Strip away the interest in fragrances, the love of shopping, the delight I take in occasionally having my makeup done for video shoots, the way I walk, the way I present myself, the amount of time I spend on my hair, my opinion that Peter O'Toole looks awesome with eyeliner, my great respect for Madonna, and what's  left of me is 100% solid testosterone fueled machismo.

That leaves room for roughly one (1) manly thing: Driving.

Ask any traffic court judge from here to Ashland, Oregon, and you'll find that my dedication to the craft is such that I've made it my life's ambition to be put on trial in every court in the Pacific Northwest for the vim with which I roadily express myself.

I don't mean to say that you need to be the concentrated anthropomorphization of chest hair that is me to enjoy driving, but let's be honest - it's tough to really get into it without being a territorial idiot male who sees everything in life as a competition (and I mean everything - today, for example, I stopped by to see Adam at work, got to chatting with him, disagreed on a point, and notified him that he had lost the conversation - before today, I bet most of you weren't even aware that you could lose a conversation, but you can - in my world, you can also lose at vacuuming, microwaving, and brushing your teeth - I'm a little competitive).

My love for driving has been with me most of my life. From the time I started driving regularly at age thirteen, all the way up until today when I took great satisfaction from checking my tire pressure, I've been smitten.

I can be critical of the US, as I think we do many things poorly (like suddenly deciding that the literal interpretation of the Bible is a good idea), but driving isn't one of them.

Well, it is and it isn't.

One source of joy in driving out here is also the source of much of the frustration: Freedom.

We'll give anybody a license. I don't even think we retest every few years. I've certainly not had my knowledge or skill questioned in any standard official capacity. Like many others, I passed the driving exam by reading my state's driving manual the night before the test and then half-assing the test itself, getting something like 70% of the stuff right, and then walking away with my license.

That's retarded.

If you were to head out into Seattle traffic right now, you'd have a hard time finding anyone who was doing anything right. The number of laws that are broken on a daily, hourly, minutely basis is astounding. Even a fabulous driver like me screws up from time to time. And now that I live in a place where drivers have been bullied into a state of timid submission by the overzealous traffic cops, I don't even know anymore what I'm supposed to do when I get on the road. I've solved this problem by simply attacking every traffic situation with the same gusto. If I don't know when I'm going to get pulled over by some asshole cop, then I might as well have as much fun as possible in the meantime (one pulled me over a few weeks ago for an "unsafe lane change" - I had my signal on, I was cautious, I didn't cut anybody off - he told me that, without one-hundred feet of distance between my car and the next over, a lane change was unsafe - bullshit).

Despite what I'm sure is harassment by the traffic piggies around here, I still have to admit that, by all rights, I should have had my license taken away years ago and thrown in jail. The first time I ever got a car impounded - which was also the first day I had my license - they should have figured out what a danger I was to the world around me as long as I was behind the wheel. I went to traffic court, plead not guilty, totally kicked Officer Leighton's ass, and got every charge dropped. The pattern has repeated itself and continues on to this day.

I won't lie. Although I mean no harm at all, I think there are few people on the road who would hesitate to shoot me given the chance.

That's fine. I think most other people can't drive for shit, either, and I wouldn't expect them to understand simple concepts like "Slower traffic keep right."

Even so, I've been pushing it. The same reasons I should have been jailed are the same reasons I should be dead. I'm not exaggerating. That I haven't even lost so much as a finger is a miracle.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I've recently started to think that it might be wise to part with my car. The more I drive, the more confident I am in my abilities. The thing I'm not very good at is figuring out where confidence should end and fear of stupidity should begin. No matter what I think of my skills, people are, generally speaking, terrible at assessing their own strengths and weaknesses. Men usually think they're better looking than they are (except me - I really am that good looking), gorgeous women look in the mirror and see a girl who's too fat for those jeans, smart people have inferiority complexes, and stupid people who are too stupid to know the difference between stupid and not-stupid think they've got all the answers (and they might, but the answers probably aren't correct).

If you think you have anything in common with me, my opinions on driving, my love of it, and also my capacity to be a real bonehead on the road, then you should do what I did yesterday, which is to purchase Forza Motorsport 2 for your Microsoft Xbox 360 home entertainment multimedia surround video Dolby reverse pixelinflating one-point-twenty-one jigawatt steam compressed touch sensitive cancer curing bagel warming plasma separating broadscreen wideband hyperstereo phonographic accelerated time traveling atom splitting gravity wave detecting gamma radiation emitting peace in the Middle East bringing treaty negotiating speed dating ebola repelling hypospace wormhole collapsing game machine. And don't forget to pick up the force-feedback wheel if you haven't already.

When I got my 360, one of the first games I picked up was PGR3. I loved it then, and I love it now, but it's a game in a very small niche (driving simulation rather than traditional arcade racing), and that niche has room for competition.

I'm not going to stop playing PGR3 just because I've picked up FM2, but I probably won't play it again for a good long time.

PGR3 does so many things so well that it's tough to think of areas for it to improve until you get your hands on a competing product that fills some of the gaps left by PGR3.

If you haven't played anything in the PGR series, then you're probably wondering what all the hoopla is about. Chances are as well that, the first time you play it, you'll hate it. The cars feel slow, the physics are unforgiving, your AI opponents are as good at the end of the race as they are at the beginning (meaning that, if you fall behind, you're likely to stay behind - none of this artificial catching up that's so common in arcade racers), and it's just plain different from nearly all other driving games.

