I have no idea where I am going with this except to say that I’m a sucker for a good documentary and I watched one yesterday. In fact, the one I watched was so good for someone with my upbringing that I feel compelled to complete the circle, and to document it in turn.

I stumbled across “In the Blink of an Eye” on Prime Video and started watching it with low hopes, but it did what good documentaries do, pulling me in, tickling my memory back to one of the passions of my youth; a passion which, as happened with Christmas at an even younger age, had its glory stolen away by the money grab of commercialism.

Those of you who know anything about me from my time here on site know that I am a redneck sprung from rednecks. I do not say this proudly, although I could. It is simply fact. And being a redneck, I like automobile racing (at least I did, once upon a time). In particular I like southern stock car racing. Like me, NASCAR sprung up from the red clay of our shared southern home; a heavy, sticky soil that packs out smooth and hard as hawked-out cement until it is perfectly suited to race cars on. So they did just that, those good ol’ boys of another era who came home from WWII having gained the three things required to create the perfect twister of a red-dust storm; mechanical knowledge, engineering experience, and a lust for excitement.

I vividly remember my first time at a race track. My father took me out to East-Side Speedway one night around 1970, when I was still small enough to be toted in his arms late at night. I remember the glow of the lights in the distance from where we parked, the roaring of cars which could not yet be seen, the anxiousness in my dad’s step to get those cars into view. I remember the roughness of the wooden bleachers beneath my bare feet, the glimmer of the lights off the whirling metal, the smells of wetted dust, burning high-test, popping corn and suspense. It was only small-time, small town racing, but it was sprinkled liberally with the magic dust of Grand National dreams.

A couple of years after that night, and right after the divorce, the old man called up my mother one Friday and asked if he could take me with him up to Martinsville, to see the “big boys” race. Caught quick like that and without an excuse handy Mom said yes. That weekend was the highlight of my childhood; camping out in the back of Pop’s pickup truck and joining in frisbee games where fifty-or-so Blue Ribbon and Marlboro toting fathers gathered in an outside circle throwing a bunch of frisbees across to each other while their screeching flock of kids in the middle happily chased down, and tussled over, any wayward throws (myself right in there with ’em). There were banjos picking over in that direction, and race cars roaring in the other, colorful flags flying on high with a blimp slow-rolling against the clouds, and best of all Richard Petty was right yonder; King Richard we called him, a sparse man sporting a big hat beside a sky-blue race car any of the three of which… man, hat or car… were already larger than life. It couldn’t possibly get any better for an eleven year old, yet it did. After that weekend followed Bristol, Rockingham, and finally Charlotte, the crown jewel of racing. What a summer!

You have to keep in mind that this was all pre-1979, when began an unquenchable thirst throughout America for all things NASCAR. Prior to 1979 Winston Cup racing was little more than a southern joke. The races were held in the south, the drivers were from the south, and there was little to no television coverage (the Daytona 500 being the lone exception as a once a year novelty event on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”). The Daytona 500 is unique in that it is equivalent to NASCAR’s “Super Bowl”, but it is strangely held as the first race of the season, rather than the last. They run it first, in late February, because Daytona is usually warm then while the rest of America is still frozen. This was especially the case in 1979, as a gigantic snowstorm had settled over most of the east coast, forcing people inside on a Sunday afternoon, and this after the NFL season had ended and before baseball season had begun… the horror! With no other sport available for bored men to watch on an inside day they tuned into the Daytona 500, and those bored men were coincidentally treated to the greatest race in NASCAR history. For stock car racing, that snowstorm turned out to be the perfect storm, as a fantastic race culminated in a last lap crash, allowing NASCAR’s only nationally recognized name, Richard Petty, to sweep through to the checkered flag. And better yet, immediately after Petty flashed across the finish line in his famous STP branded racer the cameras panned back to the wreck where two drivers were fist fighting in the infield, and still another driver had leapt out of his car to come to the aid of his brother, the three of them throwing haymakers until the service trucks could get there to pull them apart! It was glorious, this two on one melee after a fantastic race with millions of first time viewers! It was the perfect storm indeed for a second rate sport, as fans from all over America began heading down south to watch those crazy-assed southerners race their hot rods. It was the height of happiness for me to see the rest of the country embracing my favorite sport!

