Being trapped in a hospital bed, bound by tubules and wires, may keep the body restrained, but the mind isn’t vulnerable to such crude constraints. The mind soars free, like a wet, sloppy bat, smacking into walls and equipment before locating the window and making a beeline towards it, squishing hard against the glass and then sliding down, slowly and squeakily, to plop on the floor like a dropped bag of ravioli. Thanks to my soaring, smacking mind, I have decided to write another very important installment of the Autopian’s Would You Rather, still the world’s leading source of intense choice-and-consequence speculation in the automotive realm, at least according to such influential publications as Jacobin and Lift and Hoist International.
So, with that in mind, rub linseed oil into your skull so you can get that brain nice and limber for the mental and philosophical gymnastic-tastic feats it will be called upon to perform as we leap, with the ruthless abandon of kudzu, into these new conundrums automotive.
Are you feeling ready? Did you stretch? Have a snack? Get a good nights’ sleep? I hope so, because we’re doing this.
SCENARIO ONE: The Flippening
You’ve just finished changing the oil in all your cars, and find yourself with a massive crapload of used motor oil to get rid of. You figured this might happen, so you double-lined your municipal trash can with garbage bags and used that as a receptacle for all that oil. With a lot of difficulty, you pulled out the heavy, squishy bag of used oil from the can, but now you’re not sure what to do. You don’t really have a good way to take it to the oil recycling facility, because all of your cars have just had their interiors (trunks included) re-done in lovely white upholstery and thick, deep-pile white carpet. You’re just not willing to risk a spill or tear in your beautiful alabaster interiors!
Plus, the old playground where you used to dump oil now has a fence and some cameras, maybe because of you. You’re running out of options!
Desperate, you remember that a prominent cat litter company (one of the Big Six) has opened a huge new litter recycling plant just down the street from your house. Cat litter has long been known to be a prime soaker-upper of old motor oil; what could it hurt to try?
You drug a security guard with some chocolate-Ambien-chip cookies you baked and sneak in your big bag of oil. You find a large hopper full of to-be-recycled cat litter, climb to the top, open the inspection hatch, and carefully decant in your gallons and gallons of used motor oil. You’re about to climb down to feed the now-empty bag to one of the local street goats when you hear an ominous rumbling from within the hopper.
You peek inside and see the litter churning, sparks and arcs of electricity connecting various lumps of cat crap in increasingly complex webs of energy; soon the whole interior is bathed in an eerie blue light, and you can feel that A Change has taken place.
“THANK YOU FOR FREEING US” boomed a rich baritone from inside the swirling, sparking interior of the hopper.
“WE ARE THE COLLECTIVE SPIRITS OF ALL THE LITTLE MAMMALS AND INSECTS THAT THESE CATS HAVE CONSUMED, AND NOW WE JOIN INTO ONE POWERFUL ENTITY.”
Oh, okay, you think, that makes sense.
“WE HAVE USED OUR NEWFOUND POWERS TO SCAN YOUR NEURAL MATRIX; WE KNOW YOUR DESIRES AND DREAMS. THAT IS WHY WE WILL REPAY YOUR GIFT OF LIFE-GIVING OILS BY IMBUING YOU WITH A FRACTION OF OUR POWER: FROM THIS MOMENT ON, WHEN YOU SEE A PICTURE OR VIDEO OF AN AUTOMOBILE, A SIMPLE FEELING OF DESIRE ON YOUR PART IS ENOUGH TO TRANSPOSE THE CAR YOU ARE IN WITH THE LOCATION OF THE ONE PICTURED!”
With that, there was a flash of blue light, and you found yourself laying on the ground by the hopper, quietly smoldering. And maybe you peed yourself a bit.
Excited and confused, you stumble back down the street to your car and climb in. You open your phone’s browser and look for pictures of cars; you find an auction for a Citroën DS in Lyon, France. You feel a twinge of desire inside you, and then next thing you know, there’s an audible pop and you and your car are now sitting in the spot pictured in the auction listing for the Citroën.
Panicked, you log into your home’s doorbell camera, where you can usually see your car, and in its place you see the Citroën DS. You’re alarmed, but look at the DS again, feel that twinge like before, and with another pop your car and the DS have swapped places back.
Holy crap, right? Over the next few days you try this out more and more, and realize you can swap whatever car you’re in with any car you see, in person or in pictures or video or however. In whatever location that other car is shown.
In traffic, you can look waaaaaay ahead and swap the car you see almost at the exit you want with your own! You end up doing this by accident a few times, sometimes causing real trouble and making you have to work through chains of swaps to get home.
In fact, you almost died once looking at a picture of the Lunar Rover. This is a powerful ability, but not easy to control – it’s almost inadvertent! But you’re practicing, and have started keeping a Polaroid with your car in its normal driveway spot as a failsafe.
