Interest Stings

The one-of-one life I’ve spent 24 years living.

Want to win me over? You’ll always succeed if you give me something that’s one-of-a-kind. Could be whispering a trivia fact that highlights an anomaly, such as this: “The Chain” is the only Fleetwood Mac song which awards a writing credit to all five of the band’s “imperial era” members — Buckingham, Fleetwood, both McVies, and Nicks. Or, if you have the means, woo me with a talisman which has no brethren.

Last week, I rung in my 24th year of life while spending a full-bore four days in Mexico, covering the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus race team. Here’s a group fueled by a goal no one had ever thought to aim for. Three dozen people, all of whom are one-offs in the best way, gathered to assemble a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle for the punishing Baja 1000 endurance race. I’m not going to write about the Hydrogen Boot here, because I have a substantial draft in the works. What I can tell you now is that these tiring hours constituted a slice of my existence which I will never replicate. The folks in the SCG orbit, from 75-year-old boss Jim Glickenhaus to six-year-old Aurora Skilton, are all singular, all one-of-one. Perfecto.

Some of the many in the SCG fold. L to R: Mathis, Jim, Jesse, me, Glen. Shadow: Kimberly

One treat of my time, emphasis on the “one,” involved riding in a vehicle called the SCG 008. As of this writing, guess how many exist…I’m sure you can.

The 008 has an LS3 V8 from General Motors in a racy body, jacked up on an off-road platform. Three people sit inside, with the driver amidships. I buckled in to the right of Jesse Glickenhaus, and further to the right of father Jim, on a drive from the Baja Inn to the Baja Powerhouse, a garage bursting with character. The experience felt more akin to being a co-pilot in a Cirrus prop plane than shotgun in a car.

A street vendor approached us excitedly at a red light, saying he’d never seen anything like it. Hombre, it’s the only one!

I wrote a piece here some time ago about my collection of things, the esoterica bringing me joy. Yet, as we all know, inanimate objects — however rare — fail to measure against the staggering odds of each human existence.

When pressed, I’ll tell you that the overriding, overwhelming commonality between my friends is their surplus of interest. You have to intrigue me to be a friend of mine. Thus, the people I call “friend” range from younger than me to decades older, spanning across races, religious beliefs, and, to a lesser degree, political ideologies. (Suffice to say, I condemn the current administration.) All of these people are individual individuals. All of these people are interesting.

Shitty practice to dull all of their colors into one over-used, monochrome word, right? In junior year of high school, my English teacher said (I’m paraphrasing) “‘interesting’ is the worst adjective you can use. It doesn’t say anything.” He’s right, but that’s what I want others to come away saying about me, struggling to think of a better term: he’s interesting.

Hydro-Boot, which brought us together

I cannot begin to adequately truncate my last weekend/semi-week into as few words as these, but I’ll sign off by saying that the blood, sweat, and tears of that time serve as a microcosm of what I want to stand for. Bringing ideas which defy initial rebuttals to life (or as close to life as possible), hacking away at what-ifisms, meeting a ton of Björk-esque Army of Ones along the way…that’s who I want to be, from now until the deathbed beckons. Like the friends I cultivate, and the vignettes I dive into — be it as subtle as teaching someone a new fact, or as thrilling as stepping out of SCG 008 from a drive through Ensenada — I want my life to puncture perspective with a series of Interest Stings.