2026: Rockin’ The Summer of my Discontent

The punishing heatwave that has gripped much of the country for weeks continues after a short 2-day break here in the Rocky Mountains, and it is into this cauldron of heat that I proffer the first update to this blog in over 4 months. This is far and away the longest gap between posts in the history of thunderjetheaven.com.

Life has changed significantly for your humble blogger since that fateful April 1. Everything is different now. Although no new posts have appeared since then, I have actually spent quite a lot of time working on the blog over these past few months. That work, however, has been subtractive rather than additive. More than 20 posts from the last year and a half have been removed entirely, and another 15 or more have been edited, some heavily.

None of this was what I wanted. It is the tragic result of deeply loving someone, believing we were building a future together, and watching that person decide unilaterally—and with no discussion beforehand—that they no longer wanted to be a part of my life. Coming to terms with the wide-ranging effects of that decision is largely what has occupied me throughout the summer. It is not, however, the only thing…

Spinning Wheel Got To Go ‘Round: What’s Coming for thunderjetheaven.com…and What’s Not

Last year I made some promises about future content. I kept most of them, but not all. The Saturday Morning Time Machine posts, sadly, were not sustainable; although it was a great idea, and I managed to create two of them, they were simply too involved and too time-consuming for something I do in my spare time. I won’t say I’ll never revisit the idea again in the future in some form, but like so much good material on TV when we were kids, that series has been cancelled.

3 other ventures, “Lorelei,” “Modelo En Bofus,” and “DC Confidential” (and its occasional companion series, “Drag City Noir”), were sustained for a while. As much as I enjoyed writing those posts, I feel that the majority of readers interested in a blog about slot cars were probably less receptive to these than to some of my other material. Thus, only the “Modelo En Bofus” posts may continue into the future.

Here’s an overview of where I plan to go with this blog:

More plastic, less metal

As I pointed out in this post from over 2 years ago, I blended my two scale-model automotive hobbies, including my 1:64 die-cast collecting along with my tech and history articles about slot cars. This was always my intention, right from the beginning. There will still be a place for die-cast material on this blog, just as there will always be a place for die-cast collecting in my heart, but in the near term, content here will pivot away from Hot Wheels and other makes of “free-wheelers” and back toward motorized slot cars.

Less AI

AI image- and movie-making was a fun toy…for a hot minute. Over the last year, however, I have become as disenchanted as everyone else with the staggering proliferation of “AI slop” on the internet. I now see this new toy in a different light. While I will still occasionally use AI as an enhancement to some of the material I write, my use of it will be more judicious in the future, as I have no desire to contribute to the flood of machine-generated content we’re all drowning in. Expect to see fewer renderings of Drag City and more photographs of the “real” thing.

Lore…Properly Relocated

Probably my biggest joy in writing this blog has been my fiction pieces, which cover everything from the back-stories of the cars I race and the backgrounds of their mythical drivers, to historical fiction about the track itself and the fictitious town in which it is located. One of the biggest changes wrought by the process of grief over the last 4 months is a renewed interest in my fiction writing, and this is where I plan to direct the majority of my time and effort going forward…in the right venue. My intention is to publish my first book by the end of the year, and shortly thereafter, create a Substack feed for my stories. As a result, there will be less “Lorelei” going forward, with fiction concerning only the cars and drivers, rather than elaborate stories about the town of Wardglenn, its history, denizens, and mysteries. This means an effective end to the “DC Confidential” and “Drag City Noir/Dark Lounge” posts.

However, this does not mean a complete end to the stories behind Drag City; while it is likely to be years in the future as I work through publishing my writing going all the way back to the beginning of this century, I have conceived an idea for a novel about the track, combining many of the elements you’ve seen already in the pieces published here. More than this I won’t reveal because I think it’s a rather original idea I’m kicking around, but rest assured, the legends surrounding this racetrack in southeastern California are not dead!

Since I am storyteller by nature, there’s no way my imagination will be eliminated from this blog entirely. Even so, posts here will focus more on what most people want to see: the nuts and bolts of slot cars: modification, restoration, customization, maintenance, performance, and racing. Any lore included will be directly related to those topics.

The Sounds of Summer ‘26

One thing I can guarantee will never change is my passion for music, and the indelible way I intertwine it with my love for cars, driving, and racing. Seeking new sounds in an effort to forge a new path forward, the hot weather of this summer has driven me hard into a sound I’ve always loved, but which has as many descriptors as it has fans. It is most commonly called “Garage Punk.” Some call it “Psych Fuzz;” others might use terms like “Garage Psych” or even “Psych Punk.” Call it what you will, my focus this summer has been on a sound reminiscent of the psychedelic music of the late 1960’s, stripped of ornamentation and jam-band looseness, driven by blunt riffs, repetitive beats, distortion, attitude, and enough aggression to feel dangerous. It combines elements of rockabilly, shoegaze, and of course, punk; it is less about dreamy “psychedelia” and more about using repetition and noise as a weapon…in other words: DRIVING MUSIC!

