Porn Magazines

I received my regular monthly installment of magazines recently.  For most of my life, these were porn.  Glossy images of unattainable beauties spread across the pages.  I should clarify immediately none of the magazines I read are filled with naked women, not that I find anything wrong with that.  The magazines I am talking about have names like Car and Driver or Road & Track or Top Gear.  The seductive photographs were of Ferraris or Lamborghinis or Jaguars.  When I was young, I would eagerly await the arrival of my eye candy each month, usually consuming the entire contents in a single sitting.  And I mean the entire contents from letters in the front to the tiny ads in the back for retread performance tires.

I learned a great deal from these magazines, from literary tools like caesura to the difference between desmodromic valves and valves with springs.  I even tried a set of those retreads on my old BMW once.  The words on the page had so much influence over me that I believed the Pontiac 6000 STE was a cool car, even with its goofy digital dash and rear beam axle.  Each month my (admittedly small) world was full of adventures to exotic places in special cars.

As the years have passed, I have grown less excited about the arrival each month of my “porn.”  It is not the fault of the magazines, it is just that I can’t find much interesting about the new F150 v/s Silverado article, or the fact that Bentley is going to make a Sports Utility based on the same chassis that is already used in the Cayanne, Tourag and Q7.  There is an article on the new Suburban, a Lincoln truck / wagon thing, a Range Rover Sport, and the Scion iM.  I could go to my grave happily without the knowledge of how Weathertech makes floor mats or the fact that a Honda Fit is reliable and economical.  But all these things are considered important enough to print.

There is a mildly interesting article on the Mustang GT350, and some downright pleasant reading about a few English cars on the Isle of Man, only slightly disrupted by several pictures of the jackolantern faced McLaren 650.  As always, the technical articles that open the magazine are through and entertaining, and the columnists can usually be counted on for an amusing car related yarn or two.

I am not sure which is to blame, me or the magazine.  Car and Driver was wrong about the 6000, it was a horrible car.  But I liked it because it was new, I was young, and the world held the promise of yet undiscovered riches.  Now that I am somewhat older, banal cars like the Scion iM or Ford F150 do not earn my attention.  New cars tend to be somewhat homogenized due to regulations, resulting in very few interesting designs.  Fitness trackers or phones are where the excitement is these days, and there are some amazing phones out there.

I love new cars like the Fiesta ST or Viper or even the Cayman GT4, despite the computer nannies and tons of air bags.  But I really like older stuff, cars that are light and simple like an E30 BMW or MKII Supra or C4 Corvette.  It is easy enough to find something cool and entertaining to drive.  There have been roughly one million 911’s made, about a million Corvettes, more than eight million Mustangs, and thousands and thousands of other neat cars that can be had (relatively) inexpensively.  They will not impress your neighbors as much as a new Lincoln truck / wagon thing, but will be considerably more fun to drive.  And, if you are lucky enough, they will be broken or unreliable enough to require you to work on them yourself.  There is no greater satisfaction than operating a machine you have fixed with your own hands.