I’ve had the same ’69 Dodge Charger for the last nine years. It’s been stored in my brother’s side yard, bounced between three different single-car garages, sat up to its rockers in weeds in a friend’s backyard, and even lingered in “paint jail” for over a year.

Here's a tip for all you single guys: If she's willing to do body work on your car, she's a keeper.

I bought it and towed it home on my 23rd birthday, dragged it cross-country with me twice, had my brother teach me how to weld on it, pounded and bondo’ed its panels with the girl who would later become my wife, and wrenched on it while my baby daughter played nearby (I’m not much of a sitter).

I graduated college, got married, became a father and cultivated a career all the while tinkering on the same old brown Dodge.

So why isn’t it finished?, you may ask. Well, that’s the same question I ask myself every now and again. The easy answer is money, but the truer answer is everything that I listed above. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way, and it usually happens while we’re making other plans.

I’ve known only a few car guys who – despite all the factors and tangents that life throws their way – can manage to prioritize their time to complete their cars and actually get to enjoy them, while we non-super humans open up our garage doors and look longingly at our non-opt’ed projects. There are thousands of project cars – like my Charger – that require only a couple weeks’ worth of good, hard work to get back on the road.

My Charger wasn't really anything special. Of the 69,000 Chargers built in 1969, some 17,300 were equally equipped with a four-barrel 383 and an automatic. And considering that Warner Brothers trashed well over 220 Chargers for the "Dukes of Hazzard," these large B-Bodies really aren't all that special.

So what gives? What’s the problem? I think I’ve got it figured out, and quite frankly, I blame Nickelodeon. You know, the kids cartoon network. Maybe they’re not the source of the problem, but they’re sure as heck responsible for propagating it. So what is it? It’s something I call “unnecessary individualism.” Now, I’m no socialist Marxist, but I do think the screwy idea that your car (unless limited production numbers state otherwise) is a unique, individual snowflake unlike the other tens or hundreds of thousands of other cars of the same make and model is goofy.

What the heck is this thing? "Uniqua," is unlike anything on the planet. Nickelodeon would like us to celebrate her uniqueness; we'd like to kill it with fire.

Allow me to veer off on a tangent…

As it turns out, neither your car, you yourself or your kids *gasp* are all that special. Maybe it was from listening to Raffi records or reading Dr. Spock, but sometime around the mid-1970’s, people started thinking, “My snot-nosed kid isn’t like all the other snot-nosed kids, and deserves special treatment.”

This, of course, is ludicrous and an affront to Jefferson’s inspired words, “that all men are created equal;” and, worst of all, encourages a diluted sense of entitlement. These kids are mollycoddled throughout their lives believing that somehow they’re more special and unique than other kids, and therefore, are entitled to unique benefits thanks in part to their dissimilarity from the rest of herd.

Congratulations, you’ve just created a generation of self-aggrandized jackasses.

My 15-month-old daughter has taken a liking to the Nickelodeon show, “The Backyardigans,” whose premise revolves around a group of anthropomorphic animal children – presumably the offspring of survivors from the Island of Dr. Monroe – who use their imaginations to play and learn valuable life lessons, like sharing and eating a balanced diet. Sounds good, right? I would agree were it not for this pink little mutant to your right.

Named “Uniqua,” the show defines her more by her personality than by what she physically is, while her playmates are clearly a penguin, a hippopotamus, a moose, and a kangaroo. Why the show – aimed directly at small children – feels it necessary to conjure up such a bizarre creature to address the physical differences between the races of the human species is baffling.

Wouldn’t the other Backyardigans notice that they differ one from another without the need of a pink and purple polka-dotted abomination? Growing up with red hair landed me names like “Carrot Top” and “Leprechaun;” heaven forbid that my skin was Pepto-Bismol pink and perfectly matched my coveralls.

This is what happens when budget constraints and good taste are notably absent.

For whatever cause, our society is so individualism-driven, that – getting back on subject – our project cars suffer. The more ambitious the build, the costlier and time consuming it becomes. And in a world where money is tight and people are being forced to shelve their project cars or even sell them off, the struggle to build something “different” wains. Besides being a massive sap of energy, the effort poured into desperately trying to be something different, something special, usually never really connects with an audience.

Consider this: customization simply for the sake uniqueness typically leads to bizarre and oftentimes ridiculous cars like Rich Evans’ bastardization of a ’10 R/T Challenger shown in the 2010 Mopar booth at SEMA (see above). Unless you fancy yourself the next George Barris, put the Bondo down, and just build a car that you’d be happy to drive around, because, honestly, who wants to pay for a Challenger that looks like the Batmobile from Batman & Robin?

When I first got into magazine publishing, I was shared some extremely sage wisdom, “Kid, the sooner you come to terms that damned near everything has been done before, the easier your life will become. Quit trying so hard.” There’s nothing wrong with just building a muscle car that you’re proud of.

Unless you studiously adhere to restoring your project back to factory specs, it’s going to end up being uniquely yours no matter what you do. There’s no shame in building a fun, streetable muscle car that you and your family can enjoy. So quit worrying about what everybody else is building, get off your butt and get to work (that means me too).

Light ’em up,

Kevin