It's possible that P.J. O'Rourke and I both peaked around 1978, but that is not the point. I am not here to salute everything he wrote, and he, sadly, is no longer here to say anything at all.

With a handful of articles, he was a big influence on me when I was an adolescent, possibly because he wrote like one in all the best ways.

He would have perfected this at National Lampoon, but I didn't see that work until years later. The articles of his I remember appeared in car magazines, where he mocked convention by doing thousands of dollars of damage to company-provided Jeeps in Mexican deserts with former Monkees or turning a rough-and-tumble road rally into a sedate driving tour of the Northwest. In that latter story, he was supposed to be off-roading against teams from all the other car magazines, but the worst hazard he took on were terrible wine from Washington. He made a very funny joke about that. It made my teenage self laugh-snort.

This is the kind of writer I wanted to be. I was never that writer at The Dallas Morning News, and the odds are against me becoming him at the American Heart Association, but a guy can dream.

But because I was an editor at The Dallas Morning News, I met him once. He was speaking to the editorial board. The article I wrote that captured all the details of that day existed only as a blog post, and those electrons are either obliterated or locked away on a database somewhere where they will do no further harm. I am OK with this. Not really.

Let me rephrase that: I am the only person who cares about this. Perhaps there is a 15-year-old who saw that post, which required me to travel about 57 steps from my cubicle, and said, "This is the type of thing I want to do with my life," thus completing the circle. It is unlikely. And if so – I'm sorry, kid. Truly.

But this was 2009. O'ROurke was talking about one of his political books. I didn't care about his political views, at all. I endured the meeting, which I recall as cold, serious and dull in the way that only a meeting at The Dallas Morning News could be, and accosted him as he headed for the elevator.

I had one question: In his recently released "best-of" collection, he had cut the joke about the terrible winery. I demanded to know: why?

He smiled, maybe chortled. "It turns out, the wine wasn't that bad."

I hope that wherever he is now, there is golf, good wine and minimal retribution for supporting all those Republicans.

(This New York Times review of “Driving Like Crazy” captures his essence nicely.)

A narrative, in haiku.

Autumn sky wears orange

I drink the golden WUP-wup

god not this again

WUP-wup. Wuppa. WHIRRRRRRR

thup thup (rattle) WHIRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrWHIRRRRRRR

I may kill neighbor

No – peace comes when I

set anger free WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR or I

could buy a chainsaw

WHIRRRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

<Silence.> Finished I hope? WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Jurors won't convict

I'm called to forgive

WHIRRRRrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrgh rrrrgh rrgh <pause> WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I call Home Depot

Yank cord in his yard

THOKTHOKTHOK HA HAHHHH JERKFACE

NO MORE LEAVES FOR YOU

It turns out a tree

falling alone in suburbs

sounds just like sirens

Community service

Gathering trash, I wear orange

Worth it? Oh heck yeah

Yesterday, I had my regular I’m-Getting-On-My-Bike-Again-and-This-Time-I’m-Sticking-With-It-and-Not-Going-Another-Six-Months-Between-Rides ride around the neighborhood. I do this every time the weather turns nice in Texas — which means, once every six months or so.

Anyhow, while riding along a mildly busy road, I came up with an easy solution to air pollution and global warming. What if we just moved exhaust pipes to the front of cars, instead of the rear? Make us all suck our own emissions, instead of complaining about the person ahead of us?

You can bet this would cut down on unnecessary trips to the store. And it would have the added benefit of killing off the drivers of the largest SUVs soonest.

I still want to take a coast-to-coast drive in a comfortable old German car or maybe a simple camper someday, so maybe we should try some other planet-saving measures first, just to make sure I am inconvenienced as little as possible.

So the experiment of using this blog to replace Facebook didn’t work out so well. But here is a recent Facebook post, about a chair, that has some relevance to this site.

The chair in question.

Dallas friends – if you would like a chair, let me know. The mechanical and emotional details follow.

