Got this notion that we drank different before the pictures moved - and different, still, before the pictures.
Something unnatural in the slow hold, the rolling the wrists, the staring off into space -
like we were watching - as though
because all we do is watch
we must be silver to someone, somewhere, yet
so often just looking out the sides of the eye at the room as it moves
and moves around and I get no bolder than that and still not bold enough
ambered up
I don't tell you.

The room moves around and I am looking out the side of my eye
your leaning against the eve, that knee brush -
fool, here, swirling that last warm swallow around
staring into nothing, just in case.

It's the only slow time,
since we do not touch.

'So, this one time...'

I fully accept that this is not likely to be your first idea of beautiful, but stay with me.

The best thing about the internet, I feel, are the things you discover by accident - the unintentional treasures, the unexpected stories; at it's best it's the one jazz club everyone claims to have located by near mystical origins and seen someone nameless do something fantastic just one time never to be replicated again, 'So, this one time...' was how my old friend Zac started every tale - the well rehearsed hook to a non-duplicatable, you-really-had-to-be-there adventure starring, well, Zac.

But hasn't everyone got that story? Maybe not quite so many as Zac, but, one fondly remembered yarn grown to fishing dimensions by the washy lapping of time at the shores of your memory - I think so.

Now, let's scale back a bit - interesting wikipedia pages are not, generally, as empowering and colorful as random New Years kissess, near death experiences, meeting Lebron James' mom in a clothing store or the white petals falling over the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfurt, Kentucky at the end of long road trips - chance...things....that happened and no one really can or cares to try and understand the raggedy moment-edge importance of. But this one....

This is really cool.

I think anyone who likes cars in the 'I have changed my own brake pads' kind of way has heard the name Carroll Shelby. The pearling blue, white-striped Cobras with their enormous hub-flares and wide, honest faces hiding terrifying engines and monstrous rubber; these, in any trim, have seeped into motoring Americana even more than the man himself.

I was blitzing through the internet searching for the name and history of the Shelby Daytona Coupes - some hazy recollection of the world beating Cobra hard-tops and the curious bus that drove them around... only to realize that I was confusing that bus with two other completely different busses loaded with expensive race cars - one the Ecurie Ecosse racing team transporter

which is, itself, almost the right color but hopelessly stuffed with Scottish Jaguars and then, rather more innocently, the rather more correctly blue transporter of the F1 Scarabs -
Which is when things start getting really tricky, see, this one, the great blue monster loaded with America's first and only homegrown F1 team was left behind after the Scarab's European tour - like some poor unowned beetle of labor it was converted to carry around Team Lotus for awhile (apparently coach-built car transporters were the thing in that era...and there was quite a bit of bus-reappropriating going on) then prepared but not actually used by the Camoradi Maser team and then, in one of those really gratifying turns, eventually used to tote Carroll Shelby's Daytona Coupes and GT40s around.

This isn't even the neat part. I had to go deeper.

Carroll Shelby eventually built six Daytona Coupes - each a slightly different hardtop derived from the A.C./Shelby Cobra roadster for the purpose of being shipped over to Europe to compete in the GT class...and hunt Ferraris, something his previous Cobras had been unable to do. The Daytonas used the same powertrain, but made tremendous strides in aerodynamics - the resulting car was champion bred and accomplished most of the goals Shelby had set for them - including the first American wins at Sebring and taking the crown at Le Mans. Five of them made the trip - or rather, the parts for five, which were constructed in Italy, leaving just the prototype, apparently designated CSX2287 and the only Coupe built in the US, stateside.

It's clear to me and my digging that it was raced a bit itself - it owns several at-the-time landspeed records at the Bonneville salt flats - and is supposed to have spent some time in Europe, though how it got back here..that part seems questionable. And it did get back here - in 1965, unable to turn the Daytona's rather lengthy list of racing successes into premium sales, Shelby sold the CSX2287 to Jim Russel, who made toy cars for something like 4,500 dollars. Russel then sold it to Ross Spector, a hollywood record exec who used it as a sort daily driver - though apparently with a great number of issues that accompany the use of legitimate, thoroughbred race cars for running to the store for milk and bread.

The romance with the Daytona was short, Spector apparently took it to someone to see about getting the race car fixed out of it, but was told it would cost a mighty sum - the shop offered to scrap the thing for 800 bucks, at which time Spector's bodyguard, George Brand, asked to buy it for a grand - an offer Spector apparently accepted. Details are sketchy for many reasons that don't include Brand's Alzheimer's, so one can imagine how complicated it gets after that, but at some point he passed the car off to his daughter, Donna O'Hara.

In the early 70s, O'Hara, who it seems didn't drive the car a great deal and might have been a bit mad, took the car and put it in storage - and promptly began denying at least her ownership of the car and occasionally it's existence - once to Shelby himself, who tried a few times to buy the prototype back.

The car was, for all intents and purposes, gone - this wasn't 'just some car', it was the progenitor of some of America's greatest racing stories and, accordingly, it gained a near mythical status amongst Cobra/Shelby enthusiasts; the 'Lost Cobra', gone, destroyed or, as was actually the case, sitting in a storage bay somewhere in California. 30 years went bye and it might have stayed there, in the deep obscure of legend rather a lot longer if Donna O'Hara had not gone out into the woods near her house with a can of gasoline and burned herself to death under a bridge along a horsetrail in 2001.

A bit mad.

There's a bit more story, too, though it's rather more mundane - arguments regarding ownership, shadowy deals, legal battles...in the end the car changed hands for 4 million dollars and at some point found it's way to the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum. At the time it was the most expensive car ever sold.

And here's the thing....go up and look at it again. It's just a mule - a very fast mule, mind you, but it's an ancient, rotting fast mule. Think, for a moment, about all the kinds of cars you could buy for 4 million dollars, that's four (FOUR!) Bugatti Veyrons...and those look like this -

and these? These go rather a lot faster than that Daytona ever could and have things like heat and air conditioning and leather from baby animals you've never even seen. Children will squeel in delight, women will swoon, men will buy you beers and everyone will rev their engines at you stoplights, just for the laugh of it. But as good as that is and, let's be clear, a thousand horses is a pretty good...it's sort of like going to dinner at a crazyily exclusive restaurant. Or flying on a Lear jet - perhaps just a brilliantly expensive watch...a thing, a nice thing, one of the nicest, but just a thing.

And then there's the Daytona, that is not a thing - it's a myth.

I remember, very clearly, the first time I met Tommy Heinsohn. By way of one of my jobs, he loomed towards the counter and I, devout Celtics faithful, nearly squeeled like that wide-eyed child watching a Veyron, or other halcyon supercar sloop past the bit of concrete I was occupying - in fact, to be honest, I did squeel and was not able to go help Mr. Heinsohn. None of my co-workers really understood, he was just a customer, a very, very nice customer and a rather tall one, but a customer.

Over time I managed to collect myself and eventually I did help him - and did him the respect of never mentioning what we both knew, that he is a legitimate Celtic's legend; save one time when we commiserated about a recent roadtrip gone bad and I nearly passed out from excitment. Some of my friends do their best smile and nod at this story, wincing around 'guess-you-had-to-be-theres...' and not getting it.

But when someone does get it - when they remember sitting in their dad's living room with the C's on, when they recall being told the stories, when just the phrase Green 17 tosses them a bit - they really get it, and they grin and they want to have been there and they just knew he was a good guy and they beam, as I beamed, watching something that really matters, and matter to a lot of people, walking through my now.

Just as when someone who gets it walks past that particular blue thoroughbred, whether it is lounging in it's old age in a museum or burling through some possible boulevard, they'll know - as the light lathers down it, that rosy swelling that comes with intense recollection - the history repeating, the way time collapses all around you; the intense magic of a proper story barrelling first into you and then back out - what it's like when just a piece of it, that myth, is yours to know for good.

On coupes, mustangs and the light in the eye

I am working on a something - a book. A book buried deep in my recently recovered passion for automobiles, a book that seeks to explore my seemingly random interest in the matters of the wheel and also that of my country. Scribblings, now, and questionaires - fleshing out concepts, directions, a lot of planning. Am enjoying myself tremendously and find myself again charging wildly both through my own history as well as to the top of my plucky, little car's tachometer.

What I am on about most recently is Dream Cars.

Lust is a good emotion, I approve of it. Though it beguiles and confuses, though it will bend you to it, some over-eager tango partner grabbing at your thigh, it is terribly honest at the point of creation - a vibrant, reasonless want; the body's chemical bloom as it responds to something that is particularly beautiful to you.

In all the world only two things evoke it for me and I consider myself likely ununique in this regard - all the slinking lines of girls and cars. Am most enamored, come the end of day, of the frames of women - how they are set, the stance that allows for all that soft and silking shape; hips, shoulders, the neck swoop - and all these things draw me to cars, as well. How either of them move at pace, how they sit askance regard or under it, the way the light smashes along the length...delirious. These things make me delirious.

I allow that there are hues to consider, the skin and ways in which the body swells - I rather like the swells...and what it is that makes one move, be it lady or Lambourghini, will matter eventually...but those are high mind things. I am talking of the animal ripple - the senseless thing that masquerades as need and makes me, us, so wonderfully fool in it's shadow.

Here's a visual aid - it's called an Aston Martin Vanquish V12 and I desire it.


Just look at it - the almost lurid stance, the simple athlete in the lines; if one knew nothing about the torrid monster under the hood, this car would still promise speed, would still incite the light to run along it's length and the eye to chase right after- it makes me stupid, this car, it makes my mouth water; it's like some impossible dancer twisting just outside the span of arms.

My dream cars are not sensible, it is not love I feel while wrenching my head around in traffic, daring a smash for a momentary glance at some slice of sheet metal - it is lust, smashing distracted young men and women into doorframes as the eyes sprint raggedy after a hip or a chin or a faint of skin.

What I wonder is where the dream car has gone off to. As entwined as we are as a nation with the automobile - the birthright of the license, the somewhat diminished ritual of the 'first car', it seems the automobile occupies very little of our collective heart - for all the people I have asked this question after, simple, what car it is that excites them, that takes them, that they would have if only...justt a handful of people have an answer.

When I began this mental dialogue, I was most concerned with whether or not our dream cars were fair to ourselves - if it was good to create an idyllic paradigm in youth, to set a goal like that without knowing the stakes or what was involved; if the car one chooses to drive says something about someone, and I believe it does, then it follows that the penultimate car of desire would say rather a lot more. Did the car we longed for change, did it say more about who we were than who we hoped to become - was it about assigning a form to who we wanted ourselves to be or whom we hoped other people saw us as....so many questions.

Yet what became more pressing was the absence of the idea. I have a clear picture in my head of the evolution of my dream cars - how they changed as my vision of the world expanded, how my priorities changing were reflected in sheet metal and hub flares - what follow is a smattering of those shifting ideals, the vehicles whose ownership never seemed likely, but who nevertheless stirred my heart and wrenched my head dangerously around.


1996 Chevrolet Impala SS
1987 BMW M6


1987 Karen Gillan....*cough* - you get my point.




There is a part of the brain that doesn't care - that ignores reason, that refuses to know what it ought - about expensive cars, about famous girls you'll never meet - and opts instead to treat all the beautiful things as mothfire - to grab us and throw us brutally towards the fire knowing full well we wont ever get there. Eye lightning and the streaks it leaves across the mind - that, that is where the dream cars throttle and barrel through the dark.

I worry only that, like wild mustangs out bundling across the plains, no one would argue they were wonderful - simply that they could never imagine what it would be like to ride.

I want to take you far from the cynics in this town and kiss you on the mouth

I am a proponent for the idea that you are not more than you want and that what you want, your body will tell you. Mothers, I think, know some of this - how it is in carrying about young that needs will come clear; cravings, in the vernacular, a bubbling urge for some...thing...that the mind does not exactly know itself.

I'm supposed to love Bloody Marys, I am told.

The carriage shifts, thoughtless, to our desires - how the hips turn, the shoulders dip or crane to show. I cannot imagine how fool I look when you sit down next to, all marionette and fidgeting in your impossible hereness - the waking mind does not tell me where to shift my feet, it doesn't straighten my back and slouch me mounting in my chair; blinking as you go into the peculiar way this wall has me leaning to it, as if starting upon a stranger's couch too early in some morning.

And I dream. The presumptions of my deep mind are that you are mostly how you have acted around me - my dreams rarely enact changes in people, we are mostly who I know us to be. But you are in places unexpected, wearing things that make little afternoon sense and you say things I am thinking, not things you are thinking. This nightyou, who sits calmly with me in a long dark, who stretches and liquids through my sleep.

