Not that I'd be spending much time driving it, but you've got to at least have the hope of a comfortable seating position.

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Where'd the Preview button go?

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You know you need a van, but that Thames Freighter looks like it's laughing at you. And it is. It pops its face off of the classifieds and rears up, sending you reeling against the wall. This place is full of fucking reptiles like that thing.

But then you spot the timid and friendly looking Matador diesel. Being the rave-hippie you are, you naturally have to buy a diesel, for the simple fact that it can run on vegetable oil and grease that can be stolen from restaurants.

After you come down a few hours later, you get your tools together, put together a few hundred dollars and show up at the seller's door.

You're dressed like you're straight out of munich. Huge black flared jeans with red fluourescent accents all over them, a strange looking vest on and a pacifier around your neck. None of your apparel seems at all odd to you.

The seller, an elderly German man, looks very weirded out by you, but you pay it no mind. You offer him a few hundred dollars and babble semi-coherently at him about 'oh its in such rough shape.... imnotleavingwithoutit'... you banter, and your appearance alone nudges the seller into selling it to you for a paltry $200, simply to get you the hell away. He quickly forks over the pinkslip and keys, slams the door and locks it.

Your ingenious negotiating skills have triumphed again, you tell yourself. Or maybe it's the drugs telling you. You can't really tell.

You get to wrenching on the diesel engine in the front of this thing, and you dump some fresh diesel into the fuel tank, and connect two fresh batteries.

Surprisingly enough, it fires, and quickly you have yourself a sooty, smog generating deathtrap of a vehicle.

It doesn't seem to run very strong, but hey, it's running. You can see the seller looking out of his farmhouse window at you hatefully as you drive away.

Of course, you're in Oklahoma now and you need to get your vehicle ready for Burning Man. Now that the last bits of the drugs have worn off, you take the vehicle into Metropolitan Texas (an oxymoron if there ever was one) to start the vehicle's transformation.

You rent a Storage garage space, and start making runs to the defunct circuit city, scoring tons of car-audio equipment and neon lighting for virtually nothing. You even find some with damaged packaging in the dumpster behind the store.

You begin outfitting the Matador with red neons everywhere, and mount set after set of neon lighting on the interior of the vehicle.

After several days of wiring, you've got a vehicle more luminescent than most spaceships. You paint the vehicle up with "The Traveler" on the side, painting the whole thing as if it were a spaceship, and start off towards Burning Man, happy hardcore booming from your newly completed stereo package.

Red luminescence seems to ooze from the undercarriage of your Matador, and on the inside, gentle red light pulses with every beat, other colors coming on every time the bass hits.

As you cruise along, you realize that you're running low on money, and stop off at a well known green-diesel shop and in exchange for some of your "goodies" for Burning Man, you get the Matador converted to run on vegetable oil.

Now, you continue on your way to the Nevada desert as Burning Man approaches. As you continue in "The Traveler" you encounter several other art cars and join a convoy on I-40. The sight of your luminescent soot-spewing diesel contraption accopanied by a school bus with jaws on the front of it must have been terrifying for those not involved.

At last, you arrive at Burning Man, your vehicle alone is a rave, for you've set up turn tables, and massive speakers to accompany your lightshow.

You begin down the dark path of drug-addled insanity again, blasting Kraftwerk remixes, the lights of your vehicle pulse as if it were alive.

You wander around as the colors of the Matador begin to blur and swirl, people distort, and the stars careen wildly over your head. They're going to hit each other. You panic as you see star after star collide, and the sky seems to be growing darker.

Yet you still feel compelled to dance by the strange pulsating techno playlist you queued up three days prior. Many others join you and dance to the beat of your Matador, amazed by the lights and patterns thrown from it. It is magical... for a time.

After dancing for what must have been hours, you collapse, and look up to see the face of your Matador staring down at you. It swirls, twists and contorts, transforming to become a multiluminescent dragon, every scale a different color, its once friendly grin is now a huge gaping mouth hanging open as if to swallow you. As your matador leans forward to swallow you, a female form appears. An angel with glowing blue butterfly wings. She drags you away from the dragon's gaping maw, and you spasm in panic, and fall asleep.

An unknown amount of time passes.

You wake as the sun's intense, hateful rays burn your skin, you can feel its hot breath upon you.

You manage to open your eyes enough to vaguely make out the shapes of circling birds overhead, silhoetted against the noontime sun. You don't know how long you've been unconscious.

Your Matador sits thirty feet away, doors still open, but the lights have long since gone dim, and your music stopped playing long ago. A thick layer of dust coats not just you, but the interior of your matador as well. Around you, no trace of burning man remains. No trash, no ash, nothing. It was as if it was never there.

You inhale sharply, and manage to prop yourself up and start walking to your Matador. You stagger as you walk, the last remnants of hallucinogens still swimming thickly in your skull. It's safe to say you partied a little too hard.

You climb into your van and attempt to start it. Your banks of batteries have long since been drained by your vast array of neon and LED lighting, not to mention your electrically thirsty sound equipment. You try the starter and find it dead.

You want to try to push-start it, but have no luck-- it's too heavy for you to push.

Welcome to Project Car Hell. You're alone in the desert with a dead car, with no cell phone and no way to call for help.

That'll teach you to stay off drugs. Hippie.

Hope you all enjoyed that.

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[d.yimg.com]

R.

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[jalopnik.com]

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That Tempo has Alaska plates. Are we sure we don't already know whose Tempo it is?!

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Threadjack: while searching for the above picture, I came across this:

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So I'll take the nice safe Thames Freighter, please. Actually, I should shut up; I drive perilously close to Chester VA every day; it's just outside Richmond.

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On the other hand, I just can't get over a diesel-powered microvan with a dismayed expression that bears the names of two generally-unloved cars which bracketed the Malaise Era. Can't do it.

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