It’s been nearly a month since I promised to post videos of my dad’s burnouts at this year’s Wells Fun Run, and it’s going on six weeks since the event itself. To all my Loyal Readers who’ve been waiting on the edge of your seats for this — and that’s probably as many as two of you, I’m guessing — I apologize. Time flies, and it’s been especially fleet-winged this summer. The other day while I was taking my afternoon constitutional, I noticed the subtle difference in the air, that hard-to-describe quality when it’s still plenty hot outside, but the blast-furnace intensity of summer’s peak has faded and you just somehow know that a corner has been turned. The leaves aren’t changing yet, but the change is coming. Already. This summer’s shot to hell before I even realized it was summer.

You’ll have to forgive me. My mood always gets somewhat volatile this time of year, from just before Labor Day stretching on through Indian summer and into true fall (when Utah is blessed with a fall and doesn’t proceed directly into a foot of snow on the ground, which is how it’s gone the last few years). On the one hand, I love the changing weather and the golden light, the chance to slip into my leather jacket again, and the smell of woodsmoke and dried cornstalks. But I always get restless around this time of year, too, missing the certainty of long-abandoned back-to-school rhythms and knowing that, with the arrival of my birthday in September, another year of my allotted span is gone, another trip around the sun completed… another summer lost.

But we’re not here to lament over the inexorable march of time, are we? No, this entry is about celebrating my dad’s skill at an arcane competitive event.

Some of you may be wondering exactly what I’m talking about when I say “burnout.” Well, everyone knows what a burnout is, even if you don’t know it by that name, and many people — most people, probably — have done it at one point or another. You step on the gas a little too aggressively, your tires squeal and produce a little whiff of smoke, maybe you lay a patch of rubber on the asphalt, and then you’re off. For most people, a burnout is accidental and extremely transitory. In a burnout competition, however, the idea is to deliberately prolong the effect. Each driver is given 30 seconds to generate as much smoke as possible; whoever lays down the biggest smog bank and/or excites the crowd the most is the winner. Most people competing in these things will simply lock their brakes and stand there while their tires spin in one place. They might produce a lot of smoke this way, but it’s not really the most exciting thing to watch. The thing that makes my dad different and interesting — and ultimately successful at this — is that he knows how to keep the burn going while the car is moving. It’s trickier than it sounds. Most of the other drivers lose their smoke almost the instant they let their vehicles start rolling. But Dad has this knack… well, better you just see what I’m talking about. Here’s his first (and best run) from Wells this year:

You’ll notice the car tries to go sideways when Dad cranks on the power. Let me assure you, that’s normal, and it’s okay. A lot of the burnout drivers appear to be on the verge of losing control when they start to swing around like this, but Dad almost never does, which is part of the showmanship I mentioned in my earlier blog entry. I’m very rarely afraid that he’s in trouble when I see this.

Now, here’s his second run. The video isn’t as good, I’m afraid. The sun was down by that point and the light was nearly gone, so my video camera was having trouble holding focus. Also, the Nomad stalled just after Dad began his run. The engine was hot, you see, and big, high-compression, carbureted engines that are overheated are prone to a condition that you don’t see much in modern, fuel-injected cars, i.e., vapor lock. But the rules say you’ve got 30 seconds from the time the burn begins to generate smoke, so if he can the car going again…

In case you’re wondering, that really irritating squeaky noise in the background comes from a kid who had this big inflatable hammer thing with which he was beating his brother over the head. I was very close to taking it away from him.

Anyhow, because Dad was able to restart the car and resume his burnout, this run counted… and as you can see, it actually turned out pretty well, considering he lost so much time. Well enough that he won first place this year.

I know this is a silly event, and damn hard on the environment… but I love watching my dad do it, and I have to say again that I’m really proud of him. The crowd out in Wells knows that car, and they love it and him. There was a time when I didn’t have a lot of respect for my dad’s interests or abilities. What can I say, I was a real dumbass. Now I know better. Now I know it’s really cool to watch your old man when he’s in his element, doing his thing, and winning at it…

How do I know? Duh… hover-converted DeLorean!

