In an attempt to return some degree of normalcy to thunderjetheaven.com, I thought it was about time I do a post on the topic this blog professes to actually be about! A novel idea, I know, but here is the long-awaited conclusion of the “Field Find” T-Bird started here. And as you’ll see, it’s another case of salvaging something out of disaster…an act that seems to be a constant in your humble blogger’s life of late!
The parts arrived a month ago, which consisted not only of a replacement windshield and back bumper/light assembly but also a 4-pack of drivers, and this was where things got interesting. The windshield went on fairly well and the bumper was a no-brainer, of course, but when I went to put the driver in, I was surprised to find that he was too big for car! I didn’t expect that; I mean, he did kind of fit, but his head was bumping the windshield frame, and it just looked wrong. Fortunately, I had saved the original driver I had initially pried off the seat, so I dove into my parts box and found a group of tiny, disembodies heads from 2-piece drivers that I already had in my parts stash.
The original driver after his broken neck was drilled out (LEFT) shown in comparison to the recently purchased new driver (RIGHT) who turned out to be to big for this application
A previously purchased stash of T-Jet drivers with detachable heads turned out to be just what I needed for this car!
I wondered if I’d have any success at drilling out the broken neck of the original driver so that I could push the peg of one of the heads into it, so out came my tiniest drill bit, and sure enough I was able to ream out the remains of the “broken neck.” A new head was then glued into place, the driver’s hat was painted black, and with a few more touch-ups it was time to reassemble!
Sheared right off, in classic “tan style!”
And then disaster struck….aaaagain.
Some of you may remember this post, where I talked about the fragility of the tan T-jet bodies, something that I once believed was just a rumor but that I now know is true. And here it bit me again, because although I had already disassembled and re-assembled this car 2x, this 3rd time was more than it would take, and the side of the front post sheared right off…of course after I had just spent $25 on 3 new parts for it and put all that work into it, not before, right?! Of course!
OK, just keep telling yourself: it was free, it was free, it was free!
I had to walk away to let my fury subside, so when I returned a couple of days later, I started again on the process that I’ve finally learned to do and documented here: fabricating a replacement screw post. And as I’ve learned to do, it worked just fine! It took a while, including cutting the threads before gluing the post to the car, and fortunately I had my other “bullet-birds” to reference to make sure I got the length of the post exactly right, but after breaking away the rest of the broken post and grinding the jagged plastic down to create a smooth mounting surface, the little piece of styrene tubing adhered to the car fine; another day to let the epoxy dry and I was able to mount the body on the chassis just like it was original!
No problem, right? I mean, sure, it turned what could have been a nice $50 Aurora classic into a $5 scrapper, there’s that…but it looks good, it runs good, and after all, it was freeeeee!
It sure does make me wary of buying any more tan cars, though! And there are at least 6 or 7 more in this shade I still need for my collection, including the Olds Toronado, the Mercury Cougar and the Galaxie XL500, so I suspect I’ll be doing this again! The key, I think, is: don’t pay too much for one! Turns out that, considering the investment in parts, the price I paid for this one was about right!
Ever look at vintage posters like this and ask yourself…WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!
I hope anyone out there reading this had a good Thanksgiving holiday. Winter has arrived: yesterday was the 1st snow, and today-the last day of November-the temps have plummeted into the teens. I haven’t posted here since November 2nd, right after the Garage Betrayal.
Part of that silence was the move. Part of it was exhaustion. A big part of it was depression. But the biggest part of it was this weird sense that what happened with the garage—this supposedly small, local, bureaucratic thing—was actually connected to something much bigger that’s been gnawing at me for years. Its the same thing that’s made the city I so loved decades ago unlivable today, the same thing that’s made anything and everything so expensive that just daily living feels like its becoming almost impossible.
From around 2009: The wall in what was my work space for nearly 2 decades
It’s not just about zoning and compliance forms. It’s about why it’s harder and harder for working-class weirdos to have any space—physical or mental—for our hobbies and obsessions. It’s about why the garage went away, why the toy aisle feels like a Wall Street pit, and why a grown adult can’t just collect slot cars and Hot Wheels without competing with people who treat everything like a side hustle.
That’s what I’m calling investment culture.
And no, I’m not claiming I invented the phrase. I’m sure it’s floating around out there already. But I’m going to try to make it do some work here, because it ties together the garage, the housing mess, the toy car hobby, the vinyl collecting hobby, and the way certain kinds of people talk about “justice” while pricing the rest of us out of our own lives.
What I Mean by “Investment Culture”
Here’s my working definition:
Investment culture is a way of life where we’re trained to see almost everything—houses, garages, toys, hobbies, even our beliefs—primarily as speculative assets. Use comes second. Profit, status, and “upside” come first.