Stick with it, though, and it becomes satisfying in a way most driving games will never be. Once you get the hang of a game like PGR3 or FM2, it sucks you in. I quickly get bored of traditional driving games. You just point your car in what seems like the right direction, floor it, never use the brakes, and try to avoid any low-flying airplanes when you launch yourself off the Empire State Building (or whatever). The PGR and FM series of games are so, so different. If you want to do well, you have to pay attention. If you screw up on one corner, then you might as well start over. If you lose traction, it's quite possible you won't get it back. If you run into another car, you don't get points - you just make a mess.

When these games are the most fun, you won't have time to blink. Every little kink and bump in the road give you something to think about.

Even if you aren't interested in driving, it's a great experience. Not unlike playing Fight Night Round 3. I don't care at all about boxing, but I love the way the intricacies of a game like FNR3 make it feel more like you're playing a musical instrument than working a controller. In fact, the same feeling I get from playing an instrument for extended periods - this intense concentration that pushes all the noise out of my head and calms me - is also produced by games of sufficient complexity.

If my enjoyment of these games was just about the rewarding challenge of learning their ins and outs, then I could stop with only one of them and be happy.

What I love about Forza Motorsport 2, as opposed to PGR3, comes down to some basic differences between the two games.

One of those differences is car selection. PGR3's catalogue of vehicles is kind of dull. Don't misunderstand me - I love the game, and I love the cars, but the cars are so commonplace. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a lot more fun in PGR3 when I'm playing with the less performant cars. This can be nicely explained by what Lance Corporal Casey Lund told me in 1995: "Anybody can drive fast in a nice car. For a real challenge, try doing ninety in a Ford Fiesta."

I don't know if Casey's still alive, but, insane as he was, he made a good point. I rode with him in that Fiesta a few times, and it was terrifying, which was also fun. It was a little sky blue shitbox that trembled when driven at speeds above sixty. The wheels were narrow, the interior was cramped, and you got the feeling that the car wasn't welded together so much as a six year old had spent a few hours inserting "tab A into slot B."

PGR3 doesn't give you much of an opportunity to experience the Lance Corporal Casey Lund Theory of Fun Driving by Survival.

When I first played FM2 last night, I didn't head straight for the exotic Italian regulars. Ferraris don't interest me in real life, and they do even less for me in games. They're an obvious choice. It's the standard teenage boy's automotive wet dream, and I think it has less to do with an interest in driving than it does the feeling of status. Come to Redmond sometime and count the Porsches. They're everywhere. But, since I arrived last October, I haven't seen one Porsche being driven in the way they ought to be. This is a town of status seeking pansies.

When you see someone actually having fun while driving out here, it's most often a very affordable car that's been extensively modified. Those people care about driving more than they care about cruising in their wallets.

What made me happy during that first FM2 experience, then, was finding the more or less ordinary cars you can drive in the game. Sure, the fancy Italian cars are there, too, but so are junky old cars from the 70s, modern four cylinder econoboxes, and other cars that would make Lance Corporal Casey Lund proud.

The first car I picked was a 2003 Mini Cooper S. I drive a 2005 Cooper S with the JCW performance modifications, and I love it. It's not a fast car. It doesn't handle as well as you'd hope, given that it's front wheel drive and also exhibits a bit of understeer. It won't get you laid.

But it's fun.

You can toss it around in sharp corners, drift in the wider ones, take it up to 130, and then bring it back down to 55, and it's just as fun at low speeds as it is at high. I adore the thing.

The Cooper in FM2 is the standard S - no JCW performance mods. Even so, I was surprised at how realistic the thing felt. Graphically, compared to PGR3, I think FM2 is unimpressive, but the ability to take a car somewhat like my own onto a track and beat the crap out of it more than makes up for the relatively dull visuals. Everything that makes the Cooper fun to drive, as well as everything that can make it a pain in the ass, is there. The game version even loses control the way the real thing does, and I can speak from extensive experience.

I have yet to bother with the rarest and most performant of the cars. I'm still working through the lower end models, and I'm digging it. You even get a few muscle cars. I was raised on big block Pontiacs from the late 60s, so seeing that you could take a GTO out for a spin just about made me wet myself. They did such a good job on the GTO that even the colors were taken from production. In honor of my dad and the 1968 Pontiac Bonneville convertible that we took down to Baja when I was about twelve, I chose this offensive shade of green for the GTO. The color may have embarrassed the hell out of me when I was a kid, but now I have many fond memories of the adventures we had in that car, and I'm thankful that so much attention was put into the details in FM2. Word.

A feature for which I'm just as thankful is the option to turn on the racing line. You just don't have the sensory input in a video game that you do in real life, and figuring out how to corner, when to gun it, and so on, is one of the toughest aspects of games like FM2 and PGR3. In PGR3, you learn by making mistakes. Over time, you gradually develop a feel for the physics in the game, but it can be frustrating at first. FM2 solves this by giving you the option to have a line drawn on the ground that shows you when to accelerate, when to brake, how to approach a corner, and where to find the corner's apex(es). Some people might consider this cheating, but if you want to flatten the learning curve, this is the way to do it.

For the time being, thanks to games like this, I won't be on the road as much. Entertainment tech has hit a point where, although far from the real thing, games like FM2 provide a lot of the satisfaction that you'd derive from taking your real car out onto a real road and driving like a real asshole.

Also, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, it's a fine way to feel macho for a little while. Trust me. I spent this afternoon installing an air conditioner in my condo, and although it involved things like screws, a tool, and measuring things, it sucked. Home improvement doesn't make me feel like a man the way driving a virtual four cylinder grocery hauler does.

Recommended, my peeps :)