An essay
09-20-2005 | 07:00 PM
#1
Thread Starter
Staging Lane
Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 58
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From: Hagerstown, MD
An essay I wrote this a few weeks back. Writing is what I try to do when I'm not working or building something.
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The Knight Excuse
Written by Michael J. Bray
Sitting here, wherever this boredom began, first beginning to type, my mind making petty considerations having nothing to do with anything romantic, it is the car that pervades my thoughts. It drives itself, and, like most of the sacrificial obsessions with which I have managed to oppose the terrible things in my life, it can damn near fly. It is precisely times like these when the Knight 2000 seems so marvelous, days like these where I have struggled to hear another voice only to be further socially debilitated by the ludicrous memory that my wonderful flying, scanning, racecar can talk.
Like one or two of the other fixations spreading their malignancy through my once fresh and unbiased mind, this one began at an early age and with an entirely different car. It was somewhere around 1986, I think, where I would have been five. A 1978 Pontiac Trans Am, black. It was Burt Reynolds who first broke loose the wheels of my lust for what I would wait five years to discover was something called an “F-Body”. Saddled with Sally Field, Burt and his 6.6-liter super-car, “Trigger,” successfully jumped an abandoned bridge, leaving a parade of exhausted and mangled state police cruisers to crash and saturate. Beyond the great fictional city of Metropolis, it was the most spectacular feat I had ever seen. Literarily, it could have been a week; actually I am not positive. Quickly enough to maintain and further the interest and attention of a child less than eight, the auspice KITT, an affectionate acronym for the archetype Knight Industries Two Thousand, spoke his first ultra-conservative touchingly narcissistic words without clearing his throat.
I remember being five-years-old. I remember asking what sort of car it was that jumped the bridge with Sally Field, that jumped the train, that drove itself between a speeding bullet and its owner, that talked, and scanned, and, as a matter of fact, flew. “Trans Am,” they said; that’s what it was. From a place called Pontiac where apparently all of the cars can fly.
What a name, Trans Am. It was amazing! And, dissimilar from one or two other likewise amazing things, Mom said it was real. In fact, my Uncle Mark had one, and, supposedly, my father had also driven one for a while. Uncle Mark’s car was called “Formula”. It looked a little like KITT, the same shape basically; white and dark gray though, and without a single flashing red light. And although it could not speak, it did have a voice. It idled at pulsing baritone growl, overfed like a wolf, narrowly containing its rage for the road. Instead of howling, at top speeds the Formula charged like a bull taking giant breaths of cold air. It exhaled the explosion, all of them, in splinters of free flow tubular thunder. From what I could see, at seven-years, strapped in, eye level to the glove box, we might have left the ground.
At least that’s the way I would tell it were I begging for an Oscar nomination while juggling contractual product placement guidelines. And while the ride in the white Formula with my uncle when I was eight was hardly as epic as the Dukes of Hazzard remake wishes it was, for whatever preordained reason it stuck with me. With the exception of my first car, and my second car, every car that I have owned has been a Firebird. I have learned many things; a number of them regarding cheap methods to cool an engine determined to overheat and suffocate itself at idle. It should be obvious that opposing the many and varied cons and deterrents of owning an F-Body, particularly a third generation model, that the compelling nature of the dream, or the dependence rather, has always managed to keep a few steps ahead of any growing discouragement; lucky for the car. To date, I’ve replaced three alternators, two 5 liter GM 305 small block, one Corvette LT1, one aluminum radiator, one water pump, two windshield wiper motors, three fifteen inch tires, 5 rounds of padded rotors, 14 speakers, two horns, an army of incandescent bulbs, and a few tens of hundreds of special orange Dextron GM Coolant. Of course every addition has its side effects. Busted knuckles, ripped cuticles, dirt in the eyes and the mouth and the ears, a good over torque forearm bruise, and pretty soon keeping your nails clean and your cuts salved and your blisters popped seems more and more the sort of thing you might do if you didn’t have a car in pieces in the driveway.
The point is in every slamming monkey wrench punctuating a swearing complaint, every inner elbow exhaust scorch, and every job eventually well done. There comes a turn somewhere between the final depressive broom sweeps of broken bolt heads, dust, and dried Band-Aids, a sense of completion, of gratification and satisfaction. And with every proof proven and mission accomplished, much like a crutching nervous system, the ambition for more elaborate and impressive projects spreads geometrically. And there is reciprocation and familiarity. The car performs every time; it never misses. A relationship develops, one of care, maintenance, and predictability. Whatever stress involved -- involved in every component and assembly on, under, or in a car – is absolutely inarguably self-induced. Which could possibly have something to do with the inherent lonely, hermit-like, status of many local aging gear-heads and their wives.
It has never been a good excuse. It was just always something to do, or to see if you could do. Unfortunately though the first product of all the thought and follow through and blood-blisters is a very reliable sense of knowledge and certainty. Perhaps, just the sort of virtue apparently missing or ignored elsewhere. Whether it is known or not, tinkering with a car can and frequently does give a mostly meaningless life a little sound, complexity, and speed. That admission is not an endorsement.
I am neither proud of the eccentricity that has allowed me to abandon any dwindling desire I once had for companionship, nor am I ashamed. I believe that I do love the idea of my car, though randomly, but commonly, I refrain from pushing the backseat into its proper position, from checking the oil at the every other refuel, and even from parking straight. Oddly, I think, it is exactly this moment when the ability to fly, or to turbo boost, or run the quarter mile in eight seconds could really do the most good. Because it is an excuse, there must logically be a rain check somewhere to some date or dinner or chat volley with someone expecting but soon to be disappointed. And while I am not sad that the plans for the newly redesigned fourth generation Knight-inspired front bumper and dash are in the works, I sometimes want so badly to clean everything up and eat with anyone other than myself.