It’s that instinctive mental pop-up that asks:
What’s the ROI on this?
Could this be worth more later?
How does owning this make me look?
Instead of basic human questions like:
Is this useful?
Is this fun?
Does this actually serve anyone who lives in the real world?
Investment culture is what happens when the logic of a stock portfolio leaks into everything. Housing becomes an “asset class.” A garage becomes “non-conforming use.” Hot Wheels become “chase pieces” with auction comps. Original Aurora slot cars become “investment-grade collectibles.”
Life stops being something you live in and becomes something you curate and “optimize” for a hypothetical future. And as part of all this: beliefs and aesthetics turn into brands.
Just toys…to rubes like me! But to the cognoscenti, its MONEY!
The Garage Betrayal as a Crash Course
In my last post, I told the story of losing the garage I’d rented for years. On paper, it was all very boring:
Landlord.
Zoning.
“Compliance issues.”
Some convenient amnesia about lease history.
In reality, that garage was:
Where I kept the ’56 I’ve spent years rebuilding with my own hands, alongside friends who are now gone (read: deceased)
Where tools, parts, and projects piled up in that specific, lived-in way that only gearheads and hobby freaks understand.
Where I escaped from the craziness of work and responsibility to use my hands and my head on the things that I loved.
It was a working-class kind of space: concrete, dusty, unglamorous—and absolutely essential. To me, it was utility plus meaning. To the people on the other side, looking through the lens of investment culture, it was something else entirely:
A “liability.”
A “non-conforming use.”
A problem on a spreadsheet that needed to be “cleaned up” so the property could be more valuable later.
Notice how the language works:
I didn’t have a garage; I had “unpermitted storage.”
I wasn’t a long-time tenant; I was a “risk profile.”
They weren’t erasing part of my life; they were “bringing the site into compliance.”
Investment culture loves that word: compliance. It sounds neutral and objective, but it almost always points in the same direction: away from messy, low-margin, human uses and toward something profitable—and sterile.
Nobody has to say, “We’re doing this for the money.” Instead, they just say:
“We’re following regulations.”
“We’re standardizing.”
“We’re improving the neighborhood.”
The logic is dressed up as paperwork; the impact is deeply personal.
And the people who lose out? Those people look a lot like me and probably like you: working-class, hobby-obsessed, trying to carve out a little space in a world that keeps tightening around us.
Adjacent wall in for my former garage; all this was removed at the beginning of the month
Slot Cars and Hot Wheels: Working-Class Fun
If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you know what my life orbits around:
HO slot cars.
Tomy AFX.
Thunderjets.
Drag City Raceway, this giant, sprawling diorama in my basement.
Pegs full of Hot Wheels and Matchbox, baskets full of loose cars, tubs full of parts.
These things were never meant to be rarefied “assets.” They were designed to be:
Cheap.
Accessible.
Durable enough to survive what kids do to toys.
Hot Wheels and Matchbox were the great equalizers: for a buck or less, you could own a car that, in real life, you’d never get within ten feet of. Thunderjets and AFX sets showed up under Christmas trees in houses where nobody was watching their portfolios.
We didn’t talk about “value.” We talked about:
How fast a car was.
How well it handled that one tricky corner.
How cool it looked on the track or in your hand.
Drag City, for me, has always been a love letter to that world: a world where working people could afford to have fun, to build, to play.
How the Toy Aisle Became a Trading Floor
Now look at what’s happened to the exact same stuff under investment culture.
You walk into a big-box store at opening time and:
Grown adults are lined up at the toy section like it’s Black Friday for groceries.
Pegs get stripped in one swoop because there might be a “super” or a “chase” in there.
You see cars you know will never see a kid’s hand, never mind a track. They’re pre-sold to eBay.
Limited releases drop, and within minutes:
Flippers have bought multiples.
Listings are up with a 300% markup.
Kids (and broke adults) never even knew the things existed.
On the slot car side:
Old Thunderjets and AFX that once lived rough, glorious lives on basement tracks are vacuum-sealed as “investment-grade” museum pieces.
New sets get positioned less as toys and more as “collector products.”
Small manufacturers are forced into short runs, gimmicks, and artificial scarcity just to survive in a market skewed toward speculation.
The whole point of the hobby—cars moving around a track, banging doors on plastic guardrails, sparks in the pickup shoes—gets subordinated to:
Card condition.
Blister integrity.
Recent auction comps.
Investment culture takes a $1 car designed for chaos and turns it into a tiny, four-wheeled financial instrument. It takes a plastic slot chassis and turns it into a commodity. And then everyone pretends to be surprised when the people who actually live this culture—the kids, the working-class adults, the lifers like me—can’t afford half the stuff we used to buy without thinking.
