PriorBlog

I just read Evel Knievel’s wikipedia entry. I printed it out since it was really long. It has been one of those days when I can’t concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds, but the Evel Knievel wiki entry was so riveting that I am thinking of reading all eight pages again in a few minutes, like when I am done typing this.

What got me interested was piece in the Boston Herald about Sheldon Saltman, a guy who wrote a book about Evel Knievel in the seventies that Evel didn’t like so much. To show his displeasure, Knievel showed up at Saltman’s work, Twentieth Century Fox and beat him up with an aluminum bat. According to the Herald’s report, people passing by the scene thought that it was some type of stunt and consequently did nothing to stop it.

Saltman’s book claimed that Knievel was a drug-addict who beat up his wife. He came to this conclusion after 125 hours of interviews with people who knew Knievel. He has just published a memoir and nineteen pages are devoted to the beatdown. In addition, sometime later this year, he is going to be publishing the interviews, not in print form, but in audio!

Let me just repeat that in case your eyes started glossing over a few paragraphs back:

You will soon be able to buy 125 hours of recorded conversations about Evel Knievel doing drugs and beating up his wife!

At least that’s what it said in today’s Herald. You may have noticed that I often link to the Boston Globe’s website but not the Herald’s. This isn’t because I like the Globe better than the Herald, it’s because the Herald gets blocked at work. I read the article at lunch on paper, not a good link, but try this one. I can’t see it, but I think it’s correct.

It might even be 150 hours. I forget exactly and somebody already stole my paper. Whatever, 125, 150, what an amazing thing to have. I’ll see what the price is and then maybe pull the trigger.

You may ask, why would I want such a thing? I don’t really know, but I do know when I heard about it, the excitement I felt was somewhat like the feeling I get when I go into a bookstore. There’s something about seeing all of those books, they represent to me, each and every one, a large investment of potential free time. Say you pull Les Misérables off that shelf. Since it’s the greatest book of all time, you’re not going to read the abridged version, you’re going to pull down the 1400+ page full translation. If you can get through one page for every minute and a half, that means you will spend roughly 35 hours with your nose in that book. I think about that when I see the books on the shelf, the amount of liesure time required to finish them. While I realize that there will never be enough time to read all of the books I’d like to, to see all of that potential time spread out before me, well, I never make the dismal connection that I don’t have it, instead I find myself sauntering around the store in a catharsis of fantasy, intentionally mistaking the potential for actual.

And this is also probably why I would like to have those Evel Knievel tapes. You wouldn’t even need to have as much free time as a book, come to think of it. You could listen to them in the car, or you know how some people watch teevee during dinner, they could listen to the tapes instead. If I ever meet anybody who tells me they’ve listened to the whole thing, I will immediately envy them for having so much free time. Don’t you want to be envied? Don’t you want those tapes?

One more thing. There are a lot of cool things about Evel Knievel’s wikipedia entry, but I think my favorite is finding out that he had a bodyguard named Boots Curtis.