How Moving From Michigan To California Completely Changed My Life

Some people think starting The Autopian was an act of defiance — that, like the popular sports website Defector, our humble auto publication born on March 32, 2022 was a product of former Gawker employees sticking it to the man, specifically to a Gawker CEO whom many referred to as “Herb.” But this wasn’t the case; my cofounder Jason and I weren’t motivated by a dislike of anyone in particular, nor did we have a beef with Jalopnik itself (we didn’t love all the ads, but we thought it was a great car website staffed and read by cool people). No, the reality is that The Autopian came about because it simply had to; Jason and I felt we had no choice. Here, allow me to explain the history of The Autopian, and how my life completely changed since I co-founded it three years ago.

It was the summer of 2020, and I was in a deep, dark funk, crippled by regret.

I had just spent the past seven years living both my dream and my pipe dream. In 2013, after having enrolled into engineering and studying my arse off in hopes to someday get a job at Chrysler — the company I’d loved since I was just a young teen living in Leavenworth, Kansas — I landed a full-time engineering gig on the program my childhood self had prayed to work on: The Jeep Wrangler. Moving from my college town in Virginia to Detroit was a true dream come true, and I remain grateful to have been able to not only live in the Motor City that I had imagined in my head for so many years, but especially to work my dream job there.

Everything Was Going Great At Jalopnik Until I Hit A Brick Wall

In 2015, I managed to live my pipe dream by leaving Chrysler to work for Jalopnik, at the time my favorite automotive publication. Though my friends and family were confused about me taking a giant pay-cut to become a blogger, it was obvious to me that working at Jalopnik would be the greatest job on the planet.

I, a diehard car nut, all of a sudden found myself touring iconic factories; interviewing chief engineers and CEOs; reviewing state-of-the-art cars; reporting breaking automotive news; witnessing important car debuts; getting really, really geeky teaching people how cars work; and learning all the while from true industry experts. As an engineer and car person, I live for that stuff.

The job came with modest pay, but it filled my soul to the brim, allowing me to live my childhood passion to its absolute fullest. I wish everyone in the world could experience that feeling of living one’s dream to the max; now that years have gone by, I can explain it only as the ultimate contentment — a deep, rich satisfaction knowing that I did what I set out to do.

Most importantly, the job put me in contact with people who truly understood me. At UVa and at Chrysler, I had yearned to be around people who lived and breathed cars like I did, and at Jalopnik I finally felt like I was at home. I used to have reader meetups in the Walmart parking lot in Troy, Michigan, and the people I met there remain among the finest I’ve met in my life. I used to get recognized on the streets by car nuts all the time. People would stop by my Troy, Michigan residence just to say hi and chat cars. It never got old to me. Hundreds of thousands of people read and commented on my articles, tens of thousands of people followed me on social media, and every word I published on Jalopnik during that era wielded tremendous power.

I changed peoples lives; when I wrote about a Jeep parts company called FN Jeeps in Colorado Springs, their owner called me to profusely thank me for helping turn his business around. When I wrote about a massive Mitsubishi collection in Germany, the owner there — a man named Tilo — thanked me, for he was now being recognized far and wide and invited to exclusive events. When I showed Jason a largely unknown Japanese Car importer called Duncan Imports in Virginia, he wrote an article that turned that place into a household name (we later saw Warren Buffet and Bill Gates driving cars from there!). When I wrote about my silly obsession with “Holy Grail” five-speed Jeep Grand Cherokees, I helped a town raise over $20,000 to help rebuild a school. When I wrote about a man struggling in the woods, stranded in his Toyota Land Cruiser, my article played a big role in him getting the help he needed.

I could go on and on, but my point is: I was a young 20-something year-old kid who had been obsessed with cars forever, and now I had the ultimate job that encouraged me to live that obsession to its fullest. And my God, did I. I traveled the world and found amazing nuggets of car culture everywhere from China to Vietnam to Hong Kong to Belgium to Sweden to Turkey. And I drove around the United States on epic journeys in extremely low-budget junkers because 1. I legitimately had no money. And 2. I loved the challenge of trying to revive a rustbucket.

I lived in a small house off a major road in a major suburban Detroit city called Troy. My backyard was about a half an acre; I was singler than any man in human history (more on that later); I had very few expenses since rent was just $835 a month and I was basically just buying plane tickets and gas; and readers soaked up every word I put on the page, especially if it had to do with wrenching.

So I bought cars. Lots of cars.

