Come on with the rain I've a smile on my face

Summer is officially over in Seattle. Sunny days melt into rain, rain, rain for the rest of the year. A side effect of this is an increased propensity for my friends and I to slide our cars around in empty parking lots. Yes, such behavior serves no purpose other than our own enjoyment, but the smile plastered across my face all last night says its worth it. Sliding around in a rear-wheel-drive car is all about the need for control. Its taking something that normally ends in tears, broken car parts and possibly broken bones and beating it into submission with subtlety and finesse. Its taking control of the uncontrollable. Its when a falling dream, suddenly becomes a flying dream. Its awesome and I want to do it again and again and again.

Riding Dirty

I like a clean car as much as anyone. But sometimes dirty cars are much more interesting. It's like a washable patina that says something about what the car has been doing in it's recent history. Granted most of the time a layer of grime is simply built up from weeks of usage on the highway and about town, sprinkled with bird droppings and pollen. But when a car is dirty...really really dirty, it tells a different story, this time usually sprinkled with sideways shenanigans and hero car moments. 

Not to my tastes

A former neighbor of mine owned this car. To his credit, when he bought it, it was even worse and seemed to be moving towards "tasteful" in his time with it. But tasteful is all relative. Do we as car enthusiasts have a more meaningful opinion of what a tasteful automobile is? When the layman remarks that "that car looks fresh!" is his point of view less important because he knows less about cars than I do? Saying our opinion is more important makes car enthusiasts sound like a bunch of art snobs. "Well you just don't get it." I can see myself saying to someone commenting on the gaudy aerodynamics of any number of race cars. But if everyone's opinions are equal, there can be no bad art. I don't have an answer for this one. But good lord is that an ugly BMW.

Double Take

Cars that require a double take are my favorite. The one's no one would suspect are anything special. It's like being in a clique in high school, or the member of an ultra secretive society. We get it, but almost more importantly is the fact that others don't.  Like it or not, driving a car is like walking around, holding a giant sign. These signs usually say slightly different things to different people, but the message is usually pretty clear. That's why Lexus and Toyota are separate brands. However sometimes these signs are written in code, cleverly disguised to look like something else. "I drive a beater from the early 90's" the sign may read, but what it actually says is "I love cars enough to seek out the best fox body Mustang ever built." Most of us can't read the sign at just a glance, but sometimes there's enough there to do a double take and every now and then the second reading says "hello, you're one of us."

Automotive Rumination

Cars are, on their deepest level the ultimate tool. They are tools in that they are a piece of equipment that must be expertly guided by experienced hands. Their only purpose is to enhance our physical abilities, in particular our physical ability to move from place to place. As human beings we get these awesome brains and the weakest, slowest bodies in pretty much the entire animal kingdom. Not only does the car address this, but it addresses it in the form of a tool. As a subspecies of monkey that has conquered the world through a better and more efficient understanding of tools than any other subspecies of monkey, I find the automobile profoundly compelling. It doesn't just give me results, it gives me results through my own skillful tool usage.