Big Bikes

Mini Van Driver Man’s Lament

You wanted the big, black SUV with the tinted windows so that teenage girls couldn’t see the baby seats in the back. You want to be perceived as a still sexually viable male not as a middle-aged Dad. But your wife, who you oft times refer to as “The Warden” made you get the Mini-Van.



You pleaded with her to get the Magnum Wagon “It’s a STATION WAGON honey” you cried. You knew it wasn’t really at all utilitarian, not like your parent’s Country Squire, but it just looks so cool, you would feel like such a bad-ass driving that thing. But she said no, it was a stupid gas guzzler, a blatant over-compensator, then she made you get the Mini-Van. No hall pass for you to go to the Dodge dealer.


Now you drive a Mini-Van, yet you still try to appear cool, to drive like a bad-ass, like Kowalski in Vanishing Point, but you are driving a Mini-Van. If Kowalski were commissioned to drive a Mini-Van to San Francisco he would have driven it into a bulldozer in the first thirty seconds of the film sparing himself two hours of on-screen emasculation.


You drive aggressively in traffic. When men see you tearing around, screeching the tires on your Mini-Van they want to be you, they want to get a car just like yours. When women hear you revving the engine, blaring Creed, they want to be with you, they want to ride in your…baby seats…which are still in the back of the van (which is mini).