The sun hits my forehead and I feel a bead of sweat forming at the nape of my neck. I stretch my arm further out of the window, opening up my palm towards the mass of incoming air, hoping that increasing my body’s cooling area might help with the hot flush brewing my skin. The world moves fast around me, but under this canopy I am but a burning ant under God’s giant magnifying glass.
Or, to put it another way, the aircon in my Toyota Sera has stopped working, likely from a pinched seal somewhere in the system. Before, it blasted so icily that I had to keep redirecting the air vents to keep my fingers from turning white at the tips. Even then, it did little to stop the feeling of the sun hitting my head like a sniper’s glowing laser, but it was enough to ward off the overall sweaty stickiness of being cooked alive that I am struggling to stave off right now, which was a happy compromise.
Don’t be fooled though, I am exactly where I want to be. After two years away for restoration, being reunited with this car brings a wide smile to my lips. It is so utterly flamboyant, so obnoxiously unnecessary, and it fills me with unbridled joy. It looks like nothing else on the road these days, as few auto makers would be willing (or able) to justify the cost of engineering something so ridiculous such as dihedral butterfly doors or a massive wraparound glass canopy for anything not costing six figures or more, and yet, here they are in this groceries-getter.
