Your phobias are crazy. Mine are real.

Everyone’s phobias tend to look a little flimsy when exposed to reality’s harsh light. Airplanes? Bridges? They don’t really fall down that often. Clowns? Usually aren’t evil serial killers outside of sensational fiction. Meteors? They don’t usually strike just because you’ve stepped foot outside of your house for the first time in three months.

My phobia of car washes, however, is one hundred percent, unshakably, unquestionably genuine and grounded in nothing but fact.

I know, I know. It sounds silly to admit that I’m afraid of car washes, but there it is. It sounds like one of those silly little things one confesses over drinks at a party, hoping to endear oneself as a quirky oddball. But no. I genuinely am afraid of the things. I can’t drive into one to save my life.

What am I afraid of? I’ll tell you. The whole automated car wash is a Rube Goldberg contraption designed solely to reduce my car to a smoking pile of scrap iron. If I don’t align my tires perfectly with the tracks designed to grip them and run the vehicle through the tunnel of suds, if I neglect to put the gear into neutral, if I neglect to wait at the end and shift into drive before the track has let go of the car—well, it’s over, isn’t it? Not only will I induce the wrath of a dozen rag-wiping men, but my car’s wheels will fall off. It’s too much pressure, I tell you. Too much!

I also have an equally well-established phobia of oil change establishments. Frankly put, they scare the heck out of me. I know that when I drive over that pit below, where the men work, that I’m likely to swerve unexpectedly and send three thousand pounds of car crashing down blow, possibly killing someone. But while I really don’t have to wash my car, I do have to get the oil changed on occasion. So while other people rev confidently into their local Jiffylube, I’m the guy who’s creeping forward over the pit, inch by inch, while the fellow trying to guide me in impatiently beckons me forward and looks at his watch, hoping that I’ll make it inside by the time his shift is over.

So basically what I’m saying is that if you’re driving in the metropolitan Detroit area and you see someone with an impossibly dirty car, it’s probably me. But I have reasons.