When I was younger, driving fast was the irresistible medusa: Euphoria, eyeglazing thrills and day dreams of racing circuits. For every speeding ticket, I must have broken the speeding limits thousands of times. I was never so foolish as to try to outrun the police, but like an alcoholic, after a week's righteous abstinence, the devil speed would take over my brain and I would fall to it's siren song.

After losing my license, my driving would take on a surreptitious air, one eye peeled for the police colors, the other on the speedometer. Trips to the store were punctuated with heart pounding scares as I passed a parked police car, the empty spot in my wallet where my license had lived burning a hole in my head as I cruised the highway to work. One such stint of licenseless existence had me getting up one hour early to take the bus and train to work. Normally a trip of forty five minutes, the bus/train/bus route lasted two hours. I once walked ten miles on a terrifying super highway, cold grit blasting from the eighteen wheeled monsters, their horns scaring me silly.

Like being on the wagon, all the while avoiding friends, enduring family lectures, the exasperated looks answering requests for rides having little eff

ect on my disease. Advice from well meaning friends to "Just don't speed" had me agreeing whole heartedly on the surface, but denying the existence of that speed tumor inside. I guess the only way I could learn was the hard way. The never ending punishment finally got through to my brain, and I started to settle down.

Years later, married and responsible, an occasional radar trap would snare me unawares and remind me of my proclivity for speed. A police car at the bottom of a deserted section of hill, waiting like a trapdoor spider, speed limit signs politically lowered to a crawling number, aimed their radar guns, greased and ready. The courts provided no justice, the judges always siding with their own, dismissing any and all rational arguments. The answer, of course, was to find happiness in driving safely, smoothly fitting in with the traffic, arriving when you get there with the same new looking car you started out with.

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