caterpillar
This evening after sunset I pulled into my parking space at home, turned off the motor after listening to its smooth idle a minute, opened the door and the air was full of katydid and tree frog trills. I said out loud, "I'm home." Heard myself say it and was conscious for a moment of how happy I am that my home is in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NW North Carolina. Very happy of that. I love the mountains themselves and the culture of the mountain people. I'd just arrived home from an afternoon and evening and Justin and Crystal's and baby Vada in Glade Creek. We watched the race, a good race, no wrecks and only a couple of caution flags on account of debris on the track. It was a well run race all the way through. Justin and I go on pulling for Jr Earnhardt who hasn't won in over a hundred races. Today he came in eleventh or twelfth. Several years ago we got free tickets to the Charlotte 500 and Earnhardt blew his motor half way into the race. I started the race pulling for the M&M car because I liked its colors, and it was the first one out of the race. Shifted my pulling to Earnhardt, then his motor blew. I decided to pull for none of them, not to curse any more of the drivers.
There's no way I believe I was psychically instrumental in those two cars getting put out of the race. At the same time, it looks mighty suspicious. In case there is something to it, which I don't believe there is, I don't pull for a given driver any more. That felt too spooky to me. And like I say, there's no way I had anything to do with it psychically. The place was a human bowl of a whole lot of thousands of people, a lot of psychic energy concentrated in that circle. Whatever psychic energy I was projecting was neutralized by probably the ten nearest people to my seat, the whole place radiating psychic energy like the upside down bowl of intense air pollution above the bowl of the spectators and the race track. The pollution is so incredible at one of those races that if somebody from Sierra Club or Greenpeace could lower themselves far enough to go to one of those races, they'd press charges and make a big news spread of putting an end to this intense pollution. The smell of burnt rubber, burnt high octane fuel, the exhaust noise of 43 cars without mufflers, big motors that burn large amounts of fuel, rubber molecules flying off the tires continually. When somebody hits the brakes and spins around a few times, the smoke of tires, brakes locked down, billows up around the car until it's lost in the cloud.
The smell of burnt fuel and rubber so intense in the air made London's air seem clear as on an atoll in the South Pacific. But nobody is complaining. The smell was as highly charged as the sound that was like 10 rock concerts in volume, the music the pure raw music of near-perfect machines trying to outrun each other. Car racing is a Suthun thang like bluegrass that gradually became mainstream all over the country. Today's race was in Michigan. They race all over the country now. And the racing now is not like it was when it was only going on inside the South. The early tracks were half mile and plenty good for cars that might top-end at 100 or so in the straightaway. The newer tracks are bigger, like 2 miles, 2.5 miles, wider, better constructed. The cars are running in the 190s in the straightaway. A half mile track doesn't give them a chance to wind it all the way out, but it's in the short tracks that you see the real racing, drivers slugging it out for position.
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