Step 1: Fall in love. Step 2: Buy a Vespa. Step 3: Profit!
In 1977, my grandparents and I stepped out of a train station and into daylight in Italy. To my eye, the roads came from wild directions and led away crazily. Just then, a woman in a full wedding gown drove by on a Vespa. This was the first time I knew that things happened because I was there to see them.
The disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico signals the end of cheap oil-based American prosperity. It may take a few years for the full horror to dawn on us all along the Gulf Stream on both sides of the Atlantic, but it will because it’s all in motion. In the same way we look back and see how life was radically different during the recession and energy crisis of the early seventies than it is now, we will look back and see this disaster as a turning point. It’s over. If I’m going to learn how to ride a Vespa, now’s the time.
In a few weeks, there’s a class, and I already own a bridal veil and a helmet.
Poor Impulse Control 
Uh, yeah. I’m going to really enjoy riding that Vespa in January down to Shakopee.
Yeah, like it’s the Vespa’s fault that you live somewhere that the winter temperatures get cold enough to freeze EYEBALLS. Tell your wife’s company to move to the Caymans, already.
Eyeballs! Feh. It’s cold enough here to freeze a guy’s nuts to his thigh under flannel-lined pants.
I swear, if I were still working in Orangeburg I would get one. But since my route to work takes me on the Garden State Parkway, Route 46, and Route 80, I’m afraid survival has to take priority. There’s crazy people out on them thar roads.