By Timothy Ferris - San Francisco
"Lusting after supercars is like lusting after supermodels: It's easier to pant over their pictures than to actually get your hands on one.
When I was young and green, I used to think the problem was mere money. I imagined that if you had the sticker price, you could walk into a showroom and drive home in the car of your dreams.
And so you can, if your dreams run to widely available models -- Subarus or Mustangs in Hertz color schemes -- or to wallflower exotics like that silver-on-mustard-yellow aerokit Tiptronic Porsche with lipstick-red seatbelts that's been gathering grime in some disgruntled dealer's lot since May Day.
But if you have the misfortune to fall for a genuinely hot supermodel -- a fresh-faced dream car so exciting that it has Saudi princes and dot-bomb survivors bidding multiples of your annual salary above list price just to get a place near the top of the line -- well, old buddy, that's when your heartache begins.
Unless you're prepared to go mano a mano with Jay Leno and the Sultan of Brunei and drive your new car straight to bankruptcy court, you have two choices. You can do the sensible thing and bide your time for a year or two until the object of your desire turns up used, with just the colors and setup you wanted, at a cost comparable to its new car sticker.
Or you can cave into your desire and insist that love will find a way. That means living a life of obsession, persistent as a pimply teenager writing daily mash notes to Britney Spears. It means immersing yourself in the kind of anxiety associated with gangsters hunting for the Maltese Falcon and kids waiting months for a mail-order X-ray spy ring.
It can drive you plumb crazy. I took that road. This is my story."
-----------------------------------
The rest of the story is a hoot. I highly recomend it to your reading.
