1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jules Goux

Don't drink and drive, kids!

I remember when I was a kid at the height of the post-War on Drugs frenzy in the ‘90s. I certainly remember the “this is your brain on drugs” commercials. My middle school ardently participated in the infamous indoctrination campaign DARE, where police officers lectured us on how doing drugs would ruin our lives before I suppose being featured in Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” video probably killed any remaining cred the program had. We even had a Drug Quiz Team that competed to measure how well we had been successfully indoctrinated! I used to wear my DARE shirt all the time and I still think I have it! This was a part of every early millennial’s childhood and I’m not sure how much younger people even know about it since it seems like a lot of the “corny ‘90s culture” like that, Touched by an Angel (which I liked, but I remember exactly nothing except that Roma Downey was in it even though I watched a lot of it), Chicken Soup for the Soul, etc… has faded away. If something had no influence on Internet culture, it’s as if it never existed. Because I for the most part strove to be a rule-abiding teacher’s pet, it worked on me and I had no desire to rebel in those ways, but I wonder whether it backfired overall. Granted, part of it for me was that my mom was a two-pack-a-day smoker for over 40 years until she quit in 2007 and that was an example I didn’t want to follow. So, I was annoying in exactly the opposite way: the kind of person who was so freaking proud about not doing drugs (I even wrote a song about it circa 1996, which I might upload here someday just to laugh at!) while being in denial of the fact that my nutritional atrocities and inability to handle unprocessed foods were probably doing far more damage to me than moderate alcohol consumption would.

But in a way, I was more of a proto-zoomer than a millennial. I know most forms of alcohol and drug consumption (except for marijuana) have declined markedly among Gen Z, but a lot of that is in part due to the fact that people are so addicted to screens and content they forget to live, become more withdrawn, and increasingly disengage from any form of socialization, which I think is the only reason why drug and alcohol consumption has declined, and as I can attest as the prototypical Zoomero Uno, that isn’t a good thing. The War on Drugs kind of succeeded as drug addictions were replaced by possibly even more potent content addictions, but I’m starting to wonder if the latter might have been worse.

Anti-drunk-driving campaigns were also constantly in the news in this period. I remember being a kid and not knowing what “drinking and driving” even meant. When my mom and I visited my Uncle Steve in his Washington, D.C. suburb in 1994, I remember we toured the University of Maryland campus where he worked and a lot of Washington landmarks. At some point during all that, I remember him literally drinking a beer in a glass mug while he was driving, holding the steering wheel in his other hand. And he had muscular dystrophy, no less. I could see with my own four eyes how dangerous drinking and driving was. Apparently, no one had told me that the phrase meant “driving after you drink”. I know it took me way too many years before I learned that “sleeping with” was a euphemism for sex also.

I bring this up because today’s driver Jules Goux literally did just that. According to legend, he ostensibly drank six bottles of wine during his Indy 500 win before the AAA outlawed the practice the next year, although more reputable historians feel this is blown out of proportion and he drank far less. I try to capture what seems to me like the most accurate story of events from the various secondhand sources I read for today’s entry.

I wound up missing the bus by only 20 or 30 seconds. Very much my uncle’s nephew, I was eating my oatmeal for breakfast while I walked to the bus stop and just missed the 10:18 bus, earlier than the 12:08 bus I normally take. While the bus blew by me, I yelled at nearly the top of my lungs, “Bleep you”. Yes, I actually said “Bleep you”, not “Fuck you”. My blend of 1/3 nerd, 1/3 family values guy, and 1/3 trailer trash makes me a total weirdo. I really wanted to go to the men’s support group meeting at Unique Peerspectives today that started at noon after last week’s was canceled due to the Cinco de Mayo party and I skipped the week before. I want to stop venting here as much to people who don’t need to hear it. I ended up actually taking an Uber because I felt I needed to talk to people that badly. But I don’t even feel the $25 I spent was wasted. I actually think it was worth it. I value connection more than I value money and most of the people I used to talk to online seem to want little to do with me anymore… And Internet culture is all about everybody exchanging snarky jokes and I grew tired of that at least a decade ago, maybe two. I want to be earnest, vulnerable, brutally honest, and genuine online and there are few platforms that really reward that. (I guess things like this and Medium are probably the best.) I need to cherish anything that allows me to express myself in those ways, and I think support groups are where it’s at. I’m probably going to go to the neurodivergent support group tomorrow, but I haven’t liked that one as much.