Let's be clear about this: You are not a "gearhead." The closest you ever came to working on a car engine was when you broke a PlayStation 2 controller playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and duct taped it back together before the cops could bust you. You're so out of touch with car culture that if someone glued a dream catcher to the front of a Hyundai and told you it was a vintage Mercedes, you'd not only believe them, you'd pretend you already knew that. Everyone already knew that. What kind of idiot wouldn't know that?
But that doesn't matter, because this will happen to you anyway. You will go on Craigslist and see a BMW M5 that costs roughly three times the budget you allotted to yourself, and you will do some research and see that it's hilariously expensive to maintain. But it will speak to something inside you, something that has been asleep for years, something that feels strange and exciting and more than a little confusing, so you'll go test drive it anyway, and it'll go like this:
You climb into that leather seat, trying to hide how self-conscious you feel. You shift into third by accident while you're still in the owner's driveway and then mumble some excuse about how you're just checking to see if the clutch slips. Then you start making faces that you hope look like they're coming from thoughts like "I wonder if the crank is shafting" and "How's the tranny?" Finally, you're on the highway, and you really get that machine moving, and it is the greatest thing you've ever experienced. You burn through the cynicism from this article's intro faster than this 4.9-liter V8 engine burns through expensive synthetic motor oil.
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"Hey look, my bank account's empty."
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