Reminiscing about My First Car

You ever think back fondly on your first car? I do. It was a 1984 Plymouth Reliant. Yep, the old K-Car. Nitrowagon, I called it. She was a good, albeit rustic ride. Single speaker on the dash in front of the passenger seat, though, calling it a passenger seat is generous as it was straight-up 80's style bench seating, three in the front and three in the back.

I loved that thing. It was pretty far from sexy and certainly didn't win me any favor with the ladies, but it got me to work and school and was a hell of a lot better than walking. For ten years I walked to school in the freezing-ass Minnesota cold, trudging through snow and getting frostbitten ears because I was too cool for a hat (Narrator: he wasn't too cool in the slightest). It fucking blew. So when I got my license and my parents gave me Nitrowagon, I felt like my time had finally come. At last, I'd be removed from the penury of shitty coaching and wearing moon boots.

In retrospect, though, it was a piece of shit. I drove it for about six months before the CV joint blew (in the parking lot of the K-Mart where I worked no less), it was generally unable to get moving more than 50mph unless it was on a vertical decline and it burned through oil like the goddamned Bismarck.

If your first car had feelings, what would it do if it came back and saw your life today?

I don't have a fancy car, but it has more than one speaker and no bench seats. It moves and handles pretty well and I only need to change the oil once every 10k miles. That's pretty sweet. I bet Nitrowagon would be pretty salty that she'd been replaced by something so much better. I bet, if she were on Twitter, she'd cast shade on my new car, taking little shots at the rims and mocking it's catch phrases and high energy.

Nobody would be driving Nitrowagon anymore, of course, because Nitrowagon's receivers could never actually progress down field once they caught the ball. And no one's exactly sure what her qualifications to be a wide receivers coach at a Power 5 school actually were, other than being hitched to the right set of coat tails. No, Nitrowagon is left to tend to a pretty garden in Blaine, waiting by the phone for a call that will never come, casting shade on a group of coaches who teach their players to catch more than tennis balls. RIP in peace, Nitrowagon. Stay salty.