy. Thus far, my four-wheel carro has required no maintenance to speak of. (Honestly, I should start a trend of ironically calling my cart an auto.)
Sometimes I wonder, had the oil and automotive industries not captured the American regulatory apparatus, if carros and carritos could be broadly viable replacements for cars there too…
That’s why, next week, we’re talking trains… in Spain! En España! And the profound lack of rail infrastructure, particularly of the high-speed variety, in America. It’s the Spainfrastructure post you’ve been waiting for, packed with cross-cultural inquiry, and my signature humor: the kind that isn’t funny to anyone except for me.