Model Car

It was the kind of a bar, where they aren’t going to offer you a glass with your bottle of beer.

Some bikers come in, but that didn’t make me want to head for the door.

It’s strange to me how white hair seems to go so well with the Harley Davidson look. Eventually they’re going to run out of baby boomers to sell them to.

There was a time when tattoos and all that meant something rough. Something mean and nasty. Hard experience. Carnies had tattoos, and sailors, marines, people who had been to prison. I especially found the non-professional kind the most amazing. That you would entrust a cellmate or some equivalent, to decorate your one and only body with something so permanent and obvious to the world was either an extraordinary commitment, or a really dim bulb. And they were always cliché, love and hate on the knuckles, sweet and sour on the nipples. Now it just means… hell, I don’t know what it means, but isn’t good. It says here is a person that is willing to make a rash decision but at least they’re willing to make it. They may inhabit a world where the future is only next week and after that unimaginable, but they are going to make a decision based on that and stick to it.

Oddly, it makes me think of a model car I put together once.

It was a ’49 Ford by Revell, or it could have been a ’50. I had to decide if I should use the decals that came with it. There it was. This is the big decision. Stock, Hot Rod, or Custom, these are life’s choices I guess. Right there in the box. Do you leave the body smooth and shiny and let the lines of the fenders do all the talking, or do you decorate and transform your car into something other than what God, Ford, or in this case Revell gave you to work with? Are your ideas better, or more relevant than the original designers’ intent? Are you worthy of that kind of bravado? Do you really think you can improve it? Or is it more a question of making it your own? Taking it back. Proving that you are the designer of your life. Your body is a tool for your expression, not anyone else’s, not even God, not even Ford, not even Revell can tell you what is right, or what is your right. Life is a test with no wrong answers and if your choices turn out ugly, or regrettable later, at least you made them.

If you take that step, and put on the decals, which ones? There are two more choices in the box. If you eliminate Stock, do you use Hot Rod or Custom? The Hot Rod-race car look with big numbers and corporate advertisements, playing the game, making the big money. Fame, fortune, the mainstream who are the winners in life because they proclaim themselves so… or Custom, flame jobs and baby moons, the cool, the hip, the alternative, the counter-culture who don’t see the winners as winners because they have a different idea of what the race was all about. They weren’t even on the same course so how could winners call themselves winners? They can’t even find the track. Once you get the ink, you've pretty much given up the other way, you have to decide and stick to that decision for good. You're not just putting the decals on your body, you're putting them on your soul.

I’ll admit I’ve always been a stock kind of guy. Maybe I like to hedge my bets. Maybe I'm chicken. Or maybe i just like the smooth lines of the aerodynamics better than the clutter and flash of the racer and even though I like a good flame job, in my book the guy that designed the body is closer to an Artist than the guy with the spray can.

That’s just the kind of guy I am I guess. But then I’ve always wound up with a drawer full of decals I wonder if I should of used.