Editor's Note: I wrote this last week after returning from a weekend of awesome to a the familiar world of bullshit life maintenance. I'm not sure why i didn't hit "publish" then, but i suspect it had something to do with lack of sleep and grad school stress. I eventually finished the labs but didn't do very well on the quiz, but it was well worth the triumphs on the track.
I'm having a hard time focusing my brain back to the mundane day to day activities of the real world. To my brain, I'm still driving; racing a weekend's worth of endurance race. Still wearing a fire proof suit, strapped tightly into a metal box built by the team and I. Driving into corners at maximum speed knowing the brakes that I rebuilt along with the suspension that I installed would probably hold THIS car faster around the corner than any other vehicle around me. This is important information, especially at turn 11 because I also know that this motor is mostly untouched since that day back around the winter of 1993 when some Asian man (or lady) compiled its economy parts and as such, it cannot be relied upon for any manner of acceleration once we hit the front straight. But again, I'll be okay if I just brake later into this turn and carry more speed than everyone else. This late-braking, high speed plan does not of course account for a pink Camaro spinning out deep in the turn I was entering. I don't realize this until I'm approaching 80mph, trying to brake later than an MR-2, and the car a few yards in front of me locked up his brakes. Only slightly panicked, I too stand on my own tired, hot, over sized brakes, immediately seizing the front tires, stalling the engine and wearing two perfectly flat bald spots into the front tires. Turns out I was too busy minding the large, panoramic rear-view mirror for impending rear-end collisions and as such, failed to mind the clutch.
A 10th of a moment later I was coasting past the backwards-facing Camaro, noting it's orientation as the cause of my grief, and restarting the engine so as to take back lost positions.
You see, this story really starts Friday morning, when we leave the house and drive a normal car- a station wagon- 6 hours to the race track. Or maybe it starts thursday night when we pack that station wagon full of gear and tools. Possibly even the summer spent rebuilding the car or the summer before that, but its hard to say for sure. Regardless, the weekend it turns out, encompasses the lion's share of the story and it tells of the technical inspections and the building up of campsites; Cooking food, building fires, meeting up with friends and setting to rotating tires and making last minute repairs. But they are the hours spent in the car that my brain can't undock from; instances Like the one above when the system became overwhelmed by sensory data and in trying to control a world of entropy with shear willpower alone, achieved a meditative state of instantanious decision making. One void of conjecture or even the always present internal dialogue. At what point did my status quo become an impossibly small envelope inches from junk-racecars, throwing myself into squeeling turns two and three cars wide at the very real and very physical edge of grip? And that's the problem, really (if you can call it that): A series of timeless moments on a looped replay fighting for my attention.
We didn't win, per say, but we were the best loser. There was an award and a brief meeting but we were too busy to celebrate. We all had a beer because it seemed like the right thing to do but before I could finish I think it was lost in the confusion of packing up tools and loading a race car. We said goodbye and we drove home, exhausted. I returned to past due lab reports and quiz material that had not been studied. Real life moved in from all directions but the loops in my brain remain. I see them when i'm driving to work in the slow lane and when i'm sitting in a computer lab. And this is why I can't make my brain summarize and report an electronics lab from last week, detailing intricacies I can't quite recall. This is why the work world and the school world have no volume left.
If you're interested you can see the action here, from inside the car that caused the madness. The first paragraph above takes place between the 31 second mark where I can be seen coming into the frame and the 39 second mark where I coast away trying to restart the engine.
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