The most popular are smoking, drinking and fornicating. Other people succumb to cursing, or anger and other intangible toxins. For me, my vice is driving intoxicatingly fast. Fast enough to feel my left hand jackknife in the wind as it’s extended from the door of my bright red car.
There is something about being behind the wheel of a machine that is totally within your control. One that can reach seemingly unreachable and unsafe heights of speed and a machine that can—for the most part—come to a stop when you demand.
All the mechanical aspects of cars are of no interest to me. However, there is a certain rush of blood that rises from my fingertips, up my forearms, through the biceps and then diffused to the rest of my body when taking a corner obscenely fast, or flirting with the speedometer in my car. As much as the Florida Highway Patrol has tried to reign in this habit, there is still something exhilarating about releasing so many emotions onto a pedal that is no more than 10 square inches.
In my younger years, I would have judged someone whose vices involved drugs and or sex. To this day, I still have a blue joke about women and cigarettes that I tell friends. But as the points on my driver’s license started to pile up my penchant for considering the speed limit a suggestion rather than a demand fit the definition of vice: an evil or wicked action, habit or characteristic.
We all have our vices, many of which we are not proud about—some of which we hardly admit to ourselves. It would be easy to traipse through life pretending they do not exist in our lives; however, when lies are the foundation of our existence, life is eventually going to descend into rubble.
Once we are buried beneath the veneer of perfection, our vices become all the more human. Of course, to err is human; to forgive is divine.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