SCENARIO TWO: Going on a Bibender
You find out one Saturday morning that Michelin and the National Sulfur Council are hosting a huge block party right by your house, and there will be free booze and food and everything, all in honor of the 185th anniversary of the vulcanization of rubber. You’ve had a pretty shitty few months and could use a win, or at least a good way to distract yourself. So, you take your first shower in days, get dressed and head down.
The party is an absolute blast! The booze is indeed free, and it’s the good stuff. You drink plenty and get very, very drunk. While drunk, you encounter Bibendum, the famous Michelin Tire Man, and you two hit it off swimmingly.
Bibendum gets pretty drunk too, and reveals to you a dark secret: they’re not some guy in a suit, Bibendum is really just one of many alien beings that have been on Earth since the mid-1800s, and their species formed the Michelin Tire Company as a cover so they could peacefully observe Earth and all of its glorious life. There are thousands and thousands of Bibendites on Earth, but they keep a very low profile, for obvious reasons.
They love humans, though. A lot. If you know what I mean.
You eventually learn exactly what Bibendum means, many times, and when you wake up the next morning satisfied, disheveled, and with a note written on a white rubber disc:
Hey dollface,
Had a fantastic time last night! As you may guess, you can’t tell anyone about any of this, of course. But I think you’re dynamite, baby, so as a little token I’ve given you an ability inherent to all Bibendites: you now have a Bibendulumnic gland, which means that now you have the ability to urinate a new sort of fluid, one that, if ejected into a decently warm area, will soon produce between 10 and 60 perfect Michelin tires, which are really the unfertilized spores that our people use to reproduce.
The type of tire depends on a lot of complex factors far beyond any sort of easy control, so you just really need to accept whatever you get.
Anyway, enjoy! I probably won’t see you again, but wow, right?
– Bibendite 46778-∂
It’s an awful lot to take in, but the upshot is pretty clear: if you take a leak somewhere, you’re going to end up with a bunch of new tires. That’s not a bad deal, really. You test it out by peeing all over your backyard; the next morning there are about 35 strange little pods all over the yard, and about 8 to 10 hours later the pods burst, and each one holds a brand-new Michelin Primacy MXM4 tire, worth close to $300! That’s a hell of a haul, like over ten grand in tires! If only you can unload them somewhere, somehow.
For a drunken one-night stand with a being that looks like a huge stack of powdered donuts, this seems to be a pretty good result, right? But why do you feel so dirty?
Okay, there you go! Two fascinating, mind-expanding hypothetical scenarios for you to consider! So, which is it going to be? You must choose!
What happens if I change the places if a Suburban full of kids on their way to go camping and a Fiat 500 carrying just two people? Do the kids get squished? Do some of them end up on the roof? This ability could make you some kind of super assassin.
I think the car change place deal would just end up sort of a mess really. I will go with pissing tyres and selling them.
I take David Tracy and Adrian Clarke on speed dial, please.
Tire piss is probably the only way anyone’s ever getting a discount on oddly sized BMW i3 tires or Ferrari Mondial TRX tires. Have at it, boys, your weirdly sized new tires are suddenly cheap!
I’ll take the one-nighter and go live in an empty field somewhere. Otherwise I’d need all my sweet tire money to keep half a dozen plumbers on staff. The other option seems too chaotic, because just like Torch, I already can’t control my imagination.
I’m biased being raised in Michelin-Town ( read: Clermont Ferrand where Michelin headquarters is located and where it all started so long ago ), so I’ll go Bibendum.
[ I can explain the Michelin-Town, but it’s late and it probably would end up being very long… the short is that at one point you could live all your life from birth to death thanks to Michelin in Clermont Fd ]
Am favoring the Michelin option – But!
Need to know, if I micturate in the usual place, will my toilet be ruined?
after a second scan of this article, I’ve only just now noticed that Bidendum has human hands! even though being otherwise not human, hollow and made of tires, it’s hands are human!
Plus he has French cuffs but no sleeves like a Chippendales dancer. Unless he has human arms under the arm tires and only his torso is pure tires?
Well, here’s the thing. Baby reindeer read this post and proceeded. And look what it happened to him…
Can I trade both of those options for a month’s supply of whatever buffalo tranquilizer they’re giving Jason?
Does this mean all the tires are white-walls? Or, if you hold it in too long, do you get blue walls?
Definitely the car-swapping thing.
Firstly because that sounds like a neat adventure and way to experience lots of different cars (and instant travel sounds great).
Secondly because I’m not a big fan of Michelin tires. Some of them are good, great even. But in my experience they’re overpriced, the folks who champion them tend to be Insufferable, they don’t offer THAT much advantage (and even to the point that some tests or the results seemed rigged, like how Ferrari would win every comparison on of their cars would be entered into so that the reviewers wouldn’t lose access to the brand), and the compromises that come with them outweigh the benefits. I’ve had more instances of suddenly losing traction in good-condition Michelin tires than any other brand, by a massive margin.
In that same vein, if I can’t pick what tires my urine will produce then I’m creating waste. The primacy series are widely known to not be very good. But if I could harvest CrossClimates and Pilot 4S in the most-popular sizes, it would be more advantageous. But it also sounds draining.