The facts are, this is an Ethan Allen recliner, purchased circa 1995. Aside from a few love marks from 25 years of cats, the leather is in good shape. The varnish has worn off the arms in some spots. The cushioning is comfy.

The recliner mechanism is problematic. If you attempt to recline, you will travel backward with the speed and velocity that will recall any number of amusement park rides of your youth – the ones maintained by half-awake carney types who make you fear for your life, especially when it flings you with enough force to raise the front legs an inch or so off the ground and you wonder if you will be flipped through the window behind you. When the seat has arrived at its full not-upright position, it makes a loud THUNK and drops a couple of inches on the right side, as if the floor is collapsing beneath you as your house slides down a hill.

The exuberance with which the chair flings you back is matched by its reluctance to let you go forward. With your back sinking into the soft, leathery cushion, you will need to find a way to lift your gluteus region high enough to extend your legs to provide leverage to tilt your body and the chair upright. If you have, say, a pulled muscle anywhere or weigh more than approximately 25 pounds, you might find yourself on the verge of crying for help or cursing the fact that your iPhone is just out of reach on the nearby shelf, like a can of Mace someone is reaching for at the climax of that horror movie that I think starred Bea Arthur but can’t recall the title of now. Although rest assured, that when the moment to traverse forward comes, it will come suddenly and with great enthusiasm, probably flinging the drink you set on the armrest, and possibly all of you, to the floor.

The THUNK problem began last spring, and I spent many hours trying to fix it. I finally realized it would require more disassembly than I was willing to undertake even in a pandemic. I called a chair repair place. The kind people told me it was almost impossible to fix a recliner mechanism in a way that made anybody happy, so they would not even attempt it.

I purchased another chair last month, so I must part with this one.

I am reluctant to do so. We bought this chair soon after we bought our first house but before we had children, which meant we had free time and spare money and devoted a ridiculous amount of effort to its selection. Melinda and I visited multiple stores before I declared this one to be superlative. We waited possibly weeks or months for it to be built and delivered, then had Ethan Allen employees come out to adjust the mechanism when it behaved questionably. I envisioned this as my very own Archie Bunker chair – not for its casual, comedic racism but for the way I intended to expound on all the world’s problems from it for decades to come.

I would say I watched a lot of sports from it, but to be honest, if the game mattered, I was probably jumping up and down or pounding the floor. But I would sometimes hold my little girls on my shoulder while I sat in this chair, and my then-small children later enjoyed playing on this chair, which may or may not have contributed to the warping of the mechanism. I also wrote about 40 percent of my novel from this chair (another 40 percent having been written in bed, 10 percent being done at the library and the rest done in coffee shops or wherever I could steal a half-hour). I did almost all my reading as books editor from this chair. Melinda took a lot of naps in this chair. It was really comfy.

But it’s gotta go. Yours free for pickup because it deserves a better fate than a landfill. Or you can wait until next week when I will list it on Craigslist for $50 and settle for $20.

I remember three things about this book: First, I liked it. Second, always wear your seat belt. (Apparently, in the early 1960s, that was considered unmanly, which is why there are not a lot of old racers left who can talk about those days.)

Anyhow, the movie Ford vs. Ferrari is upon us. It’s based on A.J. Baime’s Go Like Hell, which really is a much better title, don’t you think?

I wrote this back in 2009 for The Dallas Morning News. It’s no longer available on that site, so I am reposting here.

Not long before I wrote, I’d been hanging out with a bunch of smart people at an NEA fellowship. This was one of the first times I was really able to apply what I had learned. The writing is a little over the top for me – I’m not one to go like hell, but I pushed myself because that matched the spirit of the book. I think it holds up well. You tell me.

June 21, 2009
Chrome, sweet chrome: A.J. Baime shares the revved-up thrills of '60s auto racing at Le Mans

By MICHAEL MERSCHEL

Like the cars it describes, Go Like Hell is a streamlined marvel built for speed, fueled by testosterone and likely to elicit happy grins from anyone who has ever heard music in the squeal of a tire or the roar of an engine.

