No Gold for the Fastest Ejaculator: A Meditation on Speed

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Slow has four letters like Life. Speed has five letters like Death.”—Indian traffic sign, 1996

“Hasty and slow meet at the ferry.”—Arab proverb

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—1/31/11—At 6′ 4″,205 pounds, I’ve never been considered slow, but I’ve never been admired for the swift completion of my rounds, either. In high school, I did compete in the mile relay, but only when one of the regulars pulled up lame. My none-too-good best event was the high jump, where speed is but one factor in determining success.

Perhaps this is where I developed my taste for sour grapes.

If not the track, perhaps the origin of my distaste lay on the Autobahn. Having lived in Germany for six years, and driven a small car on Hitler’s highways, I can assure you that nothing breeds contempt for speed faster than having a Mercedes or BMW slam past your VW at 150 mph. I say “slam” because, at that speed, a shock wave slaps the face, insults the automobile, and offends all sentient nature.

Woe awaits the “beetle” that invades an empty-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see left lane to pass a moseying truck on the Autobahn. With blue-halogen “light horns” flashing, Lord Beemer, who suddenly appears from the netherworld, will quickly let the insect know that lords alone are entitled.

Here at home, I’m confident the highway patrol appreciates what “speed limit” means, because they often fudge with the flow like everyone else. We’ve all followed a police cruiser at speeds faster than the “law” allows. Even on the flattest, smoothest road in the best of weather, no two drivers are always going to drive the speed limit as long as cars have humanly controlled accelerators.

What I object to is the “tube-sock approach to speed,” where one velocity fits all. My sense is that a vehicle’s speed should be infinitely but not wildly variable at all times. Crosswinds, the sun in the face, deer on the road, near-naked women on billboards—there are countless reasons to vary one’s speed that the cruise control cannot recognize.

Of course, it can be adjusted or disengaged but, as I have observed my wife, using this labor-saving device, she will change lanes in heavy traffic rather than modify her speed. From the saucer eyes of those who roar up behind us, she’s not alone. I sometimes remind her that the automotive equivalent of the auto-pilot is a dangerous convenience when Corvettes are sailing along at 90 and the last of the Pintos are struggling to maintain 55. My helpfulness is usually met with, “Do you want to drive?”

Call me what you will, but you won’t find a spoiler on my butt.

Had I grown up in the Khoikhoi Tribe in South Africa, my attitude would doubtless be different. Allegedly, mothers in this tribe once excised the left testicle from the scrotums of their babies, so that when the boys became hunters, their legs would be fleet, unhampered by any “excess appendages.”

But 25 mph on foot and 40 on horseback is as fast as any human ever moved (and lived to tell about it) before 1820, regardless of how many testicles were flapping on thighs. Unprecedented speed was a spin-off of the Industrial Revolution.

Though the fastest stage coaches moved at 10 mph in 1850, by 1880, some steam locomotives were traveling 100 mph. “Experts” who predicted humans would be asphyxiated at 60 mph were silenced by the nameless daredevil who first traveled a mile in a minute.

A similar “limit” was thought to stand between man and the speed of sound, but that was proven false in 1947. Except for science-fiction writers and a few feverish physicists, no one now gives serious thought to traveling faster than light, which whips around the equator seven times in less than a second.

At warp speed, Einstein predicted that all mass would turn into incorporeal energy. Very few pilots outside of “Star Trek” are going to volunteer for that flight.

I recall walking to the library between classes once when a co-ed “running like the lead cat in a dog team” bumped me and yelled, “I’m sorry, but I’m late for my Yoga class.”

If I had a mind built for “Jeopardy,” I might have said, “Do not hurry; do not rest,” for Goethe addressed the modern dilemma 200 years ago.

But, in fact, this issue has been with us since Caesar Augustus declared, “Well done is quickly done,” and a countryman anonymously replied, “Quickly done is quickly undone.”

“Speed . . . provides the one genuinely modern pleasure,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1949, echoing Futurists like Tommaso Marinetti, who had claimed that, “A new beauty has been added to the splendor of the world—the beauty of speed.”

The “gospel of haste,” however, was quickly rebutted by Gandhi, who argued, “There’s more to life than increasing its speed.”

Playing Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” in 37 seconds, and flying across the United States in 68 minutes seemed to represent the very worst of the new hustlers.

Said the Lockheed Blackbird pilot, “It was all a blur.”

Burma Shave joined the fray when it reminded this nation’s travelers: “Don’t lose your head/to gain a minute./You’ll need your head./Your brains are in it.”

As one anonymous gentleman put it, “What’s the hurry? I get to Saturday night same time as everybody else.”

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the fastest recorded speed for a human on foot is 27 mph; for a skateboard, it’s 63; for a bicycle, it’s 81; for a motorcycle, it’s 322; for an automobile, it’s 763, and for a jet aircraft, it’s 2,194.

Each of these records exceeds the ideal: less than the speed of reason and more than the speed of stupidity.

Lest these numbers inflate our collective head, may I remind us that the fastest a skier has traveled is 142 mph, but avalanches race close to 200. And while Usain Bolt recently sprinted 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, a hungry bear runs the same distance in six.

There used to be a lumbering seven-foot-tall basketballer at Clemson named Wayne Rollins. He’s a metaphor for my philosophic ideal because he was good enough to play several years in the NBA gathering rebounds and blocking shots but, at 275 pounds, he moved like molasses in the spring.

In high school, one of his frustrated coaches nicknamed him “Tree,” not for his height, mind you, but his speed.