-------------------------
_________________
-Mike,
Www.LastKnightFiberglass.Com
---------
The Knight Excuse
Written by Michael J. Bray
Sitting here, wherever this boredom began, first beginning to type, my mind making petty considerations having nothing to do with anything romantic, it is the car that pervades my thoughts. It drives itself, and, like most of the sacrificial obsessions with which I have managed to oppose the terrible things in my life, it can damn near fly. It is precisely times like these when the Knight 2000 seems so marvelous, days like these where I have struggled to hear another voice only to be further socially debilitated by the ludicrous memory that my wonderful flying, scanning, racecar can talk.
Like one or two of the other fixations spreading their malignancy through my once fresh and unbiased mind, this one began at an early age and with an entirely different car. It was somewhere around 1986, I think, where I would have been five. A 1978 Pontiac Trans Am, black. It was Burt Reynolds who first broke loose the wheels of my lust for what I would wait five years to discover was something called an “F-Body”. Saddled with Sally Field, Burt and his 6.6-liter super-car, “Trigger,” successfully jumped an abandoned bridge, leaving a parade of exhausted and mangled state police cruisers to crash and saturate. Beyond the great fictional city of Metropolis, it was the most spectacular feat I had ever seen. Literarily, it could have been a week; actually I am not positive. Quickly enough to maintain and further the interest and attention of a child less than eight, the auspice KITT, an affectionate acronym for the archetype Knight Industries Two Thousand, spoke his first ultra-conservative touchingly narcissistic words without clearing his throat.
I remember being five-years-old. I remember asking what sort of car it was that jumped the bridge with Sally Field, that jumped the train, that drove itself between a speeding bullet and its owner, that talked, and scanned, and, as a matter of fact, flew. “Trans Am,” they said; that’s what it was. From a place called Pontiac where apparently all of the cars can fly.
What a name, Trans Am. It was amazing! And, dissimilar from one or two other likewise amazing things, Mom said it was real. In fact, my Uncle Mark had one, and, supposedly, my father had also driven one for a while. Uncle Mark’s car was called “Formula”. It looked a little like KITT, the same shape basically; white and dark gray though, and without a single flashing red light. And although it could not speak, it did have a voice. It idled at pulsing baritone growl, overfed like a wolf, narrowly containing its rage for the road. Instead of howling, at top speeds the Formula charged like a bull taking giant breaths of cold air. It exhaled the explosion, all of them, in splinters of free flow tubular thunder. From what I could see, at seven-years, strapped in, eye level to the glove box, we might have left the ground.
At least that’s the way I would tell it were I begging for an Oscar nomination while juggling contractual product placement guidelines. And while the ride in the white Formula with my uncle when I was eight was hardly as epic as the Dukes of Hazzard remake wishes it was, for whatever preordained reason it stuck with me. With the exception of my first car, and my second car, every car that I have owned has been a Firebird. I have learned many things; a number of them regarding cheap methods to cool an engine determined to overheat and suffocate itself at idle. It should be obvious that opposing the many and varied cons and deterrents of owning an F-Body, particularly a third generation model, that the compelling nature of the dream, or the dependence rather, has always managed to keep a few steps ahead of any growing discouragement; lucky for the car. To date, I’ve replaced three alternators, two 5 liter GM 305 small block, one Corvette LT1, one aluminum radiator, one water pump, two windshield wiper motors, three fifteen inch tires, 5 rounds of padded rotors, 14 speakers, two horns, an army of incandescent bulbs, and a few tens of hundreds of special orange Dextron GM Coolant. Of course every addition has its side effects. Busted knuckles, ripped cuticles, dirt in the eyes and the mouth and the ears, a good over torque forearm bruise, and pretty soon keeping your nails clean and your cuts salved and your blisters popped seems more and more the sort of thing you might do if you didn’t have a car in pieces in the driveway.
The point is in every slamming monkey wrench punctuating a swearing complaint, every inner elbow exhaust scorch, and every job eventually well done. There comes a turn somewhere between the final depressive broom sweeps of broken bolt heads, dust, and dried Band-Aids, a sense of completion, of gratification and satisfaction. And with every proof proven and mission accomplished, much like a crutching nervous system, the ambition for more elaborate and impressive projects spreads geometrically. And there is reciprocation and familiarity. The car performs every time; it never misses. A relationship develops, one of care, maintenance, and predictability. Whatever stress involved -- involved in every component and assembly on, under, or in a car – is absolutely inarguably self-induced. Which could possibly have something to do with the inherent lonely, hermit-like, status of many local aging gear-heads and their wives.
It has never been a good excuse. It was just always something to do, or to see if you could do. Unfortunately though the first product of all the thought and follow through and blood-blisters is a very reliable sense of knowledge and certainty. Perhaps, just the sort of virtue apparently missing or ignored elsewhere. Whether it is known or not, tinkering with a car can and frequently does give a mostly meaningless life a little sound, complexity, and speed. That admission is not an endorsement.
I am neither proud of the eccentricity that has allowed me to abandon any dwindling desire I once had for companionship, nor am I ashamed. I believe that I do love the idea of my car, though randomly, but commonly, I refrain from pushing the backseat into its proper position, from checking the oil at the every other refuel, and even from parking straight. Oddly, I think, it is exactly this moment when the ability to fly, or to turbo boost, or run the quarter mile in eight seconds could really do the most good. Because it is an excuse, there must logically be a rain check somewhere to some date or dinner or chat volley with someone expecting but soon to be disappointed. And while I am not sad that the plans for the newly redesigned fourth generation Knight-inspired front bumper and dash are in the works, I sometimes want so badly to clean everything up and eat with anyone other than myself.
-------------------------
_________________
-Mike,
Www.LastKnightFiberglass.Com