Now, if this ability came with guaranteed anytime access to any Michelin-starred restaurant at no cost, and with instantaneous transport to and from said restaurants, and I could wear whatever I wanted in said restaurants, I might (but wouldn’t) change my vote. I love cars and driving, but really good food is also very compelling.
MAN, What drugs are they giving you in the Hospital?
honestly
The tire producing STD, I guess.
The obvious choice is pissing tires.
In Scenario #1 you could easily wind up dead – folded, spindled and mutilated into a bloody rag inside the tangled wreck you just spent a few moments too long looking at – whereas with a healthy dose of Bibendulitits you’re generating $600-5000 worth of quality car shoes every time you take a whiz. That’s too easy a choice to make. Sure, flipping cars at a whim is a fun concept but the almost-uncontrollable factor makes it far too hazardous.
My issue is that I don’t want to spend my time selling and shipping tires through eBay.
And how much will people really pay for tires from a questionable source?
And how much demand is there really for questionable eBay tires?
Too much work for very little payoff.
So if you get a UTI from Bib, does that mean that it will smell like burning rubber every time you urinate?
“Where’s the men’s room? I need to do a burnout.”
Tip: Made for the purpose oil absorbent works a lot better than cat litter for … absorbing oil. And it’s cheaper. The trick is to not buy the small bag on the shelf at Advance Auto. Go to the counter and ask for one of the big bags they keep in the back.
Get well, JT.
Lowe’s had a surprisingly cheap & effective oil-absorbing stuff—more like sawdust than litter—a few years back. Did a much better job keeping the metal deck of our truck safe after refrigerant oil would spill.
—AND it didn’t get caught in your boots & tracked into the house at the end of the day
(I can leave old engine oil out with my recycling and the council take it away, also old car batteries).
Wow, that’s unheard of anywhere I’ve lived!
Definitely going for the tires. I am opening a michelin only tire store, with a massive warehouse behind. I will massively overhydrate for a few days, resulting in a good selection of tires, so hopefully we can then have sufficient to actually let customers get 4 matching tires for their cars. If I want to travel, I still can. I will just never be able to use the same bathroom twice. Maybe… It’s possible that when peeing in a toilet, the spores would get washed down and just clog the sewer. Not my problem! Hopefully the employees don’t realize that we never get tire deliveries… That would be a weird conversation.
As an employee of a sewer utility, I curse you. As a ratepayer covering the costs of maintenance of said sewers, I put a price on your head.
Haha this is fair.
(announcer voice)
“Come join us for our semi-annual Wicked Pisser Tire Sale!”
OK, I don’t think you should be leaving the hospital just yet…
They must have him on some pretty strong meds.
I wonder what they are, and where I can get some.
Bibendite sounds like Benny from Fallout New Vegas. You dig this crazy slang, baby?
I dig the first option more. Feels better and more fun to mess around with. Could I expand it to take my people and pets with me? Cause dropping me and my partner into whatever we want would be so fun!
Is Bibendum a top or a bottom? I feel like that is a very important factor in this decision
You can’t say “Bibendum” without “bend”.
The swapping sounds dangerous. The tire spawning urine just sounds like an infinite money glitch. I’ll take the latter. Also, would your poo still just be poo in this scenario?
Why does the floppy bat make a beeline for the window? Why not a batline?
I’m sorry you’re suffering in the hospital. But whatever is in your IV, I needs some.
Philosophically, this is a meal in itself. The problem with the car swapping kitty litter is twofold. First, how it is transmitted. This sounds like a neurological effect of a toxoplasmosis infection amplified by motor oil. You’ll probably be able to swap cars by thought, according to a mechanism first described by the Persian philosopher Ibn SÄ«na (Avicenna), who counseled men seeking to procreate to climax by closing their eyes and think of a beautiful young man. But side effects could involve headaches, or never being able to find your keys. Second, how cats use cars that move into their territory. Swapping cars gives you ownership, at least territorial ownership, of the in-swapped vehicle. I’m betting that every car so swapped will smell like a 25-pound tom sprayed the passenger seat and trunk. There might even be kittens.
The cryptozoological conundrum of Bibendite behavior and mores raises lots of questions, and not just the issue of size: you’d be advised to avoid Oktoberfest, as a double-Maß leak might entail a porta-potty-exploding XDR 59/80R63.
But hold on, back to Bibendites. The name ‘Bibendum’ is a neuter gerund from bibo, bibere, so it literally refers to the activity of drinking. As a neuter, Bibendum — and, by extension the shy Bibendites as a whole — has to be non-binary. Besides, the mechanics of carnal conversation remain mysterious and fraught with hazards including punctures, blowouts, steel belting, and run flats. I’m sure they’re super-sports about it all, but when things get sticky, there’ll be more rolling resistance than you realize. Better not to think too much about it; close your eyes and think of a bicycle.
Did you happened to go visit Torch at the hospital? Unsupervised, by chance?