2019.02.02 Wo-PAH Driving

As an avid consumer of stylized violence in my entertainment, I have a diverse and detailed understanding of how fighting can be shown. The purpose of the myriad of styles is to convey feelings rooted in some primal corners of the human brain. Such fantasies have a lot of ways to be interesting.

My rather limited understanding of actual violence is pretty radically different. It's probably abrupt, and efficiency is likely key.

As an avid driver of performance vehicles, I've experience many sorts of vehicular thrills. There is definitely a trend in the newer performance vehicles I've sampled, they do tend to have generally more peak capability. And that additional capability has been engineered in the manner of a movie fight scene. The throat-clearing downshifts lead into the exaggerated wind-ups of the building forced induction follow through to the augmented raucous exhaust note battle yells.

Now, I am partial to a certain amount of theatre with my hooning, because I'm a child. But the sharply artificial rattle-barking of an over-fueled AMG 43 merely rolling through a parking lot is kind of stupid. And, if I'm totally honest about it, even my beloved Porsche 911 had a certain Bruce-Lee tension to it as you could feel the increasingly available power as the engine RPMs climbed.

And if you can get it right, there's a satisfaction in that too. Because it takes talent to drive fast well. Not just driving fast, because that's stupid outside of a racetrack, but driving fast well. You've got to be attentive to your settings and circumstances and all the vehicular variables and so on with the foolish hooning black arts.

But then you get used to driving a decent electric car, like GHOST. And it's not even a little bit about theatre. It's all about just getting it done efficiently. It's actually really fucking easy to drive fast well, because it's less variable and with less distracting show. It's all so accessible, and I do dearly love control of that kind.

In the movies, the fighters are mostly these body-builder types with showy muscles. But you have to know that, in real life, the deadliest special forces badasses are lanky efficient monsters who quietly end fights before others even know there is a fight.

Driving around in the Porsche, every asshole would try to race me and every police officer would mentally consider if they had an excuse to pull me over. But now that I skulk around in GHOST, I just succeed at speeding without anyone having much notice.