cars

I hate cars.  I used to love them.  My family got their first car in 1953, a lime green Ford Customline.  A couple years later we got a tv.  We were doing alright.

I, along with much of America, was excited every fall when the new car models came out.  Sometimes an enterprising reporter would discover the new cars without sheets over them and publish the photos.  What a scoop.  What exciting times.

I knew every make and model and year.  On my nightly walk from 55th and Homan, to Kedzie, to 59th, back to Homan, and then back again, as many times as my restless early teenage legs demanded, I stopped in the drugstores at 55th and 59th and Kedzie.  Of course I scanned the lurid paperbacks but I also went through the car magazines.  A lot of them were about the engines, and I read that but it didn't interest me much.  What did was the customizing where they would make these dream cars out of ordinary 56 Mercs.  What a world.

My later teen years I spent my evenings on the corner of 55th and Kedzie in front of Talmans, smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough and cool, and watching all the cars go by, muttering the make and model as they passed.

I hung unto that a little bit in college.  I remember the shock and awe of the Mustang, but gradually the pressure of not flunking out, and later the indifference to square materialistic matters of hippiedom, left my fondness of cars behind.

And the cars got crappy.  I don't remember when it was, the late 70s maybe, they all began to look alike.  At first they looked like refrigerators and now they look like pumpkin seeds.  They try to hide the headlights and those proud gleaming bumpers of yore are anymore just a bump of fiberglass.

And they are all Japanese or something anymore, and the models are meaningless strings of vowels, and half the makes of my youth are gone, and I don't know which ones, and I don't care anymore because they all look like shit.

Once in my life I had a car.  When I went down to Herrin for my CO of course I needed a car to get back to Champaign on the weekends to hang with my beer drinking buddies.  First I had a Corvair which was pretty cool, but I got a flat and it rolled over like Ralph Nader said they would.  The repairman said it would cost as much to replace the windshield as the whole car was worth and I let it go.  I shouldn't have, it was a cool car.  The next car was a 1962 Ford Fairlane, it was always breaking down, it was always a problem.  I kept it going until I moved back to Champaign when it was barely running and I sold it for maybe five bucks to a guy who wanted to put it in a demo derby.

I rode a bike in Champaign, and here in Chicago I walk and ride the el trains, I don't miss a car at all.  Have you noticed that in the two Ten Cat paintings that show Ashland Avenue, the streets are empty?


Pretty sure that the Rev Al's book has arrived, I got a note in my mailbox but the package room won't be open until noon today.