To this day I’m not sure how much buying those cars was influenced by the realization that I could get people to read about them, or whether I was just buying those cars because I loved them. I think it was 30/70, with my love for the cars dominating, but knowing that I could use them as article-fodder may have helped me justify filling my yard with 14.

Here’s a look at my old house, which quickly became a legend to Detroit-area car enthusiasts, especially since it was so visible right off Rochester Rd. Here it is before I moved in:

Here in 2016 you can see a white five-speed Jeep XJ on the left side of the wrap-around driveway, and my 1992 XJ on the bottom:

Things started getting out of hand in 2017; you can see there’s a Jeep J10 in the back yard, as well as my 1992 XJ in the front yard, plus a $600 Jeep XJ on the left side of the driveway (the five-speed XJ I sold):

Check out how my back yard became a bit of an off-road proving ground:

By 2018, I had a wrecked Kia Rio in my back yard, along with a J10. In the front yard was my XJ, a Jeep Cherokee Golden Eagle on the left side of my driveway, and at the top you can see what I think is a 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer.

Things really got crazy in 2019, as this 2020 photo shows. You can see the Kia still in the driveway, along with the Golden Eagle and maybe another car you can’t quite see. In the backyard is a 1991 Jeep Comanche, a 1995 Land Rover Discovery 5spd, a 1976 Postal Jeep, a 1987 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5spd, and I think a 1991 Jeep Cherokee XJ. 

This 2022 image shows my daily-driver 1966 Plymouth Valiant on the bottom of my driveway, a five-speed Jeep ZJ and a 2000 Chevy Tracker five-speed (the one I got stuck on flat ground) in my front yard, a Willys FC-170 in my backyard along with my 1992 Jeep XJ, and then something at the top of my driveway that I cannot identify.

Here’s a June, 2022 image showing kind of the end of an era. There’s the FC and XJ in the backyard, I think that’s my J10 and Golden Eagle on the left side of my driveway, that’s a Chevy tracker in the front yard, there are two Jeep ZJ five-speeds on the bottom of my driveway, and there’s Jason’s Scion XB there on the bottom left.

I’m glad my friend Kristen Lee captured my fleet at what was pretty close to the pinnacle of its madness:

But all this fun came crashing down, and it started in 2020.

2020 Broke Me

The way you see yourself is such a huge factor in your overall happiness. Between 2013 and 2019, I considered myself truly successful. I had been an engineer leading cooling system design for the ultimate Jeep, and then when I joined Jalopnik I quickly became the site’s leading writer by traffic, ultimately helping it reach its largest audience in its history. In 2019, in my head, I was a successful journalist for the best car website on earth, and I was living the dream.

But shortly after the trip shown below, in 2020, all that changed, and I no longer thought of myself as much of anything at all. And the ramifications of this new mindset ultimately led to my exit from the company.

 

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There were numerous factors that went into this, but a big one was that I had let my passion for cars completely take over my life. I don’t regret this one bit, as — like I said before — being able to live one’s passion to its fullest is one of the greatest joys one can experience. But my constant automobile accrual, my daily trips to the junkyard, my unrelenting need to write blogs about cars 24/7 meant I was also deeply lonely — something I had gone years not really paying attention to.

To be sure, I had lots of readers and social media followers and a decent number of friends, but when COVID-19 came around and the world was locked down (and my whole family lived nowhere near me), I realized that I wanted a more meaningful relationship.

I had zero luck dating. I mean zero. In retrospect, I kind of get how I might have been a tough sell (see hoarding video above), but in 2020 I was pushing 30 years old and I hadn’t had a girlfriend in seven years. On dating apps, I was probably 0 for 5 million and after a while that gets into your head, especially if you’re like me.

I’m not the type of person who makes excuses for himself. I grew up in an army family where the expectation is that, if something isn’t working, you should first look inward; accountability is everything. So, even though my friends were telling me the problem was where and how I lived, in my head when I’m going 0 for a gazzilion on dating apps (where nobody can see that I own 14 cars) I begin to believe there’s something wrong with me. That I’m the problem.

Combine this COVID lonesomeness with a rather confusing love-triangle-ish situation I found myself involved in around 2020, and I found that the youthful automotive rock ‘n roll record that had been playing in the background of my life for the prior seven years had begun to skip. I knew I had to make a change, and I felt that moving away from Michigan had to be a part of that. Jalopnik, though, refused to allow me to move. I tried relocating to Chapel Hill to live near Jason in a more youthful college town, but the company denied that. Per Jalopnik, I had to stay where I was.

