[MikeMcMo]

Hi everybody.

I need your expert help to justify the purchase of a Boxster. Here are the factors.

My first car was a used Datsun 280Z, the last of the breed before they got soft and cushy with the ZX models. I gave up my motorcycle habit when I got married 17 years ago and had kids, because that made sense. Ten years ago we got a Honda Odyssey, which has been great at what it does, but it’s, you know, a minivan. (Vanity plate reads “I CAVED.”) We will keep that for a few more years, and my wife has her Prius for her 30 mile commute, which we will also keep.

How do I justify having a third car? We don’t even have a garage- we live on the edge of Chicago and park our cars in the street. I’m not worried about having a 15 year old Boxtser on the street- people park brand new $45,000 cars on the street year round with no problem. I have been a good boy and I do my work and I pay my taxes. Do I deserve a Boxster? Life is short. We have a neighbor my age with cancer 3 doors down, a mother of two young teenagers, and her days are numbered in the double digits. I think of what that family is going through, and how do I justify a big toy that will take me back to my adolescence? Life is short, and my number may come up next, is that it? Two years ago I had my own cancer scare, and it turned out to be a misdiagnosis- what if next time it isn’t? And speaking of adolescence, my oldest son is 6 months away from driving. It would be good to have a stickshift on which to teach him that art and science, though, knowing my own history, I would never let him drive a Boxster alone anytime before his pre-frontal cortex is fully developed and out of reach of the hormone hurricane.

Honestly, this is my mid-life crisis mobile. And honestly, now that I have hit 50, I feel like the minute I buy a Boxster I will be a walking cliché. I don’t even want to be seen driving the thing, and may not even tell my brothers or friends about it. I refuse to even look at any red Boxsters. (If I could get an accent over the E, maybe I would have the vanity plate “CLICHÉ.”) On the way back from test driving a bunch of Boxsters today, I saw an old chubby guy struggling to get out of his Boxster to gas it up. I thought about going over to ask him how he liked his car, but I couldn’t decide what was more pathetic, me going over to chat with him, or just the fact of the guy clutching at his own lost youth himself. But I need to get a car that makes my heart beat a little faster when I get in and turn the key.

In fact, tell me what you think it means that I want to have this be a *secret* car. I’m thinking of renting a neighbor’s garage space off the back alley, and not even have my kids know about the car, and see how long I can keep that up. I will tell my wife to ignore any big chunks that happen to fall out of our checking account, and she will probably be fine with that, and if it’s out of sight, it will be out of mind. Because it’s just ridiculous for us to have 3 cars. What the hell does THAT mean, that I want it to be a secret car? I am in a community with its share of underprivileged people, and though it doesn’t seem to bother a lot of other people around here, this kind of purchase would fall squarely in the realm of conspicuous consumption.

I thought about getting something like a Mini, something halfway fun to drive (until I started test-driving Boxsters) but somehow that would be harder to justify in a different way. A car with more than two seats would make one of our other cars somewhat redundant, whereas if I get a two seater, it is clearly its own thing, in its own category. If I got a car that was kinda useless for anything else but for me to have fun with it, we would still need to hang on to the minivan. I just wouldn’t have to drive it around, except when it was full of people.

Your thoughts please?