175

[John DiBartolomeo]

I don’t know if this qualifies as any kind of celebration, but after 175 Blogs and two-and-half years since I’ve been penning them, it seems like a lot of… writing. Add in the countless editorials I’ve written as editor of magazine titles Drag Racing Action, Drag Racing Scene and Drag Racing Edge since 2003, and that’s a lot of – I don’t know what to call it – my thoughts on the sport we all love, with a little bit of BS thrown in there.

I’ve spoken about races I’ve attended, races I’ve won, races I’ve lost, races other people have won, along with other rants – maybe even call them complaints with some compliments thrown in amongst them, but regardless, that’s a lot of looks into my feeble mind.

Someone asked me once if there was a favorite thing I’ve written about. There have been so many that there certainly isn’t just one I can think of, or even maybe one I can remember.

In 2019, I wrote about my thoughts on journalism as a whole, liking it to art, where “art is in the eye of the beholder.” I mentioned this then but, when we had our shop in New Jersey, I used to have an art professor from a local college come and dig through our scrap bin. She’d then have us weld together some of these pieces which she’d call structural art. I had other names for it but I was amazed to attend one of her art symposiums where people would ogle at the pieces and try to imagine what they represented. Me? I knew what they represented – junk – but to each his own.

One of my kids had an art teacher who would often tell him or her; although it had to be her as she still is very “artsy;” that what she did was wrong. What we tried to explain was our thoughts that there really is no right or wrong in art. It is what you make of it. I look at journalism as the same way. Okay, so there are the basics, but generally speaking, it’s still art. Placing quote marks in the correct spot, punctuation and the use of the correct grammar, correct spacing and other typographical checks are just some of the basics. After that…

There was also the Blog about car names, something we don’t see all that often lately. Brutus. Eastern Raider. Yankee Peddler. Strip Poker. Names from a period when the cars were the stars. Today, it’s more about the people than anything else, which is probably what it should be, but oh those names, they defined the car and the driver. And naturally my favorite was the Puerto Rican Dream, a name that adorned the side of my Super Gas Vega from 1983 until the late ‘90s when we retired that car.

No, I am not Puerto Rican, although my esteemed colleague Bobby Bennett of CompetitionPlus.com still continues to refer to me as his favorite Puerto Rican. Rather I’m a full blood Italian, but we had a partner who owned the car, Gilbert Alvarez and the name was his choice. Actually, it was my wife who kidding around gave him the idea. Once he heard it, he was all over it.

There were just so many Blogs that I often forget I’ve written some of them, along with sometimes suffering from that dreaded “writer’s block.” Just like a lot of us, there are instances where I wake up on a Monday morning, knowing I need to have a Blog ready for Wednesday, yet the mind is blank. Somehow though, it just all seems to come to fruition, thank God.

However, before I end this meandering of words, I have to thank each and every one of you for continuing to follow along with me and read the Blog. I’d like to think that more times than none, there are words we can all agree with, and should you not, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. If you’re not receiving the Blog in your inboxes, you can visit www.dragracingactiononline.com and subscribe by filling out the form on the right side of the Home page.

And as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, my thanks goes out also to Artisan Coffee for their continued sponsorship of the Blog.

That’s it for this week.