When I'm in town on Sundays I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.
The United Nations four or five years ago put out a study that said the meat industry meat-eating growing meat for food is the No. 1 killer of our planet - not No. 2 or No. 3: No 1. You know what's No. 2? Transportation. Everyone thinks that No. 1 is transportation and goes out and buys a hybrid car. Screw the hybrid cars. Don't eat hamburgers.
Some people think my father was a spy because of working for that government agency in Vietnam but he can't find his car keys much less keep a national secret.
When I climb into my car I enter my destination into a GPS device whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember books to store knowledge and now thanks to Google I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
Every time I get into a Nationwide car after being in a Cup car I feel so much more comfortable than I did previously.
On Memorial Day I was out floating on Lake Norman and came across Denny Hamlin. We struck up a conversation and one of the first things we were talking about was how much it helped him when he started racing the Cup car and how much it helped his Nationwide program.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images its dreams its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination Watergate Vietnam.
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself the engineer is explained by natural selection.
America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Remote villages and communities have lost their identity and their peace and charm have been sacrificed to that worst of abominations the automobile.