This page is dedicated to awkward and unpopular teenagers everywhere.
Our teenage years for better or worse seem to have a big influence on how we spend the rest of our lives.
This will likely be seen as very bad news for lots of teenagers out there today.
But no matter what your own situation, it's likely you'll get at least a few opportunities to rise above everyone's expectations: including your own. And even have some memorable adventures and good times along the way.
For instance: few people would expect very much from a scrawny little eye-glasses wearing geek, who was painfully shy around girls, unpopular and undistinguished, and got routinely beat up by bullies between 2nd grade and 11th. Right?
Add to this being poor, with the shabby wardrobe and bad hair cuts to prove it. And so working a night-time job washing dishes in a restaurant through much of high school.
Now include a badly wrecked car with a permanently grungy-looking interior for his first automobile purchase at sixteen.
In any modern high school's pool of 'losers' category, such a guy would likely fit smack into the middle, right? Or maybe even lower.
Now what would you think if I told you this same guy ended up having world class adventures as exciting and intriguing as any first-class Hollywood script? And became literally unforgettable to many of the people he met along the way, too?
If today's teens still have much in common with yesterday's, quite a few of them will badly want to know how the hell that guy got from point A to point B. For an awful lot of them are searching for their own way out of a similar purgatory.
That's what this page does. Offers you the inside scoop on this guy's progression from obscure yard ape to an internet icon of real world teenage adventure.
In the accounts below details like names, dates, and more have been changed. Those so interested may see more about the actual events from which these stories are drawn here.
A small slice of one young rural geek's life; My family's move from the city to the country brought with it both great delights and great pains.
Passages to a larger world; I graduate from elementary to high school, and move back to the city from the country. I begin to learn what it means to struggle against adversity.
A teenage pressure cooker; Regular school beatings evolve into outright torture-- but I begin to get a handle on the violence at last (just in time to fall victim to an awful crush). The earliest notions regarding first car preferences also come my way now.
How one struggling teenager met one wrecked Mustang; Money was always in incredibly short supply. Getting my first job helped some. However, it turns out work can sometimes be even tougher to endure than raw physical violence! Luckily, some bosses can help boys turn into men on the job.
My first meeting with my Mustang would prove enigmatic. And a powerful sign of things to come.
Of new best friends and old; Growing up, we tend to reconfigure our lives and ourselves as if they were both toys constructed of legos: removing a piece here, adding a piece there, to better suit our aims.
In real life, that sometimes means making new friends while leaving behind old ones.
But fate or destiny may also play a role here.
Testing the limits; Young, brash men, equipped with new toys-- and getting into trouble-- is almost an ironclad rule of nature. Me and my new friend Steve offered up our own examples of the genre.
Fools rush in; (This section still being written up)
Ancient mysteries; (This section still being written up)
So near, yet so far; (This section still being written up)
The Talladega incident; (This section still being written up)
To save my world; Nothing was more important to me at this time than one particular teenage girl. When her life appeared to be in jeopardy, I naturally did all I could to save her.
Slip, sliding away; Street-racing for money can sure have its scary moments; but narrow escapes from dangerous gangs can be downright spine-tingling.
Too close for comfort; In my case, the 'girl-next-door' was Dana Connor, whom I'd known and loved (as a friend) since second grade.
In high school she overnight turned into one of the most breath-taking women you could ever hope to meet. Leading to an acute case of discomfort for both of us...
I would make a lot of changes to my Mustang while I owned him. The
poor man's supercar and the Shadowfast
super car project describe how I turned him into something
well beyond a 1969 Shelby GT-350 in automotive capabilities. Which was a good thing: for I'd end up needing every iota of those extra capacities.
The true source of this page is 
One small taste of Hell; Sometimes teenagers can downright hunger for intriguing mentors and benefactors of one sort or another, to help them make sense of their lives, and maybe gain more control over their own destinies.
But it's easy for teenagers to make mistakes in who they choose for this, too.
And boy, did Steve and I make a whopper here!
A call to arms; If you're a killer who likes inflicting his own brand of violent anarchy onto others, then you can't complain when a couple of teenagers show you a new perspective on the matter: that of the victim.
The Daytona 1200; One of the wilder street races you might ever hear about, this one began as a stupid mistake: me taking a blind bet. Taking it for granted I could beat whatever unknown car a challenger might bring to the table...
Wild horses; For one glorious moment in history, me and my closest buddies were practically all driving 1969 or 1970 Mustangs (basically the same car in factory terms but for minor cosmetic differences).
That circumstance would abruptly meet its end here.
The spring break plot; (this section still being
written up)
Blue light special; (this section still being written
up)
Fast times at Sigma Chi; (this section still being
written up) My first year in college might have had no memorable moments at all if not for my interaction with a particular fraternity there.
About here was when I finally emerged from my teen age years. To see where that led me, you can continue on with the full list of supercar stories from which the above were picked: The Shadowfast supercar driver logs
Notes from the actual owner/driver of the Shadowfast super car reveals many of the actual events and locations from which these accounts are drawn.
Copyright © 2008 by J.R. Mooneyham. All rights reserved.
Anything you see below this point was put there by a content thief who stole this page and posted it on their own server.