Vintage Vinyl: Another Symptom
I’m still going to talk about vinyl here and there, but in this world it’s really just another version of the same story.
Records used to be:
The cheapest way to get a ton of music into your life.
Something you found in dollar bins and junk shops.
Accessible even if you were broke.
Now they, too, are:
“Assets” with catalog numbers and price charts.
Slabbed, flipped, and flexed on social media.
Pressed in absurd numbers of variants to feed speculative demand.
But if you squint a little, it’s the same story as the toy aisle and the garage:
Objects that were meant to be used are turned into things that are meant to be held, traded, and admired from a safe distance.
The people who built the culture—punks, weirdos, obsessive hobbyists—get outbid by people who like the idea of the culture more than actually living in it.
Vinyl is just investment culture at 12 inches. Hot Wheels are investment culture at 1:64. Slot cars are investment culture at HO scale, screaming around a plastic curve.
“Luxury Beliefs” as the Moral Costume
There’s another term that folds into this same concept: “luxury beliefs.” This describes high-status opinions that sound compassionate, but the implementation costs other people more than they cost the person supporting them.
As I see it, luxury beliefs live inside investment culture. They’re the moral costume worn over the financial behavior.
Luxury beliefs = the things they say to feel virtuous.
Investment culture = the things they actually do to stay comfortable.
You see it when:
People talk about “community” and “equity” while investing in the very trends that make actual community spaces impossible to maintain.
People wring their hands about “kids these days” being glued to screens while adults are strip-mining the toy aisles for profit.
Cities, developers, and management companies wrap everything in the language of safety, fairness, and progress while bulldozing the last cheap homes, garages, and storefronts where working-class fun used to thrive.
In that sense, the people who talk the most about justice and fairness are often the most influential practitioners of investment culture.
What Got Lost (And Why I’m Still Angry)
Just to be clear: I’m not a communist or a socialist. I’m not against saving or investing. I’m not against people planning for the future or trying to avoid poverty, and I’m not against making money. I’m not calling for some noble return to living cash-only on a dirt floor.
What I’m angry about is this:
We’ve lost the ability to let use value be enough.
We’ve lost the idea that a space or object can have value simply because it’s used, loved, and shared—even if it’s not the most “profitable” way to deploy it.
We’ve allowed the portfolio mindset to colonize everything and then call itself “equity” or “sustainability” or “justice.”
That garage was never anybody’s idea of a premier asset. It was something better: a place where a working-class hobbyist could keep a big, impractical dream alive.
The toy cars—Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Thunderjets, AFX—they’re not just collectibles. They’re equipment for joy. They’re the raw material of Drag City, of the stories and races and photos that end up on this site.
Investment culture looks at all of that and asks:
How can we monetize this?
How can we optimize this?
How can we secure our upside?
And every time that question wins, something gets erased:
A garage.
A local hobby shop.
A cheap apartment with a track in the spare room.
A kid in the toy aisle who never even sees the cool stuff because it never makes it to the shelf.
Why I’m Writing This Now
So why break the silence now, after the move, after the garage is gone?
Because I finally have a name for the thing that’s been humming under all these smaller stories: investment culture.
When I write about:
Drag City and all the work it takes to build and rebuild it,
The increasingly insane price of vintage slot cars and diecasts,
The way physical space for hobbies keeps getting squeezed,
The feeling of being pushed out of your own city,
…this is the lens I’m going to be using.
The questions I keep coming back to are:
Who gets to treat life as a portfolio?
Who gets frozen out when everything becomes an “asset”?
What happens to the people who just want a garage, a basement, a workspace, and a place to build a track and race toy cars around a loop?
I don’t have a neat ending for this. There’s no “10 steps to reclaim your joy” here. Mostly, I just want to name the thing that’s been tightening its grip on everything I care about.
Investment culture is the invisible story behind a lot of visible ones: the Garage Betrayal, the pre-dawn peg hunters, the insane auction prices on old Aurora stuff, the disappearing places where regular people used to build their own worlds, either at 1:64 scale or at 1:1.
If there’s a point to this post, it’s probably this:
Not everything we love has to justify itself as an investment.
Some things should be allowed to just belong to us.
And maybe the most radical thing we can do, in a world like this, is to defend that idea—to keep claiming spaces, objects, and little plastic cars as lived realities, not speculative chips in somebody else’s game.
I don’t know what the future holds anymore. I’m balancing the yearning to leave this place that investment culture has turned into something I don’t recognize and don’t like, against the realities of my age, my skills, and my vocation. This may be the biggest decision I’ll ever make, and it may also be the last big one. All of that can make Drag City—and this blog about it—feel like background noise lately.
But the track’s not dead yet.
The holiday season is here, and I’ll be headed home for some long discussions with my family to see what choices make sense. In the meantime, I’ll post here whenever I have something worth sharing about the thing this site is supposed to be about.
