Greetings from snowy and single-digit Minnesota! It’s great to be here for almost an entire week, and now it’s time for the fun stuff. Kickstarter is over, all of my backers have paid, and it’s time to get to work shipping these rewards out to people. Since all of the rewards were kept here, instead of bringing the mountain to me I’ve come to the mountain to pack them up and ship them out. I should be continuing that right now, actually, but this particular Thursday is getting away from me so blogging comes first.
I dropped by the Woodbury post office yesterday to pick up some Flat-Rate Priority Mail boxes, which offer you the challenge of seeing just exactly how much material you can stuff into the smallest box, and today it’s time to actually do that. They didn’t have a size that would easily hold a die-cast car that’s still new and in the box though, so I had to make a side trip to the UPS store to buy some of those. And here’s where we stand… All of the die-casts are boxed and ready. All of the jackets are boxed and ready. All of the embroidered CSK starting-line shirts (are you following me here, with this trend?) are boxed and ready!
Now it’s time to transition to the printed crew shirts, which take up much less space so I’m trying to fold and cajole them into going into the smallest possible fixed-rate boxes. See the little box on the counter? That has a shirt in it! It’s a tedious process, and it might work better if I had three hands, so maybe it is better that I take a break and write a little here. Plus, I’m already dreading the trip to the post office when it comes time to march these stacks of packages in for shipping. I’m not going to be a popular guy in the eyes of anyone behind me in line. Yes, they do have automated kiosks but I think the process will go more quickly if I work with a human, especially for the boxes that are going to Australia and Canada. Do you think I could hire someone to take all of these to the post office tomorrow? Anyone want a job for a day? I can’t promise it will pay well, but it will look snazzy on your resume’ under the heading of “Shipping and Logistics Specialist at RJW Communications”.
(Remember, you can click on the photos to make them larger)
As for the writing of “Bats, Balls, and Burnouts” it continues to come along rather swimmingly. I’m now at about 80 pages, which means we’re getting dangerously close to approaching the 25% mark in terms of anticipated length. The only trouble is, Chapter 6 is the one I wrote this week, and it was a 30,000-foot overview look back at just what it was like to grow up in the Wilber family as a kid. When I take on Chapter 7 next week, it finally gets me to college. I still have college, minor league baseball, sports marketing, and indoor soccer to get through before I get to the part where I see my first drag race. Drag racing, then, will be the entire focus of the rest of the book, so I better get there by the 200th page or so. Just keep writing, Wilber!
This morning, I got Chapter 5 back from my esteemed editor, Greg Halling, and I continue to marvel at his ability to see through the clutter of my wordy style in order to trim just the fat away and make it all more coherent. Gee, can you tell he doesn’t edit this blog?
When I look at his edits and changes, and read his comments in the margins, I try not to let that be just a moment where I think “Yeah, that’s better” but also a moment where I become aware of the “why it’s better” side of it. If I can absorb some of that writing skill by osmosis, my hope is that Greg will have less and less to snip, trim, or change as we move forward. I can hope, anyway. No promises!
His view of this process is also impressive because, as he said in the beginning, “It’s your book. I’ll just be here to fix problems and offer solutions, but it’s your story to tell.” He’s able to do that at every turn of a sentence, and I’m getting to the point where I’m damn proud if two paragraphs in a row come back with no edits or corrections. I feel like I’m getting better, and I hope that’s the case. I am still the guy who, when this blog was on NHRA’s website, would have to sheepishly send corrections to Phil Burgess and Candida Benson after the blog was posted, under my pseudonym of “Mr. Typo.”
When I finished Chapter 6 this morning, I was on such a roll I thought I could even dive into those college years and Chapter 7 today, but with this mountain of packages already waiting, and 20-some more shirts to be wedged into those small flat-rate boxes, followed by schlepping all of this stuff to the post office, I think I better concentrate on this fulfillment process. I won’t be back here for a couple of more weeks, and that trip will be with Barbara, her brother Tim, and his wife Kelly, to see the Bruce Springsteen tour when it makes its way to Xcel Energy Arena at the end of the month.
