The Grandest of Introductions
I’ve been dragging my feet on this for an incredibly long time, although I don’t know exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Some sort of fundamental readiness, some viola moment where suddenly I have everything for my car blog to immediately flourish.
But! A wise man once told me: Don’t get ready. Get started.
So we’re operating on that principle here.
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Depending on how well you know me, you may or may not have any idea that I’m obsessed with cars, and that I’ve been this way since I was like five years old.
And you might get it! Or you might not. In which case, I certainly don’t blame you. Cars are expensive and dangerous and wasteful and the world would almost certainly be better off without them. Going into college, I actually underwent a period of silence on my four-wheeled obsession — mostly just because I was sick of explaining something that seemed so dumb on paper. And also a little bit because I was ashamed I couldn’t drive stick. But I digress.
Hopefully this project will appeal to you regardless of whether you love cars or not, because in so many ways they’re just a vessel for everything else. Our world, and our lives, are built around the ways cars are meant to be used. They can represent race, status, age, sexual orientation. They can represent caring about the environment, strangely enough. Or the exact opposite. They enabled white flight half a century ago, and are driving gentrification today. They’re one of the most fundamental pillars of modern America, in ways that continue to startle me every day.
As for my car enthusiasts, of course there’s more to it than that. I could talk about mastery and beauty and craftsmanship and design and subcultures and twisty back roads and a million other things. But on some primeval level, I really just think machines that make noise and go fast are super cool. So we’ll stick with that for now.
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Somewhere in between these two perspectives is the lens through which I frequently find myself viewing the world — and this blog is where I’m hoping to share it. For the most part, you can expect random anecdotes and fantasies and musings and questions. Hopefully I’ll occasionally scrape up the time to put together some more extensively-researched pieces as well.
So that’s it.
Somewhere in this winding road of a founding statement I hope you found something that resonated. And somewhere in the winding process of my first blog, I hope I get to hear from you about it. I hope something I said makes you think differently, or laugh (maybe just at me), or get your friend to teach you to drive stick, or maybe even sell your car and get a frickin bus pass.
I don’t know how many people are going to read this. Probably in the ballpark of three. So I could probably afford to take it a little less seriously. But here it is: the grandest of introductions! Thanks for being here, and I’ll see y’all tomorrow, where we’ll talk about Unimogs and the secondhand perks of absurdity.