As for you, dear readers: take care, and have fun whenever and wherever you can. You never know when it might end.
SHE’S HOME: “The Holy Grail” in her new space in my home garage
It’s done. With 2 days off of work at a time when I could least afford it and the weekend that followed, wiping out my 2nd favorite holiday of the year so that I didn’t even notice it had happened, and with the help of a friend who came through for me in a time of need like few people have, I have relocated nearly 2 decades of my life: 5 pick-up truck loads, rows and stacks of shelves, and 1 2.5 ton piece of vintage American iron are now in their new resting place in my suburban home north of the city. It was a tremendous effort fraught with rage, but as Johnny Rotten reminded us in P.I.L.’s 1986 single “Rise,” “ANGER IS AN ENERGY!”
The Final Day: What my shop looked like right before deconstruction and packing began
Eighteen years. That’s how long I paid rent on a cinder-block garage off an alley in Denver—longer than the current duplex tenants have lived there, longer than the current owner has owned it, longer than the property management company has “managed” it. And yet here I am, erased by a clipboard.
What Actually Happened
This didn’t start as some neighbor vendetta about “my” garage. The case file reads like a parcel-wide cleanup: front-of-property shots, alley angles, weeds, general “conditions,” and then my garage folded into the same abatement rhythm. It’s a city-initiated sweep aimed at tidier optics and cleaner comps, not a bespoke investigation into my bay.
Rolling up the big stuff: loading the washing machine and the toolbox into the truck
And once the machine spins up, the cure is brutally simple: remove the tenant who doesn’t fit the form. That tenant was me.
The 2nd load of 5 total arriving at the house
Denver’s zoning logic is geometry over reality: if you don’t live on the same block or the immediately adjacent block, a residential-lot garage cannot be rented to you as off-site storage. I live seven miles away. On paper, my eighteen-year tenancy never counted—which is very convenient for everyone who took my money while it did!
Naming Names: the Parties & Principals (for the record)
Owner: Ryan Sullivan (inherited the property from James P. Sullivan. In my view, that’s the definition of inherited advantage in a city that keeps rewarding parcels over people)
City: Denver Community Planning & Development — Zoning / Neighborhood Inspection Services
Inspectors: Karena Fishler; Ana Gomez
Case handling: two addresses on the same parcel; one case closed as duplicate and everything worked under the other; “tenant removal” recorded as “the cure.”
“Denver CPD — Zoning/NIS Notice of Violation, 09/30/2025. Personal addresses redacted. Reproduced for reporting/commentary; no affiliation.
Sources: CORA files 2025-ZNIS-0011946 (issued 09/30/2025) and 2025-ZNIS-0011947 (duplicate); inspector notes 10/08/2025 and 10/17/2025; Denver CPD—Zoning/NIS
The 311 Black Box → No Accuser, No Accountability
A pause in the ever-emptier space
Who complained? We don’t know. The complainant is anonymous or internal; either way, the mechanism rolls—photos, notices, “cure by removal”—with no one to face and no credibility to test.
In a criminal courtroom, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront your accuser. In code-enforcement-land? No such right! A 311 complaint can be anonymous, and the government can still upend your life! That may be legal for administrative actions, but it’s the same move every time: efficiency over fairness. If you’re going to rearrange someone’s life, the least you can do is log a name—or demand corroboration strong enough to stand on its own.
A castered-crate I’ve had since the age of 4, bought by mom and dad to hold my toys, was in the garage holding electrical parts and supplies until moving day. Beside my master toolbox, my early teenage years are still marked on a battered filing cabinet covered with SoCal surfer/skater culture stickers along with dozens of famous “customer rides” refrigerator magnets from Rock Auto from my hardcore hot-rodding days in my 30s
My life gets rearranged by a voice with no face. That’s not justice; that’s a help desk with police powers!
18 Years vs. Everyone Else
I outlasted tenants. I outlasted management. I outlasted ownership. I kept paying, year after year, for a place that now conveniently “doesn’t exist” because it’s inconvenient for the brochure. That’s not “neutral process.” That’s gentrification with a clipboard: polish the spreadsheet, dress up the parcel, move the human problem offstage.
Load #4 arrives
The Paperless Property Manager
What seals it for me is Corken + Company effectively admitting they had no record of my tenancy at the time—not from last year, not from five years ago, not from the beginning. When the City called, property management literally said they didn’t even know the garage was leased:
“Incoming call from property management today, She says she’s not aware of garage being rented out by third-party.” (10/08/2025 — CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
“She said that you were finally able to locate the third-party who is renting the garage, Management was not aware of the arrangement.” (10/17/2025 — CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
In my view, that isn’t a clerical hiccup; it’s grossly unprofessional for a licensed manager. It let them pretend I was a surprise to their own file and made it easier to treat me as disposable when the parcel needed to be “cured.” If you take over a property that has been paying rent for nearly two decades but can’t produce a lease, a ledger, or even a basic chronology, you’re not managing property—you’re managing deniability.