For a while, at least.

Then my happy bubble burst. Mom moved us further away from Dad. Worse, she moved us to the city. Trips to race tracks ended for me. City life and time changed my priorities, as will happen, turning me away from “out of sight, out of mind race cars,” and toward girls, rock-n-roll, and a car of my own. But then came cable television. ESPN and TBS began showing races nearly every weekend. I found myself drawn back in by the ’84 Firecracker 400, hearing Ronald Reagan issue the “Gentlemen, start your engines” command from a phone in Air Force 1, and then seeing in real time, albeit on television, the image made famous by Sports Illustrated of Air Force 1 cruising in to land with that iconic STP car in the foreground, racing alone down Daytona’s backstretch. It was not my luck to be able to go to the races anymore, but I’ll be damned if racing wasn’t reaching out to me and pulling me back in, or so it seemed at the time.

A few years later my buddy Dave and I got us a place down at the beach. Dave laughed at me on those hot summer afternoons when I‘d hop on my ”beach cruiser” to pedal back up to our 17th Street apartment in time to catch my heroes on TV. My asshole friend would yell, “go on then, you hillbilly fuck” as I flipped him off on my way. The bikini-clad tourists could wait, I figured. Girls would always be there, but Talledega only came around twice a year. I guess those priorities hadn’t completely changed.

I will admit to being a little bit ass-hurt when my friend called me a “hillbilly fuck,“ so I did the only thing I could do. I loaded up my truck with beer and weed, shoved Dave into the passenger seat, and I converted him; two long-hairs in cut-off shorts and Van Halen t-shirts on a NASCAR roadtrip. What a fucking blast we had! I’ll never forget the joy on his face that entire weekend. We’d been to a lot of rock and roll shows, but there is a huge and obvious difference between 18,000 headbangers at a one-night stand, and 80,000 redneck wall-bangers rockin’ a racetrack for an entire weekend. Upon arrival Dave completely bought in to the laid-back party style of it (in particular to a group of redneck girls we came across as they bathed boldly shirtless in the dangerous southern sun, Dave kindly offering to shade them with his own naked body at much hazard). And to my chagrin he also bought in to the whole “Intimidator”, “Man in Black” thing, and so became a Dale Earnhardt fan (plus he knew I hated the driver whom many fans, myself included, referred to as Ironhead, rather than Earnhardt. You have to keep in mind that Dave was, as most maturing young men are with each other, a real butt-wipe).

Our front-stretch seats for that race were low down in the stands, a bit close to the track for comfort’s sake, but perfect to hear the sounds, sense the speed, and to get caught up in the drama of it all. Dave remained skeptical of the actual racing right up through the warm-up laps, looking at me like I was an idiot when I warned him that he’d best take off his brand new Earnhardt cap before they came around again or he would lose it. You see, it takes a minute at a track like Charlotte for speed to accumulate. Heavyweight American muscle doesn’t zip off the line like a sissy little European racer does. It gathers it’s momentum slowly, needing every bit of the mile-and-a-half, high banked speedway with the dog-leg rounding out it’s start-finish line to get it’s gears sorted out. Once that space and speed is gathered however, watch the hell out!

That first lap circled about like slow motion. I looked over, unsurprised by a cynicism on Dave’s face which only made me laugh, as I knew what was to come. Like two trains vying for supremacy the twin lines of cars drove away from us down the backstretch, circling bumper-to-bumper and side-by-side-by-side through turn three, the fans in the bleachers standing in salute before the onslaught. As they rounded through turn four you could feel a difference in the air, and in the crowd, and in the concrete seat beneath you as they came, the roar from forty-three, 600 hp engines screaming angrily towards you, the cars nervously jockeying for position like a boy at the movies on a first date. Like everyone else, Dave and I were also standing now as they approach us, me screaming and waving my driver forward, Dave watching them roar past in mesmerized wonder… and blissfully hatless.

