8/8/06
t is not in good form to quote hippie rock stars who alter their brain chemistry too much and rarely changed their hygienically-challenged leather pants, but the famous freaky fop christened Jim Morrison and known to the young girls who understand as “Mr. Mojo” once sang: “Five to one, baby… One in five… No one here gets out alive….”
Sometimes the hippies got it right and this verse was certainly one of those occasions… Indeed, no one here does get out alive, and for empirical proof music fans and drag strip railbirds can just ask Arthur Lee, Syd Barrett, Big John Mazmanian and Sush Matsubara, all of whom made big statements as creative human beings during their careers and had the shitty luck to have the lights turn out permanent-like in the last month. So: those guys all knew that the trick is to getting out *while* you are still alive, because if you do not get out at all you might as well not be alive… and that all looks simple enough on paper, but sometimes getting out at all requires desperate measures. And sleep deprivation.
Which every August, somehow relates to a drag strip in Boise, Idaho and its kissin’ cousin in ridiculous displays of acceleration, the Speed Week time trials at the Bonneville Salt 
Flats…
Firebird Raceway in Boise stages its annual Nightfire Nationals and it is one of a handful of independent, free-range drag meets that actually turns a profit… thousands and thousands of speed fiends come out of Idaho’s big tall capital city and the surrounding wilderness and buy a ticket to get dosed and dazzled by a smorgasbord of boss machinery: tire-smokin’ steel doorslammers, fire-belching jet dragsters, bumper-scraping wheelstanders, banzai bing-bing ricocheting AA/Altereds and nitro-burning AA/Fuel Dragsters, all of which are pounding the pavement in supreme fashion, with awesome displays of horsepower being applied to black pavement sticky as Satan’s cotton candy…
It’s absolutely hellzapoppin and soul-cleansing… and, if you believe the words of Jim Morrison, it is also necessary… if you live in Boise, you are “sorted,” as the phrase goes….But if you live anywhere else, you gotta ignore gas prices and get on your pony and ride, I reckon…
Yes, I believe Mojo’s words. I believe a drag race in Boise is necessary and the Bonneville Salt Flats have to be dealt with in this life also… So I took those words of Dead Jim Morrison to heart a couple of years ago and motored all night to Boise to see Top Fucking Fuel, and even though this road trip came on the heels of my having finished a sixty hour work week and that mind and body were both wiped out by the repetition, ennui and grind of commuting, gridlock, and then punching a time clock; the night I left I had very little left for anything, much less pulling an all-nighter across the forgotten highways of the Great American West in order to catch a drag race.