Road Trip

This is one of those stories that I really should not tell, but I will anyway... Caveats - I won't name any of the other participants - and yes, my kids have already heard it :-)

One Saturday afternoon in early 1972 four of us young men got bored and decided to head down to Richardson, Texas (north of Dallas) to visit a couple of girls (Julie and Vicki - redhead and wavy blonde respectively) who had recently moved from Argyle.
As we headed down I-35E it got a little "smoky" in the car. Yeah - we stopped for gas and rolled the window down. The attendant caught a whiff, yelled "Holy sh*t!" and jumped back about 3 feet... It was a Cheech and Chong moment :-)
So we got to Richardson and hung out with the girls at a local park for a while. And by the time we decided to head back to Argyle it was dark out and well past dinner time... The plan was to eat when we got home but we soon realized that we were just way too hungry to wait (I wonder why) so we pulled off the freeway at Lewisville to "load up" at the Jack In The Box... I seem to recall that I got a Jumbo Jack, large fries, 3 tacos and a chocolate shake. (A light snack.)

After we got back on the freeway I got totally engrossed in unwrapping my burger (which was proving to be rather challenging for some reason) - and when I glanced up I noticed that the car was drifting onto the shoulder and was heading in the general direction of a bridge abutment... I was thinking "Dude! Whoever is driving really should be paying attention!" ... Then I remembered that I was driving... (The steering wheel kind of gave it away.)
So we did make it back to Argyle in one piece and I resolved that I would never drive in that state again (toasted, not Texas) - but I did (multiple times)... Yeah - young and stupid :-)

About a month later I was cleaning out the Charger and discovered that one of the guys had left a little bit of something with a small clip attached under the passenger seat... I was really ticked off! People were getting major prison sentences in Texas for trace amounts and I had been running around town doing burnouts and stuff without realizing that I was "in possession" :-) ... That was not cool!

Aside: I've always considered it kind of a no-brainer that if you have something in your car that you don't want the police to find you should not blatantly violate any traffic laws. Yet it seems like hardly a week goes by without some bozo getting stopped in a border state going 20 MPH over the speed limit with a half-million dollars worth of dope in the car... I mean, I'm glad they get caught and all - but how stupid can you be??? ... I figure they pretty much have to go into "witness protection" afterward because the odds are that someone is very unhappy with them... Honestly - you'd think drug lords would do a better job of "vetting" their couriers before entrusting them with that much stuff... But I'm really drifting off topic :-)

If there's a point here it probably has something to do with the sense of invulnerability and the illusion (delusion?) of control ... I have to admit that I'm amazed I managed to survive my teen years. (I'm amazed that anyone survives their teen years - that's when natural selection seems to be at its peak.) But (unlike most teens) I never felt like I was invulnerable. On the contrary - it has always been one of my defining characteristics that I expect things to go wrong... The problem was that I just didn't care :-)

That's not to say that I threw caution to the wind. That was Steve :-) I only took risks when I felt like I was in control. And that's the illusion/delusion part... It wasn't until many years later that I finally had to admit to myself that I was never really "driving"... I was always just along for the ride...