It is not a difficult game, racing, though there are nuances to know. I recall at one point Eddie Bierschwale’s car got sideways and lifted completely up off the ground as if held there by a giant, invisible hand as it flew directly towards us. I was standing and could see the car’s undercarriage, exhaust system and all as it hung like a toy in front of me. Joyful, I turned to find Dave curled up in a humorous ball beneath his seat. Yet by day’s end my rookie friend was an expert, educated in every phase of racing; driver’s, strategies, and courtesies. Having hooked my fish, those Sunday afternoons watching races alone in our little apartment became parties of two when we were broke, which was much of the time, and roadtrips when we weren’t.

They say you can’t go home again. I found this to be true. Dave and I stayed in touch after I moved to Charlotte. I even bumped into him unexpectedly at a race once. I assumed that racing was something I would always have, and that my friend Dave and I would always share it, but time is fickle, taking Dave away for good and changing my beloved NASCAR into something almost unrecognizable, with ”Cars of Tomorrow” that all look exactly alike (some are even foreign, eee-gads!) and that are unable to pass one another without difficulty. And the racetracks are mostly as alike as the cars are, besides their being spread into far away geographies where there are no hardcore fans, hence the empty grandstands in Kansas, California, and Vegas most weekends. Ticket prices have become as ridiculous as those for NFL games, and then you have these drivers with midwestern names who whine when they lose, rather than fight. Nah, me and a hundred thousand other southerners will take a pass on that.

So I am pretty much done with racing. I still turn to some of the bigger races when I am home on a Sunday, but my attention quickly wanes. Gone is the Ford and Chevy rivalry, gone are the short tracks with their noon starts, gone are the drivers in open-faced helmets having a smoke at 200 mph, gone are the kids clinging to the catch fences, and the chicken bones and soda cans tossed down to the walkways, gone are the beer brands on cars, the cigarette brand on the trophies, and the pretty girls kissing the winner at race’s end (Well, the pretty girls might still be there, I honestly don’t know. Seems a bit sexist though, for this day and age?). It seems that, as everything does, Southern stock car racing has run its course.

But that documentary, now. I’ve got to say, that was pretty darn good. The racing scenes got me going, seeing the old guard strapped in again, hammer down and hell-bent for glory. It’s a shame my old buddy Dave and I can’t load up the truck for one last NASCAR roadtrip. I’ll bet he would like that, if he was still here with us.

I know I would, just once, for old time’s sake.

The bruised muse

Hissed soul steamed escape

Before tree finger marauders

Pierced his dried up dreams’s reedy spine

And noosed charity’s crystal cracked neck

Into a violent pearled burst

Dividing glum gold spoils

To black dog troughs

Second rate ingrates

And the hoodwinked anarchist parade

Marching through strangled forests

The bruised muse

Watches the lead hearted raiders

Clap freewheeling heels

The kinetic chaos

A ludicrous marvel of steel willed vanity

Pushing prostituted trust’s bladed menace

Through sunken wildflower weed valleys

Ousting in fist hammered defiance

The bruised muse’s spectating specter

While vampiric Judas Iscariots

Drain stained glass blood

From the muse’s broken swan neck palace

The turncoat fellowship

Gloating cloven dagger flame

Through sacred parchment

The tarry blizzard

Set to burn and forget

His bliss kissed sweet nothings

Swallowed through tongue torched surrender

To the betraying void

The frayed and dethroned king of fantasia

Exiting breathlessly

Holding onto the disintegrating wing

Of his flailing butterfly queen

As the scorching house of cards

Carries ash scarred tragedy

And lung blistered chokehold

Across a psalmist anchorage

Blackened and razed

The once harmonized sanctum

Poisoned by pride’s weighed scales

Tipped towards self anointed demigods

And so the thorn clipped muse weeps thunder

And her nailed feet mete out lightning stabs

Across night’s everlasting funeral

Though their ears are plugged tunnels

And their eyes stitched bound and blind.

Time to kiss away the muffled shadowland.

Time to carry my sandpaper voice underground.

Time to sleep where concrete angels tend to split necked flowers.

Time to be baptised under hearty rain spells.

Time to dial down fears and give birth to redemption.

Thanks to those who gave ear and warm words to the paper heart sleeved muses.

I’m a long way from home, but I’m inching closer.

