The story I'm about to tell starts back around five and years ago when I bought my first car, my Super Coupe, also known as a super chicken to many car enthusiasts. This car is special to me. It's the first car that I bought with my own money with no help from my parents and it was a sports car.

All through high school my friends had their hotrods and toys and I always sat back and said one day I will own one while they got to enjoy theirs during their youth. Well, one day while I working at a pizza shop in Terre Haute in 2004, I came across this black sports car sitting in a guy's yard with a for sale sign on it. I was in the market for a car at the time, so I stopped by to look at it.

Little did I know that one stop would later cost me thousands of dollars and a whole lot of headaches.

As I stopped and looked at the car, I realized that it was a Thunderbird Super Coupe, one of my favorite cars in high school. Right there I fell in love and told myself that I have to have this car no matter the cost.

At that point, I am pretty sure that any sense or reason that I had left me, because if I had test driven the car right then and there, I would have not bought the car. But I didn't test drive it and I just bought it.

I thought to myself, "This guy looks like a nice guy he wouldn't shaft a young kid like me." Wow, was I ever so na*ve. That guy shafted me for more money than I ever would have imagined.

So a few weeks go by and meet the car's owner at the bank and sign the loan paperwork and take the keys from him, I never figured out why he was smiling so much when he handed me the keys until now. He wasn't smiling because he was happy for me. He was smiling because he just unloaded a huge problem off his shoulders onto mine -- the Super Coupe.

It didn't take long for my newly bought car to start giving me problems. Ironically, the problems really started when I started to work at the Banner Graphic the first time. The first major thing to wrong was the brakes. As I drove from the Haute to Greencastle to put the paper together, my brakes suddenly went out; well they didn't go completely out. One of my rear calipers locked up, smoking the brake pads and rotor, leaving me with very little stopping power.

I made it to Greencastle and had a local shop look at my car and found out that it just wasn't one brake that was bad -- all four of them were. Well, that cost me a grand,

Then about a month and a half later, my car was back in the shop having its ball joints replaced because as I left the Banner one afternoon after getting the paper done, my car snapped a lower ball joint right by DePauw.

The shop looks at it and tells me that I need to replace all the ball joints. Cha ching! There is another thousand dollars, and there went my tax check.

After that I went a while without my car acting up, I thought, "Hey everything is going to Be ok and I can stop shelling out money on repairs." I think right then and there my car heard me, because shortly after I was in the transmission shop get my tranny rebuilt for a nice price of $3,500.

That is when I finally figured out that one my car hates me and that guy that sold me the car took me as fool.

So me and my car have had a costly experience with each other and it's not over yet. In the course of me owning it, it has crapped out its fuel pump on me while I was covering a basketball game in Crown Point, leaving me stranded until I got it towed home. It's blown two radiators out on me, one in South Putnam's parking lot and the other outside of Crown Point.

And as I sit here and write this blog, my car is once again in the shop getting worked on. The funny part is that it was just in there a week ago and it never acted up for my mechanic. But once I took back, it acted like a total fool and it nearly stranded me on US 40 Saturday, but I was able to nurse it home.

And this morning when I went out to start it up, it wouldn't start. So back to the shop it went. Hopefully this time it will act up for my mechanic and I'll finally get it fixed. Because it is finally paid off and if it doesn't run right, it's going to get a Molotov cocktail through the window, and I am going to buy new car.

P.S. -- For any cops or insurance agents that read this blog, don't worry I am not really going to throw a Molotov cocktail into the car. I will just scream and cuss at it and dump more money into, because, what can I say, I love my car. Just ask my wife.