Fiat 500 Abarth

Hey everyone, it’s Hung Baxter. I want to thank you for reading this, my first ever car review for the Road and Track magazine, on-line edition. I am looking forward to providing you with many informed and potentially useful opinions, much like those other guys who write car reviews – but they are boring posers!  Fortunately, for people who love fine automobiles I am here representing a fresh, young, urban audience.  It’s like “Hello, Hung,” and “Goodbye boring guys.”

Today I review the Fiat 500 Abarth.  Let me just say right away this car is legit.  I mean, you’re going to be blown away by this Italian goomah. (That’s an actual Italian word.  It means lover!)  But first you’re going to have to get over the size thing.  The Fiat 500 Abarth is small. I mean really small.  When I first saw this car I didn’t know if I was supposed to drive it or shake it to see if it bobbled.

But drive it I did, readers, straight from the dealership back to my hood in center city so I could pick up my girlfriend and begin the professional car review process.  Right away, people are noticing my ride. At this one intersection, I pull up next to a Caddy Escalade. Dude rolls down his window and starts laughing.  I say, “Hey, you got it wrong, man. I ain’t fronting.  This car is hot – 160 horse power; 170 foot-pounds of torque.”  When the light turns green, I tell him, “You don’t believe me? Well, you can read about it tomorrow in the Road and Track magazine, on-line edition.” Then I press down hard on the gas pedal and take off, leaving a trail of thick rubber on the road.

There was a lot of that during my test drive. The Fiat 500 Abarth will leave rubber on the road, even when you’re trying to drive all responsible and shit. For example, I did not mean to smoke out those school children on the bus when I sped up to pass it.  I hadn’t yet learned how to control this automobile’s freakish power.

When I pull up in front of my girlfriend’s place and she sees me behind the wheel of this cherry red gelato (that’s another Italian word – ice cream!!), I can tell she is all kinds of impressed. “Hop in,” I tell her. “We got some serious test driving to do for my first ever column in the Road and Track magazine, on-line edition.”

“So, what do you think, babe?” I’m watching as my girl slides her sweet ass onto the finely-stitched leather seat.  (Also, I’m thinking of maybe getting a little action on this leather later on.)  You know what my girlfriend says?  She says, “it’s cute.”

“Cute!” I say, “Does cute do this? I quickly throw the Fiat 500 Abarth into gear and bring on a crazy 360 degree drift that catches the attention of all the guys chilling over by the Korean market.

Of course, the Fiat 500 Abarth isn’t just about impressing. This car can hold its own in practical matters.  Like when my girlfriend says that we need to go to her sister’s house and help her move out.  She is finally leaving that deadbeat husband of hers and we gotta give her a ride back to their mother’s place.  I say, “no problem, as long as I can get back early enough to write up my professional review in time to meet the deadline for tomorrow’s edition of…” “I know,” she says, cutting me off, “…the Road and Track magazine, on-line edition.”  Damn, girl, you are fun-ay!

When we get over to the sister’s place, she’s waiting outside with all her belongings.  There is no sign of her good-for-nothing husband, but this Fiat 500 Abarth has a pair of growling mufflers that sound like a soup kitchen latrine on sauerkraut and pork night.  You can hear it coming for blocks.  I tell my girlfriend to hurry up and get her sister’s shit loaded up before there is trouble.  Easier said than done, since the sister is the size of a water buffalo, plus she’s got ten bags lined up on the curb.

The Fiat 500 Abarth is rated to hold 4 people and 9 cubic feet of cargo, but I would say we maxed it out with the two of us up front, the water buffalo squeezed into the back seat and a couple of her cockroach infested suitcases in the trunk.  

With the moving done, my girlfriend and I head for the highway to see what this car can do. We take advantage of the Fiat 500 Abarth’s short wheel base and tight suspension to maneuver past the toll booth on the bridge in that little space to the left where normal-sized cars can’t fit.  “Don’t worry, babe, that’s a special ‘free lane’ they built just for drivers of the Fiat 500 Abarth.”

Outside of the city, the air doesn’t stink so bad, the sun is shining, and the Abarth sparkles like pawn shop bling. I’m telling you, days just don’t come any better than this. We just keep driving this most excellent ride until the sun goes down and the gas tank does, too.

By the time I return the Fiat 500 Abarth to the dealership, it is closed.  I leave the car on the lot and jog the six blocks back to the subway, all the while dreaming about getting home and writing this review. The way I see it, it’s a new beginning for car reviews at the Road and Track magazine, on-line edition, and Hung Baxter is at the wheel.

(Dear Editors: There might be some confusion about the temporary disappearance of the Fiat 500 Abarth from the Langhorn Fiat dealership out on Freeport Boulevard. But I’m sure they’ll be cool once they read this hip review and their sales shoot way up like never before.  As a gesture of goodwill, though, you might want to buy them a new set of tires to replace the ones I torched. - HB)

Ice Age Poetry

Every poem I write is set aside for a length of time and approached again with the benefit of a different frame of mind. How long do the poems rest? That depends. Some longer than others. Recently a poem came to me in the most unusual of formats. It consisted of a series of rock wall paintings, just like the ones found in the caves frequented by early man. This seemed pretty strange to me but as I started to decipher the meaning of the stick figures in the paintings and the actions depicted, I realized that this really was a poem and I must have written it. The style, the content, the voice, were all mine. I can only think that I wrote this poem in one of my past lives and it was just coming back to me now. It's the story of a boy and a girl from different nomadic tribes who meet, fall in love and then find themselves separated by an advancing glacier. Of course, being young and idealistic, they wait for each other, never once losing faith. And after the ice retreats their patience is rewarded - they are reunited. But not for long. Before they are even back in each other's arms, before their love for one other can be affirmed, they are torn apart. Literally. By a saber-tooth tiger. Both of them savagely eaten.  A tragic story.  I'm thinking this poem still needs rest.  Perhaps I'll leave it for my next life.

