More images from this weekend’s racing will be coming soon. But I was so happy with this shot I wanted to post it tonight.

Can’t wait for tomorrow’s race!

(PS - To do this shot justice, you’ve gotta CLICK HERE to see it BIG!)

Screw you, universe!

A few days ago I received this email from T-Mobile telling me where they’ve installed new cell towers “in my area.” I’ve marked the drive time (in red) to each of the locations from my house according to Google Maps.

On my eighth birthday my mom made me a Ghostbusters themed cake. On Saturday I turned 31 and something else spooky happened.

This year as a present to myself I turned off my phone and my BlackBerry. I turned off my computer. I didn’t check email. I completely disconnected. Several years have passed since the last time I had a day where I was completely unreachable. As wonderful as it was, I may have to make this a more frequent (perhaps monthly) occurrence. I know some people might find the thought of being without their iPhones or CrackBerries flat out frightening, but seriously, I found it delightful. It might surprise you how much more clearly you can think and focus yourself without the distractions. I highly recommend the experience.

Anyway, the spooky stuff…

Early in the morning, very much pre-dawn, I tossed my camera and tripod in the truck and headed west. The whole point of my “Day of No Distractions” was to clear my head do a little thinking and reflecting on the last year, and perhaps set a goal or two for this year. I find both driving and photography to help put me in that relaxed, meditative state of mind (especially when I’m able to get away from the city), so hitting the road in search of scenic locations is a little like doubling up on Nirvana for me.

Also, I know it’s super nerdy, but I was hoping to be able to take a picture at 3:51am, the exact time of my birth (adjusting for the shift from Eastern to Central time) — the moment I turned 31. I did it last year when I turned 30, and I was hoping to make it a tradition.

That was the plan, anyway.

I got away from the interstate when I got to Weatherford, and took Highway 180 towards Palo Pinto county. I hung a left on a state road that twists and turns its way through the dips and dives of the Brazos River valley. Another turn took me across a causeway, and eventually I found myself on a pitch dark county road in the middle of nowhere. At this point I was about 10 miles from the nearest ghost town.

Despite thoroughly enjoying the drive, I found it a bit disheartening that I couldn’t find jack squat worth trying to photograph. With the moon spending most of its time hiding behind clouds straight out of a vintage Scooby Doo cartoon, it was just too dark to shoot anything out there, even with long exposures.

I looked at the clock on my dashboard and grumbled something uncouth as the digits clicked over to the moment I’d been waiting for, and the only sight out of the windshield was pitch black.

Then, as if on cue, a brown “Historical Marker Ahead” road sign popped out of the darkness and into the path of my headlights.

Now, for those of you who live elsewhere, you have to understand that there are over 13,000 Historical Markers in Texas. They mark everything from the Alamo to “this field is only a few miles from a place where a guy ran a trading post for a few weeks in the 1850s before moving a few miles further down the trail where there was a creek with fresh water.” The vast majority of these signs are more like the second example than the first. So the odds of there actually being anything worth shooting at this marker were, quite frankly, pretty freaking slim.

But it was all I had, and the timing seemed almost providential.

I skidded the truck to a stop in the gravel in front of the sign and realized it was so dark I couldn’t even read the damn thing.

So I grabbed my camera, turned on the flash, and took a picture just to figure out what was too dark see. I blew up the image on LCD, and the first line creeped me the heck out.

So here I am, at the very moment of the anniversary of my birth, staring at a marker in the middle of nowhere that memorializes a guy born on my birthday.

Weeeeeeeeeeird.

(Here’s a link to a pic of the full marker, if you’re curious.)

I’m just struck by the eeriness of that first picture I took of the marker, though. That blue glow is probably just an odd, errant reflection of the lights on my dashboard. Although I had the window rolled down so I’m not sure what could be casting the reflection…

… it very well may be the ghost of Mr. Whipple reminding me not to squeeze the Charmin.

Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown
When at evening the sun goeth down?
When I wake with the blest in those mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?

Chesapeake Plaza, Fort Worth, Texas

As I mentioned previously, I most certainly owe a big debt of gratitude to bread and other bakery products because without them I wouldn’t be where I am today. (About 5′10″ and 230 lbs.) So for the second week in a row, Nostalgia Tuesday is dedicated to bread. (And because I’m surprised I missed this photo in the stack last week.)

With that said, parents today would probably freak out if they found their baby busy trying to shove a plastic bag in its mouth. Instead, my grandmother whipped out the Polaroid. And I turned out fine.

Do you realize that both Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh actually AGREE WITH EACH OTHER that this thing is a swindle? Sure their reasoning is different, and they blame different people, but they both think this thing is a scam. And seriously, the Pope and the Ayatollah are more likely to agree than these two.

Yes, this is bad. Old Testament. Real wrath of God type shit.

We should vote all of those bums out of office. We just got taken for a ride.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my dad recently retired after 45 years in the baking business. If you’re so inclined, go out and eat a pile of carbs at lunch today in celebration. (Of course, if you’d done this before he retired he’d probably have a little more coin in the 401K and I could have gone to an ivy league college. But we’re not bitter or anything.) Anyway, I just thought this pic of Dad and me was pretty timely.