Time to set my aim towards the sun.

Time to go.

A night song for Selene’s painted fire moon

Moans twilight sadness over Lyra’s plucked lute

Her laugh dancing thunder shaking hideaway spaces.

Motorbike leaps through Eden’s gate

Oil and tears leaking last rites

Dream buzzed veins electric and cranked.

He throttles beyond ink dipped rainbows

Where boiled technicolour skies

Melt time’s rustic phantoms cloaked midnight black.

Razor leaf trees sneeze bone spiked fallout

Splitting his banded candy cane skin

Fantasia’s fingers flicking away seething stars.

Mood ring moon winks at the smouldered sun

Her glitter soaked eye his chariot’s aim

Heartened conquest towards evaporating coil.

Lyra’s lips stir his soul

And clawed lightning tears at heaven

Slipstreaming lovers bleached galaxy gold.

She inhales him.

My previous post, Questions, was inspired by the posts of a rising star on this site—a star whose literary "creations" are being celebrated as par excellence. Their posts are also, almost certainly, all or mostly generated by AI. Many of their comments and replies to comments are also from AI.

Questions was generated by ChatGPT and posted unedited, except for the title, which I added. I'll let you all discover the rising star for yourselves, assuming you're interested. Just look for posts that have a similar structure and style as Questions: enchanting, magical, verbose, and a little too sweet. Other telltale signs include liberal use of the word 'whisper' and overly optimistic endings. Think of Questions as your benchmark.

Some of you have been gushing over this rising star's posts so much I thought I was gonna barf on my laptop. I couldn't fucking take any more. Don't get me wrong; I think AI is great. I've worked with it as a developer and in real life. And FWIW, I get that y'all want to be artists and not think about AI. Don't be left behind. AI holds many benefits to you if you learn to use it. But don't be duped by some shithead's AI-generated posts.

10/24/2024

I was able to log back in to my account.

Now.

I just have to write something.

Then.

I can explore my ending.

A peculiar monstrosity: it floated so gracefully to the ground, implying an otherworldly sophistication that went beyond mere arrival. Yet, it was obvious that Earth was its destination and Earth's people assumed to be the reason.

Its shape was one that could only be conceptualized by anatomy so alien that no one could pretend to guess function from form.

That was 43 years ago.

It sat, inert and impenetrable, occupying most of Piazza San Pietro in Vatican City. It had alighted perfectly equidistant from all of the Doric columns of the colonnade. In fact, the Egyptian obelisk was no more, as if the craft had absorbed it on descent.

It's landing spot was subject to heated debates. Politicians, think tanks, and the clergy of all religions weighed in. Yet, imagining an alien sentience that appreciated the significance of religion seemed a stretch.

There were noises emanating from within the craft. Metallic noises, arrhythmic, and seemingly random. Sometimes they beat out imagined patterns, but the best AI could not come up with a plausible analysis regarding the possibility of communication.

The Vatican Observatory Jesuits, by decreed edict of the sovereign city-state, were the first to officially evaluate the strange spacecraft. After four years they gave up, the ship's hull being completely impervious to any type of man-made breach.

Invitations in all the world's languages, on all bandwidths, went unanswered. Stroboscopic lights invited replies to mathematical sequences, but the visitors remained deaf, blind, and mute.

Four years after the Jesuits had given up, the inquiry team from CERN returned to Meyrin, Switzerland, with no information.

Then the noises stopped.

Perhaps whatever machinery was at work had finished priming itself and the craft would finally open.

But the silence continued long past the visiting team from Pasadena returning to their Jet Propulsion Laboratory—no wiser to the craft's details other than what could be seen with the naked eye or measured with calipers.

The Pope himself, in his weekly addresses from his apartment balcony, always closed with the following:

"We've been patient and faithful for two millennia now for the Second Coming. Certainly we can muster patience to out-wait our visitors."

The people were haunted: What if neither ever happens?

At first, the societal upheavals were tumultuous. evoking the many theories. Why had the aliens landed so ostentatiously in a place synonymous with Christianity? Was it a scout ship for a planned invasion? Was it a calling card, an introduction for more to come? Was it sent by God? Were the unseen visitors dimensionally aphasic and we simply missed each other due to some myopic existential blindness?

