My dad handed down his Merkur XR4Ti (yes, it had a double spoiler), and the day after I earned my license I smashed into the back of a Cadillac. It was piloted by an elderly couple on their way from Florida to Chicago to see their only granddaughter’s high school graduation. They yelled at me, but good. Old people suck.

This time it wasn’t my fault.

I was heading home from a fantastic evening with the woman I’m seeing. We had been to a musical and, on the way home had missed our exit, ending up about a dozen blocks south of where we were supposed to be. As I drove into an intersection a car traveling the other direction decided to turn just left in front of me. He was supposed to yield to my car, naturally. He did not. I slammed into him at a pretty solid clip. Well over twenty miles an hour. I think I had time to jump on the brakes but I’m not sure.

Strangely, I wasn’t afraid in the seconds before the crash. I felt an immediate adrenaline rush as the two cars became one. It didn’t feel, however, that we were ever in danger. We collided and my hood crumpled. Mind you I drive a huge old lady car. A 1999 Jaguar XJ8 that my parents were nice enough to gift. It’s a tank. But now it was smashed to shit.

His vehicle went spinning across the intersection and ended up about thirty feet from mine. I checked to make sure Beth was okay (she was), and I got out of the car. I yelled over to the guy, “Hey, I had the green light!” He yelled back something unintelligible. I was angry. The red dissipated immediately as I realized the experience was over. My car was fucked. So was his. That made me feel a little better.

Thankfully a cop had been cruising by at the same time and pulled over. That started the lengthy and boring process of waiting for the police report. The fuzz talked with me for a minute asking what had happened. It was clear that the fault lay with the other driver.

A slimy pickup truck operator had been listening to the police scanner’s accident channel and showed up within minutes. He eventually won the business of the other driver. The cop told me not to use a private tow service as my insurance has their own vendors.  I was on the phone with the insurance company for about thirty minutes and then their roadside assistance team.

During much of this time Beth was trapped inside the front-passenger seat. The side panel had crumpled back and blocked the door’s ability to open. She eventually slid out and bullshitted with the cops and tow jockey. She stayed faithfully there and kept me in good spirits. It would have been easy to steal away into a cab, but she didn’t. That’s a good woman.

The other driver was cited for failure to yield and then the cops left the scene. We were alone again, waiting on the tow. Thirty minutes went by, and since it was a little chilly we huddled into the backseat. It was kind of romantic in a weird way. It felt like we were far away from the accident and we snuggled up. She kept me calm.

There was one problem when the tow truck arrived.

I had a big purple vibrator in my trunk. Oh, and six packages of lube. The fine people at Trojan had loaded me up at the BlogHer conference a few months back. I always take free stuff, but I never knew what to do with any of these particular goods. At the time I had deposited it into the trunk and never again moved the contraband. The tow truck driver asked if I had any personal belongings I’d like to take with me.

He had a garbage bag in his truck and I filled it with marital aides. In the trunk search I also found two non-alcoholic beers floating around. Took them with me, too.

At the end of the day nobody was injured and it’s just a car that was provided to me free of charge by my parents. While I didn’t expect to shell out god-knows-how-many-thousands on a new car this year, I am an adult. Most of us buy our vehicles like big boys and girls.

However, if any of you want to donate a luxury vehicle I will seriously consider flying out to your location, treating you to a fine steak chop, taking one photo where we’re shaking hands, and drive the car back to it’s new home. I mean, I did spend my money developing the ThoughtsFromParis Apple and Android app. You owe me.

I was on the phone talking with a friend, lying down on the bed in the second bedroom, when all of a sudden I smelled smoke.   I leaped up, ran into the hallway, and noticed smoke accumulating around the ceiling lighting.   My first thought was the air conditioner.   Even though it’s sort of past air conditioning season, today was 82 here in Chicago.   Since I’m on the top floor of my condo building, it’s always extremely hot.   When it’s 70 outside, it will register as 77 inside, so the air has to be on.

I just assumed the HVAC unit (I think that’s what it’s called) had malfunctioned and a wire had caught fire.   It had that smell of burning metal.   So, I ran to the thermostat, and turned off the air.   I couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from.   Also in the room with the HVAC is the washing machine.   I had both the washer and dryer going, too.   My mind immediately flashed huge dollar signs thinking that this had probably broken and was shooting out smoke.   But when I opened to door to this room, there was no smoke.

The only other thing I have in the hallway, except for a few prints hanging up is my reef tank.

