Behold my virgin post on my new Blog called, 'While I've Got You Here.' I’m not going to lie, I sat through about 8 hours of Youtube videos and one tedious Udemy course just to get this far. I have no fricken idea if this looks like it’s “supposed” to look but, despite my fragile design skills, I’m feeling cozy here. I’m also feeling a little nervous, like the first time someone handed me the key to my own car – a shitbox, if ever there was one. She was a Datsun F10, red mixed with rust, with faded go-faster stripes and a stick shift. That’s quite a sexy phrase for manual, isn’t it?
I purchased that car in a state of 18-year-old, obtuse goofiness. I was not only incapable of driving a stick shift, I didn’t even know that driving a stick was any different from driving an automatic. I forked over $1,300 in hard-earned Friendly’s Ice Cream waitress tips to the giddy man who sold it to me (that man knew a sucker when he saw one) and forced that poor little car to grind the entire 1.8-mile journey to her new home in first gear. She handled it like a damned trooper. I remember being a little peeved at the little red trooper when, at a particularly hairy and nearly suicidal X-shaped crossing point on the Tobin Bridge, she almost ended both of us. I was heading up the ramp from Storrow Drive, summoning up all my native Masshole driving bravado to cross over onto Route 1 north during the madness of evening rush hour. I down-shifted, right at the crossing point, and the whole stick, knob and all, came off in my hand in a burst of dried-out plastic. What’s a girl to do? I jammed that thing back in, hit the gas and kept on trucking. Story of my life…
The photo above is not my exact little, red F-10, but it’s pretty close. I miss that car.