Dear Armor-All,

Let me start by saying thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in my own ability to maintain a vehicle, as up until I discovered your wonderful line of products I had no idea what the big deal was.

Recently I felt the urge to try and make our year-old Mazda look spanky new. I've never had a new car before and I thought, well, OK - it needs to be done. I had actually been kind of depressed by how shabby our under-20,000kms car was looking, despite my attempts to keep it at least *sort of* tidy. Of course, part of my resistance to spending a lot of time keeping the car looking pretty has to do with a) the environment (such a waste of water, and all those nasty chemicals!) and b) the whole weirdness of lots of men (and a few women) I've met who take a little *too* much pride in their vehicle's appearance. Like some sort of strange religious sect, they emerge from their homes to spend Sunday afternoon (and probably a few nights a week, too) hanging out in the back alley, dripping sweat while they lustily take after their car/truck/van/motorbike piece by piece to make it shine, shimmer, and glisten. They do this with the kind of cult-like dedication and zeal most women wished their husbands would reserve for important things like foreplay and helping with the dishes.

We're pretty 'green' at our house - we reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as we can. We buy second-hand and accept hand-me-downs. We're bicycle commuters and avoid using the car during the week at all if possible. We use a push mower and insist that you only flush it down when it's brown. I am personally the lights-off Nazi, spending countless minutes following people around and shutting off lights behind them. I know we have room for improvement but we *do* try and do our part to limit the size of our carbon footprint. So when I took on washing the Mazda a few weeks ago, I tried to approach it from an environmentally-friendly perspective, reminding myself that a well-maintained car will last longer and that this had nothing to do whatsoever with vanity.

Off to the car wash I went to clean the exterior. I selected the little green tree dial at the carwash for the foaming brush that uses biodegradable soap (which only runs for about half as long as the other planet-destroying soap) and vacuum (quickly, so as to not waste energy) the ever-loving snot out of the floor mats and between the seats, then return home to use water and old rags, newspaper and vinegar, and 50% post-consumer waste paper toweling to clean the interior. But after suffering through hours of wiping, wiping, wiping that damned plastic moulded crap inside my car I started thinking, "Why? Why do they make cars out of this shit? Is there really no other material they could use that wouldn't look like I had a family of 18 billy goats tramping about on it after just a couple of days? And why does this particular plastic dashboard attract all this cosmic fuzz?" By the time the sun started slipping down behind the tree-line I was practically in hysterics, thinking somehow it was my own inadequacy or maybe part of the Universe's plan that I don't deserve to have anything nice and oh boo hoo hoo meeeee~~~~~~

So, in a fit of late-night rage and frustration I decide to do what I often do when my elbow-grease tree-hugging labour isn't fruitful - I turn to chemicals, rebellious and ashamed. Yeah, you wanna make something of it? Yeah, I'm the one who buys the 'green' products and when they don't work make a beeline for the caustic stuff that makes your nose hairs curl and your eyes water, with the 'poison' and 'will probably blow up' and 'may cause blindness and sterility and spontaneous amputations' icons on them. Laundry detergents, stain removers, mildew killers, grout cleaners, scrubbing bubbles with bleach, soap scum remover, the oven cleaner that asks you to leave your home for no less than 48 hours or suffer a collapsed lung - LOVE them, LOVE THEM ALL. In shame. So yes, I admit, I caved and headed straight for the aisle of tree-killing, water contaminating, environmentally unfriendly toxic products that would, frankly, make my car look all shiny and pretty and new again.

Off to WalMart I go (who else is open this late on a Sunday night?) I return just as dusk is creeping, a storm brewing nicely in the distance, mosquitoes swarming out to greet me, and I'm armed with a comprehensive collection of Armor-All auto-care products. Shammies. Gloves. Stuff to get grease and tar off the rims. Stuff to make the tires shiny. Stuff to keep the leather upholstery supple and creamy like butta. And stuff for wiping down the plastic - a rather innocent looking black bottle that simply says, "Original Formula" in yellow letters. I am on a mission now, dammit.

I started with the wheels. I was feeling guilty about the satisfaction I felt as I watched the tar on the rims practically evaporate mere seconds after being sprayed. I was ashamed to feel such glee over my slick wet-look low-profile tires. When I slid open the doors to polish the seats, I was horrified to rub against the leather upholstery, all smelling nice while feeling supple and perhaps even creamier than butta. And I swear I did not mean that orgasmic whoop of ecstasy (or the dance of joy, or the tears and rocking on my heels repeating, "Praise be!") when I wiped down the plastic with Original Formula. Blessed, amazing, transforming Original Formula. As I stepped back and admired with deep sorrow the beauty that was the Mazda, I became Armor-All's biggest fan. (For those of you who already knew about this Armor-All thing, shut up - it was a life-changing thing for me, a revelation, maybe even an epiphany, really. I even spent a week afterwards being a one-man advertising machine for the company... "Hey, man, did you know what Armor-All can do for YOUR car?")

Now if only Armor-All would create a line of environmentally-friendly products that work as well as their regular products, I too could be convinced to spend many Sunday afternoons attending the church of car care without so much as an ounce of remorse. (I hear they have engine shampoo - whoohoo!) For now, I'll consider my new obsession with Armor-All a guilty pleasure, and if you see me at a red light whipping out a convenient Original Formula handy wipe and simonizing my steering wheel like Gollum fingering his ring, look away...