Grindin' the Emblems Off

At this point I was getting serious about claiming the car was really an Art Car so I could get units for "Independent Studies Upper-Division Sculpture" (or some such gibberish) and get the hell out of UCI ASAP with some kind of degree and start collecting the benefits of middle-class life.  The concept I bullshitted my advisors with was that I was working with "several parallel paradigms of American automotive archetypes" or something equally alliterative.  Made sense to them, apparently, so I set to work removing all the identifying emblems, logos, etc. which identified the car as a Chevrolet.  Here, a friend volunteers his services and air compressor to grind away the 283 emblems.  I discovered that a hammer and chisel was faster and left a nastier-looking mark.  It was at about this time that I started beating dents into the finish with a tire iron and inviting my friends to do the same.  I learned from this that, in Southern California, it is considered sick and perverted in a near-sexual way to willingly damage the appearance of your own car, no matter how cheap or hideous it is.  "Want to key-stripe my paint?" I would ask people, which horrified them in a way they found secretly exciting.