witch hazel

moisten a cotton ball the size of the moon

then apply to the body by swimming 

backstroke across the cottony surface

(check your local tide schedule)

next clip your nose, close your eyes

and repeat with butterfly stroke

air dry naked on a large rock

in a desert canyon turning slowly 

against the adiabatic winds

(caution: a slight tingling of the skin

may occur as the temperature drops

on a clear desert night)

rub yourself briskly and stay alert

do not use witch hazel if you

can't swim or are clumsy

side effects may include dishevelment,

a false confidence in your singing voice,

inability to remember trigonometry

and feelings that you are being watched

by a hungry mountain lion (you may be!)

if symptoms persist consult your shaman

Actual Time

Every dream has a backstory. Rarely, though, can you tie one to the other as neatly as this.

I was on a business trip recently, traveling through numerous cities in a few busy days.  I arrived first in Tucson, Arizona.  The plane’s wheels hit the ground and like everyone else I turned on my mobile phone.  A message on my phone’s screen read, “the time has been adjusted to the current local time.”

Looking again at my mobile phone, I noted a slight problem: the clock had not been set to the correct local time.  The phone’s time had been pushed back by two hours, but it should have been three.  Arizona doesn’t recognize daylight savings time. You would think my big-named cellular provider would know this!

How could I walk around Tucson for the next few days being an hour off?  I knew intrinsically that there must be a function buried deep in the phone’s menu system that would fix this issue, but I was too busy to worry about it, so I opted to live with the confusion.

Later that evening when I checked into my hotel room, I decided that I would need to set an alarm for the next morning’s meetings. Normally I would use my phone’s alarm function.  But my phone was an hour off, which meant that I would have to set the alarm for an hour later or was it earlier? The clock radio in the hotel room was no better.  It didn’t have the correct local time, either.  According to the television news program I was watching it was ten p.m. in Tucson; nine p.m. according to my phone; seven p.m. according to my laptop computer (still reflecting the time at home).  And the clock radio?  Nine twenty-three p.m.  To make matters more interesting, the clock radio was designed so that idiot hotel guests could not change the time and mess it up for the next guest.   

Fast forward a few days and more jet wheels skidded across a tarmac below me. This time I was landing in Los Angeles. I turned on my phone and got the same courtesy message from my cellular provider.  But this time they got the time right.

That evening I bedded down up the coast in Ventura, California. I was quite tired from the day’s traveling and was a bit anxious about getting up early the next morning when I would catch a ferry out to Santa Rosa, one of the islands in the Channel Islands National Park.  I needed to be at the dock by 7 a.m. If I missed the ferry, there would not be another one until two days later.  So, backing out all the time necessary to wake up, shower, eat breakfast, check out of the hotel and catch a cab to the ferry landing, I figured I would need to be up no later than 5:45 a.m. 

I set my phone’s alarm and noted that it needed a charge.  I looked around for a wall outlet near the nightstands on either side of the bed. Nothing.  This is the topic of a different rant, but I will save that for another day. The nearest receptacle, it turned out, was around the corner and out of my sight line.  This would not do.  Plug my phone in one of these plugs and there was a very real risk that in the morning I would stumble out of bed to the buzzing alarm, in the dark, looking for the phone, trip and bang my head against something – something hard and unforgiving.  No, I would have to use the clock radio.  At least I could program this one.  I set the alarm for 5:45 a.m., turned out the lights and fell slowly to sleep.

I slept poorly that night.  The worry of oversleeping and missing the ferry worked its way into my brain.  Over and over again, throughout the night, my dream state would ping my conscious mind setting up those lucid dreams when you are not sure if you are awake or dreaming.

It was under these conditions that I had the dream that I wanted to tell you about.  The dream itself lasted only a moment. All this back story for a few seconds of dream.  Anyway, it went something like this.  In the dream, I was lying awake in bed, thinking to myself.  I was thinking that I had been up a lot in the night, but that I felt surprisingly rested. What time is it? I wondered.  I looked over at the hotel alarm clock. The large illuminated digital numbers read 2:30 a.m.  Wow, I thought, I still have more than three hours to sleep.  But when I looked closer at the clock, I saw another display – much smaller, in the upper right hand corner of the screen. It read: “Actual Time: 5:45 a.m.”  Actual Time?  That got my attention.  I woke up from my dream, which of course was a huge surprise, because I thought I was already awake looking at the clock.  Only now I was awake for real. It was pitch black in the room and I struggled to focus my eyes on the clock.  It read 5:45 a.m.  In the next few moments, the alarm came on with its obnoxious buzzing noise.

I was confused at first, but then the whole story, starting back in Tucson, fell into place.  I knew I would need to write it down.  So, that’s done. I’m also thinking that I may have invented the world’s first dream clock,  a device that breaches the space-time continuum by accurately recording both dream time and actual time.  Perhaps in a future dream I will go down to the patent office and stake my claim.