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 range from the ordinary eight-hour measurement of a working day, to the relative time involving the speed of light according to Einstein.

We are story-telling mammals, and we’d not have a self apart from the stories that we tell ourselves. My “I” is just that story collection that has “stuck” over the course of this life. The story-theories we have of time, depend on the point that we need to make. Perhaps reality is completely within times’ flow, inside the process of change? Maybe we simply conjured up, fantasized a notion of a changeless state, eternity, a stasis…

So what is my life, my passage in this languid, and sometimes rapid, and once in a while chaotic procession of time?  Perhaps that remains for me to discover, and/or to fabricate (as ability allows) on this Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, of 2026. How firmly rooted can I manage to be in this day? How intentional will I hear the conversation of friends, and strangers? Will circumstance present opportunity to extend my circle of acquaintances today? I am to join a student philosophy club at Waubonsee Community College this afternoon as a guest. What will I learn from that experience? Sometimes I pause to contemplate trees and plants while I am on the Waubonsee campus. That is a satisfying “expenditure” of time. 

Furthermore I intend to dedicate myself to think, and to write more about drag racing. There are more stories to tell about the challenges, obstacles overcome, the feelings of fulfillment, in the near future. The activity involves the most intimate of relationship to a machine, a completely tactile, hands-on experience in every aspect of the matter.

Our relationship with machines or to “the machine” is one of the enigmatic, puzzling in a philosophic-way, dimensions of life. Life in America is no less than our adaptation to the automobile, thanks to Henry Ford for the mass produced (affordable) automobile, and to credit President Dwight D. Eisenhower for the interstate highway system that connects Americans from sea to sea, minimizing time needed to transverse our land.

I will write more about drag racing, the mastery of assembling, of hand-crafting a six second, 2,000+ horsepower racing machine. The sensuous flow of metal shaped to address the drag of air at high speed, to the rear suspension geometry that keeps two massive slicks planted on the asphalt at the moment power is released from a standing start, to the 200+ mph passage through the timing lights, – those stories are concealed, stories that point to the love and spirituality of the Way of drag racing. That is to say machines are expressions of our nature. Yes, even a pro-mod drag car which collapses space/time in a radical fashion. A time-machine if you will… Some additional photos that I captured at the last outing at the track.

 

Well, how about a song. This seems right, Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones.