[lbo-talk] Velocity + Skill / Quality Autotech = Pleasure (was...My interview w/ World Burns to Death)

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 3 09:52:48 PST 2006


Charles Brown:

What are the fantastic sensations in driving these various cars ?

...................

It's not entirely unlike very good sex.

And like sex, it - driving a road gripping, well made, powerful vehicle - is one of those things you botch terribly when you're too young and filled to the brim with wild hunt enthusiasm.

But when you're a bit older and perhaps a skerch wiser, more in tune with your limitations, more sensitive to your partner's moods, needs and capabilities (with the "partner" in this case, being a machine) taking the thing in-hand, conducting a live physics experiment in a sexy-ass package, can be a moment of perfection.

Of course, it doesn't last for too long - only a few moments. Maybe, like me, one winter's night, you're driving home from Manhattan at 3 am behind the wheel of your (very generous) friend's nebula black Porsche Cayman. An ancient tune - written by Satan himself when he was drunk on the blood of the damned and had big hair, sometime in the 1980's - is pouring from the stereo (something about a woman being "only seventeeeeen!!! and you know what I mean..."). The windows are half open because you're starting to drift off - you need that cold, February air to put your synapses in high fire mode (there are chem alternatives but it's well past time for that).

In a quiet corner of your brain, a usually well behaved demi-urge closes the novel it's been reading for about a decade and gets up. It walks over to a control panel, leans into a mike and whispers: 'Listen chief, you need to get your tired brown ass home. Care to see what this beast can do?'

As it happens, you do. Things go fast...er.

A little while later - at some point before exit 4 on I-95 southbound, right after you took a hard turn with both hands on the wheel, feeling the forces trying to toss you out of the vehicle at work - a State Trooper pulls you over (smiling and shaking his head as he writes out a ticket...he apologizes for having to do his job because he "understands the temptation...").

.d.


>From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Raymond Chandler

...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/



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