May I recommend screaming? It is an excellent form of release on many levels. I mean really screaming, like I did yesterday.
I was invited to Las Vegas for the weekend by Mr T who, along with 350 others top managers, were being aimed and dined by their CEO.
Two things…………..
1. I am not a convention kinda girl.
2. I loathe Las Vegas.
My deepest apologies to those of you who live there, work there, vacate there or frolic there. Admittedly not a fan of the desert, I have come to appreciate its particular beauty and nothing beats a desert “big sky”. I get why some people love it… Why Mr T loves it. I however, do not. Hell, in my youth, I even backpacked through the Mohave for 5 days, sleeping on rock ledges, washing from a canteen (yuck), on the lookout for snakes, scorpions and every other killer that lives out there. I enjoyed that experience; after which…..I was done. I did the desert.
So when Mr T asked me to be his girl at a gathering of the Moneyman Clan in Las Vegas…..you know I started humming “what I did for love.”
On entering the hotel lobby, it all came screaming back. All the elements of Sin City go against my grain. The hotel design that forces me to always walk through the smoke filled Casino (as a result I coughed all night), the mind numbing slot machines everywhere, the vacant hungry eyes of the players, the overstimulating lighting designed to disorient and distract – a cavernous suspended limbo where the price of entry is the unspoken agreement to check Conscious Mind at the door, allowing Shadow Self to rule and reign for the hour, the day…..the lifetime. Every shallow breath I took felt poisoned.
The following night, after filing onto a “tour bus” (not a tour bus girl either) which took us to the outer limits of Sin City, I was on my way to my first NASCAR experience. 
Stepping off the bus, I came face to face with the roaring parade of steroid pumped race cars. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain. The rev of the engine sent tingles straight to my…..exactly!!!!My heart started racing, my mouth went dry and my inner Danica Patrick took over. I was going to do laps around the Las Vegas Motor Speedway strapped into a tiny race car with a professional driver at the wheel, Feeling the restrained power of that engine, we took our place in line. The noise of the engines all around, creating a cocoon of muffled silence inside my helmet. Screaming my name, my sweating driver shouted “Joe” as we bumped fists. And then we were moving….slowly at first, and with no notice he hit the acceleration….and holy shit!!!!!!!! We were whizzing around that track at blurring speeds and at impossible angles, the car seeming to tilt where I thought we had to be on the two side wheels. Leaning into the steep curves, the roaring beast under me scaled the walls, climbed the bleachers and devoured the flag on the flagpole. As my mind fought to reconcile its body’s new reality my heart dove into my throat, my bladder in a dead faint threatening a release, saved only by my sphincter who slapped it awake with “Hell no! We are NOT going there!!!” I was rendered scared shitless, literally screaming my ass off. Oh my God! Thrilling!
Zooming around that track at speeds close to 200 mph. I screamed like a crazy woman. I screamed with abandon. I laughed and howled and screamed and cussed. I prayed to Jesus, then baby Jesus and then I screamed some more. I was a loud screaming banshee of a black woman in the middle of a desert going 200 miles per hour. It was heaven.
So….I still don’t like Vegas, but while there….I found me a big hunk of Lovely. Thank God I didn’t know about this in my youth, when I thought myself immortal. I would have been the first woman to win the NASCAR Daytona 500!! I love race cars.
That was a Lovely Interruption.
