Jace to Face

Let me preface this by saying that I love cars. I'm a fan, as in fanatic. I'm obsessed. I would sooner spend a wild night with a good car than Kate Beckinsale. This will be relevant a few paragraphs down.

Automotive shouty man Jeremy Clarkson recently blogged on supercars. You can read his thoughts here.

For the most part, I agree with Clarkson on this front. I'm glad supercars exist. They are an assault to the ears, a feast for the eyes, and a riot to drive. I must be clear: they're rarely good cars, but the greatest of them maintain a level of stupidity and ridiculousness that make them legendary. I found further common ground with J.C. when he says that the Audi R8 is probably the lone vehicle sitting at the intersection of good car and supercar. It's the only one that does damn near everything you could ask of a road car...and does it well.

So I'm glad we have supercars to ogle at, to fondle, to lust over, but I really can't see the point of owning one. In fact, I'll take a more aggressive position and admit I'll judge any supercar owner...and not favorably. What owners of these cars have done is spend generally in wild excess of a hundred thousand dollars on a car. Lamborghini Reventon owners have spent $1.6 million for their exotic blend of carbon fiber, aluminum, and gasoline. Aston Martin One-77 owners have spent at least $1.7 million on each example of that piece. It's worse than stupid. It's approaching shameful.

Starting with stupid: men who buy supercars are generally thinking with their penis instead of their brains. A Ferrari Enzo cannot perform better on a public road than a $30 thousand Golf R32. In fact, it'll probably do worse. Show an Enzo a speed bump and you'll see that zero-to-sixty times are irrelevant in the real world. Same is true of potholes. Roll a Lamborghini down tenth street here in Atlanta. You'd dislocate every joint in your body and every body panel on the car. And don't bitch to me about fun-to-drive factor. I'd have at least as much fun in a Focus RS because I'm happy with the size of my manhood and don't need to compensate by having people worship my car. Also, at $30k I could replace my whole car for cheaper than it'd cost Lamborghini man to replace those missing body panels. The Focus RS is a good car...a total package. It's a quarter the price of an R8 and just about as good.

Now it gets intense:

Your stereotypical Republican will forever say that people with money should be able to spend their hard-earned greenbacks however they like. From a governmental standpoint, I more or less agree; I don't think Uncle Sam should get too involved on that front. In every other respect though, a man's attitude toward money speaks volumes about his character. What he spends his money on - or more inclusively, puts his money toward - is enormously important. A $150,000 R8? A $1.2 million Bugatti Veyron? This is clearly the property of an individual purposefully ignorant of reality - intentionally blind to the human condition and by extension, willfully disrespectful toward the Divine. The Las Vegas Strip, Buckhead, Monaco...these little dream worlds with their ritzy venues and endless exotic cars...the rest of planet Earth doesn't look, sound, or feel like these. The people that put their money towards keeping their personal fantasy lands rolling? Helluva shame.

Nothing turns out quite like I've got it all lined up in my head right now. Horrific. Or perhaps providential, since the lineup shifts every damn day. In my mounting frustration, I want to offer a not-so-subtle suggestion that this isn't working - the swirling, tumultuous thick of the universe is not moving toward some happy equilibrium.

Yes, my little speck of a point of view is a bit infinitesimal, and the universe never told anyone its final destination was any sort of equilianything. Oh, and my life isn't the sum total of all there is. What? Don't lord these details over me; my life is the extent of the known universe - my known universe. So get your facts straight.

It's a bit of a letdown that I know I'm wrong.

I just wanted to throw this tidbit out there: that life is wonderful and I'm loving it. For anyone even remotely familiar with me, this is obviously a fantastic and unexplored frontier for J. Whizzle. Maybe it's a bit early to celebrate - a bit premature. But I'm not so sure. See, I'm sitting across the street from the Georgia Tech Parking office and I'm still sticking to my happy guns, so there's some resilience to them yet!

I'm sensing a bit of a paradigm shift in the works. A move toward - dare I say it - optimism? I don't know, but yesterday I saw a North Face backpack in fabtastic eighties-era hues (from North Face?!), and I'm madly enamo(red) of it. Ordinarily I would feel incomplete and lacking (see previous post on lust). But today I feel energized. I'm excited by that ridiculous backpack; enlivened by desiring it. And I'm somehow confident that I don't actually ever need to possess it to keep living. It's epic: the backpack and my new paradigm.

