Since I’m now treating this space as a sort of weird news/articles/blog space, I guess I should start posting bloggish things here on a halfway consistent basis. So here goes:

Last night was a pretty damn good night, all things considered. I hung out with friends, lost a game of pool (horribly, I might add) and had a minor run-in with the po-po, just to ensure that for the rest of my life I remember what happened for that whole evening.

So as I’m leaving Pantanas after having had a few drinks at my buddy Drew’s birthday, I get behind the wheel of my roomate’s volvo (lent to me as he didn’t want to come to the festivities). I’ve been out for about 3 hours at this point, and have had a total of 4 beers in that time, so while I can feel the alcohol, I’m pretty much completely sober. I spend a total of maybe 90 seconds driving before I see the lights in my rearview. I don’t even think about it, I just pull off to the side into a parking lot, not a fear in the world. At this point I realize my lights are out, so when the officer slides up and asks me if I know why he pulled me, I immediately tell him the answer, along with the extra information that this is my roomates car and I’m not entirely used to it.

So he asks if I have any weapons and I let him frisk me, take my pocketknife, and then he does the whole sobriety test on me… flashlight in the eyes and stand on one foot and balance (made me count to 21, but I never came close to even having to rebalance — all those years as a circus tightrope-walker apparently paid off).

He informs me that he’s not going to do anything, but that he doesn’t want me driving, so I make sure it’s ok to leave the car where it is for an hour or two and let him know that I have some friends a five minute walk away that can take care of getting the car back and me home and all that wonderful shit. He drives off, I walk away, and that’s that.

What’s weird is that at no point was I really all that worried. I don’t know why. I saw the lights behind me and just reflexively pulled over, and during the whole interaction with the officer I was pretty relaxed and just kind of went along with it. I knew I wasn’t drunk, but the fact did remain that I’d had a couple and I didn’t know how that was going to play out.

In any event, it topped off a pretty fun night out with a good story to tell my Thai slave laborers (and a hell of a lucky feeling). I’ve noticed though over the past day since it happened I kind of imagine that I was more drunk that I really was and the thought is starting to replace the legitimate memory I have of it. So, consequentially I’m writing this entry as much to remind myself in a year that even though I remember being tanked and driving like a crazy that I was, in fact, quite in control of myself. Memory is weird.

I’m sure some of the few that were still around at that point will have their own opinions on that, though.

Some douchebag rich guy wrecked his Ferrari Enzo by driving it drunk into a telephone pole at 162 miles per hour. ONE HUNDRED and SIXTY-TWO mph! And he’s NOT DEAD!

Just a little background on this… Ferrari Enzos are extremely hard to get ahold of. You have to have owned something like 5 Ferraris previously, including the also impossible-to-get-ahold-of Ferrari F50. This guy had two:

So, y’know, of course he decided that one of ‘em needed a good wrecking. The Enzo in the foreground is RIP. See below:

Please note the complete absence of, oh, say, THE WHOLE CAR. Also please note that the V12 engine is conspiciously missing. Most people who own these cars drive them on tracks, sober. And they trailer them to the track.

This driver claimed someone else was driving, got out, and ran up over the hill and into the night, never to be seen again. Evidence at the scene says otherwise. That bastard. Talk about a waste of a perfectly good car.

Props to Ferrari though for some incredible crash protection systems. Who else can claim their car will protect you in an incident like this?

There’s a bit more information where I found this: Hasty Ruminations