Whose Shake Is This!!?

There is too much instant communication and not enough time to contemplate or enjoy it. There are too many things to know and too many things to do and still nobody seems to know anything. There are too many mechanisms and too many gadgets and none of them are the right sort of gadgets that we have any control over anymore. If I had a hammer….a simple real hammer, not a hammer that is glorified staple gun or a working man’s Ouzi, but a real solid Craftsman hammer that I can hold over the head of the ten-penny nail of reason in my little fist of fury, I would drive that nail deep…drive it like a stake into the heart of the vampire world in which we dwell.

Both technology and temperament conspire against us, or, me. The unlimited world in which we live…the wired and wireless universe…is no where near as limitless and boundless as we’d care to believe. Communication which should be more expansive since any fool with a machine can reach a audience unimaginable in the Police Brutality Days of the late 60′s and early 70′s, is actually taughtly controlled by the vehicles we most commonly use to communicate. Twitter limits me to 140 focking characters or less. Not 140 words, 140 characters. Useless as a turd unless you’ve been arrested on visit to Azerbaijan, or have fallen down a crevasse after being chased by a polar bear…then it’s useful I suppose. But too many people ((that’s the REAL problem with the world, there’s just too many people and they’re no damn good)), find a urge to tell the world that they’ve got a boil on their bum. Facebook is even worse. You get to see the pictures. There seems to be some limits to the amount of characters as well. And while Twitter’s fascist chokehold on communication is fairly benign, Facebook seeming knows no bounds. But I’ll save that prize number 12 for another day. Sorry Malcolm Gladwell and those of short attention span with too much of the wrong sense of time on their twitching texting hands, with ME you have to do all 2,500 words, pictures, and the 2-10  minute musical outr0.

There are no shortcuts to actuality. I found this out a long time ago when I attempted to program a computer to write poetry. Unlike some of the computer geek types at the time who took it way too seriously (and still do), I wanted to embrace the machine world and bring a new and terrible poetry to life. So I devised a program in FORTRAN, of course, and banged away at the punch cards as though I were some college boy/man prodigy flogging his way through The Goldberg Variations on a Bosendorfer piano. A world, well…a little world, more like a satellite of Mars than a satellite of Jupiter…of words and phrases and other utopisms filled numerous boxes of cards. And when the punchcards were fed into the IBM 1620 in Green Bay and sednt off to the Univac mainframe in Madison and the machine was set in motion, poetry would emerge as though the machine were a modern day Walt Whitman or William Blake or T.S. Eliot. The conceit was that the machine would have a mind of it’s own. The machine was writing the poetry. The random, mechanized, aggregation of words, verbiage, phrases would have a brave and terrible beauty all their own. The problem, ofcourse, is that the machine DID have mind of it’s own….a mind that wandered into some nested DO loop never to return. When it found it’s way out, the epic realization on my part was that while the machine had a mind of it’s own, it clearly had no soul.

Now it would be nice if I could just look at Facebook and Twitter and say, “That damned machine!!”  But unfortunately, it’s people, not machines. As they say, accordians don’t play “Lady Of Spain”, people do. Now maybe those people know something I don’t know. But unless what they know is the meaning of John Dryden’s poem Absalom and Achitophel, I guess I just don’t want to know. And meanwhile and meanwhile and meanwhile from MY stupid Twitter feed, me and my 12 followers and my 8 followees….some dude wants to fight Shaq, Yoko Ono babbles about changing the course of reality by interception, and Justin Townes Earle wears earplugs when flying to drown out the sound of the low rent suits. I’m with Justin Townes Earle on that one, the low rent suits.

But enough of this shite…let’s get on with the motorsports and the football and the beer…

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Germany 4    England 1

They played like dopey wankers. They were old, they were fat, they were slow, they were a bit too full of themselves as individual stars to play together as a team, and in the end, they were sent packing back to England by a younger, quicker German squad. Sure, Lampard got cheated out of a goal that would have equalized the match in the first half. But nothing in England’s play throughout this match and most of the World Cup gave any indication of team that could win, when necessary, at any cost. They had talent, but not the right talent. They had stars, but as well as Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Garrard and the rest play for their Premier League clubs, putting them together on the same team was not going to get the job done. They were star-crossed from the get go….from the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama ahead of the World Cup to Wayne Rooney’s petulance on the pitch. And even though they showed some heart on occasion, they really honestly played like a bunch of dopey wankers.

England might have been served just as well or better if they’d sent an NPower League 1 team out there….the Milton Keynes Dons, or Dagenham & Redbridge. Heh. They might as well have…at least there would have been more team spirit.

But….it takes more than just team spirit to win…

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The racing season has finally begun!  I’ve been watching the Rolex 24 hours of Daytona and as I type this with about 2 hours and change to go,  the #9 Action Express Porsche Riley team with Mike Rockenfeller currently at helm has the lead over Chip Gannasi’s #01 BMW Riley by about 1 minute 22 seconds with Justin Wilson guiding the sled. It’s setting up to being an exciting finish for the race, that for me, always kicks off the Racing Season. The NASCAR darlings are mired deep in the field for the most part. The #02 Gannasi car guided by Juan Pablo Montoya , Jaime McMurray, Dario Franchitti & Scott Dixon is out of the race…they blew an engine shortly after midnight on Juan Pablo’s  watch. Jimmie Johnson the #99 GAISCO/Bob Stallings crew of Jimmy Vassar, Alex Gurney & John Fogarty are now 56 laps down essentially out of it.  A.J. Allmedinger and the $6 Michael Shank Ford Riley crew of Brian Frisselle,
Mark Patterson, & Michael Valiante are only a lap down and still have a shot at it….Allmendinger is the hammer for the team will take the checkers.