Look! Now I see a Nissan 350Z convertible and my day hasn't been ruined! And a pretty girl just talked to me (asked if she could plug in to my socket), and everything's still...that's plug her laptop into the wall socket...geez, people. Calm yourselves.

Further exploring this new ground, recent revelations have given me confident knowledge of something I am called to in life. I don't want to spoil the fun by telling just yet, but it's very exciting. I have no idea how to do it - no idea how to begin. The who, what, when, where is very much up in the air. So lots of unknowns then, but this is not an uncertain thing. It's an eventuality. It's a God-thing, and my passion for it is deeply rooted. So I eager to launch into it, but here in the meantime, I'm going to have fun and enjoy the pre-flight party.

I'm reading a new book. It's Sex God by Rob Bell. And when I say read, I mean I'm listening to it. It's my first audiobook. I know, I'm so hardcore. So far (Disc 2 of 3), it's better than I'd expected, which isn't saying much because I was fairly terrified it would be awkward and terrible. It does* offer a broadened view of some of life's important elements. For starts, Bell vastly widens the idea of sex and sexuality to include all heart connections - so the loving interaction among family, between friends, with God, etc. I thought it was all very flash and attention-grabbing, and I'm still not entirely with him on that front, but I guess I struggle to think of another English word that could take its place and adopt this new meaning.**

I'm going to take something a bit abstract and try to condense it into some words. It's one of those thoughts-on-life, wandering, stream-of-consciousness messes. So bear with me. Or read something more coherent. Save yourself before it's too late!

I've thought for many years that life should be easier than it's been. I don't mean easy, really. I mean simple. Simpler. I entertain the notion that you, me, and people in general are not complicated beings, and the lives we lead are equally straightforward. To be clear, I do think we're profound. The universe is. Its Maker certainly is, and our inherent, dim reflection of his nature bestows that on each of us. We've all said something like, "it's complicated" or "look, my problems are a really complex mess." And maybe it looks that way from a lot of angles, but at heart it's achingly and profoundly simple. So many human messes boil down to the heartache of loneliness, the human need for closeness with God. In fact, I struggle to think of examples that aren't a product of this universal suffering.

I also said life is profound. It has meaning; it's deeply colored with purpose. That's critical considering another universal human trait is a desire for this sort of significance. But oh-so-many things come between us and our significance. We are God's beloved, purposed and empowered. Life is a fantastic journey that dwarfs the bounds of our imagination. This is truth. But we - I - am limited by fear, by the limitations imposed by society and its closed-mindedness, by my own dreams and desires, by distractions ad infinitum. And it's pathetic. It's a sad, tragic little tale of my little life that I, myself, have belittled and bound and bordered and broken. And now I see the great gap between what is and what was purposed to be. The journey to bridge it begins, and it's comforting to know that I'm guaranteed love, grace, company, and victory to keep me buoyant in the equally certain rough bits.

Tangentially related to all this is my recent and cheesy obsession with motorcycles. See, I'm going to get one eventually. Because they are great fun and fascinating engineering, yes, but also because I've always been too afraid to. Like most men, I suppose, I've always wanted a crotch rocket. It's hardcore, badass, and not-so-vaguely sexual. But statistics say 117% of motorcyclists die three times or more on public roads, and this teamed with practicality issues involving storage space and passenger capacity eventually kill the dream stone dead. See but that's ridiculous. There is a reasonable and responsible way to ride the things, and despite the statistics and the legitimacy of my fears, I will. And I'll love it when it's good, hate it when it's raining, and always be excited and emotional about it. And if I die, so be it.

Don't misunderstand me. Like Lewis Hamilton said in his Top Gear interview, "I'm not looking to waste my life." But consider this: living by fear is living small, and that's the worst waste of life.

Simple. Profound. Good living to you.

I'm going to make a radical departure from the norm and play serious for a moment. The Christian church, or at least its more conservative elements, is perceived as the archenemy of the homosexual. It is, for the church and the world observing it, a ridiculous position. The message of Christ is love for all men, flawed as we are. Homosexuality is wrong because God created man-woman intimacy as the sacred right, and as with "let there be light," the rest became darkness. But for all the spotlight on gays, the error is the same for heterosexual ignorance of God. The lonely human heart is driven to terrible ends to soothe itself. But for all of us, the message of Christ is Love rather than condemnation. A homosexual can't help his sexuality nor a heterosexual his own lusts. But the Kingdom offers Love regardless, Love that heals hearts and makes men new. God is compelling because he wins us with his Love. The Christian commission is to do no less for the world.