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Joshua Brown
Here we are, 2 whole years with the vroomie.
I ducked underneath the desk, I was looking for a criminal, but I couldn't see him. Then she ambushed me. I feared for my life and I grabbed her, throwing her over my shoulder, I dashed up the stairs and someone pulled a knife on me, I grabbed her by the legs and I began to bash... They didn't know that someone had also just tried to run me over. 2,860 lbs of steel racing towards me. None of them had communicated, but somehow they all knew to attack me. It was a zombie movie where the zombies were exactly like everyone else and the only person who could tell they were attacking me, was me.
My car has shielded me from 2.5 attacks now. A 2015 Honda Civic EX. I spoke about it before. I've had it for over two years now. You could say that I understand it.
Colorado has about 185,000 miles of roads and if I were to drive it at the average speed I've maintained with my Civic over a period of 70 trips tracked, at 25.37 MPH, it would take me 303 days non stop to drive every single mile of road in the state of Colorado.
I've driven 17,973 miles since October 2023 which is the almost the distance to circumnavigate the world. This is about 24 miles per day in my glass shrouded steel cage, blasting around the flat earth listening to Freedomain, Nuclear Barbarians, No Dumb Questions and Tin Foil Hat.
If you would have told me at the time that I purchased the vehicle that I would have these vivid dreams of death by car, I would have believed you. I have a very vivid dream that I constantly reflect on, where a car in a parking lot killed one of my children as we exited a grocery store. DREAMS, or rather nightmares plague me, car after car, machine after machine, faceless, judgeless monsters committing or attempting to commit manslaughter and get away with it. Unable to fight back without my own, my weapon of mass destruction, my cage of steel to be able to defend from the attacks by those who are not raging and thus not condemnable.
In 2015 when my car started being produced it MSRP'd at $21,190 and the BTC price on October 25, 2014 was $358.61 which means that anyone that bought the car new instead of buying bitcoin had a net cost to them of 59 bitcoins, which at todays price of $101,055 per bitcoin, means that someone who bought the car brand new in 2014 spent today's price of $5,971,265!! A Honda Civic EX! This was back when Ebola and Hong Kong protests were big news items.
But I wasn't that stupid, I didn't buy a brand new car in 2014, I was still driving around a almost new Honda Accord coupe. (which was probably a even worse financial decision)
So how is this latest car working financially? Well, in today's bitcoin price, since day 1, I have spent $55,914 on the car. Not really, but more really than the fake fiat dollars that I spent on it which was $29,043. That means that, if every single penny that I spent on the car, from gas to insurance to oil changes to car washes and every time I made a car payment, instead I bailed on all of it, turned in my car and walked to save the money as an investment in bitcoin, today, I would have $55,914. But I took it a step further and calculated the cost for a monthly bus pass, which in today's price is $3,602.19. So if I just walked at took the bus and saved every other penny, I would have a grand total of $52,312.58 saved away, invested in bitcoin or gold or NVIDIA.
That money bought me freedom. I have a Colorado driver's license that allows me to drive anywhere in the contiguous north american countries of the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Canada. That's a lot of money but considering how much I could use it for and just don't, I may be paying for more than what I need. For example, my current spend rate per mile is $1.62 in fiat fun bucks. That's $2.91 per mile in bitcoin real bucks. How exactly do I feel about having a subscription to the North American continent for $2.91 per mile? How about in fiat a flat daily rate of $39.14 or in bitcoin: $70.50 PER DAY for 2 whole years. And I've barely left the state. In the last 2 years I've been to the Nebraska/Colorado border once and I've been to Cheyenne Wyoming once. I've traveled to multiple cities in my state. Denver, Lakewood, Georgetown, Colorado Springs, Elizabeth, Limon, Pueblo, Centennial, Nederland, Idaho Springs, Blackhawk, Castle Rock, Brighton, Canon City, Boulder, Golden, Kit Carson, Longmont, Fort Collins, Greeley, and Fountain.
Getting a car has substantially increased my likelihood to spend money on fast food. When I was simply taking my skateboard to get a daily McDonald's breakfast sandwich, I was afraid for my life. Hurtling down the road or sidewalk, depending on these car drivers to acknowledge and respect my presence as a transportation fellow traveler or pedestrian, it highly incentivized me to get food from the grocery store, cook and stay home. Not so with a car, now that I have a car, I feel respected and safe. I am permitted to drive a mile out of my way to commute and it only adds a couple minutes to my drive. If I were to be walking, riding my bike, skateboarding or taking the bus, even a half mile difference is enough to change the choices that I make especially regarding quick simple food like Chick-fil-a, Ziggi's, McDonald's or Subway.
