Blingity Bling

I can kind of understand the whole blinging out your car craze. Not entirely, but a little. But there are cases where I cannot understand it even one bit.

One thing that I've never got, but maybe had a breakthrough thought the other day, was the whole labeling your car with giant stickers proclaiming the make of your car. Whenever I see a crappy Honda Accord with a giant "HONDA" across the top of the windshield, or a huge Honda "H" on the hood (I saw a car with both the other day) I cringe. I never got it at all--it didn't make sense. But I had a thought, maybe they want it to look like a NASCAR race car. Maybe they want to feel like Honda is sponsoring their 1992 Honda Accord LX. I don't know if that's right, but it's the only thing I've come up with.

Now, the reason I started this post...this morning, on 77/Cedar Ave Northbound I saw a minivan. No big whoop, there are literally hundreds of minivans in the neighborhood I live in alone. Wait...I can't tell this until I tell about something else that happened over the weekend.

(Here's the crux of whether you hate listening to/reading my stories or love it: I feel an irresistible urge to give every detail and fill in every item of backstory I can for even the smallest anecdote I wish to tell anyone about. The main reason is that I'm kind of a details guy and it's the way I wish people would tell me stories; I love the little details. They're what make stories personal and unique. So love it or leave it, but it's the way I tell tales.)

So, Matt, Jenny, Luke, and I headed over to Wal-Mart the other day for some such thing. I can't remember what. On the way in I happened to notice a tire/hub cap display in the row of products lined up to entice people on their entrance to the store. The tire sitting there had this plasticky, chromed hub cap installed. But that's not it, it also had a spinner part. But this isn't your $1000 a wheel gold and silver spinner built into a 22" rim for some lowered, tricked out Escalade. This was a chromed piece of plastic that could spin attached to a rod extending out from the hub cap. It looked cheap, rediculous, stupid, and I struggled to think of what kind of person would buy these for their vehicle.

You may sense where this is going...

So I see this old Dodge or Chrysler minivan driving up Cedar Ave. But what made this minivan special was that on its tires were the spinner hub caps I just described. I wish I had been able to see who was driving. The thing that struck me was how worried I became while driving near that vehicle. The spinners looked like the spinning razor blades that would come out of the wheels of a spy car in an old James Bond movie. I was picturing the cheap posts snapping and the spinner parts rolling over the hood and roof of my car like a buzz saw.

That's the story.