I pride myself on having a very even temperament, decent analytical skills, and the ability to make sound decisions about stuff. The problem is that all those things go out the window the second a neat vehicle for sale, no matter the condition, strikes my fancy. It’s like waving bacon in front of a dog.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d never buy a car or parts that would jeopardize the financial future of my family or cause some serious harm to any personal relationships, but for whatever reason when the planets line up and I can rationalize that something found me, instead of me finding it, I’ll do just about whatever I can to score it.

More often than not, those pursuits do not pan out, but the thrill of the chase is mostly worth it. I recently saw an advertisement for a 1966 Chevy C50—yes, C50—a two-and-a-half-ton, medium-duty truck, in the classifieds section of our forums here on BangShift.com. I jokingly mentioned that I was going to have trouble sleeping after seeing the truck. Trouble was, I did.

That truck had my wheels spinning 300 mph, thinking about operating its cool two-speed rearend, rolling to a car or truck show with the kids, or just crusing it on a nice summer night to the beach. I contacted the seller and left a voice mail, which he never replied to. In all honesty, that was a good thing.

I’m knee deep into the Javelin project (pictured below) and need to save funds to complete that job. I knew that before seeing the truck, knew it when looking at the truck, and know it after losing my line on the truck, so why the hell did I go after the truck? My wife, bless her soul, saw me looking at the truck like it was a Farrah Fawcett poster and gave me the ol’, “If you really think you need it, but you do have the Javelin to work on,” line. The problem with her is that she’s logical.

For me, dollars and sense work on a strange scale. The less I have of one, the less I have of the other. When I am flat broke, I’m dreaming of owning an ex-Pro Stocker with a Lenco in it. When I am flush with cash, which is rarely, the money goes to the places it needs to go, like our house, or for kids’ clothes or other mundane stuff like that.

I’m certainly happy to have a project (ok fine, a couple) to work on, dream about, scheme about, and eventually beat the snot out of, but there’s always that nagging little voice in the back of my head that pops up when I see something weird that says, “You’ll never see it again, you need to have that.” I’m not sure any amount of therapy will stop that from happening, and frankly I hope it never goes away, because the mental bench racing of non-existant projects has gotten me through many a meeting and conference call.

I know I am not the only one who suffers this affliction. If I was there wouldn’t be several thousand of us registered here on the forum section and millions of others out there across the world eyeballing that old truck behind the gas station, trolling Craigslist every day, and raiding eBay and RacingJunk for the next big idea.

So am I the only one whose critical thinking ability seems to vanish when the moths are flying out of my wallet? Hey, did you see that? Looks like an old tractor for sale…gotta go!