The file even memorializes my refusal to vanish for their convenience. On 10/22/2025, the inspector logged:
“Property manager called again, says they’re getting a lot of push-back from garage tenant (not living there just storing his belongings), says our notice is not a legal document. I told her to tell him it’s not addressed to him but to the owner…” (CORA: 2025-ZNIS-0011946)
Translation: I wouldn’t quietly grease the gears of their parcel tidy-up to bump someone else’s property values. I insisted on what the process actually requires—formal notice to the owner, not a suggestion that I should just disappear.
Eighteen years of rent—and when it counted, per the CORA notes, they had no file. Not a lease. Not a ledger. Not a timeline. Just a convenient blank space where I used to be. Good job, Corken + Company—consummate professionals!
What This Really Is
Let’s call it what it is: property values over lives. The logic isn’t safety; it’s optics and assessment math. “Compliance” here means erasing people—the quiet eviction of anyone who doesn’t align with the new lines, the new comps, the new “vision.”
My yard on a fall day
I’m not asking you to weep for a guy and his ’56 Chevy. I’m showing you how the middle gets hollowed out: one clean-looking parcel at a time, one long-running arrangement abandoned as soon as the city takes a hard look and the numbers demand a shinier story.
The Only Thing I “Won”
Time. End of January 2026. That’s it. I got that by refusing to roll over on a 21-day “cure” to save the owner a fine. I’ll use every hour to triage nearly two decades of tools and memories. But don’t confuse that tiny concession with justice.
Replacement and reorganization begins: the laundry room as a disaster area, used for “staging” as we brought truckloads of goods into the house
What Should Change (so this doesn’t steamroll the next person)
Owner accountability comes first. If a use cash-flowed for years, the City’s “cure” should land on the party who profited, not just the person easiest to erase.
Transparent complaint pathways. Anonymous tips can trigger a look, but opaque enforcement shouldn’t decide outcomes. Log the provenance and make it auditable.
Tenant-impact protocol. When the “cure” is “remove a human,” there should be a standard window and cost-mitigation steps—not ad-hoc mercy based on who yells loudest.
Patrick and I take a much-needed lunched break at the local In-N-Out
Shut A Final Door
I’ll survive. I always do. But don’t dress this up as fairness. This wasn’t about my behavior, my car, or my neighbors’ safety. It was about tidying a parcel to match the new money next door—and the fastest way to do that was to make me disappear.
Rebuilding begins: with Patrick’s help, setting up and building new shelving the garage to hold all the goods vacation from the garage
As I described in my previous post about this, the neighborhood my garage was in was predominantly Black when I moved into it, and my next door neighbor was an O.G. Crip. The neighborhood is now predominantly White, and the block is filled with electric vehicles with bumper stickers with lefty platitudes on them. So here, dear readers, are the fruits of the labor of a city overrun and ruined by “tolerant liberals” using their money to displace the people who built neighborhoods once the property values get high enough for them to bother “investing” in them! These are the people with signs in their front yards reading “In this house, we believe…” while calling 311 to report their neighbors to the zoning board!
Thanks to my friend’s construction skills, rebuilding happened fast!
FUCK YOU, CITY & COUNTY of DENVER!
Fuck your politics, fuck your virtue signaling, and fuck your fucking spreadsheets! I’ve been here for 26 years, that garage was my space for 18 of those years! You took my money while the getting was good, then kicked me out when your property values mattered more to you than my rent!
How “PROGRESSIVE!”
“Think About The Future!”
I think this is the last straw: I’m done with Denver, I’m done with Colorado, I’m done once and for all with the cost, the corruption, and the hypocrisy of “blue cities” and “blue states.” After this indignation, I don’t think that even my job is enough to keep me here anymore. I’ll reserve a final decision for January of 2026, but by then, it is likely that I will decide to take my skills, my labor, and my tax money elsewhere… just as millions of other Americans are doing!
Its tight, but believe it or not, we found a place for everything!
If that is the decision I come to, then that, dear readers, would effectively spell the end of Drag City Raceway, and by extension, this blog. We’re not done yet, though, so tune in from time to time for updates, because you know there won’t be a gruesome step of the process that goes unrecorded!
My padlocks that once secured the garage, on my desk with their keys: retired
What happened to Halloween 1986/2025? What happened to the grand finale of Banzai Runner V and the Muscle Car Monster’s Ball? Well, they didn’t happen this year…whether they happen in the future remains to be seen!
