A couple of days ago I took a trip down to Nashville to a meet-up that Finnegan was hosting in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Yeah, it happened…a newly janky knee and all, I had no real business going, but hey, the dude is pretty cool and he asked if people could bring him some CDs for him to check out on his trip back to Georgia. Funny timing…I recently found the gigantic black binder of CDs that I’ve collected since about 2000, that I hadn’t seen much of since packing up my house in Arizona at the end of 2013. There’s all manner of stuff in that binder, from rock to mixtape CDs that we passed around on deployments to some really random stuff and comedy CDs. Hopefully most of them still play, I didn’t check. But if Finnegan wants CDs, let him have them…I have so much music on my computer it’s borderline clinical. And it was a warm, pretty day outside, so if I’m in enough pain that I don’t want to work on the car, why not go meet up with him, right?

After waiting a little bit, Finnegan and David Newbern roll in and there is no mistaking who it is or what it is. Folks, I’ve seen this thing in person. I’ve been in the front seat. This 1998 Ford F-800 is ridiculous in size and scale. It’s about the length of most regular-length school buses. It’s larger medium-duty in size, and once you get inside of the cab it’s no longer 2020, or even 1998. I hadn’t been in a late-1990s Ford medium-duty before, but everyhing…the dash, the seats, all of it…is a throwback to the early 1980s. Except for the seven-speed’s shifter…no mistaking that one. I straight-up told him he had an addiction…then he mentioned something about the Imperial and I shut right up.

The dude has a kink for big trucks, we all know this. But this is a beast. And it’s not another square-body Chevy. Check out the first part of the story, where they freeze their bits off in Iowa picking the truck up, where they screw with Mike Cotton’s head a bit, and…well, you’ll see.