Bark's Bites: We All Need a Bad Influence or Two in Our Lives

“Just passed this on Michigan Avenue outside of Dearborn. Manufacturer plate.”

The above picture of a GT350R in the wild and the accompanying text found their way across the LTE network to my phone last Thursday. My good friend — let’s call him Acd — and I have a habit of supporting each other’s addictions. In the therapy world, they call such people “enablers.”

In the car junkie world, we call them “kindred souls,” and I’m fortunate to have more than a few of them in my life.

Let’s be real with each other for a moment here, shall we? We might all be Car Guys, but to the rest of the world, we’re simply “idiots.”

I already have a perfectly good, much-fast-for-the-real-world Mustang, and yet every time I see a picture of a GT350R I start doing math in my head to see how I might possibly be able to swing one. Although I’m what some might call upper middle-class, I’m not so well off that the sticker price of a GT350, avec ou sans R, is an insignificant sum. The financially responsible thing would undoubtedly be to hold on to my Boss 302 and “let somebody else take the depreciation hit” on a 2016 GT350 — as if these things are going to appreciably depreciate any time soon.

In a culture that simultaneously encourages outlandish consumerism and then shames anybody who actually engages in it, one often finds himself wrapped in a paradox that I have previously called the “Nobody Needs That” societal ideal. On the rare occasions that I feel this pang of guilt, I thank the Lord above that I have stupid, reckless, and immature friends like WW to inspire me to do stupid, reckless, and immature things. Otherwise, I might occasionally do something intelligent with my money, like, oh, I don’t know, save some of it.

My friend Acd knows this. Therefore, he’ll do things like send me pictures of EFFING AMAZING LOOKING GT350Rs IN THE WILD. My other friend, David, does things like send me pictures of all the cars he can buy with his truckload of cash that his employer simply dumps in front of his apartment every other Thursday. We egg each other on. We encourage irrational buying behavior. We celebrate it when we do something completely stupid like lease a completely superfluous car. I’m just as excited to see the first shots of any of my friends’ new whips on Facebook as am to see all of those completely unique and original shots of their kids’ First Day of Fourth Grade (guilty, by the way).

And it’s not just new cars that my Car Guy friends and I encourage each other to over-consume. We geek out over new exhausts that serves no other purpose than turning a V8 up to Eleven. We high-five over 140 treadwear tires that might not last an entire summer. We celebrate the finding of a pristine NA Miata with a mere 200,000 miles on the engine for less than two grand. I think I received more comments about my 1996 Subaru Legacy Wagon (RIP) than I did about anything I’ve ever bought, because a certain segment of my Car Guy friends thought that it was awesome I found a running Subaru for less than the cost of a set of winter tires.

We nudge each other. We implore each other. We justify the insane for each other. We rationalize the need for new cars, new parts, new trips to new racetracks — anything that helps us feed the fire for each other. And thanks to the power of the Internet, we are normally thousands of miles away from each other when we do it. That doesn’t weaken the connection, though. If anything, it thrills me to be in Miami, sending pictures of exotic cars in Epic Hotel’s roundabout to my few friends that actually afford them in Atlanta.

It’s classic Relationship Builder behavior. A bunch of guys from different walks of life, from all over the country, encouraging each other to wring one last dollar out of our wallets to pursue our passions. Without our dearly departed editor, Derek (he’s not dead, you know, he just isn’t here), I probably would have never pulled the trigger on leasing my Fiesta ST. Without my brother on the phone, calming me down after I screamed at a New Car Manage r, I wouldn’t have a School Bus Yellow monster in my garage.

And without my dear friend, Acd, I wouldn’t be looking at GT350 build sheets as I type this. Without all of these morons in my contact list, egging me on to pursue my passion with more vigor than any normal father of two has the right to do, I’d have a lot more money, no question.

But I’d also have a lot less Life.