[froggyman]

Here is a bit of writing that you all may enjoy. One of our talented Kentucky Cobra Club Owners, Vince Lubbers, captures the Cobra Experience in words as we all have in our real life experiences from our early years.

Enjoy, I believe you all may find it relevant to your own experience.

Gninnigeb Eht Ni In The Beginning

In the beginning there was a cerebral appreciation of engineering mastery. A welling forth of admiration combined with a tip of the hat to underscore approval. That is the way I recall it from my chair labeled “Elders and Others beyond 60 years of Age.”

At the time that it happened it was emotive. It was automobile lust. No words were used. Big doses of chemicals created in 17 year olds that made us emit kool sayings before cool was even invented. Some made noises that would be censored even in this permissive age. We had no control, we were innocent. We saw the Cobra. Innocence was over.

It was crazy. I could barely afford Sunday School. That I was not doing well in Sunday School only intensified the dream. We had not heard of dreams. Seventeen year olds are blessed with the now. We had memories shorter than a pimple, gave enormous attention to the now; and no, read NO, comprehension that today influenced tomorrow. History will likely be kind to our generation. But really it was about pimples.

My innocent, impressionable mind (we just said ‘mine’ which more accurately reflected our thought process) was branded---branded with a Cobra image by a white hot poker. We had been had and we never recovered. Oh, some of us did civilized things, got married, made “vroom, vroom” sounds into the baby’s ear shortly after birth to see if the offspring carried the Cobra Lust gene, climbed mountains, and got steadily older. Branding iron marks make tattoos look silly.

There is no AA, no Cobras Anonymous, for the cobra addiction. Malaria and Cobra Lust share similar life spans. Forever. You can beat malaria into dormancy but it never really surrenders. That’s a perfectly good way to think of Cobra Lust. You could avoid any number of the prevalent diseases of the era with good self control. My mother was a treasure chest of self control ideas. But Cobra Lust could strike no matter how good your mother was. Marky’s mother claimed to be virgin, but Marky got it. You could walk down the street. See a Cobra, boom, you got it. Ok, in Kentucky that was pretty rare. But we read about it. Over and over. In Kentucky, magazines with pictures were what would be come known as infection vectors. Pick up a car magazine, turn the page, wham, you just got Cobra Lust. And there is no cure --- Next. So you hand it to your buddy who is trying to figure why you are laying on the ground making gurgling sounds. He turns the page, bang, he’s got it.

Ok, spin your sun dial clockwise 40 years or so. What do you see? Some old guy, short on hair, a broken zipper on his dockers, and a silly grin on his face. He has a day’s growth of beard, he has been sleeping in a car with two seats and they don’t recline. His lips are chapped because it has gotten cold and there is no roof. The car has no radio, but he keeps the beat of the music he heard when he was just seventeen. Just like yesterday. This is called ‘treating the symptoms.’ It is not a cure, but owning a cobra means you don’t care what people think. Your friends think you are eccentric. They smile, probably think that you are crazy, but are too nice to say so. They go home, look in the mirror and wish they were crazy too.

Dne Eht Ni In the End

Ecniv Vince