My poor, poor autocar.

    State Farm Insurance company’s claims adjuster did one quick lap around the corpse and pronounced it “99.9%” totaled. Which is wierd, because the seats seemed fine and they account for more than 0.1%, right? Splitting hairs, I suppose, and I take his point.
    My brother-in-law, Scott, is the manager of the auto shop where the little yellow car spent its last days in repose and he retrieved my personal affects from the poor thing. In so doing he tells me that he found the dashboard was split down the middle and even the back doors are now crooked. This means the entire structure of the car is twisted, and not feasibly repairable. State Farm and Ford Motor Credit had a little talk and, subsequently, my lease agreement–and the underlying vehicle leased thereby–have both now evaporated into the ether from which all credit comes and goes.
    So now I have no car. And, according to my insurance company, I’m darn-near uninsurable because of two tickets I already had on my record prior to the accident. I’m a menace, apparently, and for once I’m not talking about my seditious perversity. In Michigan you are not allowed to drive without car insurance, so I’m not quite sure what to do next. I’ll keep you posted as I figure it out.
    Here’s some more pictures of the Focus. Click them to go visit Flickr, where you can see them enlarged if you should so desire.

    Here’s one last picture, and its my favorite. Look closely; can you see the car battery? How about the driver’s side windshield wiper?

    Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, too.

* A “beater” denotes a very inexpensive car, normally aged and with high mileage, which usually would represent no great loss if destroyed. Typically you would put minimal insurance on such a thing, making it affordable for dangerous people like me to continue terrorizing the public grid.

** The saddest part of this accident is that I’d always assumed my car would last a long while. My lease was only two years, but I had some solace in knowing it would be sold to someone else and continue its life without me. By wrecking the thing in its prime I not only lose its use to me, but I also lose it for all the people who would’ve owned it after me. Plus I put several thousand pounds of metal and plastic into a junk yard, which is not ecologically the best place for it.