A very wise, albeit fictional (and dead) man once posited, “What’s more chickenshit than fucking with a man’s automobile?” And while it was clearly intended as a rhetorical question, even a strongly worded one, it’s one I’ve found myself asking with similar vigor since this weekend.

All I wanted was to do my laundry. I woke up late Sunday morning with a bit of a headache and a scratchy throat, products not just of my trip to the (outstanding) Badger hockey game the night prior and the ensuing celebration, but also of the cold, rainy walk home at well-past bartime. My clothes lay piled in a sopping mess on the hardwood floor, and I felt inexplicably certain that if I washed and dried them, my headache would clear up too.

Fresh out of bed and plenty bamboozled, I went out to my car to grab the roll of quarters that had been riding in my center console since my trip to the bank earlier that week. The warm temps that had prompted the mid-January monsoon the night before were beginning to take a turn for the subfreezing, but everything was still fresh and wet.

I opened the car and right away saw the quarters weren’t where I thought I had left them, but climbed inside and tried to cipher my way out of the predicament anyway. I opened a few compartments and the glove box before determining this was a mystery best solved after I’d had my morning coffee. I locked the car back up and wandered inside, having lost the battle but not conceded the war.

After poking around inside to make sure I hadn’t already brought the ten-dollar roll of quarters inside, and with another half-hour of consciousness and two cups of double-black sharpening my senses, I returned to the car in the street. An initial inspection revealed that, nope, those quarters definitely were not in fact sitting in plain sight where I had (in hindsight, stupidly) left them. I rolled back the driver seat and scratched amid the clutter underneath, then opened the passenger side door to do the same.

But when I touched the passenger seat, I recoiled a little sickly. It was just as sodden as the pile of clothes on my floor inside (still waiting, still unwashed and undried). I shrugged it off at first, still preoccupied with the notion that I needed to find the damn quarters and everything else would fall into place, but when I touched it again, I realized that is was more than just wet. It was soaked, and not just the casual soaking one finds occasionally in an aging ragtop convertible either.

Utterly puzzled, I turned my eyes to the sky in search of answers, and my stomach sank.

Now, I don’t drive the finest automobile in the city of Madison. She’s nearing 190,000 miles, and the rickety, very occasionally leaky pushbutton convertible top stopped working within months of my purchasing the vehicle for what I assumed to be a steal at the time. She’s accumulated her fair share of dings, dents and scrapes in four years of full-contact parking on the mean streets of Madison, and the antenna is perpetually being broken off by drunks or sheered off by passing plows or bent sideways by supernatural forces that just seem to haunt material possessions that come under my ownership.

And don’t even get me started on the current state of her suspension.

But, damnit, there’s gotta be a line out there somewhere, and this crosses it. In spite of my slightly antagonistic relationship with this car, I’ve grown quite fond of it over the years. Not to mention I have neither the time, patience nor especially the money to sink into proper roof repairs, which the internet tells me could run a grand or two. Call me a poster child for the insurance industry, but there’s no way in hell you’d catch me carrying a comprehensive plan on a vehicle the resale value of which is at best quadruple the deductible I’d pay to fix this mess.

Of course, while all of this should have been occurring to me at the time, I was instead busy getting healthily enraged about the fact that all signs pointed to my not getting to do laundry on this particular Sunday. After a momentary introspective double-take, I straightened out my priorities and directed all my karmic indignation at the knife-wielding fucktard that had slashed the top on my ride.

With some quick detective work, I established a motive for the crime, simultaneously solving the mystery of the missing ten dollars in quarters and proving someone determined enough could unlock the door through the unconventionally converted top. I then formulated a working psychological profile of my perp, but quickly abandoned the exercise as fruitless when I realized I couldn’t conceivably go around punching homeless boozehounds and 14-year-old thugs until someone coughed up my change.

Instead, I put my mind to work inventing a scheme to prevent any more precipitation from penetrating the interior of the vehicle. This temporarily proved to be too much for my overstrained psyche to handle, so I went back inside, put my feet up, drank some more coffee and read some Douglas Adams.

An hour later, I went to the hardware store, and settled on a heavy canvas needle, some 20-pound-test fishing line, vinyl sealant and vinyl tape. Then I set up in the alleyway next to my house and got to work on what I’m affectionately calling the Frankencar.

I stitched her up satisfactorily, then slapped the sealant and tape over the repair work.

It ain’t pretty, but it’s only temporary and it seems to keep the elements out. It only has to last until it gets warm enough for me to do some more respectable repair work, or I trade the car in for an upgrade, or some further unspeakable act of Godforsaken fate finally kills my freakin’ car for good. So far it’s held one day and counting.

In the meantime, if you see some knife-wielding hoodlum doing laundry or playing games in an arcade with what seems to be suspicious enthusiasm, sock him in the gut for me. I’ve got my own laundry to do.