Saturday, June 20, 2009

Welcome!

I have always been a car nut. There should be a support group for head cases like me, but instead I rely on the compassion and common sense of my beautiful wife. Ever since I can remember I’ve been fascinated by cars. I learned my colors from the cars I saw, only instead of red car, blue car, it was red Pontiac, blue Dodge. When I was nine, I saw my first Jaguar E-Type. The experience was like running into Cindy Crawford at the supermarket.

Jaguar was owned by British-Leyland then and its demise was all but guaranteed by bureaucrats who couldn’t run a fast food franchise let alone a car company. (Sort of like GM today, but we’ll get to that another time.) In spite of the Mr. Bean like bungling, they still managed to launch the XJ-S. In my fourth-grade opinion, it was no less spellbinding than the E-Type. I was so impressed by both cars, I gave a presentation on Jaguars to my class, complete with a foot-noted outline and hand-drawn visuals.

In high school I was a walking encyclopedia of car knowledge. I subscribed to all the US car magazines and knew everything about every car sold since 1950. For obvious reasons, I didn’t go on many dates in that period of my life. But I knew a guy who owned both an Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce, a Porsche 356A, and was married. I had hope. By that time, I wanted to be an automotive journalist, combining my car obsession and love of writing while letting me earn a living. After I learned that automotive journalists are mechanical engineers who can write prose, instead of liberal art majors with C+ grade point averages, I decided to look for another line of work that would support my addiction.

Now it’s 16 years later and I’m starting this blog. I’m not sure of all the reasons but mainly it's because of the kid inside me who never went away. He trolls the depths of eBay and Hemming's Motor News looking at whatever cars tickle his fancy–lately, unshakably, they are Jaguars again. Whatever the reason, this blog is about cars. Anything and everything car related is fair game. If it’s sloshing around in my brain, I will try to organize it in print. I hope you enjoy the results.

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