When I spun around to check out the tank, I noticed smoke billowing up from the cabinet underneath the tank.   When I opened the cabinet, I saw a power strip shooting sparks out of itself.   I realized that water, salt water, was dripping directly into one of the outlets.

Five seconds later, the fuse got tripped.   Darkness.

The good news is there’s no leak on the tank.   It’s a 65 gallon tank, and weighs hundreds of pounds.   If there was a leak, it would be a huge pain in the butt.

Also, good news – all my fish had dies months ago, and my corals, too.   Normally, this is a bad thing, and of course it is, but it meant I didn’t have to do anything with the tank upkeep-wise for awhile.

My tank is seven years old, and if you don’t know anything about reef tanks, just think about the ocean.   It’s basically that.   Saltwater, with sand and rock.   You have to mimic the conditions of the ocean in just about every way possible.   After a few years, the tank settles down, and everything kind of filters itself.   You have snails, and crabs, and shrimp eating all the waste and algae.   You have even smaller critters hiding in the sandbed eating the snail waste, and so on.   The rock is alive, the sand is alive.   You really don’t need much filtration, because everything is filtered by something else.

Except it’s a HUGE hassle to keep everything in stasis.   I have ten different chemical tests for things like nitrate, nitrite, calcium, ph, salinity, alkalinity, etc.   If just one of those levels gets out of whack, you’re fucked.   Things start to die.

Plus, you can’t use tap water in a reef tank.   No way.   I have a RO/DI unit (think a Brita filter with five chambers on steroids) that drips into a bucket after going through many filtration stages.   Once the bucket fills up, the dripping stops.   Then I siphon the good water into another bucket and pour it into the tank.   You have to do this every few days, because the lighting is metal hallide, which is crazy hot.

Every day several gallons of water evaporate under these lamps.

So, you can begin to see just how much of a pain a reef tank is.   Not to mention all the food, keeping the tank to a specific temperature, etc.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours, and thousands of dollars over the years on this tank.   And I’m not a guy that throws around money at hobbies just to do it.   When four fish die, that’s probably $200 to replace.

I figured out it was the protein skimmer that had been jostled and somehow decided to leak, out of the blue.   So weird.

So, I have made the decision to sell ALL of my equipment – the tank, the lighting, the live rock, the sand, everything.   If I wasn’t home during this, there’s a good chance my place could have caught fire.   I can’t handle that sort of thing in my life right now.

Dealing with the aftershocks of a divorce, new career, and taking care of a cat and dog is plenty for me.

I will dig up some photos soon of the tank in happier times.   Just glad my place didn’t burn.

No?   You never had a bully repeatedly embarrass you in grammar school?   Yeah, me neither.   I was one of the cool kids.   Scout’s honor.   No bullying done to this guy.   And even if I was subject to some bully-trauma, I wouldn’t still be holding on to that shame and anger 30 years later.   I’d have to be really screwed up to still be dreaming of that night after night, waking up in cold sweats and shaking, and just hoping, one day I get my sweet revenge.

Moving on – here’s the good news.   If you never thought about running over bullies in tanks as a child, you can start thinking about it NOW.

Why?   Because, back in 2005, you could actually buy yourself a tank.   Honest-to-shit.   And you didn’t even have to join the Marines.   Although, if you do join the Marines, my understanding is that they give you a tank after a few years in the service.   I saw that in one of their commercials.

Introducing the greatest civilian vehicle of ALL time:

JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank

First off, let’s talk about the name.   I really dislike this word, “badonkadonk.”   You know how there is some slang vernacular that needs to be run over with a tank?   (See what I did there?)   This is one of those words.   If you want to talk about a woman’s behind, which I think we can all agree is time well-spent, by all means, go right ahead.   I support that.   But the word “badonkadonk” should never be uttered by anyone, anytime, for any reason.   It wasn’t funny when the word came out back in 2002, and it isn’t funny now.

But, anyway, this IS the name of a great automotive engineering achievement, so we’ll have to look past the unfortunate branding decision.

Let’s take a peek “under the hood” of the ‘Donk and let you in on its awesomeness.

From Amazon’s Product Description:

• Completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank.
• The Donk can transport cargo or a crew of five internally or on the roof, and
• Can be piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch
• One-way steel mesh armor windows
• Standard drive is an air-cooled, 6hp Tecumseh gasoline (unleaded only) engine

Sounds pretty kick-ass to me.   6hp?   I don’t know what that means.   And I don’t care.   I just want a tank.