A special shout-out and thank-you to my main main Patrick, who – despite his own trials and tribulations – was there for me when I needed him most, and provided the muscle, the guidance, and the wisdom to shepherd me through this. We should all be so lucky to have friends like him in our lives!
Right in the middle of the biggest tournament of the whole year! It was only last Thursday that I dropped an update on the results of the Grupe B brace of “Banzai Runner V” while admitting that I couldn’t quite finish it, and still had 2 heats to run before I could report the final results. Well, if you read my last post, you probably have an idea of why that didn’t happen this weekend, and now I’m out of time: tomorrow morning, I have to begin one of the biggest, most complex, and most high-stakes projects of my career: a “startup” where I am working with a team of 4 of to install nearly $100,000 of new hardware and reconfigure existing hardware on a tight schedule with minimal downtime at a sprawling series of plants scattered across the geography of a whole town, all linked by miles of glassfiber data cable. The project is complex and fraught with potential snags, and if you’ve ever worked a project like that, you know that no matter how many things you think you’ve planned for and worked through before it even happens, there’s always something unexpected to bite you in the ass! We anticipate 12-15 hours of work a day through end of Friday.
Grim duty – at the shop today beginning to break down and pack nearly 20 years of work
My favorite month of the year seems pretty well wiped out already for 2025. The Secret Oktober tournament for this year is likely to remain unfinished: out of necessity, and for the 3rd time in the last 6 years, Drag City Raceway is going dark, and thunderjetheaven.com is going on hiatus for an indeterminate amount of time.
thunderjetheaven.com is a time consuming project. Writing this blog is something I love doing, but between collecting, building, repairing and maintaining hundreds of slot cars, racing them in tournaments, and doing the photography, video, editing, and writing to come up with new and interesting content, I devote many hours each week to keeping the blog going. With pressures at both work and in life building up around me to levels not experienced since my friend Dale passed away in April of 2023, something has to break. The situation I described yesterday, with the sudden loss of my garage and work-space of nearly 20 years, was the straw that finally broke my back. The bottom line is: I simply don’t have the time anymore.
Checking battery, tire pressure, fuel status
If I really wanted too, I could just lower the quality and throw up any old nonsense; have an AI spit out a bunch of gibberish with some stock photos from time to time and pretend I’m still producing content. Sure, I could do that; but although I can’t say I’ve never been guilty doing just that when time is short, I will never make it a habit, because doing so defeats the purpose. I want you, dear readers, to come here for content that’s worth your time, and to give you that, I need time to produce it. Sadly, this is something I no longer have. Life is just continuing to get more expensive, more stressful, and more difficult all the time. For the next month, every minute of my spare time will be spent out of necessity relocating out of my workshop, which will cut into the time I need for work, where multiple projects all seem to be converging at once; that means making up the time I miss at the office dealing with the move with longer hours when I am there. There is some house maintenance and repairs I’ve been neglecting for too long as well that I need to scramble to remedy before winter hits full force, and then we’re into the holidays, and all the craziness associated with that.
Where I’m usually happiest
There are only so many hours in the week, and the last few months my insomnia has been worse than ever, partly because I often stay up far too late either racing cars at the track or working on this very blog out of excitement to get a new post out. I knew this couldn’t continue indefinitely, and I’ve now reached the point where I have no choice but to lay the blogging pen down.
As of now, I am not intending to shut it down for good; I will be back…but I can’t say when. Maybe in early December when the dust settles on the situation with the shop shut-down, maybe after X-mas when the holidays are behind us, maybe in January of next year when work hits the slow period before the ramp-up to spring. I wish I could give you an idea, but there are too many unknowns, too many variables, too many things going on right now to know when and how they will end.
A couple of small developments: some recent arrivals on the diorama. This is about all the updating I can offer at the moment.
One last run before switching it off….
I also may-in fact, I likely will-drop a random post here or there in the coming weeks if I have something I just have to impart; you want to see how that “field find” ‘63 T-bird came out, right? The parts have arrived! And I sure owe you another “Modelo En Bofus” post! So don’t be surprised if a new post pops up here or there from time to time over the next couple of months. Even so, I can no longer commit to a schedule: racing tournaments into the sunset, photographing and filming them, then editing it all together with music and a storyline – for the foreseeable future, the bandwidth to do all that just isn’t there.
It’s a sad commentary on life today that I have to cut one of the things I most enjoy out of my schedule. I could bitch and whine about “the state of things” for a paragraph or two, but I won’t: I’ll just get down to business and get things done like I always do.
