Castrating Your Tesla

I may just be ahead of the curve, but I’ve always detested the Tesla logo. First, it seemed a little on the nose. Using an upper-case T struck me as painfully witless, like a prostrate failure of imagination. If that’s the best Elon Musk and his predecessors could do, no one would ever trust him with the federal government. Uh oh. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.

Then I started seeing Fallopian tubes. The arms of the T sloped a little bit downwards, just like the curly tendrils where the eggs originate. But that made no sense at all. Why would a bro with twenty-three wives offer a salute to eternal womanhood? There might be a logic here, but it felt unlikely. Finally, I settled on male genitalia, which made all the sense in the world. The arms of the T. The descending member. All of a sudden, it was worse than witless, but somehow felt simultaneously inevitable. I think I’m not supposed to say penis , but is the Tesla logo not Elon Musk’s junk?

Which means that we have come to the necessity of castration. Take the case of my cousin in Los Angeles. In the heady first days of auto-electrification, he bought his Tesla as an act of virtue signaling. It was everything you could do to declare your selfhood, especially freedom from fossil fuel dependance. No matter that the charge held for a minute and a half. There was another car in the driveway for grocery shopping and errands. The Tesla was for dropping the kids at school or coffee at Intelligentsia down the street on Sunset. He really wanted the original deal for life-long charging, but like most good things with Tesla, it lasted about a week.

But now, of course, the bloom is off the rose. Who wants a Tesla? Exactly no one. The problem is a basic principle of economics. When no one wants something, it’s worth nothing at all. But if you’re a sensitive person and you’re sick of getting the finger, the only thing left is to castrate your Tesla.

It turns out to be easy enough. Turn your hairdryer to its highest setting. That’s apparently enough to soften the mastic that holds the penis to the lip of the hood. When it’s sufficiently slurpy, run a piece of nylon fishing line behind the logo and massage vigorously from side to side, just as you would with a piece of dental floss. Musk’s genitals should then pop right off. Total expenditure: four bucks for the fishing line.

Next up is hot glue and a replacement logo, which the novelty market is now producing in abundance. I would personally opt for a Day of the Dead sugar skull. It somehow speaks to Meso-American cannibalism and that flap of degraded skin next to Elon Musk’s mouth. Now I’m really in forbidden territory, but our co-President is about to decapitate Head Start. If that’s not about child-sacrifice, what is?

Any which way, the Day of Castration is here. If you bought a Tesla, push it over a cliff. If that’s not in the cards, try the sugar skull.