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Because the temperature is somewhere around 1,000 degrees below zero today, I went outside this morning to start my car so it could have time to warm up before I had to get in it for the long, torturous drive to work (this long, torturous drive takes about five minutes, but whatever). So anyway, when I opened the door of my car, I noticed that there was some weird brown ice on the seat. I brushed it off, then sat down so I could put the key in the ignition. In doing so, I noticed that some papers I had to take to work this morning and left on the seat so I wouldn’t forget them were also covered in the weird brown ice. I shook them off and looked around a little bit. The floor had chunks of brown ice on it, there were bits of it on the steering column, and there was a glob of it frozen to the side of the passenger seat.

Around then, I realized that something strange had happened. And yes, it took me that long, because it was morning, and a Monday morning at that. Plus I’m kind of an oblivious idiot, so I’m sure that played a part as well. Anyway, I turned around and looked in the backseat, and that was when I understood the scope of the horror. It looked like someone had projectile-vomited all over everything. Naturally, my first thought was, “What the hell did I do last night?” I replayed the events of the previous evening, and was satisfied that I had not at any point done anything that would have necessitated puking all over my car, which made me glad, but I also couldn’t figure it out. If I hadn’t thrown up all over the inside of my car, who had?

Then I remembered the fact that I’d seen the footprints of the neighbors’ six-toed cat all around the car, and since that cat freaks me out (not because it has six toes, but because it’s weird and creepy) I thought, “The cat did it.” But then, upon further reflection, I realized that was a stupid hypothesis, because there was no way the cat could’ve gotten inside the car, since all the doors were closed and the windows rolled up. Unless it crawled up in the tailpipe and came out through the slats in the heating vent or something. And I wouldn’t put it past that cat: like I said, it’s weird and creepy.

So, having discarded my first two suspects after a logical examination of the evidence, I was back to where I started: baffled, and with no one to blame. This was not particularly satisfying, and I knew that in order to solve the mystery, I was going to have to look in the backseat. I got out of the car and opened the back door. It was then that I found my culprit: an exploded can of Diet Coke. Please view Exhibit A (click to enlarge):

Yeah. So that’s awesome, right? I know.

Then I went back outside, because I realized I didn’t want my car to get warm before I had to get in it for the long, torturous drive to work. You know, so that my car wouldn’t fill with liquid Diet Coke and drown me. Upon so doing, I took my camera with me (because what’s the point of having a camera if you don’t use it to take pictures of explosive Diet Coke aftermath?). I present to you Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

and Exhibit D:

It was a grisly crime scene indeed. But the mystery still remained: who had done this to my poor little car? See, I don’t drink Diet Coke anymore. Well, I do, but I only drink 1 or 2 cans a day as opposed to the 3,000 cans a day I was drinking before. And since I do this Diet Coke drinking in the morning, in the confines of my house, when I am bleary-eyed and unwilling to admit that it’s time for me to be awake and useful, I couldn’t figure out how the CokeBomb had gotten into my car. So I did the logical thing. I called my mother.

And here’s where the story reaches its conclusion. My mom had taken my car this weekend to go to a wedding in Lansing, and she had taken a can of Diet Coke with her which she did not drink. She also didn’t remove it from my car when she was finished driving it, even though it is 1,000 degrees below zero outside and that causes contents under pressure to freeze, expand, and explode all over my car. Fortunately, my mother was contrite enough to offer to clean up the entire mess, so now the inside of my car is cleaner than it was before, and I say she can borrow my vehicle anytime she wants to.

The end.

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