"Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow"

"Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow."

TS Eliot wrote this in his poem The Hollow Man, and I think of it often when trying to make sense of projects, ideas, or aspirations. I have been obsessed with vehicles since my earliest post-puberty memories. In middle school, I played Gran Turismo obsessively and learned everything I could about the contemporary lot of Japanese performance cars from Japan, which were much to my chagrin, not available in the states. The forbidden fruit from Europe and Asia that I played in video games and watched in early car DVDs like Mischief 3000 felt like borderline blasphemy growing up in a household whose family vacations were spent backpacking and bike touring. Attempting to talk to my dad and brother about cars was as futile and misled as gay conversion therapy. I'm still not decided as to what side of this analogy my brother, my dad, and I were on.

In my 20s, I dove headfirst into vans and campers and spent a good portion of my creative energy following them around, photographing them for a few photo books. I owned many different variations, with the ideal configuration always seeming to be one consolidation and Facebook Marketplace purchase away. In my 30s, as my stop-motion work started to snowball and for the first time in my life, the ratio of free time to money shifted away from my itinerant 20s, I did what so many people have done before me and started looking for the sports cars from my childhood dreams. I first bought a 1991 Lancia Delta Integrale, and then a few months later bought a 1993 Nissan Skyline GTR at auction in Japan. As a kid of the 90s and 2000s, the GTR was the peak of Japanese exoticness, and as the kid of a family of old Volvo station wagons, was as far away as Mars.

After a few weeks on a boat and then another week sitting at customs in Tacoma, I hitched a ride north, picked up the GTR, and drove it home. It looked better than in photos, and after a week or two of talking to Tommy F. Yeah, I loaded it up on a trailer and sent it across the country to the best GTR shop in the States. The GTR spent a year in Connecticut at Garage Zero getting a mechanical makeover, replacing old worn-out parts with NISMO and HKS parts.

I am as stubborn as a crow and was determined to put together the car of my childhood dreams and take it on trips and rip around the winding roads around my house. Despite not having a garage and living on a 1-mile gravel driveway, I eagerly paid the invoices from Connecticut and waited for the GTR to be back in grasp.

I picked up the GTR outside of Sacramento on a clear December day in 2023 and drove it up the 101 back to Washougal. Along the way I stopped at AIRBNBs and watched bits of the World Cup from sleepy fishing towns along the Oregon and California Coast. Outside of Arcata and then again north of Brookings, the local fuzz pulled me over. The first time I was going 30 MPH over the speed limit and somehow managed to get off with a warning. The second cop, a 30-something tattooed vet in a Ford Explorer, just wanted to talk to me about the car. The car and I made it home in one piece, and for the last two years, the GTR has mostly sat in my studio. Firing up on a few occasions and making runs into Portland for dinner or a car meet. I'll stare at it when I'm tinkering in the shop, and for brief moments I'm that 13-year-old kid, sitting cross-legged on the carpet racing Laguna Seca on a rear projection TV.

Despite spending a good portion of my adult life behind the wheel of an automobile, I have never had a speeding ticket. Generally, when driving, I am not in a rush. Driving a car of my childhood dreams with 400 horses at the wheels, revving to 8500 RPM all while sounding like a fighter jet spooling up, got me into trouble and attracted far more attention from vaping 20-year-olds and curious cops than I cared to have. I found myself driving the GTR less and less.

Now, some 4 years and a down payment on a house later, I've realized that I would much rather go camping, hunting, or surfing than to a track day or car meet. It's not that I don't love the sound of chirping tires and a high-revving inline 6 on a cold, far morning; it's just the painful realization that I'm far closer to being an old Volvo station wagon person, like my parents before me, than the 911s and Supras I'd rubberneck as a kid from the backseat of an old, bumper sticker-laden 240D on carpool to soccer practice. This realization has been hard for me to swallow and undoubtedly one I had to find on my own. In this instance, the shadow referenced in TS Eliot's poem was far bigger than I imagined, and last night, I swallowed my pride and listed the GTR on Marketplace.