I spent a minute deciding on what exactly my first post on this site should be, knowing that it's a site about music, cars and not much else; I figured I'd just write an introduction on my cars with a little bit of me thrown in. I plan on making an individual post for each of my cars as I have enough to say about each to make an entire page on this site a little claustrophobic. I feel as if the best opener to this small series of posts would be one telling my love story for the retro Japanese automobile from where it began until now.

One of the worst questions I can get asked as a car person is "What got you into cars?" for some of us it may have been a car a friend or a family member owned, movies , video games , sometimes anime or a combination of the above. Now, I've never been sure of why exactly I dislike this question when my answer is pretty straight-forward, my father owned some very cool vehicles while I was growing up but even at that time, I wasn't very interested in them to the degree a lot of my classmates and neighborhood friends were. One day this changed, a trip to a small, local charity thrift store introduced me to cars through finding a certain game known as Gran Turismo 2. The game that would introduce a nightcore listening, arm warmer wearing, flat iron abusing teenager that was for lack of better words, near apathetic towards cars into a hobby that would go on to shape my life, introduce me to friends I would've never met , taken me on journies I would've never embarked on and leading me to eventually meet my lovely girlfriend in a way I believe nothing else would.

I was introduced to a world of cars that could be described as surreal, the complete opposite to the shades of USDM beige, Coke bottle green and recession era red that surrounded me in my poverty-stricken hometown. I was hooked, everything I was curious about, I went on an hours long Wikipedia binge reasarching. The urge to own my own piece of this new, weird world grew and grew with each day until I turned fifteen. I would pass by lots on my way to school , spotting everything I could from fifth gen Celica All-Tracs, to Del Sols, Miatas , Preludes, Imprezas and even a mail carrier spec FR32 GTXi for 8,000$(We will never see these prices again :c.) all affordable , all avaliable and all sung a siren song as I passed it, daydreaming of carving the foothills in my own weird Japanese car. Where would I get one? Where would I get the money? How do I get my license when I'm too afraid to leave my own bedroom half the time? These were all questions that danced in the back of my head , but I preferred to stick to the daydreaming.

A year after this, I'd finished school, bored and still playing weird racing games within the confines of my own bedroom with no income , no real social interaction outside of internet friends, I began to feel a little crazy. There was a certain car within my backyard that would change this, one that came at the unbeatable price of "If you can get it out of the woods, it's your's," and so it began , my quest to save a humble, formerly red, 1999 Mitsubishi Mirage. Eventually after a few days of consulting friends, image boards and forums I got it moving under it's own weight and completed my end of the deal, getting it out of the woods. It felt great, it wasn't the Celica I'd dreamed of but it was the Mirage I needed and most importantly , it was my own piece of freedom. I picked up a part time job to fix it , within a few months it could go anywhere I'd want it to. From work, to long , 2016-2018 indie rock and city pop fueled afternoon drives in the Foothills it barely let me down. I sadly, don't have many pictures of this car or a lot of details to write anything more than a paragraph about but, this was the car that started my journey and I figured I'd give a little shout out to it.


She wasn't pretty, she wasn't fast but she was mine.