The Choices We Make

Friends,

Back during my High School days, my Dad presented me with a choice that would be life-defining: “there’s a ’79 Chevy El Camino for sale from a guy I know for cheap, it’s got a little V8 and runs okay for a thousand bucks, or from another guy a ’74 Ford Courier that blew a head gasket.

He started taking the motor apart and most of it’s in the bed. He only wants five hundred for it though…”

Those were my transportation options presented in, what, 1982? I was friendly with the El Camino/Ranchero owners at school. Mullets, mysongeny, and Milwaukee’s Best were the rule with that crowd. Fashioning myself as some sort of thoughtful intellectual, the baggage with the “pickup-car” wouldn’t really fit the image I was working on. I ended up, happily, with the broken Ford-badged Mazda B1800.

Dad and I spent a bunch of happy afternoons putting that thing back together which led to thousands and thousands of miles of trouble free teenage vehicular idiocy (until the head cracked and stranded me outside an insane asylum, but that’s another story).

But you know how you get a song stuck in your head? Even songs you hate? That’s what this Jalopnik.com El Camino thread sounds like to me. It’s grimly fascinating when you realize how many people have succumbed to the urge to turn a car into a pickup.

Call me old school, but I like my pickups to start as pickups. And in pieces.

Your pal,

– bob