When 90 MPH Was Too Slow For 419

I cannot remember the last time I was in a land vehicle going over 100 miles per hour.

(Insipid statement sponsored by Mountain Dew Throwback. MAN this stuff is good!)

I suppose birth certificates should come with disclaimers. For me, that disclaimer would have read, "Warning:" (The German instructions, of course, would have started with that Kaiser helmet-sounding "Achtung!") "This infant is designed for future unsupervised acceleration trials only. Any warranty herein is null and void." Such an official notice would have gone a long, long way toward avoiding aggravation on the part of the Roanoke County Sherrif's Office long 'bout 1977 or so. For the uninitiated, when I was a teen and doing dumb things like spying on the girl next door (they were pink, as it turned out) and putting Pop Rocks in my beloved Boxer dog's mouth to watch his reaction, taking a nightly study break was always a temptation for my very short attention span. Typically, it went something like this: "Dad, can I borrow the keys? I need to go to Hop-In for -" "You need to go to Hop-In? Here's five bucks. Bring me back some cigarettes and a six pack." Daaaaad, you KNOW they won't sell me that stuff!" "(Grumble, grumble) All right, but take it easy with the car, okay sport? That last engine cost me $900."

Going to Hop-In was great, but who wants to head straight back home when you're sixteen and have wheels? Electric Road, known by locals as 419, has a wide, sweeping turn between Keagy Road and all those nondescript office buildings overcrowding the highway these days. The nightly goal, while you were studying trig and writing a paper for English Lit, was to blast toward that sweeper at, oh, 90 miles per hour or so, then slow waaaay down to a very sedate 70 through the turn (diving down to the fast lane from the right hand lane ala NASCAR; it's called "riding the apex" because you wanted to know). Then, coming out of "turn four" this future savior of Petty Enterprises would upshift back to third gear or, as it's called on automatic transmissions, "drive".

Then the fun would begin.

Dogs ran.

Children cried.

And a leadfooted, dumb kid with 400 horsepower under his right foot would blast back up to 120 miles per hour as though heading down the Mulsanne Straight with the smell of the checkered flag hanging heavy in the air. Think of it as the high performance equivalent of Ray Charles singing "Shake Your Tail Feathers" in the Blues Brothers. Let me tell you, Margie, that county library came up FAST! Telephone poles began to look kind of like a picket fence. Deputies stirred from their boredom in time to hear the wailing of a fast-approaching 440 Magnum engine (and a police interceptor engine at that). Often, the Doppler effect distracted them before they could adjust their radars. (Remember when they looked like two Clorox bottles glued together and hung on the passenger door's window? I bet Bert Tyler does! Sorry, Bert -haha!) When the deputies weren't distracted by the Doppler, they would pull out of their favorite hiding places and give chase. I learned automotive escape and evasion techniques that would have wowed SEALS Team 6.

Well, all good things come to an end when you're sixteen and hot-footing dad's car around Southwest county. An overwhelming sense of guilt always followed such impulses. And a vow to myself to take studying geometry seriously when I got home. (Yeah, right.) I had already studied geometry. I had calculated the degrees of the curve in "turn four" -at 90 miles per hour. I had also summed the total number of degrees required to take the fewest number of 90 degree turns to get back home undetected.

And the best part? I was a kid, and there were no required postulates and theorems.

Live From Roanoke!

What a horrible title. I know. A few who have been reading this blog (and others like it which I seem to have misplaced) are used to intriguing titles like "When Dogs Commit Anthropomorphic Fallacy" or "Steak Fries: Are They Right For You?", but in my defense I'm hot and tired. I was tempted to title today's entry, "Never Drink A Slurpee While Taking A Cold Shower", but some of you out there are too dirty-minded and would never have let me live such a title down. and that's sad, of course, because just this afternoon I was, in fact, drinking a large, Cola-flavored Slurpee while standing in a cold shower. I do this because (a) money is tight, (b) because I'm cheap and don't want to enable the CEO of AEP's greed, and (c) because you know you've always wanted to do this, but were afraid of what your loved ones would think. One of my favorite standup comics says he likes to step into the shower with his clothes on, turn on the shower, and pretend he's in a submarine that got torpedoed. Well, I do that too, but I save that naughtiness for laundry day. Today is all about peeling off my drenched-with-sweat work shirt, turning the cold water on with such precipitous force that I get blasted against the towel (purchased from TJ Maxx for $10) hanging on the rack opposite of the faucet wall, and get forced to inhale deeply whether I want to or not. This latter point is key to my decision to climb into the shower, since I've been short of breath lately and cold water really helps me breathe. Of course, inhaling deeply when going into hypothermia can only help, so I elect to keep the cold water running until I'm just about incoherent.

While the hamburgers are frying away and the steak fries are changing into a golden brown that only Burger King could possibly duplicate, and while I'm hard at work anticipating how great it's all going to taste with the Goulden's mustard, the balsamic vinegar, and the garlic powder, it occurs to me that preseason football is just around the corner. Yep, in just literally days we're all going to be cheering our teams on to win those oh-so-important preseason games like we're already in the playoffs. Oh, the humiliation, nay tragedy, of being outscored by... another highly trained, equipped, and motivated team of professional athletes who have been playing this game since they were kids. What will my fellow football-loving coworkers think if the Steelers fall, in Preseason, The Prophetic Word of Future Victory, to some team like the Panthers? Could I ever look them in the eye again or until next week when Pittsburgh wins a preseason contest which carries with it all the importance of an audited college course on your gpa? We'll have to see, but this blogger has steeled himself (no pun intended; I'm a Steelers fan, btw) with a dogged determination to see these harrowing few games through to their bitter end. Frankly, I believe the Steelers are going to have a great season, but if I'm wrong, so be it.