I want one. I’m just too lazy to build the thing myself.

…but it actually kinda bums me out:

Source: xkcd (of course).

I realize, of course, that people trying to raise money for their pet causes are as common on the Internet as funny pictures of cats. Nevertheless, I hope everyone reading this will take a moment to at least consider what I’m going to ask.

(Facebook friends who’ve already read my plea over there are excused; I don’t want to become tiresome with this, I’m just trying to spread the word as far as I can, through all the outlets at my disposal.)

For the past several months, my lovely significant other has been working very hard to lose weight and change her habits for the better. We both have. It’s something we’ve needed to do and threatened to do for a very long time, but of course it’s so easy to put these things off, to just coast along for another day, another week, another month in the comfortable old rut of processed food, oversized meals, and sedentary lifestyles. But just recently we’ve been confronted with the specter of diabetes, the plague of first-world malnutrition, and it’s jolted us out of our rut about as effectively as stepping on an atomic landmine. If you don’t know anybody with diabetes, or you think you don’t, just wait. You will. It may even turn out to be you. This grim realization is what convinced us both to get bloody-well serious about trying to undo what we’ve done to ourselves over the past 20 years.

Anne has made genuinely terrific progress, dropping a significant amount of weight and learning to eat things she never would’ve glanced at only a year ago. Now, to celebrate and hopefully make a difference in the fight against this damn disease that affects so many of our loved ones, she’s committed herself to participate in the upcoming JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes on August 25 with our friend Kathy (who has also made some amazing changes over the past year!).

So here comes the pitch: I’m asking my Loyal Readers out there in the darkness to please consider donating to the cause. I know times are tough, and nobody likes having the bite put on them. But even a dollar or two would help Anne reach her goal, which is actually quite modest ($150). It’s a cause we both believe in, for whatever that’s worth. If you’ll just follow this link, you’ll be taken to a page where Anne explains this a bit more in her own words; there’s a button there that will let you donate in her name.

Anne thanks you in advance, and so do I. You’re good people. I know you’ll come through for us.

It’s true. At least for one weekend a year, in one specific location: a place called Wells, Nevada. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it.

Wells is a tiny outpost town located on I-80 midway between Elko and Wendover. With a population of only 1,200 souls, there’s not much reason for passing motorists to notice it. Its quaint historic main street was damaged by an earthquake several years ago, and there’s been no money to repair or even demolish the crumbling buildings. It boasts a number of mid-century “motor lodges” — motels, to us younger road-trippers — but many are boarded up, their neon signs broken and swimming pools filled with dust blown in by the desert winds. About the only going concerns are the truck stops clustered near the freeway exits, a modest casino, a couple of restaurants, and of course the pair of legal brothels that are primly separated from the rest of the town by a railroad line (they’re literally on the wrong side of the tracks!). But whatever Wells may be lacking in amenities is more than compensated by the hospitality of its citizens, who once a year throw an incredible three-day party known as the Wells Fun Run.

While it’s ostensibly just another weekend gathering of classic-car enthusiasts — my parents participate in a half-dozen of those every summer — the Fun Run feels more like an old-fashioned, small-town founders-day celebration. In addition to the cars, there’s a parade, a fireworks display, a big barbecue hosted by the local casino, a community breakfast in the park, and a Saturday-night street dance. People pour into town from the surrounding ranches dressed in their finest western-style shirts and pressed jeans, giving the impression that this is the biggest thing that happens around these parts all year long. And unlike other shows where, frankly, there isn’t much to do, the folks behind the Fun Run organize actual events for the car people to compete in — drag races, “slow drags” (a ridiculous thing in which the object is exactly the opposite of a regular drag, i.e., you’re supposed to go as slowly as possible without stopping; the first one across the finish line is the loser), and burnouts. And it’s in these events — particularly the burnouts — that my dad has built his reputation. Well, he and his ’56 Chevy Nomad.

If you don’t know your cars, the 1955 through ’57 Nomads were essentially station wagons, but sporty ones, with only two doors and the same nose and tail styling as the eternally popular Chevy Bel-Air. Dad’s Nomad is even sportier than most, with a blue-on-blue color scheme that includes digital readouts in place of the original dashboard gauges, a purple flame job across the hood and fenders, and a monstrous 502 cubic-inch big-block V8 engine. Oh, and there’s also a nitrous injection system when he needs a little extra “umph.” To be honest, the Nomad is too much car for me, and I don’t enjoy driving it very much. But Dad has complete mastery over it; when he’s behind the wheel of this behemoth, he’s in his element, and at those times I can very clearly see the motorhead greaser I know he once was, back in his youth during the early ’60s.

Dad would no doubt scoff if he read this, but he knows how to excite a crowd, and between his innate sense of showmanship and the general awesomeness of the Nomad, he’s made a big impression on the citizens of Wells over the years. So much so that the organizers of the 2012 Fun Run granted him just about the biggest honor there is in cruiser circles: they featured his car on this year’s souvenir t-shirts. Which means that after last weekend, there are now several hundred people walking around with this image on their backs:

As I said, my dad is a bona fide rock star… he even has his own tour merchandise! How bloody cool is that?

He hasn’t made too much out of the t-shirt thing — Dad’s pretty laconic most of the time, in the spirit of all the great Hollywood cowboys — but I’ve seen subtle indications of his excitement. (He got the Nomad’s bumpers re-chromed before the show, for one thing.) And I’ve been very excited on his behalf for the past several months, ever since I first saw a lo-rez JPEG of this artwork. It might sound a little cheesy to say this, but what the hell… I’m very proud of my old man. I don’t go to many car shows any more — I got burned out on them a number of years back, and anyway, I’m pretty busy most of the time — but I made a point of driving out across the desert this past weekend for this one, as a show of support for my dad in his moment of glory. I’m glad I did, too; my parents and I had a good time together, and I think it made him feel good to know I was there. In addition to the honor of the t-shirt, I’m happy to report that he also took first place in this year’s burnout competition! I’ll be posting video of his burns in a couple of days, so keep your eyes peeled…

Following in the path of the previous entry, I thought I’d quickly note some recent accomplishments by a couple of my other friends:

• I’ve known Mike Gillilan since our days tearing tickets and running 35mm film projectors together at good ol’ Movies 7 (later Movies 9, after the addition of a couple more auditoriums), way back in the early ’90s. He was an accomplished photographer even then — he took some of my favorite pics of myself from that time period, several of which I have hanging on the wall of my living room — and now he’s teetering on the razor’s edge of finally going pro. He’s particularly interested in high-performance cars and Le Mans-style racing, and he’s currently a contributor to a motorsports blog called The Daily Derbi. Got all that? Okay, well, last week, Mike posted an image he took of a Honda Fit doing its thing in the Pirelli World Challenge to the Daily Derbi’s Weekend Wallpaper feature (Mike’s regular gig with the Derbi). Not long after that, the official Honda racing team, a.k.a. Honda Performance Development, tweeted a link to Mike’s photo. Way to get noticed, man!
• Meanwhile, another friend, Melissa Warner, is part of a musical group called The Royal We (official Facebook page here). With an acoustic sound built on the vocal harmonies of Melissa and bandmate Stacey Board, they’re somewhat reminiscent of Shawn Colvin, and they’ve now got a six-song EP available for download at CD Baby. Go test drive a couple of tracks and see what you think!

That is all for now. Man, I really need to get cracking and do something worth pimping for myself…

I count myself among them:

Created by: Online PhD

Roger Ebert’s latest blog post is really something to behold, a beautiful, heartbreaking, and, from a writing standpoint, truly enviable piece that has nothing to do with the movies. Instead, it’s an elegiac meditation on death and memory, and reaching that stage of life when friends and family members begin winking out of your life at an alarming pace, and you start to ponder what’s left of them — and will be left of you — in the years to come:

The photo showed a family gathering in front of a small house in North Champaign, on some land where there’s now a shopping mall. In the second row, much taller than anyone else, was Uncle Ben. He was married to Aunt Mame, my father’s oldest sister. He drove an oil truck, and when he passed our house he sometimes tooted his horn and I’d run out in front and wave.

