Some youngsters just hit my dad's perfect Buick.  My father is relatively wealthy and could afford a nice place, but he wants to "wait until things get settled" with his divorce and thus he lives with the bohemians in the same block I lived in 20 years ago (in my twenties), my same landlord, $400 a month.  The new Lucerne, black and supercharged, was of course scrubbed within an inch of its life.  All materials in the trunk were secured ("don't want to dent the body from the inside") and, when he used to visit me a day's drive away, the car was, remotely, anti-effectively,  and anachronistically all at the same instance, started every morning to keep the battery up.  The kids chose neither right nor left effectively at the "T", and t-boned the finely groomed neighborhood oddity.

My dad is no mechanic.  He gains no pleasure with hand tools and has no interest in how things work.  He makes no personal modifications, no bumper stickers.  He learned in the 1950's that V-8's are better (the "parts-run-slower" argument I believe) and that is why he does not have any of a number of other cars he likes - might not last as long - even though he gets a new one every three years (car has 60,000 miles on it so it is going to start breaking down).  I have great respect for people who protect objects in whose creation they have participated or in whose sustainability they depend, but this is a case of neither.

Medically motivated by obsessive-compulsive disorder, I've struggled to find happiness my whole life, mainly by identifying and jettisoning sources of anxiety.  Rate the importance of decisions and make the inconsequential ones without debate.  Obtain a life with a relative amount of control.  Look for reality.  Do not live co-dependently.  The more recent, more fashionable (and, to me, very effective) strategy is to seek novelty (Satisfaction, Gregory Berns).  Biological drives at the helm of this argument, we should (we are wired to) seek a series of experiences that are new, we gain some familiarity with them, we move on.  This does not discredit expert performance, nor preclude progress through persistent, tedious creation, nor does it pan vigilant maintenance of standards.  It simply means there is no arrival - you are never done.  Hard lesson for us, the anxiety shedders.  

So I'm trying to understand my father's anxiety with cars - I've seen him high-stepping to demand remuneration from an adjacent parallel parker who brushed the gloss off a square inch of his bumper - and now this happens.  Life has been modest lately and dad wants to celebrate emerging from the abusive marriage by getting himself a Lamborghini.   I'm not heading for the extravagance debate here, neither at the limited world resources nor personal level.  I just think it will make him miserable.

Dad, how are the new jazz guitar lessons going? I've never heard you so happy as when you call me to tell me about something you are DOING.  That new, exciting girlfriend with the antique Gibson?  She wants to keep meeting cool people.  She's a little post-modern.  Doesn't need a neat, happy ending every time.  Your mom screwed you down pretty tight (she worked on me a bit, too) but she is dead.  Dad, buy a house in Modena.  Learn to drive the thing.  Rent it, sign up for the school, buy the expensive insurance, slide into the wall with four flat tires and ON FIRE.  Climb out with some broken ribs, hand them the contract and walk home.

 PS.  I sort of did this once in the more modest context of a rented Chrysler headed for LAX, insured.  I made an emergency maneuver, saved the guy's life for sure,  fantastically hacked up the Chrysler from stem to stern.  Still marginally drivable but totaled with 500 miles on it, I pulled into the airport rental garage steaming and smoking, contract in hand.  Didn't even miss my flight.