This week someone was staring at me in my car and I thought “Well, of course- I have a dragon on my car,”. Surprise twist: I was driving a big white minivan because my dragon car is gone.

I’ve been processing losing the Dragon Wagon for a week now, and it’s been a weird reverse process of when I finally got the wagon all painted. Instead of thinking, “Why are people beeping at me?” I’m assuming that people are able to track my whereabouts in what’s amounting to my stealth van.

There’s a lot of things I thought the dragon car was going to do. In my wild flights of imagination, I thought that I would be Randy Land on wheels and that hundreds of people would follow me on instagram or something. Headline reads “Local Hero puts one in eye of polite society-  gains key to city”. Fast forward to this morning, still waiting my winner sash and parade.

What the Dragon Wagon did do was make a lot of little kids happy. I got to see them get excited everywhere I went. It also meant a lot of my friends beeped at me in traffic, which made the city seem smaller and reminded me that I knew a lot of great people. It also just felt good- sometimes when I was going to bed feeling low about stuff, I got to remember that at least some of my life was off script.

Wait, what’s that? Would I do it again you ask? Yeah, maybe I will. I couldn’t resell the parts of my car because of the artwork on it (Which means my artwork was worth -450 dollars) but if I had the right situation, I would do it again. I’d like to make a better looking dragon, for one, now that I know the process better. Also, I still believe people need to see dragon cars rolling around just to remind them that life has a zillion possibilities.

I’ve been grieving the loss. I got the hood off, or my car guy, Paul Gates got it. I’m going to try to turn it into a “Welcome to North Braddock” sign. I mean, I know it can survive the weather and stuff. Just gotta seal the underside with rustoleum I think. That’ll be a good enough headstone for my favorite car I ever had, and an appropriate epilogue to the wagon’s mission.