On the GT side. Bobby Labonte’s  #71 TRG Porsche GT3 crew somehow ran him out of gas and he actually had to be towed to the parking lot to get a splash of gas to get thim back to pit road.  Very odd, yes?  How could they let him run out of gas!? With Spencer Pumpelly at the wheel at the moment, they are currently 27 laps behind the current GT leader Nic Ham and the #70 Speedsource Mazda RX-8 team.

However, my enthusiasm is guarded and I’ll still not quite on board with the new NASCAR season just yet, even though Speedweeks is less than a week away. I haven’t resolved in my mind all the changes, both in terms of rules and team mergers. It think part of this also has to do with uncertainty over Matt Kenseth’s sponsorship for 2010. As soon as that gets resolved. I’ll most likely be all in.

But I did hear a rumour regarding some new Kenseth sponsorship last night….

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The countdown clocks are ticking, ticking, inexorably ticking. Countdown to Daytona 500. Countdown to Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. Countdown to F1 Practice in Bahrain. Countdown to the F2 Race at Silverstone. Time is running out and there is no hope left of stopping it. No hope of turning it back to the beauty and wonder that once filled its days and hours to the brim. No time to catch a breath of innocence and wonder, no time to hold it’s contemplative silence gently in one’s hands or heart. The clocks are ticking and they will not stop. There is no hope left.

A year ago, the ticking of the clocks was music to my ears. This time of the year was a-swirl with excitement and anticipation. Each tick of the countdown clock was bringing me closer to the excitement and exhilaration of a new season of racing. I couldn’t wait for the clocks to tick down to the respective zeroes and bask in the hallucenogenic roar of the engines as my favourite drivers and teams raced off into the on-rushing year with hope and determination with an almost  psychedelic furor not to end until the final checkered flag is dropped at Homestead or Bahrain.

Now, in this terrible year of 2010, I’d like to stop all the clocks and chronometers. Not forever mind you. But for the moment. I’m not looking forward to anything or any of this and I’d like to stop the ticking ticking ticking for long enough to salvage some hope from what seems to be a hopeless world.

“And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;”

from “The Dry Salvages” by T.S. Eliot

Now don’t get me wrong. I want to feel this excitement again. I want to be looking forward to the new season of racing. But somehow, somewhy, I’m not. And I don’t know if it’s the racing and what it’s become, or me and what I’ve become, or both. But right now I want it all to stop so I can unweave, unwind, and unravel the mess that this has become.

Well, it’s hopeless I guess.  The clocks are ticking. Daytona 500 is 21 days and change as I write this. Rolex 24 hours is 6 days and  change. Bahrain is 46 days and change. Sao Paulo tees off on March 14th but IRL thankfully has no countdown clock. So you might as well join me. I have no choice in the matter. The clocks are ticking. So come along for the ride.

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As I begin to write this, there are 35 days and change to the start of the Daytona 500.  Normally, I would be excited right now, anxious with the anticipation of a new season. I’d be a fountainhead of analysis regarding all the Silly Season changes and moves, directing poignant commentary like it were some NASCAR symphony orchestra. And I’d especially be all over the on-going Danica Patrick Saves NASCAR story, along with the on-going Jeremy Mayfield saga like a cheap polyester suit on an hot humid day.

But I’m missing the spark, I not feeling much of anything right now. Now admittedly, this has more to do with me and the great and terrible world we live in, than it has to do with NASCAR. But it disturbs me greatly when something I am passionate about, flickers like a little flame and then goes out. Imagine if you will when on Sunday, February 14th 2010, the Grand Marshall of the Daytona 500 steps up to the mike and utters those famous words, “Gentlemen, START YOU ENGINES!!!”  Imagine instead of the nuclear roar of the engines, imagine instead a dead and utter silence, and silence so bitter, so penetrating, so piercing and numbing, that bit by bit and person by person, the world around you begins to deconstruct and you are left alone at the starting line, in ghostly echoes of the empty speedway, under a bright and terrible sky.

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When I began this war of words, or as I affectionately called it back then, blooging, the idea was fairly simple to me. My first bloog post, on June 23rd 2001 was thus:

Saturday, June 23, 2001

Test

This is a test of the BLOG concept. I’m not sure if I like this concept. But I shall toy with this for a bit until it grows tiresome and banal. It probably has already. I’m going HERE for a Beer.

posted by Michael Smith at 7:46 PM

Blogging had become, or was becoming all the rage, and as y’all will someday figure out, if something is all the rage, then I will rage against it. It took a descending series of moments, but once I grasped the gestalt tightly in my little fists of fury, the race was on. The stupid, the banal, the paltry, the insipid, the doomed, the bored, the damned, the quisling, the bored and the damned, and all the rest of that dross became grist for my sullenness. I tore through the hell of others’ bloogs with a vengence in an insect-burning, snake-roasting rampage  that would have made Jack Barron and Morton Downey Jr. proud.

Proud…yeh…..that’s a pretty unreasonable quixotic notion, but….onward.

Rather than moving that hate-machine over here, I’m letting it burn where it is. But don’t think for a moment that I’m out of fuel….that all I’m going to do from now on is reenact a weekly supercollider experiment with particles of anime and particles of NASCAR.

There still are insects. And I have a magnifying glass. And the sun is very bright.

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