Inspiration and Street Racing

Sunday morning, Sunday paper, Breakfast, check the weather channel. I caught a few seconds of a religious channel. A preacher doing his thing on stage in front of a packed house. Ahh! inspiration! I haven't posted in a while because I haven't felt anything worth saying. But today has been an inspiration storm!
Why can't all those people in the audience at the religious show see that the guy on stage is really creepy? I wouldn't let any of my kids get within twenty feet of that guy. It's just not normal for a man to get that emotional over anything, especially a glorified rulebook. Men don't like being told what to do anyway, especially when threats are involved. Threaten normal men, they'll fight, not cower and praise. That preacher is not being honest about who or what he is and that should be obvious to everybody,not just me. So what the hell is wrong with the folks who are applauding and giving him money? Maybe someone can help me out with that one.

I read an article in the paper that was espousing the dangers of street racing. I had to check my calender to see what year we are in. My god man,this is not news. It is not new, and it is no more dangerous today than it has ever been. This subject hits really close to home with me, and not just because street racing was my main receational activity from the moment I turned sixteen until my early twenties. Also because the article mentioned that in California, street racing is now a crime punishable by jail time. Participants cars are siezed and publicly crushed, and in some places it's illegal to just watch a street race. How times have changed!
My typical evening as a teen was to head over to my friends house, make sure my car ( a 400 h.p. Camaro) was running good, and then hit the Boulevard. We lived only twenty minutes from Sears Point Raceway so hot rods and racing were a major part of teen culture. There were bracket races at the track on Thursday nights, and everybody who had a car would show up and run. Friday at school, we all still had our times on our windshields as kind of a badge of honor. The fastest guys were the ones who everybody wanted to beat, and the Boulevard is where these challenges took place. During the week, and especially in the weekends, we cruised. The Boulevard was the place to find the other racers. When we saw someone we wanted to run, we would "jack them up", which means to cruise next to the and accelerate hard briefly so that the front end of your car jumps. Some guys could spin their tires. I could get my front tires off of the ground in two hops. Sometimes we would go right there, from a roll, without ever even saying a word. These races were usually short, with the winner outrunning the loser in dominant fashion. These races were the most common when the other guy was from out of town, or obviously
wasn't very fast. Usually after it was over , we would look for uor next victim. If the race was close, or we knew the other guy, or his car just seemed fast, we would talk shit back and forth for a minute, and then follow each other to Frates Road. Frates Road was the road used for the race scenes in the movie American Grafitti. In the movie it was called Paradise Road. Frates Road was wide, flat, long, seldom used, and had a Quarter Mile clearly marked on the pavement in white paint in a checkered pattern. We would pull off to the side near the starting line and wait until we didn't see any oncoming headlights coming at us. When it was clear, one of our passengers would jump out, run to the center of the road on the starting line, wait for the two cars to line up, point at both cars, raise his hands and then drop them to start the race. I personally did this several times a week. Most of my friends did the same . Some Friday nights we would have a hundred or more people show up to see several races. When the cops showed up, everybody ran. It was chaos, and it was fun. Back then the police couldn't catch most of our cars, and we didn't hesitate to run. I have run three times that I can remember, and never been caught. Today if you run, you get shot!
I moved away from California because I could see the direction things were giong years ago. Today if you live in California, you are doing something illegal. You might be breathing, or maybe your shoes are tied too tight, or you may have washed your underwear in non-government-approved detergent. Whatever it is, it's definately very wrong and you'd better straighten up and start following the rules before someone gets hurt. (or has fun) I hope things will stop moving in this direction, but I believe that California may be too far gone at this point. So, for now I'm going to be glad that I don't live there, and continue to discourage anyone else from moving here!