On coupes, mustangs and the light in the eye

I am working on a something - a book. A book buried deep in my recently recovered passion for automobiles, a book that seeks to explore my seemingly random interest in the matters of the wheel and also that of my country. Scribblings, now, and questionaires - fleshing out concepts, directions, a lot of planning. Am enjoying myself tremendously and find myself again charging wildly both through my own history as well as to the top of my plucky, little car's tachometer.

What I am on about most recently is Dream Cars.

Lust is a good emotion, I approve of it. Though it beguiles and confuses, though it will bend you to it, some over-eager tango partner grabbing at your thigh, it is terribly honest at the point of creation - a vibrant, reasonless want; the body's chemical bloom as it responds to something that is particularly beautiful to you.

In all the world only two things evoke it for me and I consider myself likely ununique in this regard - all the slinking lines of girls and cars. Am most enamored, come the end of day, of the frames of women - how they are set, the stance that allows for all that soft and silking shape; hips, shoulders, the neck swoop - and all these things draw me to cars, as well. How either of them move at pace, how they sit askance regard or under it, the way the light smashes along the length...delirious. These things make me delirious.

I allow that there are hues to consider, the skin and ways in which the body swells - I rather like the swells...and what it is that makes one move, be it lady or Lambourghini, will matter eventually...but those are high mind things. I am talking of the animal ripple - the senseless thing that masquerades as need and makes me, us, so wonderfully fool in it's shadow.

Here's a visual aid - it's called an Aston Martin Vanquish V12 and I desire it.


Just look at it - the almost lurid stance, the simple athlete in the lines; if one knew nothing about the torrid monster under the hood, this car would still promise speed, would still incite the light to run along it's length and the eye to chase right after- it makes me stupid, this car, it makes my mouth water; it's like some impossible dancer twisting just outside the span of arms.

My dream cars are not sensible, it is not love I feel while wrenching my head around in traffic, daring a smash for a momentary glance at some slice of sheet metal - it is lust, smashing distracted young men and women into doorframes as the eyes sprint raggedy after a hip or a chin or a faint of skin.

What I wonder is where the dream car has gone off to. As entwined as we are as a nation with the automobile - the birthright of the license, the somewhat diminished ritual of the 'first car', it seems the automobile occupies very little of our collective heart - for all the people I have asked this question after, simple, what car it is that excites them, that takes them, that they would have if only...justt a handful of people have an answer.

When I began this mental dialogue, I was most concerned with whether or not our dream cars were fair to ourselves - if it was good to create an idyllic paradigm in youth, to set a goal like that without knowing the stakes or what was involved; if the car one chooses to drive says something about someone, and I believe it does, then it follows that the penultimate car of desire would say rather a lot more. Did the car we longed for change, did it say more about who we were than who we hoped to become - was it about assigning a form to who we wanted ourselves to be or whom we hoped other people saw us as....so many questions.

Yet what became more pressing was the absence of the idea. I have a clear picture in my head of the evolution of my dream cars - how they changed as my vision of the world expanded, how my priorities changing were reflected in sheet metal and hub flares - what follow is a smattering of those shifting ideals, the vehicles whose ownership never seemed likely, but who nevertheless stirred my heart and wrenched my head dangerously around.


1996 Chevrolet Impala SS
1987 BMW M6


1987 Karen Gillan....*cough* - you get my point.




There is a part of the brain that doesn't care - that ignores reason, that refuses to know what it ought - about expensive cars, about famous girls you'll never meet - and opts instead to treat all the beautiful things as mothfire - to grab us and throw us brutally towards the fire knowing full well we wont ever get there. Eye lightning and the streaks it leaves across the mind - that, that is where the dream cars throttle and barrel through the dark.

I worry only that, like wild mustangs out bundling across the plains, no one would argue they were wonderful - simply that they could never imagine what it would be like to ride.