You know you are a Lincoln car addict when...

Your dealer hides when he sees you coming.
You have interesting conversations with the hardware guy about the flow characteristics of sewer pipe.
Mobil 1 sends you a card at Christmas.
You know what "TSB" means.
You get an erection whenever someone says "4.6 DOHC".
Geno {MAXRPM} tells you to quit bothering him.
You know who Gene Deputy is.
You wave at perfect strangers who have the same car as you...and they wave back!
You can't function on the job because your spouse took your car to work today.
You spend at least an hour a week polishing your exhaust pipes.
You face Carlisle and pray five times a day.
You won't vacuum the house once a month but you sweep the garage once a week.
Your wife wants to know why your underwear smells like car exhaust.
You like to set a red or blue coffee mug on the dash and tailgate people.
Your dealer calls you when he has good deals on Mark VIII parts.
Your dealer calls you with Lincoln questions.
You wave at perfect strangers who have the same car as you...and get mad when they don't wave back!
You follow perfect strangers off the freeway to give them LOD applications, never dreaming that you are scaring the @#%$ out of them.
Your dog can fetch a 10mm box end wrench.
You swing by the house at lunch to check your LOD e-mail instead of eating.
You would rather drive across the country, even though it is twice as cheap to fly.
You say, "look! there goes a '98 Collectors Edition" and you can't understand why nobody else knows what you're talking about.
Normally, you give your wife static for sending you to the grocery store but today you volunteer to go because you just found out that a picture of your car is in the February issue of MMFF.
You spend 15 minutes driving around a crowded parking lot hoping to find that perfect spot, even though the movie has already started.
The first waking thought you have at 6 A.M. EVERY Saturday morning is to get up and go wash your Mark VIII
You have an 8 x 10 color printout (downloaded from the Internet) of an Mark VIII doing a smoky burnout, hanging on your office wall.
The only thing you use your computer for anymore is to check for new Lincolns of Distinction e-mail.
You are looking forward to the warranty expiring so you can do some of the better mods you've read about one these websites.
You get really cranky when you check your snail mail and there is no LOD newsletter, and you know that others have gotten theirs.
You take heart knowing that those bugs paid the ultimate price for messing up the front of your Mark VIII.
Your wife/girlfriend now points out Mark VIII's and can tell you the difference between a93, 94, 95 and a 96. not to mention the 97's and 98's.
You request a parking lot view of your car instead of an ocean front so you can watch the guys gawk at your car instead of gawking at the babes on the beach!!!
You mail the Governor of Tennessee and the Mayor of Nashville to ask them to name the States new NFL Team the Tennessee Lincolns!!!
You wake up in the middle of the night, slink over to the window, part the curtains, and gaze at your car for a minute or so. At least twice per night.
You cannot stop smirking. .You eat lots of meat, drink lots of beer, don't exercise hardly enough, watch a lot of TV, and generally don't give a rat's patootie about your health, but MAN, you treat that car like it's the last living member of the species on Earth. Which it is, really.
You calculate your gas mileage every time you fuel up, and get mad at your significant other when she doesn't reset the trip odometer when SHE fuels up -- but, you probably don't let her fuel it up anyway.
You sneakily look in the rear view mirror to see if that Bubba you've just passed is sneakily trying to get a second look at your car.
You can hardly conceal that insane grin as people gawk at your car, but you try your best to look indifferent, even bored.
You keep grumbling "sorry" to your wimpy passengers for snapping their necks back and forth. Your wife actually knows what an off idle launch is.
You get in fist fights over the morality of odometer disconnection.
You don't eat lunch at work because if you save the $6.00 every day so in 15 weeks you can buy the H.I.D."S from Dennis!!
You measure EVERY new home garage to make sure the Mark VIII fits, otherwise refuse to buy the house.
Everytime you pass by the garage door you open it just to look.
You drive 15 miles out of your way trying to catch that Second Gen LSC you KNOW hasn't been flyered yet.
You buy the SMH Resins Mark VIII model kit and then buy a '01 Ford Lightning truck kit so you can put the Supercharged 5.4 in it.
You wipe down your Mark VIII after each time you use it.
You have mats on top of the factory floor mats.
You park your car on some type of mat on the garage floor.
You always wave to other Mark VIII owners on the highway.
You carry a color-coded container in the trunk full of cleaning supplies.
You budget more for MAXRPM parts than say, family vacations.
You send your oil out for contaminant testing, just like the Space Shuttle.
You start buying clothes that match your Lincoln as well as your skin tone.
You refer to your girlfriend as "a convertible F-Body owner".
You cut the workbench in half so the car will fit in the garage.
You only patronize convenience store whose cups FIT in the cup holder.
You know how to fold a LOD application so that it flies correctly when thrown across lanes of traffic.
You have more pictures of the car than you do of the wife.
You save up for weeks to cut 2/10ths off your 1/4 mile time.
Take a VACATION to drive to TEXAS to stand out in the SUN in a PARKING LOT.
You discover your spouse has a much broader vocabulary above 120 mph.
Your fiancé walks in naked with that sparkle-in-their-eye, but you need "just one more minute" to finish reading the latest LOD news letter.
You've had to explain the term "pucker factor".
You measure all family acquisitions in terms of the number of mods that could have been purchased.
You know well that Orthodontic work is the equivalent of three sets of HID's
You sit in your Mark VIII in a dark garage and make car noises while waiting for the Lincoln mechanic to finish under the hood.
Your wife says, "If you buy nitrous, I'm getting a new mink."
You have enough spare parts to build another Mark VIII
You have Lincoln parts in your cubicle at work.
If you can't remember when you last worked on weekdays and rested on weekends.
Registered for wedding gifts at the MAXRPM website
Your Christmas list begins with 4.10's and a Blower.
After your answer to "How was your weekend?" the next question is always: "And you do this for fun? Right?"
Your friends don't recognize you without an Lincoln shirt and sunglasses.
You astound the clerk at Sears by bringing in a snapped breaker bar every other week or so.
You complain when cars in front of you on highway off-ramps don't stay on the line, causing your exit speed to drop.
A neighbor asks if you have any oil, to which you query, "Synthetic or organic?" and they reply, "Vegetable or corn."
You tell a friend you need to clean up the heads this weekend and they think you mean the toilets.
You refer to the corner down the street from your house as "Turn One."
You look at the fire hydrant at that corner and see an apex marker.
You always late apex the intersection and try to pass few cars coming out.
You can't stand understeer.
You've ever tried to convince your wife that you really need that flow bench to fix the air filter on her station wagon.
You save broken car parts as "mementos".
You've found your lawnmower runs pretty good on 93 octane gas (*after* Jerry recalibrated the ECM...).
You know that you're a real gear-head when during a phone call to your wife to wish her a happy Mother's Day.., you ask her how the Mark VIII is doing.

By LOD member Tommy "XLRVIII" Douglas

February 1, 2002