NFA Finance

Which fictional world would be the most fun to vacation in?

If I could vacation in any fictional world, this isn’t even a hard question.

I’m going straight into The Fast and the Furious.

Not Hogwarts. Not some tropical island that doesn’t exist. Not some futuristic utopia where robots do everything for you.

Give me Los Angeles at night, a garage full of cars, questionable decisions, and somebody saying we’ve got a race in twenty minutes.

That’s a vacation.

And I’m not talking about the later Fast & Furious world where they’re jumping cars between skyscrapers and somehow saving the entire planet before dinner.

I’m going back to the beginning.

Street racing. Car meets. Garages. Parts scattered everywhere. Engines being built at two in the morning. Everybody arguing about what somebody has under the hood.

That’s my fictional paradise.

I’d want to walk into that original garage and immediately start looking around.

What’s for sale?

What’s broken?

Who owes somebody money?

And most importantly…

What are we racing tonight?

Because let’s be realistic. I wouldn’t last twelve hours in that world before I somehow owned another car.

I’d show up supposedly on vacation and three days later I’d have a half-finished project sitting in somebody’s garage, I’d be hunting Marketplace for parts, and I’d have convinced myself there was money to be made somewhere in the deal.

Basically exactly what happens to me in the real world.

That’s probably why I loved those movies in the first place.

It wasn’t really about the ridiculous stuff that came later.

It was the culture.

Cars brought everybody together.

Your car said something about you. You built it. You worked on it. You raced it. You talked shit about your buddy’s car. You broke something. You fixed it. Then you went back out and did it again.

There was always another build.

Always another race.

Always another adventure.

And somehow nobody ever seemed particularly concerned about going to bed at a reasonable hour.

My kind of people.

I’d probably skip the whole international-criminal-mastermind portion of the vacation.

No tanks.

No submarines.

No jumping a Pontiac Fiero into space.

I’m good.

Just give me the cars.

Give me the original street-racing scene.

Give me a garage, a lift, some tools, a ridiculous amount of horsepower and absolutely nowhere important to be tomorrow morning.

And yes…

I’d absolutely go to the barbecue.

Because apparently after spending the entire night destroying transmissions and committing multiple traffic violations, everybody just shows up the next afternoon like nothing happened and starts grilling.

Perfect.

The funny thing is, the older I get, the more I realize that’s probably what I’ve always loved about cars anyway.

It’s not just the machine.

It’s where the machine takes you.

The people you meet.

The stories you collect.

The stupid adventures you couldn’t have planned if you tried.

I’ve made money because of cars.

I’ve lost money because of cars.

I’ve traveled because of cars.

I’ve made lifelong friends because of cars.

And I’ve spent an unbelievable amount of my life standing in garages staring at something broken thinking:

Well… now what the fuck do we do?

Then figuring it out.

So if somebody handed me a ticket tomorrow and said I could spend one week inside any fictional universe ever created?

Easy.

Put me in The Fast and the Furious.

Preferably somewhere around 2001.

I’ll bring my own tools.

And knowing me, I’ll probably come home with three cars.

— NFA
Bring your own tools. 🔧🏁