But the end of my time at Jalopnik wasn’t just about me realizing I was getting older and singler by the day and had to stay there in Michigan with no family nearby. No, COVID also shook me out of my euphoric car-nuttiness enough for me to realize that my career had stagnated.

In 2019 Jalopnik’s editor-in-chief Patrick left, leaving a hole in the EIC position. Mike Ballaban assumed the interim position, but I think some union trickiness made it such that leadership was looking for someone else. After having no leader for weeks, I reached out to my friend Rory to suggest that he go for the job. He’d worked at Autoweek, and frankly, I thought (and still do) he was just a cool and smart dude.

A few months passed, and enough time alone during COVID forced me to realize something I hadn’t before: I had been the website’s top writer by traffic during the time I was there, and yet I was still a “staff writer” making the company minimum 4.5 years later. I obviously hadn’t joined Jalopnik to become rich, but at a certain point it was hard not to feel disrespected, and it took COVID for me to snap out of my car-trance and see it that way. (And now that I’m running an organization, I can confirm: If someone kicks butt, leadership should show them that they’re valued. Period.)

Eventually — probably two months after the EIC position was posted and I’d reached out to Rory — I realized that the only reason why I myself felt unqualified to be EIC of Jalopnik was that I hadn’t been properly promoted according to my performance (again, I also shouldn’t have let my car obsession blind me from pushing for what I wanted career-wise, so some of it’s on me). Upon this realization, I applied for that EIC position, but it was too late. I had recruited myself out of an opportunity; Rory was the new boss.

Rory came in and had to learn the ropes, as one does. And I sat there thinking (naively) I could do that job with my hands tied behind my back — probably a fairly typical feeling when outside leadership comes into any org. I attended meetings with the CEO to get Rory up to speed; each meeting made me regret not having believed in myself (though again, I understand why I didn’t given my lack of promotions up to that point).

But the truth is, there was a third, perhaps overwhelming factor that pushed me not just away from Jalopnik but towards building The Autopian: you, dear readers.

Jason and I received hundreds of emails and comments from readers telling us: “Guys, I love your stuff, but I just cannot visit that site anymore.” People were sending me pictures of their cellphones literally overheating from all the ads on the page. Other concerns about the site design and general tone also contributed, but the point is that, after reading hundreds of emails like that, Jason and I knew we had to move on.

You readers are some of the best people we’ve ever known. We’ve met many of you in-person, we’ve corresponded with you in comments, we’ve chatted over email. Some of you have become lifelong friends. You are what drives us. So when so many of you told us you wish you could continue reading our work, but that you didn’t want to visit Jalopnik anymore, it broke our hearts. We knew we had to act.

I Was Lost, So I Took On Two Crazy Projects

For almost two years, I was a bit of a lost soul. Whereas before I felt proud that I was crushing it writing for the best car website on earth, interacting with some of the finest car experts and enthusiasts around the globe, I now felt like my career had stagnated. I was a perpetually single 30-year-old who had been doing the same thing for years without really progressing career wise; I was a blogger for what felt like a struggling car website not nearly as beloved as it once was. In my head, I felt like a failure.

This is obviously complete BS. I had a job, I had my health, I have a great family, I had 14 cars for goodness sake! And yet, I was unable to see this sunshine through the clouds. Like I said at the beginning of this article: How you think of yourself is so critical in this life, and modern me now lives a life of gratitude (more on that in a bit). And in 2020-2021 I just felt lost. I felt I had stagnated in my personal and professional life, and if I didn’t make a change soon I was going to explode.

All of this — the loneliness, the dumb love triangle, Jalopnik refusing to let me move, the lack of promotions, the regret from not having applied to that EIC role, the emails from upset readers, and the departure of some of my friends from Jalopnik to pursue other jobs — sent me into a bit of a daze. Almost overnight, I went from the most-read writer at Jalopnik to the very least-read, and as someone who cannot stand poor performance, looking at this data just drove me deeper and deeper into a sea of melancholy.

My friend Andreas helped start my journey out of the funk. A Jalopnik reader-turned-close friend, he bought on my behalf a manual transmission 1994 Chrysler Voyager turbodiesel – the holy grail of minivans. Based out of Nuernberg, he had been chatting with me about those vans for a while, and he’d found one for sale near him, so I told him to just go for it. He bought the broken machine for 500 Euros, towed it to his girlfriend’s parents’ house, and told me: “Yo, this project-van is ready for you!”

