#NewJerseyMotorsportsPark

I do not know precisely when I became an itinerant. For a long time, I traveled the Midwest racing bicycles. When I was too crippled to race a bike I changed to cars. Some years I am gone from home more than half the weekends of the year, racing cars and teaching at various trackday events. I am on the road four days a week at a minimum in my day job anyway.

Constant motion distorts time, preventing one from seeing the growth of flowers or children. It distorts perspective, focusing attention on the next event and blurring what comes after or came before. It distorts relationships. Friends exist on the phone and the Web. We never touch or meet, comets locked on disparate orbits. A contrail of romantic episodes crystallizes to angry ice in the sky behind me. “I should have known,” an e-mail in my inbox reads, “that nothing you ever told me was real, or true.”

This is what is real and true: the next racetrack and the road to get there.