Neanderpundit

By the time I was old enough to know what an attention span was, I had spent most of my money on car parts, and could only afford a very tiny one. I keep it here on my desk, inside a hollowed out m&m.I fear someday I will actually eat it, and then my attention span will really end up in the crapper.

Consequently, from Captain Kangaroo on, I have needed a constant influx of colors, shapes, and ideas all my life. The “information age” has dramatically worsened my condition, and I arrived at the point ages ago where no computer I have ever used can keep up with the speed at which my thoughts carom off one thing and head off to another.

If I had devoted that microscopic attention span to sports of one kind or another, I might have been something- but I have always had the coordination and reflexes of cheese, and because I was the only kid my age in my neighborhood, and there were no sports leagues or anything nearby, I never had much opportunity to develop that coordination and get good at anything. So I spent most of my evenings being the ravenous bibliophile beast of Cedar Lake. By fifteen I had read from one end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica to the other, and exhausted the library’s supply of science fiction, mystery, horror, science and technology. I usually had four books on the go at any time, one in the bedroom to read at bedtime, one in the living room to read while everyone was watching something toxic like Lawrence Welk or the like. Another in the bathroom- those were usually Vonnegut or Heinlein. And yet another book just for the car. Often these books got ‘Cleaned” by mom, which is to say, they were taken from their place and tossed into a box in my room. A powerful lot of my lawnmowing money went to library fines, and I’m still convinced that the library’s “Amnesty days” were designed for me and me alone.All of this was in addition to the Herters catalogs, Johnson Smith catalog, Sears tool specialogs, Boys Life (I STILL love reading that magazine, which may be a little weird- does anyone else remember Kai Beezy Tentroy?)

I never did well in school because my thoughts always wandered. To the book I was reading in the bathroom that morning. To the rabbit I scared up on my way to school. To the deer I wanted to be shooting that fall. To the new hackle I got for my flytying kit. To the whatever, a hundred times a minute, six thousand times an hour, fifty thousand times a school day. Oh, the Chemistry professor or the dr of physics could pique my interest for a few minutes, but it was all just boring, boring boring. College was no different and after a couple years of dicking around I just moved on.

When I got my first apartment, and my very first color TV, and the guy came and hooked up cable to it, I looked like this, for about a solid month.


For the very first time in my life, I could shut off the boredom and stimulate the pleasure centers in my brain at will. Cable TV had EVERYTHING. It had old SF movies. It had 24 hour cartoons. It had USA network, with made for cable movies. It had made for cable softcore porn. It had the 20 minute workout, which was practically softcore porn. It had Martha Quinn queuing up the same forty music videos, you watched her yapping from that barstool in those hippie dresses and hoped for a beavershot (Which legend has it once actually happened). You had premium channels that cost a few dollars more, and you could see all those old movies without commercial interruption.

I was in heaven. it amped up my requirement for perpetual stimulation until it bordered on insanity.

Around that time i had to cut back on the caffeine because I would occasionally start to vibrate. Even now, though I still have the caffeine addiction, I need to keep it under control lest my attention span go completely away- I walk a tightrope between having a constant caffeine headache and having my stomach give me fits.

Eventually the Cable was just not good enough and I went back to what i did earlier to control the boredom, which was poaching and grand theft auto driving. My cousin drove stock cars and he always had at least two on the go, so I spent as much of my summers as I could driving or wrenching cars with him. Most of the tracks he ran were dirt with a little asphalt here and there, so we would change setup often between one race and another on a single weekend. I remember one trip between tracks where I changed the camber on the outside front while he was towing the trailer down the road, to switch from the high camber used in mud to the less-high camber used on tar. His trailer had no floor, just planks where the tires ran (it was made out of old well pipe, this was oil country) so I had to sit on the plank and try not to drop any tools on the road. (granted, these were dirt country roads that you couldn’t drive faster than 40 mph at best)(yes, alcohol wsas often involved)

Anyway, I had laid my hands on a tach, and i was reading the handwritten instructions the guy who gave it for me had written out, and my cousin asked me what the hell I was doing. “i’m gonna put a tach in the car! ” I figured he’d be tickled, it was free. “What the fuck for?” he asked. “Well, to be able to see how fast the engine is turning”

Blank stare.