And so, right in the middle of 2020, during the pandemic that had me feeling all sorts of negative things about myself to the point where I lost tons of weight (see below), I whipped out my red passport and left the U.S. on one of the few flights bound for Germany. I got an Airbnb in downtown Nürnberg, which at the time had no visitors due to the lockdown (it was wild), and I used Andreas’ Toyota MR2 to commute daily to his workshop so I could try to resurrect that rare Austria-built, Italian-engine-equipped, US-engineered minivan.

That diesel manual Chrysler Voyager gave me a spark when I desperately needed one. Just when I felt that my passion for cars had reached rock bottom, here was this fascinating contraption — a wacky mix of American, Italian, and Austrian — waiting to be revived from the dead. 

The days in Andreas’ workshop were tough at first. I was slower than usual, less motivated than usual, and found myself just staring blankly at the car quite a bit in the early days, just thinking. And overthinking. And then overthinking my over-thoughts.

But Andreas and his friends helped, and with stuck-at-home readers tuning in to see what I was doing all the way in Germany — at the time a locked country — I was slowly moving forward.

I wish I could say the road out of this mental funk was a short one, but it wasn’t. It was a multi-year affair. In the summer of 2021, I drove this van to Sweden on a trip that resulted in the story “I Visited Supercar Company Koenigsegg After Sleeping In A Van And Bathing In The Sea.” During this trip, I recall meeting a British reader named James and his wife Amanda, who was from Missouri. The two of them lived in a tiny town called Vännäs, because James had gotten a teaching gig there.

I remember staying in their remote farmhouse, drinking wine with them around their furnace as snow fell in October, talking about how, even though a passion is a blessing, it can also be a huge curse. I recall saying at the time that the danger of a passion is that you put everything you have into it, and if that passion falls away, so does your sense of self.

That’s how I felt at that time. I had loved cars for so long, and I’d put my whole soul into my job at Jalopnik, and now that I knew it was over, I felt lost in a way that honestly scared me.

This is the conversation that I had with numerous people over those two years between 2020 and 2022. I remember meeting Jalopnik reader Dragoslav in his hometown of Belgrade, Serbia. Like James and Amanda, he had a lot of wisdom to impart as I found myself totally lost, grappling with what felt at the time like my loss of a passion that had come to dominate my life.

What became clear over these two years of soul searching is this: Having a passion is a huge blessing, and being able to fulfill it is a godsend, but there really is a danger associated with going too deep: If the passion is compromised — perhaps as a result of loneliness, a pandemic that makes you wonder if cars really matter that much in the grand scheme of things, a career that feels like it’s stagnated, or general regret about missed opportunities in one’s love life and job — then you might find yourself living out of a diesel Chrysler minivan in Eastern Europe wondering what the hell just happened.

Diversify. I knew that’s what I had to do. I had to find joy beyond just cars, though I had no clue how.

The Autopian Is Born

I’ve always believed that the best way out of a personal rut is to tackle something difficult. Take on a grueling challenge. The diesel manual minivan wasn’t that tough of a challenge, but it was something. It gave me something to put sweat equity into, and most importantly, to be proud of.

I knew this was the answer I sought. I knew that what I had was an entirely irrational self-confidence issue — one that had seemingly crept up out of nowhere during the pandemic and stuck around for far, far too long — and the only way out was getting a bit of pride back. And that meant putting in some work.

After taking on another absurdly challenging project in 2021 — a completely dilapidated 1958 Willys FC-170 (see above) — and getting trenchfoot in the Pacific Northwest, I now knew I could fix anything. But that wasn’t enough. I had to move on from Jalopnik and face something more professionally challenging. The only problem is, I wasn’t sure what.

So I applied to graduate schools and began looking into badass engineering jobs and considered driving my five-speed ZJ around the world to write a book about car culture. All the while, Jason Torchinsky remained my biggest advocate, always lending an ear, supporting me in whatever I wanted to do, and just generally being the best friend anyone could ever want. (He even helped me with grad school applications).

He and I had found ourselves heavily recruited by The Drive shortly after our former EIC Patrick left for the publication that was in rebuild-mode. I remember sitting in a WeWork in a skyscraper in New York City, where executives who had just bought the publication were telling me the vision for the site, and asking me what I needed to feel comfortable coming and kicking butt.

Jason and I thought long and hard about moving over to The Drive. We understood that our time at Jalopnik was over, and while Jason was open to making the move, I just couldn’t. The recruitment process just felt off, and what’s more, deep down I knew one thing: You only get to leave Jalopnik once. All that momentum we’d built — the readership, the thousands of stories, the notoriety — could only be levered a single time. We had one shot (one opportunity) to launch our gas-thrusters off the launch pad that was Jalopnik; were we sure we wanted to aim our nose at The Drive? And if not, where would we expend our last bit of fuel trying to go?

