Amber and I went and saw The Green Hornet last night. It was great, once again my ability to choose awesome movies to see in theater comes through with a winner. It was hilarious and action packed. It also featured a very cool car, Black Beauty.
A little bit boxy but just plain awesome when it came to the outfitting, the black and chrome with green highlights really made the car pop on screen. Seeing cars like this just makes me lament all the more the sub-par cars I have owned, especially when you consider my beginning.
The first car I remember riding in was this:
That's not a picture of my dad's car exactly, but it's the same car. In the picture is an '83 Camero, if we owned an 83 then my dad bought it new, but that's the design. Tres cool n'est pas? I know that my dad also owned a Thunderbird and a Firebird at various points as well.
During my teenage years when cars of course became cool to me we owned this abomination:
A Pontiac Parisienne, ours was baby blue though. It even ran on propane instead of regular gas. It was such a crappy car my dad never even bothered to lock it when we parked it somewhere. No one was going to bother stealing from a car like that. To be fair we did own a Saturn during my later teen years as well as a succession of different trucks that were simply utilitarian.
I look back and wonder how I missed out on all that owning a cool car-ness. My current car is neat, but we'll get to that. My first car was cheap and short lived, though I did put a lot of Kilometers on it during the short time I had it. It was cool that I had my own car, but my car was far from cool!
A Sunbird wagon, I don't think I even have a picture of my own first car, maybe because I figured that it was kind of a false start. Like actually everyone owns a crappy car to start with because they need it to work, and then they use that money to buy their "real" first car. Mine was dark blue, and I don't think the front end looked quite the same. The complete lack of pictures of '89 Sunbird Wagons on the Internet says to me that very few people were proud to own this car.
My particular Sunbird was ten years old when I bought it, it drove about 4000 Kms for me, and then died in a plume of smoke and a dashboard full of flashing lights, at least it died in a memorable way. Not bad for $600 though I will say that.
My 'real' first car, meaning my own insurance policy, my name on the ownership, I went and bought it myself and all that junk wouldn't come for about five years after the purchase of that Sunbird (though I did drive a Ford Taurus Wagon between the two cars). I got a job fixing computers, and selling them and whatever else as well. It was a traveling around town job and during the interview I admitted that my only transportation was a bike. I must have made a good impression otherwise because I got hired and during the week in between my interview and start date I did the leg work on finding a car. Day two on the job I left early to pick up my car.
And this is it. Back when the height of affordable digital photography was like 2 mega-pixels. My 2000 Saturn Wagon (see a pattern here yet?) It was a good, functional car especially for my job, I could put printers in the back, four or five computers, tube monitors et cetera. I did like the plastic body on it, but the colour was kinda lame.
Eventually the transmission went and I traded it in just in time before it died to get my second Saturn branded vehicle.
Finally a car that's not a wagon, except that really it was a wagon, just a bit bigger. This is a car that I chose because it fit two things though, I liked the style of it and I liked the colour. On a sporty car the orange would have been even better, but with a family at the time this car seemed like a very logical choice. Logical, but not cool. Funny thing is this car succumbed to the same fate as it's predecessor, transmission failure, which I learned when trying to be rid of it was a common problem in this year of Vue.
The car I have now is pretty cool, except for the colour.
My current car, a Sebring. I like this car. Buying a car this time around I had a limited budget and the choice was actually between two Sebrings when it came down to it. This one was four years newer, the other had way cooler rims and a whale tale. I nearly died when I had to pick this one. Once again my desire to have a cool car was shot down, not by anyone else, just by practicality.
I have told Amber on many occasions that my next car will be 'the Batmobile'. Clearly I do not mean this literally, any of the Batmobiles featured in the movies or on TV would be ridiculously impractical for anyone to use as a day to day car. I do mean however that it will be a car that looks awesome, has all the bells and whistles and is black and mean looking.
This car with some red highlights will be my next car. Because.. well because it's cool, and I think it's about time I owned a cool car.