Scoring the scorching summer of ’26 here at Drag City Raceway are the following acts, all of which I have dived into with relish in the last 4 months:

* Loop
* Moon Duo
* The Janitors
* The Warlocks
* Magic Shoppe
* Wooden Shjips
* Dead Skeletons
* Singapore Sling
* The Third Sound
And the 800 lb gorilla of this genre:
* The Brian Jonestown Massacre

And, reprising their roles from the summer of 2022 when my dear departed friend Dale was still with me:

* Psychic Ills
* The Night Beats

No, this is not a complete list; there are a great many others I’ve been listening to for years (The Black Angels, The Black Keys, The Vacant Lots, The Telescopes, The Raveonettes, The O-Sees, LA Witch, etc), but those listed above are the ones I’ve most recently gotten into and thus are ascendant this year. These are bands that owe much of their sound to some of my near-lifelong favorites like The Cramps, Suicide, and The Jesus & Mary Chain. Some of them date all the way back to the mid-1980s, many are much newer, but all have something to offer for those who, like me, worship at the alter of reverb and feedback. Many of these acts – particularly Wooden Shjips – utilize the vintage sound of the Farfisa organ impeccably, while others specialize in rhythm like pumping pistons, and still others are content to just blow your head off with glorious squalling noise! BJM is the one that covers all the bases, from psych-inspired dream pop to garage punk at its most feral.

Naturally I must stream in the beginning, but I’m working on getting everything I can on vinyl, some of it surprisingly difficult-and expensive-to track down. But I’ll get everything I want eventually, and I’ll drag you along with me every step of the way! Expect any future slot car racing videos to dip heavily into this catalog for their accompanying scores!

Now Is The Time To Look Forward, Not Back

Drag City Raceway, and this blog about it, is by nature a nostalgia project: for me, a look back on the era of my personal childhood, and for you, my readers, a look back at the toys we loved as kids and still do. Although there has always been a small, strange contingent of people who insist on stigmatizing it, I have always believed that nostalgia is a positive force in our lives, and it’s a powerful one. However, like everything in life, it can be overdone.

There comes a point when looking backward, however fondly, begins to compete with looking forward. I think I have reached that point. The months since April 1 have been among the most painful and difficult of my life, and one thing they have made very clear is that I need to begin putting more of my attention toward what comes next. There are parts of the past that I will always treasure, and I have no desire to erase them or pretend they did not matter. But there is also a time to begin making new things, pursuing new ideas, taking some chances, and finding out what else life may still have waiting. For me, that time is now.

That does not mean Drag City Raceway is going anywhere, nor does it mean that I have lost my interest in slot cars. I still collect them, I still race them, and when something particularly interesting turns up—whether it is a new addition to the collection, a discovery worth sharing, or some obscure bit of slot-car knowledge I think deserves to be preserved—I will still turn up here and write about it.

But going forward, those posts are likely to become much less frequent.

For some time, life has pulling me in some new directions, and now, that pull has become an irresistible force: there are other things I want to build, write, explore and accomplish while I still have the time and the opportunity to do them. For many years, thunderjetheaven.com has been one of the places where I put an enormous amount of my creative energy. Going forward, more of that energy is going to be spent elsewhere.

So this is not exactly an ending. The lights are still on at Drag City Raceway, and there will still be nights when the cars come out and the track comes alive. But the races will be fewer, the intervals between them longer, and this blog will become less a continuing chronicle and more what it perhaps was always destined to become: an archive of a time, a place, a hobby, and a particular way of remembering the past.

To those of you who have stopped by over the years—especially those who subscribed, commented, shared a memory, asked a question, or simply kept coming back—thank you! A blog like this is an odd little thing to send out into the world, and it has always meant a great deal to know that there were people out there who understood what I was doing and enjoyed coming along for the ride. I hope you’ll continue to stop by from time to time. There is an awful lot here already, and every once in a while there will still be something new waiting for you.

So by all means, keep thunderjetheaven.com bookmarked and check in every now and then. I can’t tell you when the next post will appear; it might be a few weeks from now, a few months from now, or whenever something comes along that I genuinely think is worth sharing. There will be no schedule, and no posts written simply because I feel obligated to fill space on a calendar. But when I find another car worth showing you, learn something about these old toys worth passing along, or simply have something new to say, I’ll be here.

We have spent a lot of time looking back. Now, I am venturing forth to see what happens next.

Wish me luck, dear readers, and I will see you at the races!

SOUNDTRACK SAMPLER