Jason stood by me when, honestly, maybe he shouldn’t have. I didn’t have a plan. I was just going by what felt right. Even though I wasn’t sure I’d be staying in automotive media, Torch turned down an opportunity so he could continue working with me, and that stuck with me. Still does.

I remember the exact moment The Autopian became a spark in our heads. I was in Germany staying with my parents in the upstairs bedroom chatting with Jason on the phone. Europe was locked down, the world was going hard on sourdough starters, and much of the workforce was en flux like it had never been before. COVID had taught people just how fragile this world was, and because of this, many looked internally and wondered if their life’s trajectory was headed where they truly wanted it to go. So many people changed jobs, and so many people started new thing during this period of mass introspection.

It was in this global environment that Jason and I were having a pie-in-the-sky talk. As we chatted on the phone, I remember asking the question that so many were asking at the time: “Life is clearly shorter and more volatile than we think. So if you could do one thing in this life, what would it be?”

“Well, I mean. The greatest thing ever would be if we could have our own site.”

Me: “OK then, let’s do it.”

It was an absurd thought, and we had no idea how we’d pull it off. But in retrospect, that moment did teach me something: If you want something, you need to start trying to get it. Just begin the process. Whittle away at it slowly. Iterate.

The painstaking process of trying to start an automotive publication from scratch is something we could write an entire book about. Torch and I talked with all sorts of potential investors, and because of all the work we’d put into our jobs over the prior 17 combined years, not only did readers support us in our efforts, but investors knew who we were and picked up the phone.

But none of the investors we spoke with felt quite right. Many wanted to install their own leadership — leadership with absolutely no interest in cars. I considered taking out a loan so Jason and I could start our own YouTube channel. I had that much faith in him, and us. But then Jason reached out to Beau.

Beau had always been interested in being involved with an automotive publication, as his family had been in the publishing world, and he’d always been a voracious reader of car magazines. As an avid reader of Jason and me and of Jalopnik in general, he understood the problem we were trying to solve, and he wasn’t just interested in helping solve it: He was amped.

Again, the process of starting The Autopian is one that would take me many pages to describe (someday I’ll tell the story of how Jason designed the site as we know it by sketching it on his iPad), but the short of it is that Beau’s passion for cars, his endless knowledge of the auto industry, and above all his values that aligned so well with ours just made this a match made in heaven. His business acumen — especially his urging that we start by setting a mission statement (one that we have since used as a guiding light on so many occasions when things got a bit murky) has been so critical in our site’s success. That mission statement – which the three of us devised while sitting in some of Beau’s microcars — is:

That Escalated Quickly

Jason, Beau and I decided we were going to go for it, and in order for me to be close to Beau and his team, I had to move to LA. (I wanted to, to be clear).

I remember day one of The Autopian. Jason and I had taken a one-month break between jobs so we could amass a bunch of stories for launch day, which we decided would be branded as March 32nd, so as not to seem like an April Fools joke. I remember when we published those stories on day one, wondering if anyone was going to read. Though we’d done our best on social media to make a marketing push, did anyone really know what we were up to? Were we going to write all these articles and find that only like, 200 people read them?

That, to us, seemed like a huge possibility. The risk we three were taking was massive, and it was scary.

Thanks to the car-gods above, and to you, dear readers, what happened was one of the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed: A community came together before our very eyes. Comments poured in, readers read, and writers reached out to support us, some willing to take a professional chance on a no-name site (thank you Thomas!) and some non-journalists putting together blogs for absolutely nothing in return.

The full story of how we built a team of excellent staffers like Matt (an owner and huge leader of the site) and Mercedes (an absolute machine and camper/diesel extraordinaire) and Lewin (our beloved engineer-writer) and Peter (our extremely talented managing editor), and amazing contributors — and how we ultimately eclipsed the size of Roadandtrack.com in our second year and even beat out The Drive in monthly traffic before we turned three — is a story for another day. Right now, I want to tell you about how I solved my “singlest man on earth” problem, and I have an announcement to make.

How I Met The Girl Of My Dreams

In my move from Michigan to LA, I was Jed Clampett. In early 2023, for my second trip after driving my brother’s 1966 Mustang cross-country, I filled a U-Haul full of tires and engines and axles and all sorts of random car parts. I was a greasy wrencher moving to the big city, and I was especially excited because of Elise.

