Currently, as I write this, the NHRA Mello Yello tour is in the midst of a very real summer grind. Six races in seven weeks are at the heart of it, but the bigger summer picture shows the classic crunch. The teams get a breather on either side of Joliet, then it’s off to the Western Swing for three straight, heading from the mountains to Wine Country, then up through the redwoods to Puget Sound. Blink when that’s over, and you’ll miss Brainerd. After Brainerd, it will be time for Indy.

Seriously, didn’t the season just start? It never fails to go this way, where Pomona kicks things off and the full season seems like such a long and insurmountable adventure, but before you can even conceive of it races are piling up and months are flying by like calendar pages in an old black & white movie. If that last reference makes no sense to you, it means you’re too young to remember that old cinematic trick to represent the passing of time.

So right now, everyone is gathering in Bristol, at Thunder Valley. It was always one of my favorite stops and tracks, although there was usually a price to pay. Flying into Tri-Cities Airport requires connections, from MSP, and it requires a larger hit to your American Express bill. Small airports don’t generate the passenger count or competition that might keep costs down, but there’s not much in terms of options when going to Bristol. I’ve used Asheville and Greenville-Spartanburg in the past, but they’re generally not much cheaper and then you have the drive to make after you land. One time, and one time only, I flew into Nashville because it saved me $100. The long drive through a tornado, on the way back, was enough to dissuade me from doing it again.

The hotel situation was never ideal in Bristol either, although we finally did discover a pretty nice place north of the track after staying in Johnson City for so many years. Still, it’s one of those markets where the rates on race weekends bear little resemblance to what they charge on a typical day when nothing big is going on. I can’t imagine what they charge when the circle-track guys come to town.

People often ask me what my favorite tracks are on the NHRA tour, and the usual answer includes Pomona, Gainesville, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Sonoma, Bristol, and a few others. But, if you factor in the overall difficulty of travel and cost, a bunch of those would fall off the list. Combine a long drive from the nearest airport with extraordinarily inflated hotel rates for lousy rooms, and notoriously horrible TSA lines when you’re flying back out, and it can ruin the experience when you do it for 20 years. Or, as I would also say, “If you fly me to Bristol (or insert other town) on your private jet, then helicopter me into the track and have a beautiful motorhome all set up and waiting for me there, that would be really great.” Surprisingly, no one ever took me up on that. Hard to believe, I know. I love Thunder Valley, but I never much enjoyed getting there.

So, here’s this year’s most popular question. Whenever I’m at a gathering of friends and neighbors, people ask, “Do you miss it?” That’s a really good and totally understandable thing to ask. I just don’t have a neat and tidy answer for it.

Do I miss the people? Yes, absolutely. Do I miss the camaraderie, with PR colleagues and teammates? No doubt about it. Do I miss winning races? Oh, you bet! Do I miss the smell of Nitro in the morning? Oh yeah, and I think it becomes a bit addictive after a couple of decades. Do I miss getting to the races, standing in lines at airports, driving rental cars, and staying in so many hotels? I gotta be honest. I don’t miss that at all.

When we instituted the cost-cutting move of having me work from home when LRS didn’t host hospitality, it was very weird at the beginning. Then, a few races into that, I was talking on the phone with Elon Werner and I said, “You know what? It’s weird not being there, but on Sunday we got eliminated in the first round and I looked around and realized I was home. That was pretty good, actually.”

And here’s a piece of trivia based on that prior paragraph. I have, indeed, been to Epping for a race. It was, however, an IHRA race back in  1992 or ’93. Kind of hard for me to remember the specific year. But, LRS never did hospitality there so I have not been back for any of the NHRA events in Epping. I find that kind of funny in a peculiar sort of way.

