PP: Part Twenty Eight

I miss the Polaroid project I was doing there for a while. Polaroid stopped making the film and artphags bought up all the film, driving the price up beyond my means ($15 a pack of film at Wal-Mart, and usually a dollar or two more per pack anywhere else), so this project, which I was gonna run up to 1000 pics is probably stuck in the mud wherever I stopped at, which I think was around 280 or so. But I remembered had some I had already uploaded to photosucket but forgot to write blurbs for a while back. So here I am, catching up on stupid shit that nobody cares about but myself, with fake robot deadlines that mean nothing, wasting my fucking life. I am a fan of older Dodge trucks, especially when they are all dented and dinged because people actually use them instead of riding around in them all shiny with bed covers and chrome flame things and fake nutsacs hanging off the hitch and some little miniature Steve Austin behind the wheel. The guy who owns this truck used to be a tobacco farmer in southside Virginia, but that's not profitable anymore, so he grows wacky organic shit to sell to those types that enjoy spending three times as much for something that costs about the same to grow.

The Greene County fair has a pretty good little demolition derby every year. We actually went with some friends to the one this year, and it was some good stuff. This was an advertisement car along US 33 for the demo derby from last year, probably from the previous year's derby. It doesn't look that fucked up physically, but that crumpled front end suggests radiator breachings. I like the drip paint scheme. Knowing all these cars get destroyed, the paint jobs are always budget as fuck, but it's interesting to see and figure up how much time and energy put into some of these things, meant for nothing more than bashing up into other cars.

There is a town nearby me called the Columbia, Virginia, nestled along a chink in the James River that I try to cleanse my dirty soul in a couple times a year. Last time I swam in it was the night me and my mom and sister went to see Willie Nelson and it was a good drunken time that culminated in me making a loud ass of myself as I'm apt to do once too much alcohol mixes with my bloodstream. Columbia, Virginia, was supposedly going to be the potential capital of the Confederate States of America at one point, it being a booming little assed city, but then modern times plus a couple of devastating floods has decimated it down to what it is now, which looks more like The Bottoms from the In the Heat of the Night TV show than anywhere else I've ever been, but without voodoo princesses (although I don't know that for sure). Last time I ever stopped there was to buy a double deuce at the county line country store (straddling Goochland and Fluvanna on the Fluco side, with Cumberland County right across the bridge as well) because it was raining like shit and I felt like drinking a beer was a good idea. The store owner was some east African dude, and he was watching an east African comedy of some sorts. I wasn't wearing a shirt because I am self-employed (haphazardly) in construction, and if you are living a life where you can go whole days without wearing a shirt, you should embrace that, because most western society miscreants are not so lucky. Anyways, there's a truck driver guy in Columbia who always has old dump trucks that he's fixing up just enough to sell to somebody passing through on their way to Richmond. This one sat there forever and was one of the first Polaroids I took doing this stupid project. Were I rich man, I would be cultivating a feng shui junkyard, and this would be one of my first purchases, although it's gone now. Probably to the scrap yard, as metal prices going high plus economy going shitty have had a shitload of vehicles get rollbacked or towbarred to the scrap yard the past few months. If someone is all like, "I'll take your junk car off your hands, no charge," tell them to fuck off, because if it's old and made of metal, you could get a couple hundred for it at the scrap yard, easy. Newer shit, not so much, because newer shit is plastic as fuck, and that's not me being metaphoric. For real, new shit is plastic as shit, and ultimately worthless.

The Imperial is a beautifully ornamented vehicle, highlighted by the Bocephus eagle as seen in this shitty picture. Just look at that back end, with the chrome circle holding the eagle, and that concaved piece of metal running parallel to the bumper going into that circle. That's quality design that looks pimp as fuck. It's a shame that today, when every second local bartender and third english-speaking landscaper is a graphic designer of some sort or another, that our cars look so much fucking stupider. You slap basically a copycat style of this eagle on the back end of Priuses, and I bet you'd sell like three times as many next year, and little racing clubs would start up that combined souped up goofy speed with how many miles per gallon you could get, and there'd be magazines with sliding scale charts in the back to show whether you win, depending on your mph and mpg. And that would make America a better place in the long run, because then we wouldn't be so dependent on that shit them dudes be talking about in all those commercials popping up all the time all of a sudden while I'm trying to watch TMZ at night.