While in Italy our home base was Treviso. According to the internet just over three hundred thousand live there now. It is a medium sized town, by the Sile River. The Sile is the longest spring fed river in Italy. Treviso is on an ancient road that leads straight to Venice, on the Adriatic…
Halloween has evolved into an expanded public celebration. Merriment, good will, reality-bending apparel and make up is the privilege of any adult who wishes to imagine themselves as a child. Indeed, the child I once was endures as a dimension of my contemporary self, so why not “come out to play” in the late…
Laura and I arrived at the Venice airport. Yes, the flight was six and a half hours of discomfort. We could not have been better treated by the KLM flight attendants but, a constriction of space is the price that one pays for the affordable ticket price. Unless you pay for an upgrade to…
Ok, ok, ok! Would you get to your point? Fair enough. As a reader you’ve been patient to accommodate. I’ll bring my best effort to say it plain. This is the point of drag racing. It is an entire package: the years of absorption, a type of apprenticeship, the nuances of basic high-performance engine…
Lives unfold, shake out, become a revelation, or become a cul de sac in the course of time. What is time? I have read various theories of time. Our dilemma, we find ourselves inside of time, caught in times’ flow, we have no vantage point outside of entanglement in the flow of things. Theories…
It is Labor Day Monday. I spent Saturday at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove Wisconsin. Two lanes of asphalt, stretch for a half mile that allows two race cars maximum acceleration for a quarter mile, then another 1,320 feet of room to slow the vehicles. That’s drag racing, a type of competition originating…
At sixteen I discovered drag racing. Performance engines built for extremes, they seemed magic to me. And that sound continues to have the effect for me. I remember the sound of those engines, – a Super Stock Plymouth, an A/FX Ford Mustang being tuned in the pits under the pine trees in North Carolina….
What matters in your life today? What challenges and opportunities will I engage? I have plans in mind. Will nature endorse, go along with my intention to replace the missing bolt in the rotating blade of my Briggs and Straton powered tiller or, – not? Thunderstorms are expected for later today. Nature, that neighborhood…
Two photos which recently came from the garden. The first are of tiny mushrooms growing in the organic debris at the side of the path. Wikipedia writes that these are Parasola genus of mushrooms. They are the size of an adult thumbnail. Likely the unseen underground filaments extend further than the visible umbrella-like shape….
A postscript to what I wrote yesterday. Additional reflecting on my experience of time spent at Great Lakes Drag-a-way. A forthright form of competition involves two cars driven from exact standing alignment toward a finish line, 1,320 feet distant (a quarter mile) accelerating at the maximum given the engine and chassis design. The first…
