Most people summon up that plucky resolve to re-model their lives with the fresh start of a new year.
The game plan usually involves a life-altering change that involves iron will or steely resolve to accomplish a personal goal, so most people usually last about a week as a “new me”.
The best plan is to begin a change at any other time of the year and do not advertise your intentions to make changes in your life.
It won’t really help with the process to tell everybody that you plan to sever ties with fun activities like drinking and carousing on January 1 and then nuke that plan on the next available weekend. The same goes with diet and exercise resolutions that die a horrible death before the end of the first week.
However, if you just have to lean on a resolution crutch, make it a car guy crutch and keep it.
The real trick is to pick the right car guy resolution and run with it.
One relatively easy resolution is to promise to love your old dog more than your old car. Sure you may have named both car and dog, plus both do not do well when neglected, but you have to love your dog more than your car. It is a fact of life.
You should never put yourself in a position to love your old car more than your middle kid, but it would make the top of any New Year’s resolution list to remedy this situation very quickly-probably long before January 1, 2013 if necessary.
If the kid and dog situation is already under control in your world, then you are free to throw a little love at your car. Maybe you can resolve to begin the restoration project that has been on the backburner gathering rust and dust for 12 straight years under a leaky tarp.
Bring it in from the cold at the very least and give it your parking spot in the garage because this in and of itself is real progress in the resolution department. The fact that the family garage is now home to a function-less inert mass of metal will put you on your wife’s radar for all of the wrong reasons.
This kind of highly negative spousal attention for you and your car project will force you to deal with the project in a much more compressed time frame than the leisurely pace of zero progress over too many years thus far on your car.
Rusty old rides are poster children for the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” concept and that old bucket of bolts will not look too pretty to anybody but you once you park it in the family garage. Be prepared to face the kind of intense heat that will melt iron ore from your lovely bride every minute that old car sits in the garage.
Thus your simple New Year’s resolution to rescue the old beast from wintry cold and give it a new home in your garage will light a giant fire under the healing process for the car. The second half of this New Year’s resolution will be a complete restoration or divorce-whatever comes first once you dive into this shark-filled pool of fulfilled resolutions.
Happy New Year.
Jim Sutherland
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