It’s a game that you can never win. It starts innocently enough though, as follows you, or some might say, haunt you for the next half dozen decades of your life. To the casual observer, the old MOPAR was unassuming. It was for the most part not pretty at 50 feet, and certainly an eyesore at 5 feet. But she existed in an era where muscle cars ruled, and was not slouch if one knew how to dissect a tell tale signs of modifications under the hood.
You were wildly excited to be a passenger in your older brother’s car. Some might even think of you as a captive audience. You were younger then, and your 135 lbs 5’10 ft frame would just sink back into the springs of the seat, as your neck whipped backwards. Forward did the old MOPAR accelerate you leaving a smokey haze of vaporized rubber. The air wafted and the tarmac had a trail of positrac goodness. Despite how you promised not to tell mom, you couldn’t contain your excitement about the ride. However, your inadvertent snitching would limit your future rides to times when it seemed appropriate to antagonize the parental units. A few years later at sixteen years young, you were never so proud to earn your right of passage and get a drivers’ license.
For the next decade or two, cars come and go. Buying and driving whatever jalopy finds its’ way into your life. Some were driven until your squeezed every living drop of oil from their pumps, others came and went based on needs of basic transportation. As you begin to settle down and put down roots, multiple cars enter your stable at once. Some are project cars, others serve purposes like haul trucks. . Much like you prepare a lobster by putting it in the pot while the water is tepid, then slowly increasing the flame on the bottom of the kettle, you are becoming numb. Numb to the fact that your procurement costs for vehicles have lept by two orders of magnitude in the decades since your first. You hadn’t even realized the startling revelation more than to mentally note, you remember when vehicles were more reasonably priced.
You have reached the point in career when more of the years are in the rear view mirror, and only a scantily few stand before you. The vehicles in your stable have become less and less practical, and more tuned to scratching an eternal itch. An itch every time you scratch requires more salve in the form of additional horsepower. You dabble in motorcycles, as even an expensive motorbike is far cheaper than a cage with the same performance. However, the motorcycles only prove to you that life is fragile, and while you are (mostly) sound of mind and body that fortune can change instantaneously.
While none of the current vehicles is high mileage, nor mechanically a basket case, all are beginning to age out. Age out in the sense that most were bought a previous decade. Car shopping begins with random chatter, but nothing lights your fire. High end European luxury sedans, to station wagons, Pro-toured Fat Fender trucks, and even an errant Land Rover all mull over your conscious thoughts. None however prove to excite more than the last decision. Months elapse.
As the summer solstice approached, the credit union announced a new partnership with a car buying service. Purportedly, the car buying service would save thousands off all models using a dealer within their network. After eagerly entering all the minutia details down to the color code of the prospective vehicle, the process seems to instill prowess. This prowess quickly erodes as all of the offers are for base model vehicles, wrong options and nary one even in the desired color. The calls and emails received would mostly be considered spam, dealers which haven’t given the slightest thought about the user’s requirements, nor the have the slightest care. They want to sell you anything they have, and torture you until you understand that fact. Summer marches on.
You were wildly excited to be a passenger in your older brother’s car. Some might even think of you as a captive audience. You were younger then, and your 135 lbs 5’10 ft frame would just sink back into the springs of the seat, as your neck whipped backwards. Forward did the old MOPAR accelerate you leaving a smokey haze of vaporized rubber. The air wafted and the tarmac had a trail of positrac goodness. Despite how you promised not to tell mom, you couldn’t contain your excitement about the ride. However, your inadvertent snitching would limit your future rides to times when it seemed appropriate to antagonize the parental units. A few years later at sixteen years young, you were never so proud to earn your right of passage and get a drivers’ license.
For the next decade or two, cars come and go. Buying and driving whatever jalopy finds its’ way into your life. Some were driven until your squeezed every living drop of oil from their pumps, others came and went based on needs of basic transportation. As you begin to settle down and put down roots, multiple cars enter your stable at once. Some are project cars, others serve purposes like haul trucks. . Much like you prepare a lobster by putting it in the pot while the water is tepid, then slowly increasing the flame on the bottom of the kettle, you are becoming numb. Numb to the fact that your procurement costs for vehicles have lept by two orders of magnitude in the decades since your first. You hadn’t even realized the startling revelation more than to mentally note, you remember when vehicles were more reasonably priced.
You have reached the point in career when more of the years are in the rear view mirror, and only a scantily few stand before you. The vehicles in your stable have become less and less practical, and more tuned to scratching an eternal itch. An itch every time you scratch requires more salve in the form of additional horsepower. You dabble in motorcycles, as even an expensive motorbike is far cheaper than a cage with the same performance. However, the motorcycles only prove to you that life is fragile, and while you are (mostly) sound of mind and body that fortune can change instantaneously.
While none of the current vehicles is high mileage, nor mechanically a basket case, all are beginning to age out. Age out in the sense that most were bought a previous decade. Car shopping begins with random chatter, but nothing lights your fire. High end European luxury sedans, to station wagons, Pro-toured Fat Fender trucks, and even an errant Land Rover all mull over your conscious thoughts. None however prove to excite more than the last decision. Months elapse.
As the summer solstice approached, the credit union announced a new partnership with a car buying service. Purportedly, the car buying service would save thousands off all models using a dealer within their network. After eagerly entering all the minutia details down to the color code of the prospective vehicle, the process seems to instill prowess. This prowess quickly erodes as all of the offers are for base model vehicles, wrong options and nary one even in the desired color. The calls and emails received would mostly be considered spam, dealers which haven’t given the slightest thought about the user’s requirements, nor the have the slightest care. They want to sell you anything they have, and torture you until you understand that fact. Summer marches on.