0313: The Beetles and the Damage Done

Quiet Brainy-Lefty Southside Street, Edmonton: With their territory shrunk to tiny areas surrounding universities, libraries, and walking-pace retirement parks, Volkswagen Beetles are becoming scarcer than ever, and most normal citizens are okay with that. Years of encroachment by Japanese subcompacts sporting actual heater/defrosters has left Beetle ownership to the few delusional, masochistic, subversive socialist/socialites who prize the intangible middle-fingerness of the original anti-car above all.

   None of this optimistic post-war hippie idealism seems to have yet yeilded a successful rust-prevention policy, however, and most Beetle-ists seem to have reverted to Birkenstocks, bicycles, or BMWs for actual transportation, leaving their floorless bugs to adorn yards and alleys; sometimes under tarps, always under the weather, and usually well past the point of no return; running boards dragging and crispy R.E.M. tapes cooking on top of the dash.

   So it was probably with a mild sense nostalgia lightly flavoured with undercurrents of slight irritation that 0313s neighbours awoke to the choppy, chainsaws-over-Chopin rasp of one of Edmontons last aircooled lawyers (911 owners excluded, of course) attempting the drive to the office. 

  Unencumbered by any conventional sense of normality, Agents 0311 and 0313 have seen their fair share of Beetle-bullshit over the course of their little romance, and Agent 0313 has run through her share of the things; currently inflicting some light neglect upon a later model red example. The President, just having purchased Plymouth #7, is unable to offer defensible criticism of a policy of purchasing multiple examples of the same car, and therefore powerless to withold Full Presidential Approval, even though some of the individual examples themselves would have been called into question over possible violations of Code 7-11 in the Agency Handbook Re: Permissible Maximum Diameters of Floor Perforations due to Rust: Section A; Chapter 14 of Ferdinand's Letter to the County Zoning Board, verses four through thirty-nine: "If thine love be true, don't let her fall through". Jesus wept. Amen.



The more graceful solution is always worth the extra effort.



  Agent 0311, flush with the success of "Operation Snowball", was eager to dive deep into the tarry, rusty guts of this latest double-feature horror-thon, and wasted no time (well, actually, a pretty fair-sized bit of time, truth be told) getting down to some serious structural renovations. The results speak for themselves; another triumph for 0311's inimitable form-follows-function aesthetic. The parts themselves are sculpture, achingly beautiful; each piece poised, as though ready to leap into flight at any moment. Breathtaking as usual, and a real crime to hide such beauty beneath a carpet. Such is the legendary modesty of the great master 0311; we are humbled in your presence, sir.

  All Agents are being encouraged to carry extra tow ropes and jumper cables for the duration of the summer months, as Agent 0313 will be at large in the Edmonton area. Watch this space for timely updates and remember to set your clocks back 4 hours on Wednesday, just for the fuck of it.