Good lord, I haven’t posted in almost a week. That’s like, blog kryptonite, or something.

This week’s slightly bike-related post is about the often-times painfully bored existence of the stereotypical adrenaline junkie. The event that brought about this post was a short car ride. Last week at work, one of Fullface Kenny’s friends stopped by. This friend, a Porsche driving school instructor, was driving a Nissan 240. The Nissan 240 contained both a roll cage and a Chevy LS1 motor (the same one that you’ll find in a Corvette).

You see where I’m going with this…

We spent all of 5 minutes driving around the deserted back road from the shop. A large portion of that 5 minutes was spent drifting sideways and/or accelerating as fast a possible. It’s amazing what a very skilled driver can do with a very powerful machine. I spent most of the time plastered against the seat and giggling as much as I could.

According to Kenny, that’s Dude’s normal mode of driving. He gets tickets. Apparently, he once got a warning for wheelie-ing a street bike in front of a cop with a 24-pack of budweiser strapped to the tail. Why no ticket? Because the cop said that it was the dumbest thing he’d seen that day and was going to have a good time telling his buddies back at the station.  What’s the point of telling you all of this? Well, I can see a few of you shaking your heads and thinking about what a total idiot this guy is. However, also according to Kenny, the guy has worked his way up a corporate ladder and has a very respectable, clean-cut, wear-a-suit-and-carry-a-card job. I can only imagine how much stupidly fast and sideways driving it would take me to unwind from that sort of thing.

“Adrenaline Junkie” is a totally cliched and played out stereotype, but if you think about the meaning of the words, it makes unfortunate sense. For whatever reason, we belong to a subset of homo-sapiens that requires heavy doses of epinephrine on a regular basis in order to feel satisfied with life in general… very much like an individual addicted to any externally available drug, substance or action.  If you don’t get it, you experience withdrawal.

Boredom.

For those of us living with co-morbidities of both adrenaline junkie-ism and Attention Deficit Disorder (maybe the two go together like diabetes and high blood pressure?), normal life can sometimes start to get depressingly boring, so we do things that other people think are crazy… like driving a car really fast and sideways, riding a mountain bike at high rates of speed, or completing incredibly random expeditions via various modes of human-power.

Side note- if you look into the bikecar videos at that last link, you’ll see the one I posted a couple of months ago where the expedition was interrupted by a motorized car. Dave looks almost excited that some sort of dangerous wrench was thrown into his plans. “F*CKYEAH, EXCITEMENT!!”

Boredom is a horrible thing. It’s almost physically painful. Some people reading this will agree, others will think I need to take my Ritalin and chill out. I’m on a constant search for small bites of excitement in everyday life. Not necessarily for adrenaline-raising purposes… just mostly for “something different and awesome” purposes.

Sometimes, it’s just cool stuff that shows up at the shop:

(that bike is all Campy!)

…or outside of the shop:

(Indy caught his 2nd mole ever… he has to eventually with the number of holes he digs in the process!)

Whatever it is, when I don’t get it, I start doing crazy things like cutting my hair into a mohawk or getting a new piercing. Anything to add the edge of danger or excitement to mundane periods of life.