I still talk with Krista Wilkerson on a weekly basis (we just chatted yesterday, as a matter of true fact.) I text Tim during the races. I talk with Elon and share emails or social-media posts with many of my former PR colleagues. And, I join the rest of you watching on FS1 where NHRA’s ratings and viewer numbers are astoundingly great. All of that keeps me connected, and the Wally trophies remind me of the good times. Every now and then, though, when I look at my Delta page and see that I “only” have about 20,000 miles in the bank this year, I get that pang of “Oh no! I won’t even make Platinum, much less Diamond. What am I going to do?”

I’m going to not worry about it. That’s what I’m going to do. It was great being Diamond. There are a lot of perks that come with that status. But the price you pay in terms of wear and tear on your body and mind is a stiff cost indeed. To be Diamond Elite, your life needs to be overtaken by the travel. I knew I was over it last year, and I’m 100% sure I was right to take this year and just be a stay-at-home writer. It was what I needed to do.

Of course, yesterday I booked my flight to Joliet, flying into and out of that charming little no-stress airport named O’Hare (sarcasm alert), so I do have that on the horizon. And I booked a room for two nights at Madden’s Resort for the Brainerd race. And I might go to Indy. And I definitely will be going to St. Louis. And Vegas. And maybe Pomona. I just need to get the book finished first.

To that end, I now have 21 chapters done and I’m working on Chapter 22 this week. It’s a fairly monumental moment in the book, because this is the chapter in which I take the job as general manager at Heartland Park. My first foray into the racing world. It all speeds up from here! That’s a literal statement and a pun.

Most of the book, so far, has been upbeat and fun, because that’s the way I try to live my life and I’ve been fortunate enough to do that. There are a couple of chapters, however, that simply have to deal with some bad times, or some sad times, or some confusing times, and I try to deal with those stories honestly. I do, however, try to walk a fine line between dragging the reader through too much muck and glossing over it far too much. I just try to be honest. Sometimes that involves telling important life lessons learned through interaction with people I didn’t get along with.

I think one of the things I’ve learned about myself, through this writing process, has been the realization that I have rarely been able, and I’ve rarely been willing, to just put my head down and work when I’m around people who are miserable, mean, or disrespectful. I’ve been flat broke (and deeply in debt) a number of times because I’ve chosen to walk away from situations like that, without taking the time to set up my next move. But each time, I chose to believe there was something better for me, even if I didn’t know what it was. I just trusted myself to find the next answer.

With all that in mind, I’ve made the decision to not share a snippet from Chapter 21. It’s a chapter that needs to stand on its own, and any snippet would be doing it a disservice by removing the overall context. I’ll make it up to you in chapters to follow.

So now, it’s time to write more about being home.

Last weekend, we attended a marvelous party in the old neighborhood, hosted by Mary Beth and Joe Gillis. It was a backyard party, with a fantastic performer who sang and played the guitar, on a perfect summer evening. It couldn’t have been better. But the best part of it was that we simply got the invite and we went. No airplanes, no travel, no trying to coordinate schedules or find someone to look in on the boyz. We just got in the car and drove over there. And we were surrounded by wonderful friends, just like we were the weekend prior when we attended the graduation party at the Blake’s house. It’s very good to be home again.

And, it’s good to be in a “home” again. Barbara had to spend this week out in Liberty Lake, so each day I’ve been trying to tackle one or two things in order to make this house feel like our home. I’m finally getting there.

I’m not doing much in terms of artwork on the walls in the main living space, on the upper level, because I need Barbara’s vision and input on that. But, since the main room in the lower level is mostly my new domain, I’ve worked hard down there. We still haven’t decided about racks for the wine room, though, so I’ve held off on putting any of the bottles away in case we decide to put in all new racks. That means those bottles and cases are still on the floor down there, in front of the big wall where my racing pictures will go. Those frames may need to wait until the bottles are moved, before they find their permanent spots on the wall.

The key to getting started down there was the installation of the new home theater. That happened this week.

Late last week, a new curvy console was delivered. It holds the sound system, the cable box, and our favorite DVDs. The television got mounted to the wall right above it.

