I finally did it. I finally fucked up my low-hanging front bumper.

Like, two days after I got the car I went over a bump at a bit over fifteen miles an hour. I heard a horrible grinding and stopped the car.

I found that all the paint had been scraped off the lower part of the front bumper. I thought I'd done that. It had probably always been like that and I'd never noticed.

My buddy Glen has an Eclipse, too. Same body style, but his is a convertible.

"I don't even worry about it anymore," he said when I asked him about the bumper-scraping, "I just let it rip. Maybe one day it'll fall off and I won't have to worry about it anymore."

So I pull up on curbs and parking blocks all the time. It rarely makes noise when I pull up, but when I pull away it scrapes and then pops when it comes off of whatever it was hung on.

Monday I stopped at Sonic for a tasty burger for lunch. As I drove off the scraping and popping was especially loud. I ignored it.

Monday night I had to go somewhere. It was loud when I pulled out of my parking spot, and then it kept scraping as I drove along. I got out to investigate.

The left side of the front bumper had been yanked out and down, dragging along the street like a demented cowcatcher. Luckily, it's plastic. I bent it back until it was more or less where it's supposed to go.

Now my car looks like it has a loose tooth.