blown brown vanagon: the dead have faces, automobiles

Don Delillo, wrote the title line this week, so poetic, in reference to the fact that we as Americans, die and people and friends know things about us, superficially, he drove a brown vanagon~ can poetry, and the American novel coexist with the automobile, do you think great novels have been killed by great cars ?

for the passed two years I've been driving with wild loose wires and keys stuck into slots, because the VW Vanagon, has some ignition switch problems and mine particularly has tumbler failure, this passed weekend i hit the parts van as remedy

now i have three ignition switches to roll around the glove compartment, safety factor x3

i had wanted to drive around with a giant visegrip as a steering wheel, but i have children, and i crash plenty with out assistance

having a parts van is great, now i'm always grabbing stuff off of it, after the ignition swap, i pulled window cranks

everyone should have a parts van, a parts house, a parts wife, parts kids, parts self ?

these two always wait up for me~ at street intersection

i think this is John and Donna's, it's for sale, but too much~ 5k

i found this 1979, Rolling Stone at a junk shop, and read this amazing article, titled as above, the gist being that these crazy drug and beer nuts who owned vans in the seventies liked to party but they couldn't get along with the straight/family van owners who didn't want the fledgling van scene to turn into the outlaw biker scene, the one percenters, so these guys called themselves the 2% ers, and partied like the sixties never ended, and subsequently brought down the van clubs

as far as i know, the van thing happened in the west and mid~west, the east coast had disco, my buddy at work pointed out, that's the difference, so i never had the chance to see these real life lunatics, not that i would have, this same magazine has a huge interview with the Ramones, the times were slowly changing, i at the time was a string been, who lived in a void of trees, looking back at these guys through the time machine of times actual passage, it's easy to see the last gasp of the sixties caught up with the middle American regulars, who just wanted to eat mushrooms and smoke pot and party, like anyone else

young guys who, shortly would have to face the early eighties economic recessions, the hard reality of getting jobs and having a family the impracticality of going to van fests

the police at this point in history had begun a nation wide crack down on drunk driving, impaired driving and a cultural swing to the right, away from Woodstock and toward Nancy and Ronnie, the war on drugs, the war on music and obscenity, the war on fun and freedom

it would be a great documentary though, don't you think, go interview these guys now, find their vans, dig up some historical film

you can still see some of these faded vans parked in driveways, repainted flat black parked downtown, the drivers once young and wild, in jorts shirtless, parked in fields with friends, smoking from bongs, and listening to. . . i don't know, skynard ?

are all in their fifties now, they've moved on, the fun stopped, the vans broke down, cost too much to fix, they've raised whole families, and the world, the world has forgotten that once, one million years ago this was fun and they were wonderful monsters with beards and beers against the system and they lost so fucking hard they sucked the whole country down with them~ even here in the vast mighty future we can feel the loss pulling at our ankles, every time some beat up shit pig creeps down the street or some joker paints free candy on the back of his bands tour van

the cultural wonder of this moment is lost to the youth and eyes of today behind the hideousness of the men involved, the low crude antics, the base instinct, the carnal desperation, the middle American nothingness, the common denominator of living just to get fucked up, drink till you pass out, fight or fuck, and keep doing this over and over until your old, an alcoholic, chain smoking and your van is the only van parked in the field