The Germans have a saying I’ve always admired: „Pflicht geht vor Vergnügen:” “Duty goes before pleasure.” This is a maxim, but its also a necessity. I remain fortunate: I have a job, I have a home, I have money, I have responsibilities, I have people who depend on me and people who love me. That is life. The music, the records, the cartoons, the toys – both @ 1:64 and @ 1:1 – are all great fun, but life requires prioritization. So once again, I quote the introduction of Nexus VI Replicant Roy Batty from one of my favorite films of all time, and I leave you with the hope that, down the road somewhere, there will be “TIME ENOUGH.”
Wish me luck, dear readers…I hope to see you at the Finish Line!
It is unfortunate that I have to use my Saturday post to the bearer of bad news for any of my readers that may drop by my blog from time to time for banter about vintage slot car racing or die-cast collecting. It is, however, far worse news for me. Unexpected events over the last 36 hours serve as a frightening reminder of how quickly our lives can change and how precarious middle class life has become in the 21st century, and are going to have significant repercussions for me and for Drag City Raceway…so much so that you may now be reading one of my last posts.
Since the fall of 2007, I have been renting a large 3-car garage in an old neighborhood in Denver not far from the section of the city I once lived in. The location was ideal at the time because it was in walking distance of my swanky urban bachelor pad. Garage rentals in the city even in those easier days were notoriously difficult to find, so I lucked out finding an exceptionally large place for a reasonable price. I’m convinced that I got it simply because the owner/landlord and I hit it off and he just took a liking to me, and told me when he inked the deal that he wasn’t in the habit of raising rent on people unless “they gave him a reason.”
The garage was an old detached unit of cinder blocks and heavy beams whose exact age was difficult to determine, facing an alley behind a pair of very small Victorian-era houses. The place was not in great condition: the floor was unevenly poured asphalt over a dirt floor and it had no running water and no windows. But it did have electricity, the roof didn’t leak, and it seemed pretty secure despite being in a neighborhood which, at the time, was reputed to be dangerously gang-infested. The repute was right! As it turned out, the man who lived in the house right next door to my garage was an O.G. Crip, and he often had groups of pretty rough looking guys hanging out in the alley right outside my garage door. Thing is, I eventually made friends with them too; they had cars of their own – one had a boat-tail Riviera, another a mid ‘80s Coupe deVille, and by loaning a few tools and helping them troubleshoot some mechanical problems, I got into their good graces, and before long they went from harassing me to protecting me! And so it went: the gangbangers were my neighbors, and I was just another kid in the neighborhood.
Early days at the shop in Denver
I spent 2008 and 2009 working long hours in that garage on the body of my ’56 Chevy, all of which I did on my own; after losing my wrenching partner Ken to an early and unexpected heart attack several years earlier, I re-dedicated myself to finishing the car I had do so much work on with him, and by the fall of 2009 I took my first cruise down Colfax Ave in my finished car. Well, you know…they’re never really “finished”…but it was finished enough! It all happened in that ramshackle garage.
One of the proudest, happiest days of my entire life: my 1st Colfax Cruise as a participant rather than a spectator!
The Collapse That Wrecked A Generation
It wasn’t more than a couple of years later that everything went to hell. Unless you were born yesterday, you were there: the 2008 crash, Occupy Wall Street, the Obama presidency, the bank bailouts. Your HB was one of those people who lost it all, and by early 2012 I was out of my downtown condo and back to renting. Thing is, I kept the garage, and I kept my car in that garage.
One of the worst days of my life: final packing my Capital Hill condo on the way out in April 2012
In the years that followed, a lot of things changed. The landlord who owned the garage and the houses and had rented to me passed away sometime in 2020 or 2021 and his son, who I had never met, inherited the properties. And your humble blogger? I went through two more house moves and 3 more jobs. My marriage deteriorated and eventually came to an end. My family sold their house and left the state. My father was diagnosed with brain cancer and later passed away. And through it all, my garage remained a sanctuary that was always available to me; a place I could always go to tinker with my car. Many cars passed through my hands throughout those years; a couple more Chevrolets, a pair of Buicks, a duo of Mercedes-Benzes and a Jaguar, to name just a few, all of which spent at least some time in that garage. The place wasn’t always pleasant – it was burning hot in the summer and brutally cold in the winter, and I had to piss into a jug when necessary – but I could play the radio and turn my wrenches in peace without anyone telling me otherwise. To a gearhead like yours truly, that was the best deal going!
But then came Gentrification…
“Little Pink Houses:” the structure in the center represents the Denver I moved to in 1999; the abominations on either side of it is what “the Blue-ing of Colorado” hath wrought
The neighborhood began to change…FAST. From 2012 on, within the space of only a few years, houses began to flip on every block and renovations were everywhere! The neighborhood went from being roughly 60% Black to at least 70% White faster than I would have thought possible, and houses that were selling for under $100,000 when I arrived in the area were going for over half a million. Now, there’s a lesson to be learned there, and I don’t have to tell you what it is, but it was one that I didn’t learn, because at the time I was happy with things just the way they were…and somehow I forgot one of life’s most important lessons: that nothing lasts forever.