What I know I keep.

2010 Olympic Winter Games Opening Ceremony

Textcast from the Precinct Bar, Union Square, Somerville, MA

Olympic ceremony....Mexico! Population: 110 million! Athletes:....1.

Even the ugly girls on the New Zealand olympic team are hot. They are winning the fly-lympics so far.

Its great fun, Bryan Williams (it must be noted that I was drinking and managed to merge Brian Williams the Canadian reporter and Bryan Adams the singer into one person) is now leading a collection of Native Canadians in some sort of rollicking sing a long. New Zealand handily won the She's-Fly-Lympics and I'm drinking at Precinct with some buddies, how you?

What sort of reasons? Is it gaudily clad olympic athlete withdrawal? I think I can help.

There is some legit Lord of the Rings shit going on in the opening ceremonies.

we are entering the 'giant glowing bear' stage of the evening. I am predicting the wizard from earlier is going to tame it, or befriend it, whatever a Canadian would do. Perhaps tax it heavily but give it great benefits.

In more upbeat news the stadoum (ahh, drink) is overrun with what must be called spirit penguin.

aand spirit orca...big ones...in the snow. This is intense.

The stadium has sprouted totem-trees, which seem to have summoned Sarah Maclachlan...likely here to save the spirit penguins.

this ceremony is pretty awesome, probably moreso because I am at a bar with a reggae band playing and cant hear the actual music. They had a giant holographic/magic orca swimming through the place a bit ago..and there was a wizard...some sort of snow wizard.

hunter moon motif....with violin-playing cloud viking. Not making this up. Viking. Cloud canoe.

possibly playing the local favorite Devil went up to Calgary if the horns are any indication.

He just lost the helmet and has a mohawk, now there is a lady fiddler, the stadium is now constructed of holographic mapleleafs..oh, this is the cape breton poriton of the night, at least I understand now.

all much weirder with the slow, bedframe breaking reggae beat.

the viking is very metal, even while step dancing. I couldnt make this up. Not even me.

all the dancers have set their heels on fire and are hard shoeing, there is a lot of orange lightning annnnd they actually went to commercial.

Canadian petern pan stands in a field of wheat, space-walking the hologram....i'll assume this is Saskatchewan...aannnd he's flying...

The canadian peter pan, for the record, wears a lot of denim.

we have spirit horses...and upon closer inspection of his earring, C.P.P. miiight dig dudes. Whoa, storm mountain rave scene!

the canadian creation myth appears to center largely around glow sticks and flying boys.

flying boys with snowboards.

We're at a lull...still just flying boys and snowboards around a giant montage filled mountain.

we have roller-blades. has Charles given any indication why he isn't speaking? Did you tell him about the spirit orca?

the roller-blading folk might be a Tron tie-in, there is a lot of body light going on here.

now the univerce is centered by a kalaidoscope pillar of energy and there is a reasonably fat man with a neckbeard and a beret talking on top of it.

He has gathered a throng of white suited native canadians to him and apears, if the holograph montage is any indicator, to be telling them about Toronto.

"Stay afloat, the key is hope, I'll never let a motherfucker break me, dawg"

It's been busy, lately, and I have.

I can't bring myself to cut my hair. We are approaching, as though at sea, seeing it only through stars and charts, a year.

I think I will let it grow until then and then I will make a decision.

I no longer question that he loved me, just feel this sadness occasional bundling that he never managed to tell me.

When she says she wants someone to love, I hope you know

I worry I have broken the bone that cares that you read what I say.

Pouring over these poems that other people write,
watching the way we choose to fix the window
through which we are perceived

it is so obvious, your love
the way she moves in your mind
and she knows.
So the truth is dressed, the angle tilted
you play at being obscure, vague
the dim, one-language
of the constantly waking up at night

I do not write her letters anymore.
Feel defeated, completely, by knowing she knows -
how it is we do not talk, the way we do not smile
the absence entire of touch
so I move away from the sound
no longer entertain it.

It pains me to see you do it still,
how many years from that first glance
some joyous accident in body
why do we not let this go?

Silence is not love.
The things she leaves unsaid
unwritten
the lipless, duskwords you read into -
these are not a window you have climbed through
this is nowhere for you to sleep.