On The VW Beetle

I've been saying for years that there is no such thing as a masculine Volkswagen Beetle.

Sure, you can get it in black, or even silver, but all anyone will see is a middle aged man with three daughters and sperm that's been swimming sideways for the past two decades.

Dean tried to argue this point once, after telling me his office had sent him on a two-day excursion in a yellow Bug. After maybe fifteen minutes, he added that the Beetle comes with a place to put flowers.

Not a cup holder that could serve as a repository for floral arrangements should you stick them in your travel mug, a tiny vase. There is a thin tube of plastic built to hold sweet smelling botanicals and it has its own little hook to one side of the dash. The Beetle has a flower hole and that's not even a Georgia O'Keefe joke.


That said, until a few days ago I would have stood by my original hypothesis that there is no masculine Beetle. I just saw it as an impossibility. There was no way to make a Bug seem cool in any way. Obviously, I forgot blatant irony.















Now, I'll freely admit this is a mock-up achieved through about twenty tedious minutes in Photoshop, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is a pretty accurate representation of the Monster Bug I drove past a few days ago.

It was just a strip of polymer bumper material, patterned with red and white triangles, but dammit if this twenty year old kid in his Mastodon t-shirt didn't find a way to make a busted-up hand-me-down Beetle something a dude could stand to be seen in.

Kudos, Sir. You have not only proved me wrong, you have proved life hilarious.