The Badonkadonk was released to the public back in 2005.   It was priced at $19,999.95 and was featured to purchase on Amazon.com (shipping extra).   And, in usual viral-web fashion, someone stumbled across this gem and posted an article about it.

And then the reviews started popping up on Amazon like minute three of a Orville Redenbacher bag in the microwave.   Here we are, five years later, and people are STILL writing reviews on Amazon.com for the Badonkadonk, even though it hasn’t actually been available for four years.

My review is by no means the best of the bunch (there are 233 reviews currently), but certainly of the better ones out there.   Morons like me flocked to this page and wrote our reviews of our experience with this amazing technological marvel.

Click to Enlarge

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some of my personal favorite reviews for the Badonkadonk.   Here are three   – simply click on the images below to access the reviews.

So there you have it.   At some point, you probably are still asking yourself, “Why was this created?”   The actual truth behind the why and what of the Badonkadonk is quite boring, so for the sake of mystery, let’s just say that the engineers knew something.   Something profound.   That sounds good.

Was John Lennon right? Is happiness a warm gun?   I don’t know.   All I know is that over 200 people across this country gathered electronically to express how they felt about one of the most insane products ever to hit the market.   And if the creators never sold a single Badonkadonk, they generated a lot of good laughs.   And that, to me, is something special.

No?   You never had a bully repeatedly embarrass you in grammar school?   Yeah, me neither.   I was one of the cool kids.   Scout’s honor.   No bullying done to this guy.   And even if I was subject to some bully-trauma, I wouldn’t still be holding on to that shame and anger 30 years later.   I’d have to be really screwed up to still be dreaming of that night after night, waking up in cold sweats and shaking, and just hoping, one day I get my sweet revenge.

Moving on – here’s the good news.   If you never thought about running over bullies in tanks as a child, you can start thinking about it NOW.

Why?   Because, back in 2005, you could actually buy yourself a tank.   Honest-to-shit.   And you didn’t even have to join the Marines.   Although, if you do join the Marines, my understanding is that they give you a tank after a few years in the service.   I saw that in one of their commercials.

Introducing the greatest civilian vehicle of ALL time:

JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank

First off, let’s talk about the name.   I really dislike this word, “badonkadonk.”   You know how there is some slang vernacular that needs to be run over with a tank?   (See what I did there?)   This is one of those words.   If you want to talk about a woman’s behind, which I think we can all agree is time well-spent, by all means, go right ahead.   I support that.   But the word “badonkadonk” should never be uttered by anyone, anytime, for any reason.   It wasn’t funny when the word came out back in 2002, and it isn’t funny now.

But, anyway, this IS the name of a great automotive engineering achievement, so we’ll have to look past the unfortunate branding decision.

Let’s take a peek “under the hood” of the ‘Donk and let you in on its awesomeness.

From Amazon’s Product Description:

• Completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank.
• The Donk can transport cargo or a crew of five internally or on the roof, and
• Can be piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch
• One-way steel mesh armor windows
• Standard drive is an air-cooled, 6hp Tecumseh gasoline (unleaded only) engine

Sounds pretty kick-ass to me.   6hp?   I don’t know what that means.   And I don’t care.   I just want a tank.

The Badonkadonk was released to the public back in 2005.   It was priced at $19,999.95 and was featured to purchase on Amazon.com (shipping extra).   And, in usual viral-web fashion, someone stumbled across this gem and posted an article about it.

And then the reviews started popping up on Amazon like minute three of a Orville Redenbacher bag in the microwave.   Here we are, five years later, and people are STILL writing reviews on Amazon.com for the Badonkadonk, even though it hasn’t actually been available for four years.

My review is by no means the best of the bunch (there are 233 reviews currently), but certainly of the better ones out there.   Morons like me flocked to this page and wrote our reviews of our experience with this amazing technological marvel.

Click to Enlarge

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include some of my personal favorite reviews for the Badonkadonk.   Here are three   – simply click on the images below to access the reviews.

So there you have it.   At some point, you probably are still asking yourself, “Why was this created?”   The actual truth behind the why and what of the Badonkadonk is quite boring, so for the sake of mystery, let’s just say that the engineers knew something.   Something profound.   That sounds good.

Was John Lennon right? Is happiness a warm gun?   I don’t know.   All I know is that over 200 people across this country gathered electronically to express how they felt about one of the most insane products ever to hit the market.   And if the creators never sold a single Badonkadonk, they generated a lot of good laughs.   And that, to me, is something special.