Do you remember that I told you before, I bought this car because of a dream, a dream about a blind date and me lying about having a car to impress her? Well, that's done nothing. I am still single and in fact, I don't even live with a roommate anymore, so post car-ownershipping I am actually a bit lonelier than when I did not have a car. I don't feel lonelier, because I have replaced some of that life with things that I can do now that I have a car that would have been a bit more of a hassle without. The gym. And Toastmasters. I can choose a gym that is further away but has social classes where I can chat with people and connect in ways that the gym that is close to my house just doesn't conduce. And the public speaking class that I am able to attend would also be undoable if I were to have to take a bus home from work for an hour.
Who built my car? Bob Nelson. My car was built in a Honda manufacturing plant in Greensburg, Indiana in 2014 and according to the data I could find, the president of that plant at the time was Bob Nelson. Now I don't think that Bob Nelson would have ever imagined that bitcoin would hit the price it is, and who knows if he ever even saw my car if he was sitting in his office negotiating a pay raise for his employees the day that they were making my car. The 9th generation of the Honda Civic. Built on a small highway frontage road between Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
I have used 625 gallons (~12 bathtubs) of unleaded gasoline, a lot of it purchased from my corner 7-Eleven. They use their own company to purchase fuel called SEI fuels.
Since purchasing this car, I have earned 1.5 bitcoin from my normal daily job, spending a whopping .5 bitcoin on everything associated with the car! That's a third of my income priced in BTC! This is in part due to the enormous amount of money I put into the car upfront and the fact that that real money is valued so much higher in the past than it is in the last year.
My average time spent in the vehicle is about .9 hours per day. That's 55 minutes, which at 55 words per minute spent typing is 3,000 words I could have typed instead of driving. That's a blog post a day!
I don't know what all of ts means on a certain level, I mean, the price of the car is what I pay for it. All of money is a bit fake and momentary. But in retrospect, what value did I spend on doing nothing? I laid in bed 8 hours a day, I played video games for who knows how many hours in my lifetime, I scrolled TikTok instead of starting a business, and all of these things were $0 to do. I didn't spend any money on those things, that was money saved for bitcoin, but yet, it wasn't. These things added nothing to my life, and in the same way, having a car has added something to my life. Including giving me something to think about and write about here.
For example, having this car, I can transport 4 other people legally with me. I can transport heavy items, large items, bicycles, trailers, guns, all kinds of things that would be tricky to do with public transportation. Also the value of not having to figure out when and where the bus will come, which connections I need to make, if the bus runs that late (here the bus stops at 2am for a few hours) and a myriad of other aspects of public transportation, like the fact that if someone is in my car who I don't like, I can tell them to leave, not true about RTD!
I can listen to my music as loud as I want, I can drive as liberally or conservatively as I want, I can stop paying my registration, evade the cops, and drive around with expired plates if I want. That was a joke. These things are part of the equation for sure. Could I pay a monthly subscription on RTD to play the music that I want? Can I pay an extra $270 a year to change the schedule of one of the buses to better suit my commute? Can I get frequent flyer miles that I can use to pay for Delta flights to other cities? Maybe someday in the future when the government gets its grimy paws off of the stranglehold of the roads, if we can break free of this car-centric mentality that is costing us nearly a third of our lives, will we be able to build interesting and innovative, cool and collaborative structures and institutions that don't drag us into despair.
Am I optimistic that we will solve these issues in my lifetime? Will transportation ever be more competitive? Who builds the roads and why aren't they automatically shareholders in the value that the construction work that they have done? Is it because it isn't value, it is a waste of money disguised as economic gross domestic product?
Bitcoin fixes this.
Someday I will find the individuals who built my car, the laborers, and I will ask them how much they made during the time that they were employed by the Honda manufacturing plant. I will ask them about their health and mental wellbeing, do they remember any interesting stories about their time at the factory. But for now, they will live in infamy, the people who worked, their dreams and hopes funded by the careful creation by capitalists of a giant behemoth of a business that navigated the choppy waters of The State to bring to bear the soft cushioned seat in the cozy protected space of the car that drives 3 times as fast as the fastest horse.
Now imagine what business and relationships built on freedom could bring us in the future! I can't imagine the tunnels, or flying cars or same minute delivery services that we will have but I know that it will be built on freedom, not oppression.
#car #automobile #review #dream #freeverse #poetry #streamofconscious #waroncars
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📅 Published November 13, 2025
📍 Written in Centennial, Colorado
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There are some people who are much wiser than me who have laid the financial foundations to begin to unwind these ideas. If you are interested in learning more about how money works, the internet is full of discussions and debates about these things, I have learned to be objective and what that means is I should observe and articulate what I observe to others. These studious metrics are hard fought for over the last few years.
I use a huge spreadsheet, which has primarily been hosted on the LibreOffice software to keep track of all this data. Every single piece has been meticulously placed into the ledger to better see and understand what is really going on with my money, so that I can see scams happening when they are above my immediate understanding of "number go up" ape-brain that sometimes I find myself resorting to.
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