Someone - or something - put three rolls of colorful paper party streamers under the hood of my car, and I'm going to find out who.

I'll need your help solving this mystery, so here are the facts:

We own a 2000 Subaru Legacy. It's the primary car for my wife and our two daughters, but occasionally I like to drive it to feel the raw power of the high performance Subaru engine. What a rush. I pulled the Subaru into the garage the other night and popped the hood to check the fluids, which is totally not a masturbation joke. To my surprise, I found three rolls of multi-colored party streamers and their plastic wrappers (pictured) sitting on the engine of the car.

What the hell?

The streamers can't have been there for very long, because we had a tune up and oil change a few weeks ago at a trusted local mechanic. As far as I can tell, they did no damage to the Subaru. But how did they get there, and why?

There are two possibilities:

1) The party streamers were placed under my hood accidentally.

2) The party streamers were placed under my hood on purpose.

I've been trying to think of plausible scenarios that explain how the streamers got under my hood by accident.

Was I really drunk one night while checking the wiper fluid levels and in my delirium I tossed the streamers under the hood? "New wiper fluid for you, car! Lesh have ush a party! Woo!" And then I blacked out and completely forgot about my engine block celebration.

Or maybe I was sleepwalking one night and I went out to the garage, opened the hood of the car, threw a few rolls of streamers in, and then went back to bed?

Or maybe I was working on the car in the garage and one of my little girls hurled the party streamers on to the engine just as I was closing the hood, and I didn't notice. But wouldn't the mechanics at the auto shop have noticed the streamers when they were working on the car?

The thing that I find particularly baffling is that the streamers come from Party City, a party supply store. I have been to Party City, both literally and metaphorically. I was practically the mayor of Party City in high school and college - I say practically because we all know Sammy Hagar is the official mayor of Party City. If memory serves, and often it does not, I visited Party City in October 2008, but I don't recall buying any streamers. So where did they come from?

As you can see, the accidental scenarios all seem unlikely. The streamers may have been placed inside the hood of our car on purpose.

Let's break down the more sinister scenarios that explain the presence of the Party City streamers on the car's engine.

1) Fiend - There may be a maniac mechanic working at the local auto repair shop who has a pathological need to put foreign objects inside the cars he works on. The guys at the auto shop were the last people that we definitely know had access to the engine, but we've used the same auto shop for years and have never had a problem.

Alternately, a random fiend could have stumbled upon our Subaru, found it unlocked, popped the hood, planted the paper streamers on our engine, then ran off into the night, cackling wickedly.

Evil knows no logic.






2) Those Damn Kids - It's possible that a horde of punk kids, high on meth and listening to Insane Clown Posse, wandered up the street, saw the Subaru, and targeted it for the party streamer treatment.

Why would they do such a thing?

They're Juggalos, agents of chaos - who knows why they do anything? The likelihood of the Those Damn Kids scenario is diminished somewhat by our house's location on a sleepy street on a semi-rural island in Puget Sound. We just don't have that many Juggalos around here.





3) Monster - A monster put the streamers there.

I think this needs no further explanation.

In a world where party streamers can magically appear in your car's engine, monsters may very well be real.

Now...

I have to type a few more lines so my picture will fit and I won't throw off the formating. Thanks for your patience.





4) Vengeance - Maybe somebody in our community has a grudge against me or my wife. I can't imagine who - maybe somebody who is jealous of my inherent awesomeness? This may be the most improbable scenario at all, due to my lack of awesomeness. However...

Consider this: my wife is a moderator for an online community of local moms, and we all know how popular mods are. Recently she's had some minor conflicts with members of the group who either don't understand the rules of the group or feel that the rules don't apply to them. Typical stuff. But my wife is not exactly anonymous, and our island is not all that big - it's possible that a deranged member of the group planted the streamers there in a fit of pique.

I know what you're thinking: If somebody wanted to sabotage my wife's car, they could have chosen a more effective method than placing party supplies on the engine. But what if the saboteur was a) crazy, b) spiteful but not murderous, and c) not mechanically inclined? They might have just impulsively thrown the streamers under there and scuttled off, their craving for petty revenge against the mod sated.

All these scenarios are complicated by the fact that my wife religiously locks the car, and the only way (that I know of) to get under the hood is to pop the lever inside the Subaru. We also park it in our garage at night, although we don't lock the side door leading into the garage. However, we own a pair of extremely jittery little dogs who bark when the wind blows outside, so they'd probably detect and then maul any intruders into the garage.

There is a third possibility which may have entered your mind: I may be totally full of it. This could be a classic case of an unreliable narrator, and I'm just fabricating the entire story.

But I'm not. If I was going to make up a story like this, wouldn't I have come up with something less lame? Like I found a dead squirrel or a bunch of wet diapers or a severed raccoon head under the hood of the Subaru? No, this mundane mystery is real - you're just going to have to trust me on this one.

So what do you think? Whodunnit? My mom thinks I should call the police, but I'm not convinced that there is a credible threat here. Help me, Internet. Help me solve the mystery of the Subaru streamer sabotage.

This entry was posted by David Campbell, on Saturday, January 24, 2009. You can leave your response.