“That’s what your foot is for, son. That’s what your ears are for. Do you think you’d be able to pay attention to a tach while you’re driving?”

I had to admit that I could not imagine it. I reflected: ben’s car had a toggle switch that cut off the ignition and electric fuel pump. it had a pushbutton starter switch. It had a single light bulb in what was left of the dash that showed that there was enough oil pressure.

All the cars were like that.

it dawned on me that the races were short enough, the pace frantic enough, that there was not time to look at any instrumentation. There was no need for any of it. In fact, there were guys who had souped up slushboxes that did as well or better than the guys with sticks, just because they didn’t have to pay any attention to what gear they were in, they just punched it and went; the big torque convertors and beefed up cases on the powerglides could take a hell of a beating and they raced well. The six minutes you spent on a 1/4 mile oval were BUSY. You had eight or ten other cars you were trying to avoid. You had to try to pass as many of them as you could. You had to try to do this on the minuscule straights and get into the apex of that turn a curly hair before the other guy, and you had to do all this while struggling with the rudimentary controls of a rusted out beat up piece of crap that was trying it’s very best to kill you, and your nuts were being crushed flat in the fivepoint. An awful lot of the time it turned into an impromptu demo derby, and the damned car you were driving might be lacking a tire, a wad of sheet metal, or an oilpan before you finally ran it off into the pits. About the only reason you ever took your hand off the wheel was to lose a tearoff, and as often as not you had to leave the damned thing dangling half off to grab the damned wheel and pull for your life.

There are a powerful lot of people for whom those three controls- an on/off switch, a pushbutton start, and an idiot light, are all the instrumentation and control they can handle, in addition to the wheel, gas and brake pedal. I have often theorized that for a bucketload of people, a single pedal that goes when pressed and stops when released like a golfcart would be preferable.

For those people, tachs and fuel gauges and speedos and temperature and oil pressure gauges and even turn signals and headlamp controls are not just distractions but possibly dangerously lethal distractions. At some level, your winshield washers should be automatic so you don’t have to bother turning them on, your lights should be on everytime the car is running and everything removed from the car except the driver seat so nobody can talk to you and distract you. Everytime you move the wheel more than a degree or two the turn signals should go on automatically, and the one and only idiot light should be heads up, reflecting a big red “NO!” in the windshield whenever there are any sort of issues, be they fuel, temp, pressure, or speed, so that the driver never has to remove his or her eyes from the road.

At the other end of this spectrum are people like my friend Jon. We were co-workers at the mill in the day, and he had a Subaru Brat, on which the drivers door would occasionally spring open while he was driving, and the brakes didn’t often work. Jon was my kind of driver, because he could hold a conversation, drink a beer, eat a cheeseburger, shift the crappy trans in that Brat, swerve from one lane to another and reach out and grab that door and slam it shut every time it sprung open, and never think twice. It was a hoot to drive with him because he had about the same attention span I did. and it was NEVER boring.

Jon and I went to Skip Barber together all those years ago, and we had a BLAST. If you like to drive, you owe it to yourself to take this course. At the time they were racing Formula Fords and Saabs- we did the Saab school and went back for the formula (Yes, there was once a time when I could actually wedge myself into a formula car) Anyway, there, you had to pay attention to the wheel wear and RPM (Somewhat) and of course if you got involved in one of the race days you’d have to watch your fuel, but again, it was all about feeling the track with your ass, and knowing instinctively where to shift and having a feel for the friction of the tires and where that groove was. You could have hit the dashboards with a can of spraypaint, for the amount of time you actually spent on the track.

I was told by my instructor that I had a death wish, that I tended to push cars to the point where the instructors winced. I spun a lot, and threw the tail out a lot, but shit, that was the fun part, right? I still love to do that shit.

There are a lot of people I work with that are still into racing; I used to help crew for them once in a while, but time and other responsibilities prohibit it. That’s why I want so much to do the 24 hours of Lemons, if I can. Track driving is always and will always be the best driving, anything you can do on the streets is either too sedate, too dangerous, or illegal.

These days, I satisfy my lack of attention span by reading, once more, because I don’t have the time or resources to race, but if I ever can, again, I will. Hell, maybe I can get the oglet involved and ruin her attention span too.