Kickin' Rocks

with Don Pennington

Words to Live By... Divorce, Root Canal and Ebay

At gun point we went to school for all those years, EVERY teacher told us to pay attention and learn the stuff they were telling us, because we wouldn't be able to get a job without it and would be bums all our lives! How much of that stuff do YOU use? We learned many things in school, very little of it came from the front of the classroom, most of it came from the back row or during those endless social trial and error exercises. You tried it, she said error or you got smacked by the bully boys. I remember a couple math things, nothing from Biology (your should never have Biology last period, it's hard to stay awake, it's all the school's fault we didn't learn anything, it's their scheduling... school should have let out at noon). Some kids payed attention and years later we still run into them from time to time directing traffic at the swap meet (them, not us). One thing we did learn was that the simplest things leave the biggest scars, like one word things. All these years after those lessons have been learned they continue to bite us in the arss.

As we all know, cars are cool, and ours are the coolest. We fix ‘em up, then do it again, then again. Once they are almost done we fake an engine blow-up because the new 700 inch bow-tie is out and we need one, and then there is the stuff to go along with it and a cool new jacket with giant embroidered "I've got one of these and you don't" logos on the back, and of course toys, toys and more toys . You expand the garage and now can call it a shop and keep pumping up your hot rod estate. As you go farther into the money curve of life the cars get cooler, the stuff is all "one-off" (or so you are told) and everything is going along just great... until that certain day when a single word that will change your life pops into your head like the Small Word theme song at Disneyland, a word like...divorce, root canal or EBAY!

Holy rusty parts Batman... where did that Ebay thing come from? Did you see it coming? I didn't. And when did it start? You take one nap and all the cool parts are on Ebay. What the hell is EBAY? Not knowing what it is and not wanting to be labeled "out of the loop"...again (my buddy Larry continually reminds of that), I began roaming around visiting garage after garage and cleverly slipping the question into the normal hot rod banter, like... "wow, those are eight of the coolest carbs I've seen on a Pontiac since the 60s, where did you get those, from that old carb guy down by... the bay?" You say... "the bay"... real fast, hoping it will be mistaken for Ebay. This would hopefully be followed by something like... "yeah I get a lot of stuff on Ebay". See how that works, the door has been opened so you don't look stupid and that you are not the only hot rod guy on the planet without an Ebay card.

There are very few words that can inspire feelings of pure lust and pupil dilating-nail in you heel  fear at the same moment, "marriage" is one, another is"Ebay". When you hear one of those you tingle with greed and get that warm feeling in your jeans at the outrageous money you are going to get from those parts you would have thrown away a year ago, and at the same time cringe as orifices begin to pucker at the nutzo prices you must pay for the stuff that your buddy would have given you for free, also a year ago. Ebay has eliminated the free lunch? What really starts the choppers grinding is that you or I didn't think of it first. The guy that owns the Dallas Mavericks sold his .com whatever for 5 BILLION DOLLARS. To put that in perspective, you could buy 50,000 high dollar hot rods which would require an 89 acre building to hold them all. If you started dusting them off today, it would be take you 2 ½ years to finish. The people that run Ebay are making bazillions every day on our stuff! Somethins' outta whack here. That reminds me of a joke, there are these two older business gentlemen leaving a house of ill repute when one turns to the other and says... "that's quite a business, you sell it and you still got it".  That doesn't exactly match, but it's in the ball park.

Hot rodders really resist change. For sixty plus years the greasy fries and burgers that make up hot rodding has survived the unending Kamikaze attacks from the billet mongers and friends that think the bottom line is the most important part,  but we still consider the old A-V8 look as the real hot rod, everything else is pretty cool but when asked, the image is still the A-V8. If you lined all the others up along the west coast and everybody stated jumping up and down until California slipped into the Pacific taking all that iron (and billet) with it, we'd be okay because we still have the original hot rods. Well we wouldn't be killer happy about that but the original hot rods would still be there and we could build more just like them. Actually I think it might be cool to throw ALL the new stuff on the beach too, especially Ebay, and let it sink. This computer thing is out of control, it's going to do more damage than TV. Television has brought all the gang stuff on us, James Cagney and Marlon Brando have taught these neck tattooed thieves and killers how to do it. But as I speak, it comes to me that maybe the computer would be better. If all those derelicts were on computers instead of the streets all they could shoot you with would be a nasty drive-by email.

All the good stuff aside, Ebay still has got to go, or at least be limited to Teddy Bears, old dishes and quilts... no car stuff. Ebay is educating the wrong people. People with old cars stuffed away in sheds don't need to know what their junk is worth, they don't need more education and Ebay shouldn't be in the teaching business, we can teach these people all they need to know about car values, and will be happy to give them every dollar we think it's worth for everything they've got! Well I think we have ragged on this long enough, besides that thing about dusting 50,000 cars has wore me out and I need a nap, but first... there is a really cool polished log manifold with eight carbs coming up on Ebay in about three minutes,  I know it'll be too much, but I gotta have it!

Kick a Rock

DP