And speaking of the 500 ...

I woke up this morning hating today.

I woke up this morning hating today because I'm not walking out of the hotel with dawn a rose-colored splinter in the eastern sky, cardboard cup of cardboard hotel coffee in hand.

I woke up hating today because I wasn't climbing in the car and driving to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and humping my gear through the infield expanse in the brightening morning, my eyes still grainy with sleep.

I woke up hating today because I wasn't setting my gear down in the IMS media center, retrieving a marginally better cup of coffee, watching the F1 boys race through the streets of Monaco on the hundred or so TV monitors. I wasn't thumbing through the paper, rapping out a blog, making desultory chatter with a few other early arrivals.

I woke up hating today because it's not the day. It's not Race Day.

For the first time since 1945, 33 leadfoots will not come screaming to the green today in the last days of May, while 300,000 humans send down a sound like hurricane surf. We have the Bastard Plague to thank for this -- and for me in particular, it's never been more of a Bastard than it is today.

That's because, for me in particular, it's never left a more vacant space, as if a thief had broken into the Louvre and stolen a priceless work of art. Nothing remains now but the sterile outline of it, the outline of other Race Days in other years.

Within that outline are those moments early in the day, when the morning sun bathes in gold that immense cliff of grandstand across the track, and the shadows are deep and cool. You can walk downstairs and stroll through the pits in the scrubbed morning air, see the drivers' names and numbers freshly painted on the pit wall, feel the whole stuffed day begin to stir around you.

Down the way in Gasoline Alley, nosecones and rear wings lie scattered about as the crews turn the wrenches one last time. The early risers in the overlooking suites lean on the balcony railings and watch, 7 a.m. cocktails already down a quart.

None of that will happen today. I won't stroll through the pits or the garage area or while away the hours with the rest of the deadline grunts. I won't hang out on the tiny porch outside the media center, turn to watch the balloons drift aloft in the late-spring breeze, watch the 33 come to the green -- a moment that will jump your heart right up into your throat if you are a breathing human at all.

I also won't be sitting in the side yard in a cardboard-box fort, the way I did as a kid. I won't be hunched over listening to the radio boys as they run down the starting lineup (And on the outside of Row 7, from Tucson, Arizona, Roger McCluskey in car No. 8, the G.C. Murphy Special ...), and go to Mike Ahern and Jim Carroll and Howdy Bell on the backstretch, and tell me to Stay Tuned For The Greatest Spectacle In Racing.

All of that is part of this day, at least for me. But not today.

Today it will just be that vacant space on the wall. And I'll hate every minute.