Unlike most of us, though, Buster decided to act on his impulse. After being dumped by his girlfriend, he decided it was time to marry his one true love—his 1996 Mustang GT. He went to the Knoxville, Tennessee courthouse and filled out an application listing his fiancée’s birthplace as "Detroit", her father as "Henry Ford", and her blood type as "10-W-40". The clerk told him no go.

     The problem is that Tennessee law says it’s only legal for men and cars to marry if the car is older than 16. Just kidding. Actually it turns out your bride has to be female. Imagine that! Buster defends himself by pointing out that his fiancée—who he probably calls GT when he’s murmuring sweet nothings into her fuel injectors—has fewer plastic parts than either Cher or Pamela Anderson Lee. Just kidding again. Actually they have the same amount.

     Why is it we love our cars so much, anyway? They’re big, hulking, cold, balky pieces of metal. Not something we’d usually think of as a loveable object. True, we spend a lot of time in them, but we also spend a lot of time in the bathroom and most people don’t have the same relationship with their toilet. [NOTE: Insert favorite "Buster marrying an outhouse" joke here.] It could be because cars get us places quickly—well, usually—but people don’t feel the same way about bicycles or buses or trains or roller blades. Well, maybe roller blades, but that’s mostly in Southern California.

     Just the thought of My Mother The Car should be enough to make people like Buster Mitchell abandon any thoughts of marrying his car. Suppose your mother was reincarnated as a car and you married her without realizing it? How would you cope with it? Psychiatry? Move to West Virginia where it’s legal? Join Roman Polanski in France? The sick part is that that sooner or later someone in Detroit would decide there’s a market there and start producing the new Ford Oedipus.

     Actually, one of the things that bothers me most about Buster and his attempt at auto-eroticism is his taste in mates. A ’96 Mustang? Come on! I had a ’66 Mustang convertible for a number of years and I have to say, even though I really liked the car, I couldn’t see marrying it. It was too hard to cuddle up to, it would overheat and stop before I was done, and in the winter it took forever to warm up. True, it didn’t talk back, I could turn it off anytime I wanted, and I could take the top down whenever I was in the mood and it never complained of having a headache. But even so, marriage is a big step.

     The biggest problem, really, is that this could set a very bad precedent. If people are allowed to marry their cars, what next? Lawn mowers? Power saws? That new gadget from the Williams-Sonoma catalog? Suddenly that stupid joke from when we were kids—"I love Tootsie-rolls!" "Then why don’t you marry one?"—will be taken literally.