Recently I checked eBay to see what people were asking for their Porsche 914s, and discovered something interesting. I had known that this was the first Porsche model to be produced without all the excruciating hand labor that had traditionally gone into their cars; it was their first mass-produced vehicle. It was made at the Karmann factory in Finland using parts supplied by Porsche in Stuttgart. The thing that was so remarkable about the cars being offered on eBay was the claim that they had the original paint! I had always admired the paint on my now-38-year-old car—even now I can spit on it and rub it with my finger and it comes back brilliant! It’s doubtful that this kind of paint is available any more since, being so good, it must have been totally toxic and dangerous to use and probably killed entire generations of families of the users if even a drop of it accidentally landed on the skin of the poor paint gun operator. It will probably be declared illegal in California to have a car with that paint on it, once its long-lasting properties are discovered by the regulators. Maybe I should scrape it off and embed it in concrete in a double-walled stainless steel and titanium drum and deposit it on the bleeding edge of the nearest geologic subduction zone, hoping it will enter earth’s mantle for recycling and emergence in maybe a billion years or so. It’s my duty, and I shall not shirk.
Or maybe not.
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