Novelist Thomas Wolfe claimed, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

Funny Car dominator John Force said you can.

Moreover, the 16-time champion said, “For the first time, people, you’ve got a right to go home.”

It sounded odd, he said, for him to say that: “I’ve said a million times, ‘Get off that couch! Get out there! I’m 100 years old! Go exercise!’ And you know what’s funny? Now the government – the President, the governor, the mayor of L.A. – says, ‘Go home.’

“I take every negative and try to make it a positive,” Force said in a phone interview from Southern California. “What can you tell people that you’ve told to get up off the couch? You worked your whole life. Maybe you’re not a workaholic like me. But you went home to your beautiful house, your beautiful wife, your kids, your grandkids, and you couldn’t enjoy it – because you get there and you’re still stressed about paying the bills. And had [just] the weekend off and had to go back to work after you mowed the lawn.”

This economic shutdown about health concerns, though, gives everyone time to reflect, he said.

“People can be home. Maybe that’s a little bit of a positive, even though you’ve got to worry about family, you’ve got to worry about friends, and you’ve got to worry about the world. At least you’ve got time,” Force said. “Spend it with the family – and still get up and exercise and take walk and do what you have to do. That’s about the only positive right now. You’ve got a chance to go home with your family, stay inside, and spend that time with them. For me to go home now, it’s just a different world.”  

His caveat is that now that most people are staying at home, what they might discover is a bit eye-opening.

“I know the kids’ll drive your crazy – that’s the way the world is. But you’ve got an opportunity to look at your house, look at toilet you may never have flushed that was in a guest room. There’s things you can do. You know what I mean?” Force said. He discovered he has nine televisions at his home. He pared that number down to two – “one in the living room and one in the bedroom. That’s all you really need in your home,” he said. “I learned how to start my coffee pot. Coffee is essential. I got on Nutrisystem. I love Donnie and Marie! [Marie Osmond is a Nutrisystem spokeswoman.] Dieting ain’t never worked for me, but I’m willing to try.”

Wife Laurie might have one eyebrow cocked at that. She explained to him when his box of food arrived that he had for each day a breakfast, lunch, and dinner – and asked him one morning, “So what do you have stacked up here?” He had his own system. He told her, “I’m trying to bypass all that. I’m going to have six of these chocolate rolls and coffee. I’m eating the same stuff they said to eat. I’m eating all this stuff today, and tomorrow I’ll eat all the cereals. She said, ‘It don’t work that way, John. Do it right.’”

So he’s learning, including learning to take care of his home’s exterior.  

“I’m mowing my own lawn now,” he said. “I did attempt it the other day. Almost ran over myself.”

He’s not much of a whiz yet with the cell phone, either.

Force decided he didn’t need to use as much water or keep his hilltop home lit so brightly, especially from the outside, although he received some pushback from at least one fan.

“I’m getting calls because I turned off most of the lights on the hill,” Force said. “That thing was lit up like an airport. A fan called and complained: ‘I love looking at that hill! And you shut it off.’ You’ve got to cut everywhere.” 

He said he’s being extra-careful to practice so-called “social distancing” and to protect himself from possibly contracting the dreaded virus. He said he took a little flak from the delivery folks he has known for a long time. When his diet meals arrived, the delivery driver let him know, and Force instructed him to leave them outside the gate. He didn’t want to touch them, fearful the virus could spread through the handling of packages. The driver said, “You who’s died almost 100 times, you won’t open the gate?” Force told him, “I will when you leave” and said, “We ended up laughing about it, and we stayed apart. You know what I did? I left it outside for three days.” He said when it comes to paranoia about the virus – which he calls “No. 19” because “I don’t even want to say the word” – “I’m probably the worst!”

So Force has reconnected, sort of, with his home. But his mind (and occasionally his 70-year-old body) still is at the shop in Yorba Linda, Calif., thinking about what’s sitting in his shop at Brownsburg, Ind.

“I’m 70 years old. I’m still racing. My kids are there. My grandkids are lovin’ it. I’ve got to fight to where this is going in the future, to be there if it comes back,” he said. “My rigs are ready to roll and one day [the team will] come back to Indy. Everybody went home.”

But he said when his teams returned from the interrupted Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla., to Brownsburg to button up everything temporarily, he told his hauler drivers, “Pass all the trucks.” They asked him what his big hurry was, and he said, “Get ’em gassed before you put ’em away, because if they’ve got to roll, we don’t have time to get gas. We’ve got to get to the next racetrack. And that’s how we kind of left it.

“And we made some changes. I’m not trying to kid nobody. We had a few layoffs,” Force said. “I looked at places where I could go [to cut expenses]. What if there was a miracle tomorrow and God just put out His hand and said, ‘OK – everybody back to work!’? I’ve got to keep that [his operation] alive. So I made some changes on how to make that work.

“So,” he said, “we are ready to go. We know a lot of us are nervous. Even Don [Schumacher] is calling and talking to Robert and talking to me. You know, we’re all worried sick. We just keep moving ahead. I’ve always been [driven] that we’ve got to help those who need to be motivated.

“You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to honor contracts. You’ve got to pay your people. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do with people that’s willing to work with you. We’re looking at a possible grant that’s coming from the government. My attorneys are reading it,” Force said.

“We don’t know where [this unprecedented situation] is going to go. We don’t know how long it’s going to take to fix it,” he said. “I don’t have no answers for nothin’.  I’m just trying to stay positive. They say we may never go back to the way it was. NHRA will come back someday. It will return. I don’t know when. I don’t know their deal. But I know they want it to.

“What I’m saying is the world is going to reset itself,” Force said. “I think we’ve got an opportunity to fix a lot of things that were wrong.”

That goes beyond unflushed toilets and neglected diets and lawn care and family conversations. But maybe it’s a chance to get a wake-up call for what our real values are. We’re so busy running through life, looking at how to make tomorrow better that we never enjoy today. And that’s what I’m trying to do” – one chocolate Nutrisystem roll at a time.