On a completely different topic, I hear that the economy is kind of in the toilet right now. I know the financial situation is pretty bad, but don’t worry. I’ve got a shovel. I can dig us out of this hole.

And I’m sure we’re pretty close to rock bottom, so there’s nowhere to go but up from here.

(And you can trust me — if there’s anybody who knows “rock bottom” when he sees it, it’s a lifelong Rangers fan.)

The opening act, Jessica Mayfield, was a horrible match for this show. Maybe if I were in a different mood I would have enjoyed it, but she was like an Emo Emmy Lou Harris and Gramm Parsons minus Gramm Parsons and plus a gram of heroin. It was twangy slow ethereal music and it made me want to just lie down in the back and take a nap until Dan and Pat hit the stage or until I died, whichever came first.

Thank goodness they eventually did hit the stage. The Keys were EXCELLENT. It was probably their 2nd best show since ACL a couple years ago when my friend Sophie (thankfully) made us camp out in front of the stage. They sounded fantastic (good sound man, for sure) and they played almost the entire Rubber Factory and Thickfreakness albums. It was so, so, so damn good.

The only bummer of the whole thing was that I was pretty sore, and standing that long kinda hurt, so I would occasionally squat down or lean on the railing in front of me and watch more over my shoulder than straight ahead.

But wait…

Why was I sore you ask? Did I leave out an essential part of the story?

Yes. Yes I did.

Friday afternoon I cleaned up the guest room where Brad was going to sleep. I’ve got a queen sized bed in there on which I had been piling all sorts of stuff the last couple of weeks, because it was a convenient place to pile things that was out of the way. I’m sure you all have similarly convenient piling places and can sympathize. Anyway, I got the bed cleaned off, and put on fresh sheets.

Then I called Brad to see how close he was so I could determine if I had enough time to take a shower before he got here or if I was gonna have to put a “come on in” note on the door.

He was in Hillsboro, so I had like 45-60-minutes before he showed. COOL. So I figured, hey, I’ve got a little extra time, I’ll use this opportunity to put a couple of mousetraps up in the attic. (I don’t think I have mice in my attic, but I just wanted to be extra sure. I’ve heard scratching up above my bed a couple mornings in a row, but I think it’s actually a squirrel in the rain gutter … But just to be sure…) SO ANYWAY, I get my couple of traps and a flashlight and I climb up in the attic and very cautiously begin tiptoeing my way from beam to beam towards my bedroom in the back corner of the house.

Then, I bumped my head on a roof joist and lost my balance. My right foot slipped off the beam and onto the sheetrock.

The world.
                 went.
                                  into.
                                                                    slow.
                                                                                                      motion.

It was like in the old Road Runner cartoons when Wile E. Coyote runs out across the canyon and there’s a delay of a couple of seconds before he looks down and THEN falls.

In this like 5 seconds (which was in reality like .005 seconds) my brain calculated that this sheetrock could not support my weight. It also then calculated that I was essentially screwed anyway, because there was no way I’d be able to LIFT that foot without “pushing off” to lift it.

So the ceiling DID in fact give way, and in a grand and dramatic fashion my right leg led the rest of the right half of my body in a mad dash for the floor 10 feet below.

Unfortunately, the right half of my body was (and still is) attached to the LEFT half of my body. And the left half of my body was trying to compensate for the sudden balance shift that had just occurred and my left leg slipped to the LEFT side of the beam I had been (partially) standing on. The left leg immediately punched through the sheetrock and essentially decided that this must be a race for the floor.

The middle half (yes, I wouldn’t have thought I had three halves before this moment either) sadly did not get the memo. It decided it was not having anything to do with this race and SUDDENLY STOPPED on the beam on which I had been standing.

The Three Stooges made crotch injuries seem so glamorously funny.

I probably hung there for five minutes wondering if I was going to die from internal bleeding and this was how my body would be found.

Once the blinding pain subsided to a mere severely throbbing death wish and my vision began to return, I pulled myself up, looked down into the gaping maw which had tried to swallow me, and screamed what very well may have been the loudest obscenities in the history of mankind. It’s quite possible you heard them.

I climbed back down out of the attic, still cussing like a sailor (who also happened to have searing pain in his crotchular area) and slammed every damned ladder and door in my path. I walked into the house to survey the damage.

This is what I saw:

Yes. That’s the newly cleaned guest bed.

Yes, the one with the freshly washed and changed sheets.

Yes, that’s about 50 gallons of fiberglass insulation.

Yes, Brad laughed non-stop for about 15 minutes when he got here.

So.

The good news is, my testicles are fine.

But before Friday if I had heard anyone utter the phrase “Bruised Taint” I would have assumed it was the name of a crappy punk band.

Here’s one thing I’ll tell you about, because I have pictures to help my brain-dead self tell the story. My friend Carol bought this 1973 Challenger a couple weeks ago from a farmer’s field up in Missouri. The car, which she named Ginger, wasn’t exactly in driveable condition (you may have noticed the duct tape “racing stripes” holding the hood down) so I finally gave Herman a good workout towing her back to Texas.

Everywhere we stopped (for gas, to pee, to reapply the duct tape) people would come out of the woodwork to gawk at the Challenger and ask questions. I snapped this picture just before the trucker from that red rig in the background jumped out and told us all about every project car he had in his garage back home.

Twas a fun trip.