Roses are red and the sky is blue, I've got my barrel at your neck so what the fuck you gonna do?

My first car was a 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. It was given to me by my grandmother as a wedding present, and I couldn't have been more grateful for it. It burned about a quart of oil for every tank of gas, but it got us to the places we needed to be for nearly a year. It even survived collisions with two deer and Flaming Gorge Dam. It was probably state of the art when she first bought it though. After all, it did have electric windows and seats (pretty impressive for 1977) and a slot in the arm rest that would fit a Coke bottle (the first cup holder?).

I stopped driving it when I realized that it was going to cost me well over $1000 to get it to pass the safety and emissions inspections that were necessary to renew the registration. It stayed in my parents' storage shed until they moved a year and a half later. They told me that they weren't going to move it with them (and I don't blame them, I wouldn't have either) and that I needed to do something with it. I tried to give it to at least three different family members, but none of them wanted it. Finally I sold it to a guy who wanted to put it in a demolition derby for $50. I never even went to the derby to see how well it did.

The other day I was reading an article about the latest automobile craze to hit the southeastern U. S. It's sort of the anti-low-rider. They've been jacking old cars up and putting them on rims that are 24" or larger. These cars are called Donks, Boxes or Bubbles. According to an article in the latest issue of Maxim (and if you can't trust a fine literary work like Maxim then who can you trust?), a Donk is a 1971-1976 Chevy Caprice or Impala, a Box is a 1977-1990 Caprice, and a Bubble is a 1991-1996 Caprice.

Supposedly people are so crazy about these things that you can no longer even get a "rusted shell from the junkyard" for less than $5000 (again quoting Maxim). I guess they basically rebuild everything, and these cars end up costing about $100,000. Apparently, a lot of the people who drive them feel threatened enough to have to carry guns everywhere to thwart any attempts at car-jacking.

All I want to know is why couldn't this craze have started in northeastern Utah (or Wyoming) in the late 90s? I'd have been able to sell the car for a hundred times more than I actually did. In fact, if I had only been able to hold on to my '77 Caprice for the past ten years, I'd now be sitting on a gold mine. Talk about not being able to capitalize on one's assets. Of course, I probably also would have had to begin packing heat.