Posted by Roy Hobbson on September 21st, 2010 •
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Sometimes I’ll catch myself slouched over at my desk with spectacularly awful posture. I’m talking about that special breed of bad posture — the kind that makes me instantly feel guilty for how I’m treating my body. It’s like I’m raping my lower back. With extreme sluggardness.
But I don’t notice the problem right away. Not at all. Not until I happen to sit up straight and marvel at the SHEER ANGULAR DISTANCE my spinal column just unspooled in order to get vertical. Because the difference between how I WAS sitting and how I’m sitting NOW is all kinds of shocking. And rather disheartening. (THIS is what good posture feels like??? GAH!! IT BURNS THE SPINE!!!) Plus, this new upright position will inevitably make me feel like that asshole from The New Yorker, all stiff & uppity and mocking poor people for sport. But I certainly don’t appear like that to others, of course. It just feels that way. It feels that way because for the last six hours I’ve been slumped over my keyboard like a fat bag of soup. That is not a pleasant realization.
Fascinating, right? Not at all?? Good. Then the time is right for us to adjourn to the mountaintops of Motegi. You are now ready. Five Pagodas for that which was decidedly awesome … one Pagoda for that which was uncomfortably pathetic and/or Marty-Reid-ish. My call.
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on September 8th, 2010 •
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Print it off … cut it out … hang it on the fridge. And every morning, take a brief moment to figure out which Scott Dixon best captures how you’re feeling. You’re welcome.
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on September 7th, 2010 •
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En route from Indianapolis to the Kentucky Speedway on Saturday afternoon, a navigational discrepancy occurred. The car’s lovely GPS Lady advised me to take a certain exit off of I-74 — my wife quickly & vehemently advised against it. Right or wrong, I chose to go with the one who had every single back road in America manually downloaded into her brain. It seemed like the smart play at the time. It was not.
Because for the next 100 or so miles, we crawled up & down winding dirt roads and one-lane blacktops at LITERALLY 12 mph. That’s not a joke. Nor hyperbole. GPS Lady apparently wanted to give us the scenic route — and if it took three weeks & a divorce to get there, so be it. Have you ever been in a terrible rush & slowly inched along behind a tractor tiller deep in Southern Indiana hill country as your scorned wife silently fumes next to you? Holy Jesus. Misery. Total misery. If I could’ve crawled into the glovebox right then, I would have. The resentment in the air was so thick, you could cut it with a court summons.
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on September 1st, 2010 •
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[Dreyer & Reinbold Racing drivers meeting -- Wednesday, September 1st]
PT: Whaddup, homes? I’m Paul Tracy. But all my friends call me Big Dick McWinnerscircle. Someone here called me, so now I’m running this operation. Who the f–k are you?
Justin: Named after the naughty bits, are you? Right then. The name’s Wilson, friend. Justin Wilson. We’re teammates now. We’ll be driving together.
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on August 30th, 2010 •
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It was going on 4:00 AM Sunday morning when we finally paid tribute to a fallen friend. Because there in some crazed campground outside of the Speedway, we honored the life & death of IndyCar in Chicago — and we did it in our own inebriated fashion: by senselessly burning anything resembling fuel. We torched most of our tents & also a railroad tie we found & various electronic goods, among other things. And as we stood around the noble funeral pyre taking turns eulogizing the departed, massive PLUMES of black (and certainly toxic) smoke filled the Joliet sky. Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” blared from the speakers, but that was not by design. It was a moment. It was a glorious tribute befitting a life well lived, and if throngs of downwind campers awoke in the morning freshly paralyzed & genderless, so be it. Sacrifices are necessary on these occasions.
Because this race — this trip — had become THE seminal moment of the IndyCar season for us. More than the Indy 500, frankly. And now it is gone. Likely forever. The good ones always leave too soon — and yet Mid-Ohio lives eternally, like one of those giant turtles at the zoo that never die.
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on August 25th, 2010 •
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Few things can be as dangerous as a sense of entitlement. Because frankly, if Reality wanted to know what you think you’re entitled to, It would beat it out of you with a commercial table saw of some kind. And then laugh dismissively & continue on not caring about what you feel you deserve.
Not everyone learns this lesson, but I did. I did indeed.
Because my senior year in high school, I received a full scholarship to play basketball in college. All those miserable summer games in 128-degree gyms & 9,000-degree blacktops … all the horrible travel & missed opportunities & gruesome floor burns … all the work & the injuries & the stupid, never-ending ball-handling drills … they were all about to pay off. Finally. My thoughts of what I felt I was owed were not subtle:
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Posted by Roy Hobbson on August 22nd, 2010 •
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Well — not CLOSED closed. Just temporarily relocated. Because today we’re making a mad dash out of these here parts & jumping the big stupid Wall of Oppression that has long held us back & we’re running roughshod through the terrified audience at VERSUS.com. Or to put it another way, we’re the bull shown here:
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