The year was 2003.

It might have been 2004. Don’t quote me on that.

I was driving home from my amazing job at Easy Video in Ramsey, NJ. As I cruised down Rt. 17 on the way back to my stomping grounds of Saddle Brook, a magical moment was about to happen. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tiny camera that I brought with me in anticipation of this incredible event.

My champagne-colored ‘97 Chevy Cavalier and I had been through a lot together. And while it may sound silly, the next few seconds solidified our bond. I was never a big car guy (as evidenced by the vehicle I was driving), but the emotional attachment I had to that car grew by leaps and bounds on that fateful day.

Slowly, the numbers in the odometer rolled. 99,999.9 became 100,000.0. A milestone had been reached. I snapped pictures and celebrated.

It was the last time I would ever see that happen.

If you haven’t witnessed an old-school odometer slowly turn to 100,000, you haven’t lived. I recommend going to a used car dealership and purchasing a vehicle with a rolling odometer immediately to rectify the problem.

Cars have certainly advanced quite a bit in the past fifteen years, essentially turning into mini-spaceships that don’t fly. I appreciate mostly all of their modern conveniences: heated seats, dashboard navigation, rear-view cameras, iPod hookups, and satellite radio quickly come to mind.

But the tradeoffs make me sad. Digital odometers? Really? That’s not even an upgrade. If anything it’s a downgrade. When I want to see my travel in tenths of miles, I have to switch to “Trip A” or something like that. I can’t just look at it.

And now that power locks are standard, gone are the days of judging a girl by “the door test”. How else am I supposed to tell whether a potential date is selfish or not? Stupid technology.

Lots of other things have changed since I started driving. Gas was, at its lowest point, 98 cents a gallon, though it averaged somewhere around $1.28. Licenses changed too – in New Jersey, you get a provisional license at 17, which means you can only have one other person in the car, you can’t drive after dark and you can’t eat after midnight. Or something like that.

Then you’ve got EZ Pass instead of Garden State Parkway tokens, red light cameras and High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. What a strange new world.

You know what would be awesome? If they could make a car that could go like, 300 miles per hour. And then they’d make a one-lane highway from the east coast to the west coast. Only one car would be able to use it at a time, but you could just rip through the countryside driving up to 300 mph with no fear of crashing into anyone else or getting a ticket.

I guess you would need some gas stations though. They probably wouldn’t make much money.

Do you ever pretend that marks on the highway are like those little speed burst things they have in Mario Kart? I do. I don’t go faster, but it feels great.

But yeah. Odometers. Seeing it change to 100,000 in digital just isn’t the same. Digital odometers are the Technicolor to my rolling odometer’s beautiful black and white. Just another intricacy of a simple time that’s gone forever. I’d pour some gas out for my homey, but it’s too expensive.

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