My original ticket to fly here had me coming in when I did, on Monday, and then not flying home to Spokane until Sunday. I did that because the Saturday night stay-over lopped about $100 off the fare. Once I got here, that started to seem more and more silly, so I gave that discount back to Delta by changing my ticket to Saturday afternoon. And now I’m feeling like I’m up against a wall getting all of this stuff out and in the mail. Time to focus! What? Hey look, a squirrel!
The added bonus for flying home Saturday is that I’ll now be home on Sunday when the first-ever NHRA and Fox Sports 1 telecast goes out to the world live. I am really looking forward to that, although this week has been kind of surreal and uncomfortable in that regard. The sportsman teams are racing right now in Pomona, as I write this. Tomorrow, Team Wilk and all the other Funny Car and Top Fuel teams will hit the track for their first qualifying sessions of the season, and I’ll be right here cramming more shirts into more tiny little boxes.
All this week, my former PR colleagues have been on Facebook and Twitter, documenting their travels and their anticipation for the season to begin. I’m as excited as anyone about the season, and I’m over-the-moon fired up about the new TV deal, but I have to be brutally honest in one regard. I’m not very sad that I don’t have tales of airports, airplanes, rental cars, and hotels to tweet about. I figured it out for sure this week, when everyone was traveling to get there and all I did was come back here to Minnesota to handle some business and get this shipping done.
And my friend Kelly Topolinski, who also walked away from the sport we love after last year, just tweeted this:
It’s a small boat, but we’re in it together.
For 20 years I loved my job. I got better as a PR person, I made friends who are the most inspiring group I’ve ever known, and I went through all of the ups and downs of being a part of the team. But when this week rolled around I knew I had made the right choice.
I’m loving the process of writing this book. It’s what I was meant to do. And I was even more “over” the grind of the travel than I let myself realize, at the time. 20 years of it was enough. I like having something approximating a more “normal” life right now. And I’ll get my NHRA fix at a few races and on FS1 and FOX.
And it’s not just the fact that I had to travel so much for so many years. I’m a stressful traveler. I can’t help it, and every week when I’d go to a race it was the same long series of things I had to worry about and couldn’t help worrying about. Would the TSA lines be long? Would the plane leave on time? Would I get upgraded? Would I make my connection? Would my bag meet me at the other end? Would my rental car be there, and would it smell like a dead body was in the trunk? Would the hotel have my reservation, and would a gymnastics team be in the room above me? Would traffic to the track be bad in the morning? Would we qualify? Would the traffic heading out of the track be bad each night? Would I sleep okay? Would we lose in the first round? Would my flight home be on time? And on, and on, and on. Do that for 20 years and it wears you down. It’s just how I’m wired, and I know I got all of this from my dad, who got to airports two hours early back in the days where there wasn’t any security.
My travel now is far less stressful. If my flight is two hours late, no biggie. I’ll get where I’m going and I won’t be late to the track because of it.
As I’ve been writing about the various years of my youth, two of the more entertaining summers were 1971 and 1972, when I spent a few months with my dad as one of the batboys for the Denver Bears, the Triple-A minor league team he managed. In doing a little research, I found this classic old photo from 1971. By my recollection, from left to right that’s Big Del, Norm McRae, Charley “Shooter” Walters, and Garland “Shifty” Shifflett, on the field at Mile-High Stadium, staring at a clipboard that no doubt contained the secrets to the baseball universe. They were great guys on that team, and they treated me very well despite the fact I was the dorkiest 15-year-old in North America.
But, what really struck me about this photo was my dad. How old do you think he looks? To me, as a kid, he was always an older-looking guy, and by the time I spent these summers in Denver with him, I considered him an old man. But was that just the perspective of youth?
Amazingly, my father was 52 when this photo was taken. I’m 59 right now. How can that be?
Time is a strange thing. It’s linear, and it never stops, but our perspectives certainly do. And I think men of my dad’s generation did look older. They’d come through the Depression, they’d fought in a World War, and they’d worked hard to support their families. We have so many luxuries and benefits now, I think my peers and I look far younger than my father and his peers did at the same point in our lives.
That was deep!
Time to get this posted and cram some more shirts into boxes. Lots-O-Fun!!!
Bob Wilber, at your service!