…

I think there’s a chance I was the only person in the room who knew it was Uncle Ben in the second row. There were probably a dozen who knew in general who the picture showed–ancestors on the mother’s side–but does the name or an idea of Uncle Ben linger on earth outside my own mind? When I die, what will remain of him?

Memory. It makes us human. It creates our ideas of family, history, love, friendship. Within all our minds is a narrative of our own lives and all the people who were important to us. Who were eyewitnesses to the same times and events. Who could describe us to a stranger.

…

On and on, year after year. I remember them. They exist in my mind — in countless minds. But in a century the human race will have forgotten them, and me as well. Nobody will be able to say how we sounded when we spoke. If they tell our old jokes, they won’t know whose they were. That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

I’m not sure I can express how very strongly this resonates for me. I went through a phase in my younger days when I was near-obsessed with the idea that I won’t be remembered after my death. I’m still bothered by it from time to time, to be honest. And in fact, now that I think about it, that’s been a concern of mine off and on for many years. I remember signing a lot of high-school yearbooks with the phrases “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”; at the time, I thought I was being impossibly clever by referencing a couple popular songs of the day, of course… but thinking about it now, in context with Ebert’s post and a bit more self-awareness than I had at 17, maybe there was something more serious lurking underneath those seemingly innocuous taglines. And then there’s the way I still sometimes think of certain ex-girlfriends and wonder if they ever think of me, and if so, what they think about me. I suppose everyone probably does that from time to time, and I don’t think I’m unhealthy about it — it’s not like I’m constantly mooning over girls I haven’t seen in 20 years or more, and I certainly wouldn’t trade the good thing I have now for anyone from my past — but I do hope I’m well-remembered by those I used to love. Hell, that I’m remembered, period.

I used to imagine I would acquire some degree of immortality through the bestselling novels I was going to write, which would of course become beloved classics that would still be read and discussed and possibly even — God, I was so arrogant! — taught in classrooms a century or even two hence. But of course I haven’t actually gotten around to writing those novels, have I? And even if I had, and they’d been as successful as I had ever dreamed… well, chances are they’d still be forgotten in time. And a fairly small period of time, too. Consider the bestselling novels from 50 years ago. Not really so far away when you think about it, but how many of those books are still read — or are even familiar — today? I know the names of several of the authors on that list, and I’ve heard of a couple of the titles, but I personally have read only one of them, Fail-Safe. (I sought it out back in high school after catching the movie version on late-night TV.) And I’m willing to bet I’m in the minority on that one, certainly among people of my generation. Now go back another 50 years to the list from 1903; recognize anything? Anything at all? Once those titles represented the blood and sweat of the people who wrote them, and they were popular and read in parlors and on front porches all across the country, and readers must surely have discussed them and loved them… and today, they’re all completely obscure.

If my writing won’t live on, how about other forms of recording a life? Photographs, perhaps? We are in a golden age of photography right now… there are more cameras, more photos of the average person, than ever before, and I, like everybody else in the industrialized world, have lots and lots of photos of myself. But a generation or two from now, assuming those digital photos don’t just evaporate in the wake of a big electromagnetic pulse or something, will anyone remember my face any better than any of Ebert’s relatives recall his Uncle Ben? No, of course not. I have in the fabulous Bennion Archives several photo albums that belonged to my grandmother, packed with images from her teens and early twenties. I love looking through them… but I don’t know a soul in them, except her and my grandfather. I’m sure some of the other faces in those snapshots belong to family members, ancestors of mine, I imagine… but I don’t know their names. I am diligent about writing the names of people on the backs of my own printed photos, and I tag every digital shot I take to a ridiculous degree… but I can’t help thinking even that won’t make a difference. People in the future may have my name, but no one will remember who I actually was. And that’s a factor too, isn’t it? Not merely that we are remembered, but how? My memories of my Grandma June are mostly constructed from her latter years, after a stroke robbed her of her mobility and her speech. My mother, however, remembers her very differently… as a young, vivacious, fun-loving woman who liked to play boogie-woogie on the piano and throw parties cook for 20 people while they were all camping. But that woman was a stranger to me, and after my mother is gone, all that will be left — for a time anyhow — is the memory of the stroke victim.