We made the conscious decision to get what we wanted, without fretting too much over price. I said “too much” not “at all”. I’m sure you can easily spend $10,000 on a TV and surround-sound system in a heartbeat, if money is no object. I suspect it wouldn’t be that hard to spend twice that, actually. We wanted something nice, something very good, and something that’s on the cutting edge of technology. But, yes, there had to be some sort of limit on the cost. We upgraded our surround system with a new receiver and some ceiling-mounted rear speakers, and we went with a 65-inch LG television with an OLED screen. It seemed like all the TVs at the store were great, but when you’d watch a normal LED screen next to the OLED one, the difference was startling. It’s the finest television I’ve ever had the privilege to watch.

Once everything was installed, I had my parameters in place to start decorating. I decided to do groupings of frames in different parts of the room, as well. Near my desk, in that separated part of the room, it’s all baseball and all my dad. I like having his old Twins jersey right over my shoulder, looking down on me at my desk. His DNA is on that jersey. It feels like he’s there.

Around the TV, it’s entertainment. My autographed “Jersey Boys” poster, our Chuck Jones animation art, and my autographed Rush lithograph of the “Power Windows” album cover. In front of all that, our white leather furniture that dates all the way back to when we lived in Austin. It’s just a love seat and a comfy chair, and it was in our sunroom at the old Woodbury house. We made a point to sit out there on Sunday mornings, reading the St. Paul Pioneer-Press over coffee. We didn’t take it to Liberty Lake, though. We left it here in storage knowing we’d be back.

The reason it’s acting as our interim seating for the theater is because we haven’t totally decided on what theater seats we want. We found some that are spectacular, but they’re incredibly expensive and they’re custom made in Norway. It takes four months to get them, and then there’s that whole pesky problem of even conceiving of spending more (a lot more) on the seats than we did on the TV. The old white leather stuff will just have to do for a while.

On the wall to the right of that, it’s all music. Another autographed Rush lithograph is surrounded by our five framed autographed album covers, ranging from Stevie Ray Vaughn, to Bruce Springsteen, Genesis, Queen, and (duh) Rush.

And last night, to christen the new entertainment system, the first Blu-Ray DVD I cranked up was the “Clockwork Angels” concert, by my favorite band. I didn’t get to see their final tour, last year, so the Clockwork Angels show was my farewell concert, and it was a fabulous way to go out. That was the show we flew down to Orange County to see at the Honda Center in Anaheim. Jeff and Windy Arend were there, as well, although we had floor seats while they were in a suite. Somehow, as 12,000 people exited the building together at the same time, after the show ended, we ran into them outside and Jeff excitedly shouted “Best Rush concert EVER!” I agreed. While the band is still mostly mum on ever playing live again, I suspect there’s a chance they might do a festival or a stand-alone show at some point. I’m just not banking on that, and if Clockwork Angels was my last slice of Rush onstage, it was a fantastic slice.

There’s still so much to do here, but it’s feeling incrementally more like home with each passing day. Both of the spare bedrooms downstairs are still a mess, though, with stuff just piled up wherever we could put it. The whole wine room issue needs to be settled. And next week our master bedroom will enter the world of clutter in a massive way. We’re having our custom closet installed in a couple of weeks, but before that happens the installers will come out and take away the white wire racks we currently have, then they’ll spackle all the holes that will be left behind. We’ll need to repaint in there before the new stuff arrives, and we’ll need to go pick up some temporary racks the company will loan us, to have something to hang at least a portion of our clothes on. We’re a long way from high-fiving each other when we know we’re done getting settled here.

This afternoon and tomorrow, I’ll be back to work on Chapter 22 with tales of my first drag race and all the things we did at Heartland Park. Some of it was great, some of it was weather-plagued. All of it got me started on the path that led to the last 20 years. It’s worth telling.

I’ll see you next week, for another Thursday Blog Day.

Bob Wilber, at your service hanging photos…