Wisdom is a product of age and experience. When you get older, you tend to be better at judging something on its merits, rather than your emotional attachment to it. That’s why a while back, after losing money on cars that I initially intended to sell, I vowed never to invest my time, money, and sanity into a vehicle that wouldn’t give me an adequate return on my investment. As you might’ve deduced by now, I am horrible at following my own advice.

Lots of people have something they like to call retail therapy. It’s the incredibly narcissistic and self-serving act of window shopping and acquiring material items to make yourself feel better about whatever issues you have. It’s disgusting, deplorable, and one of my favorite pastimes—well, it would be if you replaced “retail” with “scraping the rusty bottom rung of Craigslist.”

Fueled by my need to own something that would be more at home in a hillbilly’s front yard, I looked for the cheapest Japanese turbo halo car I could find, and one kept popping up - a 1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 that was rough on the inside, rough on the outside, didn’t run, and, as the seller put it, needed some “extreme TLC.” I wasn’t tender, loving or caring, but I knew how to fix a damn car, so I took a fistful of cash and drove an hour and a half from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to see the rust bucket. After gathering that yes, this was the cheapest and worst 3000GT VR4 imaginable, I paid for it and let it sit in its spot for five months before picking it up—a fact I subtly mentioned on Twitter:

Now, in video form, I can tell the story of what happened when I tried to get it running and back to my house.