You know, it occurs to me that my instinctive resistance to remakes of movies and TV shows I loved when I was young could be rooted in this as well. I always identified with those things so strongly, considering them core parts of what made me me, that the idea that they are now somehow obsolete and need to be replaced… my fear being of course that once replaced, the originals will no longer be seen and will start to fade from memory… and where I’m sort of made up of those things, what does it say about me? Maybe what that’s really all about is my own fear of obsolescence and irrelevance. And ultimately oblivion.

The basic existentialist dilemma, especially for the childless: will I have made any sort of impact on the world for having lived? Or is it all futile noise screamed into a windstorm? Is it any wonder that the single word Mr. Spock utters to Bones as he prepares to sacrifice himself for his shipmates in Star Trek II is “remember?”

Forgive me. It’s late, and I’ve had something of a downbeat day anyhow. If I haven’t depressed you too much, go give Ebert’s essay a read. It really is a lovely piece…

Late last summer, I took a day off so I could help my father install a new swamp cooler on his and Mom’s rental property. The rental is actually my mother’s childhood home, a smallish, post-World War II tract house that I suppose could be loosely categorized as a bungalow. My Grandma June lived there until the mid-1980s, when a stroke debilitated her badly enough that she could no longer take care of herself, and then my uncle Layne, the hard-livin’ biker who took his final ride last May, occupied the place for a while after that. But for the last 20 years or so, my folks have earned a little extra income for themselves by renting it out to strangers. Unfortunately, the Salt Lake neighborhood where the house is located isn’t what it was during the Eisenhower years, or even the Carter and Reagan years, so it’s difficult to find tenants who both (a) are willing to live there, and (b) give enough of a damn not to trash the place. The last bunch left an especially nasty mess behind when they abruptly split without notice — Dad went to collect the rent one month and found the place empty, save for filth and vermin, and I’m not kidding about the vermin — leading to an entire year of clean-up and renovation. Dad performed most of the work himself (and it’s actually not done yet!) but the task of hoisting a bulky, heavy air-conditioning unit up to the roof was too much for one man, even one as resourceful as my father. To be honest, it ended up being too much for two men as well: after a half-hour struggle that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Laurel and Hardy movie, we ended up disassembling the damn thing and carrying it up the ladder in pieces.

Not so long ago, being around my father under those circumstances would’ve inevitably ended in disaster. The setbacks in the task at hand and my relative incompetence at that sort of work would’ve put him in a foul mood, which would’ve made me defensive, and the feedback loop would’ve quickly spun us into an angry shouting match over nothing at all. But recently it feels like something between my dad and me has quietly evolved. We seem to have somehow outgrown the alpha-dog pissing contests that defined our relationship for so many years. We still get testy with one another and occasionally bicker, but now it’s more like little border skirmishes instead of all-out global thermonuclear war. And as unlikely as the idea once would’ve seemed, I sometimes even find myself enjoying the time I spend helping my dad with jobs like this, when we’re just a couple of Men Doing Manly Things.

Anyway, our plan had been to have the unit in place before the day became too uncomfortable, but by the time we gave up on lifting it whole, broke it down, and got all the parts onto the roof, the sun was already well up into the sky, and heat was beginning to radiate off the unshaded roof like the wavy mirages that float over I-80 as it slices through the West Desert. And if the temperature alone wasn’t bad enough, the tar on the asphalt shingles was softening and our feet were slipping in the loosened grit with every step we took. After a frightening foot-and-a-half-long skid, Dad suggested we throw in the towel for now; he would come back that evening when it was cooler and finish the reassembly. I didn’t need much convincing. We carefully stacked the remaining parts and tools on the roof, locked the ladder in the garage, and piled into Dad’s beat-up old flatbed truck. He asked if I wanted to go grab a Coke; I said sure.

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