Cars for Old Geezers

I made a personal goal this week to post five entries in five days. That's getting to be a tough task. It's not that I don't have plenty to rant about -- in fact, the more of these that I write, the more I think of. (You can't tell that there's any self-editing here, but you should read some of the garbage that doesn't make it.)

No, it's actually just lack of time today and tomorrow that keep me from lengthy and interesting thoughts to share. Instead, I have a quick observation and comment that all sprung from an advertisement that I saw when I was getting dressed this morning.

I saw a commercial for the local Lincoln/Mercury car dealership. This particular commercial has the dealership full of young families: 30-somthing parents, with cute active kids. The problem with this whole thing is that there's no way in hell that any of these people are going to buy a Lincoln or a Mercury. I really thought that you had to be collecting social security before they would even let you into the dealership. At the very least, they must have an AARP discount.

This local advertisement is no more rediculous than Tiger Woods pitching Oldsmobiles. I can't really picture Tiger in his home town, showing up to pick up his hot young girlfriend in a giant Oldsmobile sedan. I can't picture him stumbling out of the nightclub at four in the morning, and telling the valet, "it's the white Cutlass Supreme."

Actually, I don't think they even make a Cutlass Supreme any more, or at least they couldn't possibly be selling them. To be honest, I couldn't name a single Oldsmobile model that I would be confident is still made.

I wonder if in the geezer circles it would be uncool to drive an Accura or a BMW if you were looking for a comfortable car. Would your geezer friends give you grief, as in (read in your best senior citizen voice), "What do you think you are? Some kind of college boy in that thing?"

The tradeoff for driving big, ugly, giant, American sedans is that you wake willingly at the crack of dawn, and then go some place to hook up with your buddies and bullshit until about 10:00 in the morning. We're all too busy going to work to notice these people, but check it out the next time you have a day off. There will be small groups of retired men hanging out for no apparent reason in lots of the places that you go. You do have to check old-fashioned breakfast places though. There's no way they are going to pay $27.50 for a coffee at Starbucks when they can still get a bitter fifty-cent cup somewhere else.