cars

 I spent much of my teenage years hanging out at the corner of 55th and Kedzie Avenue, smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough, and watching the cars go by, the cars, the cars, I loved the cars.  I knew every make and every year and most of the models,  They were  beautiful things then all chrome and fins and outlandish designs.

But I've only owned two cars in my life, when I was down in Herrin in southern Illinois in 1969 and I needed one to get around because it was a small town and I needed to drive back to Champaign to hang with my beer drinking buddies on days off.  The first one was a Corvair which, true to its rep blew a tire and flipped over, and the second one was a Ford Fairlane, in which I limped back to Champaign in 1971 when my CO was done and parked in a lot behind my apartment and let it die.

Maybe that was when no-fault insurance came in, I seem to remember the name and the brouhaha, but all that was over for me, insurance, gasoline, engine troubles, license plates, stickers, looking for a parking place, all that crap knocked into a cocked hat and booted far away never to darken my thoughts again.

Knocked into a cocked hat?  Apparently a cocked hat is one of those hats like the tea partiers used to don when they were in a festive mood, which are triangular, and then there was the game of skittles, some early form of bowling, and when your ball left a split in the form of a triangle which apparently was hard to convert, you might find yourself muttering "Damn, knocked that into a cocked hat."

I never really liked cars after that.  Noisy, smelly, dangerous, who needs them?  Not me. I liked to walk, later I had a bike, and if the situation was dire the bus system worked very well,  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Now that I live downtown a car is even more useless.  It's a small fortune to rent a place to keep it when you are not slogging through heavy traffic. Garage fees seem exorbitant as does paying by the hour, and then there are those parking tickets,  Here is what a joyful innocent I am, I have no idea what a parking ticket costs.

Well that's just me.  I know if you live in a swamp, or if you have kids who have to be driven everywhere then you have to have a car, and likely the joy of living in a swamp or having kids outweighs the pain of having that hunk or metal wrapped around your neck.

So no real point here, it was just the talk of no-fault insurance reminded me of how glad I am to be outside of that and I just wanted to share my happiness.