Nothing to Shoot at, too lazy to Fish

Well there are times that I choose to engage myself outside the shooting sports. In the interest of furthering my goal of driving in the American Le Mans Series or being Paul Newman's appropriately good looking driver in Indy, I have spent a good deal of time on the track this year.

Previous to buying a Lotus Exige S in 2007 I had not driven a sports car regularly since 1991. That was when the local Police from my home town of Bum-Fu** Egypt encouraged me to park my Porsche or the were going to send my ass to County Jail for the rest of my senior year.

I still have that car, a 1968 911L Porsche, and it is being restored as we speak.

I bought the Lotus as a present for me surviving neck fusion surgery. I quickly remembered why I had gotten cross with John Law. I love to drive really, really fast, on curvy roads. Fortunately there is a legal way to do this now, but there were no road racing circuits in my lovely, rural, backwater, home-of-David Koresh (really) town of 12,000. These days I am far removed from that rustic setting and have taken well to being a dazzling urbanite. Just don't tell my folks.

Everyone asked if I was having a mid life crisis. Some folks even tried to console the wife. I told them despite everyone's odds making I am not (clinically) insane, nor near mid life. I suspect most of them hoped I was past mid life and well on towards twighlight. No luck.

If you start early and practice a rigorous regimen of aberrant behavior it will never become a crisis. I think of it as therapy. Most people work their whole life for some magic fairyland day that will come and make all the troubles disappear. I got news, life is the long stretch of troubles between the fleeting moments of joy to reward us for keeping faith. If you are me, life is more long stretches of joy sprinkled with occassional strife, but I have always been lucky as hell. I guess it is up to how you see things.

I had one of those joyful moments in Mid May at track, MSR Houston. I was down there with my Wife and Daughter. There is a carting track separate from the race track, and they happened to have a 5 year old girl sized cart, decorated in 'Barbie' motif. My daughter got in it and took off for about 10 laps. She got off track a few times once she got tired, but I was amazed at how well she did. She had a ball, and is talking about when she can go back.