There are always cold showers and Slurpees.

What a soaker!


I'm not sure how hot it is outside these days, but inside the building at work it has routinely been slightly over 100 degrees. That's Fahrenheit to you, Myrtle. My work shirt, proudly emblazoned with the company logo, looks like the a wet t shirt contest gone awry at a frat kegger. It's so saturated with perspiration that I duck out the back door to the dumpster in order to wring it out so I don't have to put up "Caution: wet floor" signs on the sales floor. This, as it turns out, is an excellent idea; Sky and Freedom, two diehard hippies from Floyd who are shopping for old lumber for some kind of art I'd frankly love to go see, notice that my freshly-wrung shirt is now sporting a tie-dye look, albeit a subdued look. "It's monochromatic" I offer to my two acquaintances who have more talent than I could ever comprehend having. Now, I'm not sure what monochromatic means, exactly, but in sales one must think on one's feet. As it turns out, Sky nods understandingly while Freedom (Free for short) expresses his wish that the shirt had more color -more "hue".


Mike is making do with the second floor in an effort to deal with this somewhat oppressive heat (humidity). In his defense, he works full time and needs air conditioning every now and then. I'm only a part time worker, so I can deal with it a little easier. Well, except for last week when I had to leave work an hour and a half early due to shortness of breath. I found that humiliating, since I was a desert rat for five years in the New Mexico sun while pursuing an undergraduate degree. I'm conditioned to 120 degree summer afternoons. What a wimp! 95 degrees and I fall to my knees on the dock floor like a B-movie sidekick looking for a lost contact lens in a bar brawl. Brent, mercifully, reminds me that I'm "not in my twenties anymore", and that I need to keep an eye on my elderly health. Hmm.



I'd put a paper bag over my head, except it might get wet with sweat and fall apart.

What's up with all that sort-of-sticky clear plastic that covers new electronic gadgets? What IS this stuff, anyway? Is it window tint material that got rejected? I ask, because waaaaay back when I was a late-blooming hotrodder, I tried (in vain) to affix something similar that covers the outer edges of new keyboards to the windows of my beloved '71 Dodge Charger. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that the stuff I was smearing all over the inside of the windows was tinted. And didn't stick to anything except dead bugs and dust.

Mind you, I DID wash those windows until you could perform surgery on them. You'd think that Windex would dry fairly quickly in the heat of a New Mexico summer. This marvelous space-age material peeled faster than Marsha's flipflops when someone yelled, "PINWHEEL COOKIES!" I ended up tossing $20.95 worth of glorified Saran Wrap in the apartment dumpster because, apparently, I was the only hotrodder in Dona Ana County who couldn't quite master the four inch squeegie that came with the kit which extolled the virtues of dark tint ("guaranteed to reduce the heat of your interior by 50%", which, um, means I'd have climbed into an all-vinyl interior whose temperature would have been reduced to a balmy 900 degrees Celsius).

Now, after the Charger has long since been recycled into a new refrigerator for Lillian in Akron, I type this blog, shaking like a leaf due to the five square yards of failed window tint which adorns this keyboard so it wouldn't get scratched or dinged during shipping from Beijing. Perspiration frames my face as if it were an 8 X 10 glossy from MGM Studios. 3m's latest attempt to induce Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in my psyche has, for the moment, failed.

I've considered removing it, but there's something irresistable about new electronic gadgets staying wrapped in failed window tint.

It must be that new electronic gadget smell.

It's Late And I'm Tired, So This Won't Take Long

Well, tough taters.

While I continue trying to retrieve my previous two blogs (Technology. Bah!), I decided to spread myself thin with a third (!) blog. You know, an interim blog. Like the Toyota Tercel your neighbor four houses down got for his dumb kid, except now the kid doesn't want it, so he drives it to work amidst much snickering among his Lexus-cruising coworkers. The Tercel is, of course, going to be replaced sometime between Christmas bonus and junior being rejected by UNC Law School. The problem is that I keep forgetting to write down my passwords for these blogs, so when the blog companies refuse to help an old fart out, I have to move to an interim blog.

That's why we're here. While you were asleep, I decided to keep driving through this internet countryside without a map. Hey, I'm a guy and guys don't use maps. Too unmanly -worse, in fact, than letting your woman make you hold her purse while she "won't be a second" in that lingerie shop she just stepped into while other guys looked at you pityingly. So we ended up in another cul-de-sac in the ethernet equivalent of Dekorah Iowa. Deal with it. I'll figure this out. Heck, I might even be able to retrieve the password this time -and if that happens, we're in fat city, baby. According to the instructions that came with this blogsite, I can even give these ramblings a neat-looking background, unless you want me to put up curtains or something.

Anyway, it's late and I'm tired. I'm going to bed so that some dumb kid can scoot past my apartment door, startling me awake by yelling, "Over here! The fire crackers are over here!"