I found it. It’s my Christmas present AND the most ridiculous thing the Williams-Sonoma, Inc., family has offered for sale since the Electric Vacuum Marinator. It might even be more ridiculous than the marinator because it costs $5000. Five. Thousand. Dollars. For something made by Pottery Barn. I would hope that for five thousand dollars I would actually get a pottery barn. I’m not 100% sure if that’s a barn that stores my pottery (of which I have very little – possibly because I don’t have enough dedicated pottery storage space) or a barn made of pottery. I don’t care which it is: at San Francisco real estate prices, $5K is a bargain for either.
But back to my Christmas present: it’s a car. A Bugatti, to be precise. But not an actual one, a miniature one. With no engine. So even if I were two feet tall, I couldn’t drive it around my house, which is a theoretical crying shame.
If it were an actual one, five thousand dollars would be the bargain of the century. But I probably still wouldn’t be able to drive it since it’d be a hundred years old and wildly unsafe, so I guess Pottery Barn hit the nail on the head: why buy the un-driveable real thing for an exorbitant sum when you can spend a slightly less exorbitant sum on an equally un-driveable but much smaller fake thing?
My Christmas present features, “hand-polished aluminum wheels,” which I’m assuming, since they use the present tense, means the car comes with someone to continue the hand-polishing. I’m starting to see where the cost started climbing.
Also, it has a nickel-plated, cast bronze radiator which sounds expensive and like maybe that’s what kind of engagement ring I should’ve held out for. Or what my next stove should have.
(I hate our current stove by the way. Maybe when my tiny car has it’s inevitable catastrophic accident, I will weld the nickel-plated, cast bronze radiator onto my stove, thereby improving it immensely.)
The web site says “…this car isn’t meant to be driven, but that won’t stop it from making your heart race.” I can only imagine. Between the price tag and the frustration at being unable to either fit into it or drive it if I could, my heart is already racing and the car hasn’t even arrived yet. I can’t imagine what kind of stroke/heart attack I’m setting myself up for on Christmas morning. Don’t not get it for me though because of that: this is all I’m asking for this year. Really. I have to have this car, health be damned.
Send me the shipping confirmation when it leaves the miniature Bugatti factory, OK? I need to know when I should go stand by the front window with my nose pressed against the glass.
Displaced 
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