If I Were King...

Things would be different if I was King. In the words of Glenn Beck, but hopefully not in his style, "I have a list..."

Maybe the first thing I would do if I was King was put news back on Headline News and send Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace back to whence they came. A disgrunted partisan hack and Roland Friesler in nice clothes - I certainly never asked for either one.

But I digress. If I were King, I'd bring Pro Mod and AA/FA back to the NHRA. I was never sure what the movitation for killing Pro Mod was, but in retrospect it seems obvious it was a mistake. Cars with huge V-8s and blowers sticking out of their hoods? What's not to like? This isn't to take anything away from Pro Stock, which is certainly cool in its own right, but c'mon, we're talking about big blowers here!

I read in a book a while back that the NHRA scuttled the AA/FA ("Fuel Altered") class because of the popularly of Funny Cars and the fact that AA/FA cars were more or less indistinguishable from Funny Cars anyway. True? I don't know. I've only seen two FA cars run in person in my life, and most of what I know about the class comes from old magazines and books, so I may not have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about. But I do know that at my local drag strip, as soon as a FA car fires up, everyone stands up and all the guys that were in line to get Cokes at the snack bar or get rid of Cokes at the bathroom turn around to watch the run. Now, this is against a backdrop of cars that, while impressive and fast on their own, are not powered by nitromethane. If there were a bunch of top fuelers or funny cars there, would anyone give a hoot about a Fuel Altered with a ridiculous Topolino body?

Of course they would! They would because I, as King, would decree that it be so.

(Tellingly enough, I've seen about nine FA runs, and only one of them was clean. The others were marred by blown engines, wall rubs and other hijinks brought on by piling too much horsepower on too little car. But that one clean run, somewhere in the vicinity of 5.4 seconds if I remember correctly, that was magic. And there was no prying the grin off the driver's face.)

And while I'm at it, I would decree that the NHRA continue to get crappy TV coverage. One of my greatest fears (in drag racing anyway) is that the NHRA will suddenly become hugely and peculiarly popular for no apparent reason in the way the NASCAR suddenly became hugely and peculiarily popular. I think that would be bad.

Pinks is bad enough. People turn on this wretched program and think they're going to be watching drag racing, but it is to drag racing as the WWE is to Greco-Roman wrestling. It's all a bunch of ego-fueled posing and bad-mouthing, exactly the kind of Dueling Testicles crap I don't want to watch on TV. They could settle the matter at hand within the first 15 seconds of the show. Start your damn cars, get in, and race. But no. The principals must bop heads in a metaphorical sense, shout hoarse nonsense, threaten to take their basketballs and go home, and suddenly remember they were scheduled for tap dance lessons and can't race after all.

And when they do race, some guy waves them off the line with his hat. What is this, a time warp? Is it 1951 again? You mean to say we installed all those fancy timing systems at our drag strips so we can ignore them and wave cars off with our hats?

Oh, right. It's not about racing. It's about drama.

My mistake.

VALIS

I'm rereading Philip K. Dick's novel "VALIS" for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time it makes me think. It's a screwy book that only barely qualifies as a novel by technical definition, and I can never decide if it is brilliant or complete swill. I suppose cynics would argue that since Mr. Dick got my royalty check either way, it doesn't matter, but still, when I read something as dense, strange and thoughtful as VALIS, I want it to mean something. I just don't know if it does.

My favorite part of the book by far, aside from the idea of Soviet technicians scurrying around in the background behind the three-eyed alien cyborgs in Horselover Fat's bizarre vision, is when the narrator talks about his persistent dreams of living in a nice house by a lake in northern California, a house he doesn't own near a lake that doesn't exist with a wife he never had. (For the record, yes, I know that Horselover Fat and the narrator are one and the same, but one of the glories of the book is the way he effortlessly convinces you that they are separate people even though he goes out of his way to remind you that they are not separate people.)

He concludes that not only is the landscape and population in his dreams wrong, but the ideology is wrong. He doesn't even want to live that way, would rather eat a dead dog than succumb to that kind of suburban swill - but the dreams are nevertheless extremely pleasant. He concludes in the end that he isn't dreaming his dreams but is in fact dreaming his father's dreams.

Maybe. Maybe not.

What interests me about this is that I also have recurrent dreams that always take place in a constrained geographical region that doesn't exist, in my case, an entirely fictional part of central Arizona somewhere between Camp Verde and Phoenix. This landscape is fairly rugged, ridged with mountains and slashed with valleys, and the roads wind painfully up and down the mountains in endless switchbacks. But what's really interesting is that this landscale is dominated by what can only be called Herculean earthmoving projects - highways, dams, tunnels and weirder things yet - sometimes I encounter titanic earthmoving projects that appear to have no purpose other than their own mere existence, as though someone decided to move 300 million cubic yards of earth just for the sheer hell of it.

Unlike the narrator's dreams, I don't find this landscape or ideology unnerving. Well, sometimes I do - sometimes the earthmoving projects are a bit hair-raising with dozers and tandem scrapers perched on the narrowest cuts on the sides of nearly vertical slopes, bringing to mind the Fun Old Days when doing my job involved running the right track of my D6C halfway out over the abyss... Strange, isn't it, that I never see hydraulic excavators in my mythic landscape. It's always oval-track dozers, D9Gs to be specific, and strange tractor scrapers like Cat 630s or DW-20s, or Euclid TSS-24s, or even older "pans" pulled by bladeless D9s, and spidery draglines and - oh dear - Wabco graders.

I once dreamed that I was riding on the back of such a grader, gripping the exhaust stack while someone else drove. It was raining and the grader's tires were throwing up great sprays of muddy water, and I decided I didn't want to ride on the back of the grader any more. I tapped on the glass and the driver turned and I saw that it was Adolf Hitler wearing a stamped-metal hard hat. Huh. Go figure that one out. Maybe we would all have been better off if Hitler had been a crabby, dyspeptic grader operator instead of a monstrous dictator...

When I was a kid there were only two kinds of landscape: that which was flat enough to be built on as it was, and that which required a bigger dozer before it could be built upon. I think that's the message of my dream landscape, that no matter what the terrain is like, we (mankind in general) can master it with the proper application of engineering, willpower, guts, and heavy equipment.

Which doesn't have much to do with VALIS at all, now that I think about it, except for the shared habit of dreaming about a specific geographic locale that doesn't actually exist. Well, that and my habit of sitting out on the patio at night and speculating about Gnosticism.

And They Laugh At MY Music

I "discovered" two new bands the other day. I say "discovered" because they've been around for a while, quite a while in one case. One is Bolt Thrower, which reminds me a bit of, say, Dismember or a somewhat less arty Entombed. The other Insomnium, a Finnish melodic death metal band that reminds me a bit of a less commercially polished In Flames with just a hint of doomdeath mixed in. They're both quite good, though in different ways. Bolt Thrower is heavier, but Insomnium it cut out of the Gothenburg cloth, which I happen to like. I apparently have an infinite appetite for melodic death metal, at least as long as it says away from modern experiments in metalcore. I don't care for all that indecipherable shouting and prefer all that indecipherable growling.

A day or so ago I watched a news story about the Billboard music awards. I'm not a big fan of music awards - I think they are fundamentally irrelevant. I know the kinds of music I like and I don't need to buttress my tottering ego by listening to what's new or cool. And, let's be honest, the music that is likely to win awards just isn't made for me. You like pop music? By all means, enjoy it in good health.

But please stop barging into my cubicle at work just so you can sneer at the music I listen to.