I'm not going to be polite about this. I'm done being polite about this.

We live in ♥♥♥♥. Everything's a subscription, everything's locked, everything's designed by some committee of cowards to squeeze the maximum out of you while trusting you with nothing. You don't own your car. You license the privilege of sitting in it while a computer decides how much of it you're allowed to feel. Pop the hood and there's a warning sticker where the engine used to be. Try to change something — anything — and the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing snitches on you to the manufacturer. No trust. Anti-everything. They took the one object a working person could actually make his own and turned it into a phone with wheels that spies on you and charges rent for the seats.

And spare me the safety lecture. They didn't make it safer. They made it obedient. There's a difference and they're counting on you not noticing.

The worst part? I wasn't even there for the good part. I got here after they'd already put the fire out. I inherited the ashes and a monthly bill.

Because there was a time. Let me tell you about the Mid Night Club, since people throw the name around now like it's a sticker pack and have no idea what it meant. Those men ran north of 300 down the Wangan in the pitch dark and held a code stricter than any law you've ever bothered to obey. You couldn't just show up. You got vetted. You earned it. Your car had to prove itself. And above everything — you never, ever put a civilian at risk. And the one night it finally went wrong, the one time the line they swore never to cross got crossed, they didn't lawyer up, didn't spin it, didn't post some apology. They disbanded. Ended the entire thing. Because respect meant more to them than the high did. Show me one company, one government, one influencer, one single institution today with a fraction of that spine. You can't. A gang of illegal street racers had more honor than this entire polished, gutless era combined, and it isn't even close.

And those touge kids everyone sneers at — grinding the same mountain the thousandth night until the road lives in their hands — know more about a car than 99.999% of the rich pricks who buy a hypercar to park it, photograph it, and never once find out what it does past forty percent. Skill you can't buy. Feel you can't finance. They earned something money can't touch, and that's exactly why the people with all the money spent thirty years legislating it out of existence. It embarrassed them. Something real always embarrasses them.

So to every last one of you who sanded this down — who regulated it and app-ified it and safety-committee'd the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ life out of it and called it progress — eat ♥♥♥♥. Every single one of you. I hope the world you built feels as hollow to live in as it feels to drive through. You took something real and swapped it for something that scores well on a spec sheet and dies inside you, and you were proud of it. You put it in a press release.

I'm angry. Not sad — I'm past sad. Angry. Because this wasn't yours to take and you took it anyway, and you took it from people who weren't even born yet. From me. And you'll never give it back and you'll never once understand what it was.

So as the final thing. Go and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill yourself, each one of you who stripped us of the Legends of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Screaming engines, no filters, raw sound and analogue beauty. I hope you die a long and miserable death.