I like my new car, but I’ve been in no mood to celebrate it. I’ll be blunt and inelegant. I can’t afford this new car. It’s a “mid-life crisis” purchase. I got the car that I can’t afford that I’ve been thinking about getting for four months so that I could feel like I got something I wanted. It’s textbook irresponsibility. It’s textbook repeating-one’s-mistakes. Seven years ago, I bought a Prius because no one had one yet, and I thought, after a long period of feeling like I was beyond the curve in all sorts of areas, having a distinctive, environmentally-aware vehicle put me ahead of a least A curve. I wanted my car to make a statement about me, since I wasn’t particularly pleased with anything else I could say about myself.

In 2009, I hardly think the type of car I drive wins me any points from others. It’s just for me. I had this cool car that had no horsepower but gave off almost no emissions and got 40 MPG, and I wanted another one. You’d think if I have so much insight into what my thought process has been, pun intended, I’d have resisted the purchase and opted for something more sensible. My old car really was dead to the point where investing in its repair would have been a pointless endeavor. But my reasonable desire to avoid car worries for several years and have a car that represented something about me could have been accomplished with a few-years-old Civic or Fit. I just had to go all out. I wanted the Insight. Heck, I wanted the EX (pricier) trim of the Insight. It has a USB stereo input, after all!

I am admitting all this for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me right now. It doesn’t help me to let the world know just one more way that I’m an idiot. Unlike most people I know, I don’t think much about saving for retirement or planning for ten or five years from now…or one year from now…or one month from now…because I just can’t imagine a bright future for myself. So I’ll buy a car I like that I can sort-of afford at the moment, even though there’s no way I’ll be able to afford it should dialysis start kicking my ass in a couple of years and I have to curtail my work hours…or if that starts happening in a couple of months.

Anyway, so asinine decision-making and health-tangent aside, here’s the chronology of my automobiles:

December 1992 – June 1996 : 1986 Chrysler LeBaron (sedan)
June 1996 – July 2002 : 1993 Honda Civic
July 2002 – May 2009 : 2002 Toyota Prius
May 2009 – ???????? : 2010 Honda Insight

Toastie’s Prius
July 29, 2002 – May 19, 2009
117,800 miles

I was told there was an electrical short. It would have needed a new inverter and catalytic converter. I don’t pretend to understand how all that stuff works. I had to believe the diagnosis from the dealer, since the local mechanic I had gone to couldn’t tell me diddly. The repair cost would’ve exceeded the car’s value. So I had little choice but to give up on it, even though Toyotas and Prii ought to last a lot longer than seven years

Of course, I had plenty of choice in what to replace the Prius with. I’ll get into that another time, as that’s related to an internal monologue I’ve been having with myself about cars for the past four months. Also, any sympathy I gain from the sad tale of my Prius will surely be lost when I try to justify how I decided upon my new mode of transportation.