Why no doors or windows—not even a seam in the unknown metal? We knew the craft was not solid; we all heard the noises for a few years before they abruptly stopped.

Why the hell hadn't they come out? Why the hell wouldn't they? They came all this way (a long way, indeed), only to hide themselves from us. Was it some test that only made sense according to some alien cognitive sensibility?

We waited.

Could they have been waiting on us? For some societal milestone? For some evolutionary rite of passage that finally would deem us worthy?

We wanted to meet them. Learn from them. We wanted a cure for death, solutions to climate change, perpetual motion machines, and free, limitless energy. Certainly they knew! We needed them.

Yet, they chose to remain unavailable.

Some mysteries were not worth the effort.

So the people of Earth moved on.

While at first there were promises of a new age of understanding and brotherhood among Earth's peoples and nations, after a decade and realizing once again we were on our own, the old grudges, feuds, and holy wars re-surfaced.

But also, total human knowledge continued to double faster than an in-winding Fibonacci curve.

It, one day, came to be: we were finally able to open the craft.

With much holographic media coverage and fanfare, seams were rendered where there were none before. That's when we discovered that the door header wasn't level: the jamb's slope could be freed from the outside, but from the inside would have been impossible.

The smell was awful.

What was left of them were smudged, gelatinized stains on the craft's floors. Many alien contraptions lay about evidencing the occupants' efforts to clear the doorjamb, open their portal, and exit their craft to meet their new friends.

In a quiet little town named Meadowbrook, where the sun dipped below the horizon in a palette of lavender and gold, lived a young girl named Elara. With her wild curls dancing in the breeze and a notebook clutched tightly to her chest, she spent her days exploring the meadows, enchanted by the whispers of nature.

One afternoon, while lying in a field of daisies, Elara noticed a peculiar sight. A small, shimmering butterfly fluttered nearby, its wings glistening with hues she had never seen before—iridescent shades of blue and green that seemed to change with every movement. She watched in awe as it danced from flower to flower, and an adventurous thought sprouted in her mind.

“What if this butterfly holds a secret?” Elara whispered to herself, her curiosity ablaze. With a determined yet gentle approach, she reached for her notebook, where she often penned her observations about the world around her. Today, she would document something extraordinary—a question.

“What is it like to be a butterfly?” she wrote, her pencil scratching softly against the page. “Do you feel the wind as I do? Do you dream of the flowers you visit?”

With her heart racing, Elara closed her eyes and whispered into the summer air, “Oh, butterfly, if you can hear me, tell me your secret!”

To her surprise, the butterfly paused mid-air, hovering just a few inches away from her face. For a moment that felt like eternity, Elara felt a connection—an unspoken bond formed between the girl and the creature. She grinned, believing that perhaps, just perhaps, the butterfly understood her.

Days turned into weeks, and every day Elara returned to that spot, asking her question and jotting down any answers she believed she found in the fluttering of wings or the rustling of petals. She imagined the butterfly’s life, weaving tales of adventure and dreams between the flowers.

One bright morning, as she sat in her familiar patch of daisies, she noticed something new. The butterfly landed lightly on her notebook, its delicate feet dancing across the paper, as if reading the words she had written.

“I see you, friend,” Elara said with a smile, her heart soaring. “Do you have a secret to share?”

In that magical moment, time seemed to slow. Elara could almost hear a soft voice brushing against her thoughts. It was a whisper of freedom and joy, reminding her of the beauty in impermanence and the thrill of seeking understanding.

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the butterfly took flight, spiraling upwards into the sky, leaving behind a trail of shimmering dust. Elara watched in wonder, feeling a warmth in her chest. Perhaps learning about the butterfly wasn’t just about the answers she sought. It was about the journey of asking, of yearning for knowledge, and the beauty of connection—a dance that transcended words.

From that day on, Elara understood that questions were not just about seeking answers but about embracing the wonder of inquiry itself. Each day brought with it a new query, and she found joy in every moment of exploration that followed, with her notebook filled with stories not just of what she saw, but of the questions she dared to ask.