Yesterday, it all came to an end.
The Door Slams
The Skytrain, my ’83 300D Turbodiesel, in the garage
On Friday afternoon, while I was at work in the middle of trying to solve a complex technical problem, my cell phone rang with an unidentified number I assumed was one of my customers. Not so. It was a woman who explained that she worked for the “new” property management company that had just taken over from the one I had been working with for almost 18 years because they had “gone out of business.” That was news to me, but ok….and here comes the notice of rent increase, I thought.
Not so. It was far worse than that. What she told me was that the City of Denver Zoning Commission had visited the property and done reconnaissance on the house and the grounds, including talking to the renters in the two houses the garage was behind, and had informed them that my renting the garage was a “zoning violation.” Nearly 3 years after I signed my lease, a new zoning law was passed (in 2010, the benchmark year when Denver began its precipitous decline) that made it illegal for a property owner to rent a building that was “an accessory to a home” to someone who was not a resident of that home: that only the resident of the house to which the garage belonged was legally able to utilize it. So no, it wasn’t a rent increase: I was no longer eligible to be in the garage at any price! I was told to vacate completely and soon as possible: no negotiations to be had.
Looking back on the days when I had a generous enough work space to make things happen
I spent Saturday with my nose buried in research and was stunned to discover that, yes, that was absolutely correct; never mind that countless thousands of property owners all over city – countless millions all over the country – rent out garages and other out-buildings on their properties to people who don’t live in the houses they go with to get some extra income on space they may not be using. Well, that is now a “ZONING VIOLATION.” And since that was a matter between the city government and the property owner, I, as the tenant, had absolutely nothing to say about it! I was just S.O.L.! Have a nice day!
One of the last images there will ever be of my car in this space
I am now in the position of losing my work space and having to migrate 18 years worth of tools, parts, memorabilia, and supplies to my house roughly 7 miles away north of Denver, and the old Chevy, too, has to come back to my house. My garage at home is adequate, but has nowhere near the space of the one I’m being forced to abandon, and this means one my vehicles is about to be relegated to outdoor parking again just in time for winter! The only fight I can win here is the date: they tried to tell me to get out before the city levied a fine against the owner. I told them to fuck themselves: it’s going to cost me thousands of dollars to move everything out of there because I will have to hire a lot of it done, and boohoo that the owner might get fined a few hundred dollars by the city: they’re going to do this “by the book,” giving me an official letter of termination of the lease and the full 30 day term to vacate. Any attempt on their part to strong-arm me out sooner results in my pushing the “lawyer-up” button!
But I’ll be lucky if I can manage all the reorganization this is going to require even then, especially at the busiest time of the year when my work schedule is pegged! In order to orchestrate all the moving parts this unwinding will entail, I will be forced to take numerous days off work at a time when I can least afford to do so, ramping up an already stressful situation to its maximum! I’m already working over 50 hours a week and managing on 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and now, there’s this.
The Garage and the System
Just a scant year ago…
What’s happening to me right now—being told that a garage I’ve occupied for nearly two decades can no longer be rented, not because of safety or wrongdoing but because of a bureaucratic technicality—is a small story, but it’s also the story of the time we unfortunately find ourselves in.
For most of the 20th century, a garage was a working person’s space. It was where you kept your tools, your car, your independence. It was a little slice of freedom: four walls where no boss or landlord could tell you how to live. Now, even that has been fenced in by paperwork and property values.
The zoning board doesn’t care that my use is legitimate and harmless; what matters is that I don’t live on the same parcel of land. That’s the logic of a society that has forgotten what property was for. It’s no longer about use, it’s about control. This isn’t just one tenant’s headache. It’s what happens when the middle class gets hollowed out—when regular people lose the ability to own a bit of land, and the rules start serving those who already do. It’s the same frustration that drives ordinary Americans to rage against elites and dream of systems that might level the field again, no matter how wrong-headed they may seem.
The city thinks it’s enforcing “order.” What it’s really enforcing is alienation: the slow erosion of self-determination, one small eviction at a time.
My garage isn’t just a shed with a car in it. It’s the last visible symbol of a kind of life that’s disappearing—the modest, self-made life where a person’s labor and love could shape their surroundings without permission.
Yet ANOTHER “end of an era!”
You can say I screwed up by not making the landlord an offer; by not buying in that very neighborhood when I saw what was happening and had a chance. You can say that, and you’d be right. But is that the real moral of this story? Or is it something else: is it that, if the system can’t make room for a man and his car, maybe it’s the system—not the man or the car—that needs rebuilding.