The prior summer Beau had taken Matt, Jason and me to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, where I had randomly met Elise both outside of a Kia party and then later on the lawn at Pebble Beach.

After she’d told me she hadn’t really looked around since she didn’t really know much about cars, I showed her around, introduced her to some owners, taught her how coal-powered cars work, taught her a few cool bits of history and car tech — it was great. Yes, one of the car owners at the show said to Elise in a surprised way: “Wait, are YOU with HIM?”

This was uncool. But Elise replied cheerfully: “I guess so!” I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked her energy. Not enough to ask for her number after this frankly date-like stroll around Pebble Beach, but enough to give her my business card before I left.

She never did reach out, though she now tells me she eventually would have. I ended up finding her on Linkedin a few months later when I was trying to fix a junky ute in Australia, but again, I was too nervous to message her. I just friend-requested her. Then she messaged me! I had no clue what was going on, but we had a nice cordial conversation.

 

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Fast forward a few months, and Jason, Matt, Mercedes, Thomas and I are in LA covering the LA Auto Show. We’d been invited to an event by the same folks who had invited Elise to Pebble Beach. “You should invite her!” said Matt. “You should invite her!” said Jason. “Come on, Dave!” said Mercedes.

I couldn’t do it. Plus, I figured she’d be at this event anyway. She goes to all of that organization’s events, I figured. So day one of the LA Auto Show goes by, and Matt and Jason are still telling me to reach out to Elise. Day two passes and they tell me to stop being a chicken; I reply that there’s no point, and that she’ll probably be there anyway. Then it’s the day before the event, and Jason, Matt, and Mercedes are letting me have it. “Dude, just invite her. If she’s going to be there anyway, you have nothing to lose!” they said. I hesitated. “Just do it!” said Jason.

So I penned a message on LinkedIn asking if she was planning to attend the event, and she said something to the effect of : I’m thinking about it.

Turns out, Elise hadn’t been thinking about going to the event, but when I’d reached out, she’d gotten her dress ready, called her friend for support, and made sure the two of them could be there to see me. Me! (This is still hard for me to believe).

Jason, Mercedes and I had a great time at the event. I remember Jason really pushing me to try to get her number. When Elise and her friend said they were going to get drinks, Jason said “Oh, David can go with you!” When Elise said she liked hiking, Jason said “Oh, David you’re an outdoorsperson too right?”

He was really, really pushing it. And that’s because Jason had seen me during my hardest times, he’d talked with me on the phone throughout the entire pandemic; he was my close friend. He wanted me to find someone. He’s a truly wonderful human being, though on this night he needed to relax a bit (lol).

Jason asked Elise and her friend if they wanted to go to Canters Deli after the event, so we did. It was a great time. I nervously recorded Elise’s number, and as soon as we started texting, we connected in a way that I’d never experienced with another person before. Before I left back to Michigan I walked her around the LA Auto Show; it was “date” #2. Two car-show dates in a row!

To this day I’m unsure if I would have impressed her had I not been gifted the two most up-my-wheelhouse dates of all time, but what I can tell you is that when I moved to LA a few months later, we fell in love immediately.

I look at her and am amazed that someone this kind and caring and smart and beautiful exists. I love her with all my heart, and she loves me just as much, even with all my flaws (she read this post about year-old milk in my fridge in Michigan, and sent me a text that I thought was the end of it, but no! She somehow stuck around!).

We got married in December, and now we’re three:

What a whirlwind it’s been. I went from a perpetually single, oil-and-rust-soaked man with 14 junky cars in his yard (to the chagrin of the city) to a married man attending sound baths, driving an electric BMW i3 in LA, holding the cutest baby ever, co-running the greatest car website on earth. And I could’t have done it without help. Thank you all.

I’ll leave it there since I’m already 6,000 words in. Those of you who are Autopian members can expect to read more from me and what I’m up to these days. The number of changes that have occurred in the past two years is shocking, but delightful. Yes, there is a part of me that remembers all those “never change” comments on my old crazy wrenching posts, and feels the need to continue to give you readers some of that wrenching wackiness many of you follow us for; I’m still figure out how to pull that off given my new work and family obligations.

I’ll end with this: A key learning from all this is the realization that no matter what happens moving forward — after all, life is full of ups and downs — I can get through it by simply living a life of gratitude. I lost sight of that around 2020, but especially now, as I look at my wife and child and our (mine and yours, dear reader) amazing website/community, I’m certain that will never happen again. I just have so much to be grateful for.