Years Ago, Sometime when I was in college, I think, or possibly just afterward, I got a call from someone, out of the Blue, who had contacted me in a fit of excitement to tell me (and perhaps everyone else he could reach) that he was standing in a parking lot, right next to a De Lorean, the Gull-winged sportscar from the 1980's most widely known as the time-travel vehicle of choice for one Marty McFly in Back to the Future. The De Lorean Motor Company (DMC) also inspired the name of the Rap group known as "Run DMC".
The DMC-12 was the only model ever produced by the Ireland-based company, and only about 6,500 of them are believed to still exist. So running into one of these in a restaurant parking lot is pretty unlikely.Here's The Thing; I can't remember who it was that called me to tell me this. It was a male, around the same age as me, and was most likely either my Friend Corey, or Glenn, or maybe Jarrod.
Here's The Other Thing; This kind-of-slightly-interesting thing happened at least 5 or 6 years ago, and I hadn't given it a second thought for half a decade or more, but just recently, in the past 9 days or so, I have told this story TWICE.
My wife and I were talking about something-or-other while driving home, and somehow the conversation came around to this half-remembered story about getting an excited phone call from.. Who? My brother? or Corey, maybe? Might have been my brother, but I think it was Corey or Glenn or somebody. Then, just a couple of days after that, (Thursday, May 1st, to be exact) one of my co-workers mentioned the band Run DMC, and this led to me again recount this story of the time a guy I knew called me, out of nowhere, to let me know he was spitting-distance from this very rare and cinematically significant automobile. I didn't have to mention who it was that made the call, because my co-workers wouldn't have known them anyway, but again the thought nagged at me; I couldn't remember if it might have been my brother that called me.
3 days later, my cellphone beeply-beeped at me in the middle of the night as I lay in bed. I groped for it on the bedside table, and flipped it open to reveal a camera-phone picture of a De Lorean DMC-12, sent to me by my brother, completely out of the Blue! Underneath the picture was the brief, but evocative caption, "A Friggin Delorean!" (I only found out that that's not how "De Lorean" was spelled about halfway through writing this post.)
Now to make this even creepier, the message came after I watched a marathon of "Heroes" episodes from season 1, in which people are time-traveling, and predicting, painting, and altering the future all over the place. Was I "remembering" someone (maybe my brother?) calling me about seeing a De Lorean, or was I having a pre-cognitive vision of the future? After you watch 6 episodes of Heroes in 2 days, you start to think this way. Factor in the time-travel associations of the Back to the Future vehicle itself, and it really starts messing with your mind! I know I did get that call, and I am now relatively sure it wasn't my brother (What're the odds of seeing 2 of these things?), but it is nonetheless a really freaky coincidence!
Either that, or I am such a huge geek that the standard reaction upon anyone who knows me seeing a De Lorean is to instantly inform me of it.
Gotta go see Iron Man now, so... I'll see you in the future!
4 comments:
Details I didnt feel like mentioning in a TXT message:
-It was for sale in a classic car store.
-It was only $32,900, which seems like a huge bargain for what it is.
-It has 6,969 miles on it.
It had a sign on it that read:
"Flux Capacitor not included."
And there was a Back To The Future Soundtrack Cassette Tape lying on the front dash.
Actually, I got most of that from Valorie's blog about it. A new Ford station wagon costs about as much. The reason for this, from what I've heard, is that the DMC is actually a pretty crappy car, when you come right down to it. All that stainless steel makes it weigh about a million pounds, and the doors weigh half a million. Great collector's item, not-so-great car.
i would vote for total geek.....
The first instance was Corey...I remember having a conversation with both you and Corey about the same subject with in minutes of each other...and thinking that the whole thing was kind of crazy...
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