Playboy editor A.J. Baime takes readers back to the early 1960s, when auto racing was a brawny, bloody affair, when seat belts were considered unmanly and spectacular deaths were commonplace.

And "the greatest automobile race in the world," he says, was the endurance contest in Le Mans, France, where drivers battled on an 8.36-mile course in what was described as "a four-hour sprint race followed by a 20-hour death watch."

A business deal gone sour made this contest personal for two titans: Enzo Ferrari and Henry Ford II.

Ferrari was an international enigma, "a man who built racing cars but refused to attend races. Who worked tirelessly to perfect state-of- the-art machines yet feared elevators." His cars were "built by Italian artisans, every detail down to the steering wheel handcrafted using some of the same methods used to make Roman suits of armor." At the 1963 Le Mans race, his cars placed first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

Ford was the industrial scion who had saved his grandfather's company from ruin and now coveted the European market - and the millions in sales that would come from victory at Le Mans, "the most magnificent marketing tool the sports car industry had ever known." His directives were as clear and as blunt as the card he handed an underling on race day: "You better win. HF II."

Even with the millions of dollars at his disposal, winning would be no easy task. Ford's team would have to create a car that would be durable enough to race for 24 hours straight at speeds beyond 200 mph, covering the length of a football field every second. At the time, Ford had never even managed to build a car that could outrace a Corvette.

Key to Ford's dream was an overalls-wearing Texan, Carroll Shelby, who cut his racing teeth in races in Grand Prairie and Fort Worth. Shelby was recruited to drive for Ferrari and, with his own personal band of gearheads, went on to create a Ford-powered car that outraced any committee-built product the corporation had been able to produce.

In the same way that Shelby straddled the worlds of Ford and Ferrari, this book straddles eras. At its beginning, a driver's instinct and a designer's vision are enough to win. At the end, cars are being analyzed by computers and tweaked by teams of engineers. And the carnage among drivers, both on the track and off, is beginning to force automakers to factor safety into their efforts.

Baime never gets bogged down in technical details and only rarely slips into hyperbole. ("The pavement beneath his feet was drenched in glory, courage, honor and blood.") He merely hits the gas, pops the clutch and takes readers on a red-blooded ride to glory that will have them smiling all the way to the checkered flag.

Go Like Hell
Ford, Ferrari and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans A.J. Baime
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26)

So, I am experimenting with replacing Facebook as my blogging tool of choice. Here is a post I wrote there yesterday.

TL;DR Free lawnmower available. 

Full version: Let us pause to honor fine machinery. 

I don't even know how old this mower is. It came into my possession as a hand-me-down from a generous friend of  who was getting married. It replaced a terrible, corded electric Craftsman that tried to kill me once by whipping me across the groin before it burned out after only three years. The mower, I mean. 

Anyhow, I thought this one, which was up to four or five years old when it was given to me, would last a couple of years before it died and I replaced it with something nicer. 

That was in about 1999. It has never died. It has probably mowed (let's see, figure a quarter-mile of yard a week times 20 weeks a year times 20 years) a lot of miles of scaldingly hot Texas grass since then. It can be finicky to start, but it has never been tuned, never even needed a new spark plug -- I think I replaced the air filter now and then and sometimes added oil. 

I used it once this March, then picked up a cool battery-powered mower from Craigslist. That one has been running great. So it's time for this one to go.

I just now pulled it out of the garage, added a little gas, and, after about 5 minutes of pulling and priming, it coughed to life with a cloud of smoke and a hearty American fossil fuel roar.

It's free for any friends who could use it. It'll be posted for $25 on the neighborhood market site later, the price reflecting that it is still a viable tool. Maybe needs new wheels and a sharper blade. I'll throw in the gas can and half a gallon of gas for free. 

May we all be so hardy and surprisingly long-lived.

Hi. I am thinking about starting a blog because I am tired of Facebook getting all my work for free. So let’s see how this goes.