Stuck here out of gas...

Although it had a dire lack of need for illustration, my last post sent me hunting through old photos tucked away between the cushions of the hard drive.  So I find this picture of my old car, an '89 Plymoth Horizon, the "ass car."  It was an old dock runner at Portland's Terminal 2.  The company that ran Terminal 2, Stevedor Services of America, had placed decals on the door bearing their trademark logo, the letters "SSA" in green on a yellow background.  The gag was, lame as it might have been, that whenever anybody asked, "What the fuck is that shit on the door?"  The response would be, "Fuck if I know, man, it's all ass backwards," because, you know "SSA" is ass spelled backwards.  Yup.

So, whatever, in 2001, maybe '02, SSA was going to scrap out the car because it was all dented up and didn't run, but my brother, gentleman that he is, bought it and another car, fixed them, sold one for high profit and gave the Plymouth to me because I was poor, miserable, and without personal transport.  It was, by far, the shittiest car I ever sat behind the wheel of, and, to me, that was a pretty awesome thing.  A coworker at the time, and one of my favorite people in the world, used to laugh at the juxtaposition of the ass car parked in front of my downtown apartment surrounded by fancy German imports, and the notion that, by virtue of its mere presence, the owners of the foreign cars lost a little bit of that cachet they had hoped to gain by having them fancy downtown digs.  Of course, that juxtaposition didn't really exist; I lived on the seamy border of downtown, the section whose denizens were decidedly slummy and showed no compunction in taking advantage of "income restrictions."  Still, I found the notion flattering.  I felt that the idea was just an extension of how he saw me, as a person with all of the merit but none of the pretense typical of those who populated the city.

So, a couple weeks after my brother gives me the car some friends and I decided to head a few hundred miles into the mountains and camp for a few days.  It is agreed that, since I have the shittiest car, I will drive.  This decision was actually made without me, then sprung on me by my two companions, who, incidentally, are the same two people that I was with during the events recounted in the Alice in Chains post from a couple days ago.  In any case, it is decided that I will drive, but it is going to be a several hours long trip, and the Plymouth has no stereo.  So, I go to the store and buy the absolute cheapest CD player available, drop it on the gear shift lever and bust out the display cover before finally getting it hooked up enough that sound comes out of the speakers.  The dick move here was that I intentionally didn't hook up the antenna and brought along only albums that I knew my companions were unfamiliar with so that I would, by default, always be in charge of what music played.  We listened to a fuck of a lot of Stereolab during that trip.

It was only about a month after this picture was shot that got another car and gave the ass car back to my brother.  He sold it to some lowlife motherfucker for a few buck or a bindle of dope or something, and the asshole didn't bother to transfer the title before getting the damn thing impounded.  I got a letter from some tow company telling me I owed them a couple grand in storage fees and I called them and let them know that they were fucking insane.  I was as shocked as anyone that this worked, but I never heard another peep.

So, the point here is that just the mere glimpse of an accidental photo has me overcome with nostalgia for the best period of my life.  Man those were good times.  Of course, back then I thought the times were kind of shitty, and used to look back with unbridled fondness at the period just a few years earlier, which was really the best period of my life.  Nostalgia, though, doesn't really frighten me or make me sad, no matter how unrealistic and delusional it is.  What is truly frightening, however, is the inevitable fact that someday I will think back on this period of my life as being the tops, because, let me tell you, things right now ain't nearly as fun as I will eventually remember them to be.  That is exactly what is so great about nostalgia, the fact we eventually forget the shittiness in favor of those rare few moments in any given period with things are just a little better than tolerable.  It is life's way of compensating for the fact that the future is getting shorter.

Oh, I'm sure you can't tell, but the cd in the picture is labeled Surfer Rosa/Doolittle, thus the attached song, my favorite song from the Surfer Rosa album.  Damn I'm thankful that Surfer Rosa was the first Pixies album I heard.

Comments

[Joolie]

A song so nice I played it thrice.

[bp]

"Thrice," like in that Golden Girls episode where Rose enters a songwriting contest but Dorthy keeps busting her chops for saying "Miami is nice" a number of times that doesn't fit with the rest of the verse. Fuck did I ever waste my elementary school summer vacations...