Wind

Wind

Cycling into the wind. That's what I've done lately and not only metaphorically. How may hands seem to hold us back as we pedal and pedal and crouch and try to disappear on the road? And the wind still finds us.

It's been blowing like an eternal fan here. Northeast for weeks, dry, lots of sunshine. And still we complain.

Summer

I was tired and chose between reading and taking a ride with the little one. The weather just cleared today after two weeks of basically winter weather. This is good and bad. The tourists came out of their hiding holes, hungry for summer and sun. The traffic getting to the bike path was nervous as though everyone were busy trying to get something out of this non-summer month. Behold summer! Then we end up not getting onto the bike path along the shore because some moron parks his car precisely on the entry way and there is no way I can lift Xabi and the bike together over the small fence. I wait there for a couple of minutes to see if this driver shows up – I really want to let him know how damn stupid he / she is.

A woman with a baby stroller on the other side of the path faces the same problem except she can’t get out of the path. We stare at each other like morons. Eventually we have to turn back because I can’t help her with her carriage and she can’t help me with my bike and baby. Oh well. I didn’t bring my cell phone so I can’t call the cops to have the car towed away. I swear I would have done it. Damn. So I take another route and try to enjoy the ride. That’s the beauty of cycling – and more so with children. In a second I’ve forgotten the incident ‘cause Xabi says some little word about seagulls overhead. It’s great to hear him try to make his first sentences. I know, son, it’s a beautiful day nonetheless.

Cowardice

Now, I’ve no picture here ‘cause I’m a coward. You see there’s these dogs that have chased me on occasion. I’ve no idea why they’ve chased me and why they don’t chase me any longer. They are the same dogs. I’m the same rider (well...slimmer...handsomer...no doubt.) Does the moon have to triangulate with Venus on the Mars quadrant for them to chase me?

My astrologer doesn’t exactly know. My astrologer doesn't exactly care. Neither do I. Well I do, sort of!

Now, I could stop my bike right by the dogs – one sleeps on one side of the road opposite the other – like some kind of Cerberus joke and they open their eyes as I pass but do not make a move. Am I such boring prey? But, damn it!, I know they will eventually chase me…again. So I ride slow past them risking a bite – my ass! – instead of having them throw me off the bike. What’s worse?

What to do? I want a picture…just to show you how small they are and what a coward I really am.

Brakes

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

Yeah. Right!

Being self-sufficient is an ideal; self-reliance a goal, perhaps. For me, certain limitations are truth. I’ve said it before: I am an idiot with my hands; tools under my power are weapons of evil.

Ok. I didn’t exactly kill my wife. I tried (not to kill her, I mean), but to fix the rear brake on her bike. It kept loosening for some reason ever since someone gave us the bike last year. (Is that why they gave it us last year?) My wife barely rode it, for it always rode badly. The tires were out of true; the gears jumped and skipped; the brakes, well, the brakes….

I wanted to be self-sufficient or just somewhat sufficient. Just this one time I didn’t want to go to the bike shop. I mean you just loosen this bolt and tighten that one…no? The bike – aptly named Envy because should she feel she must feel, well, just as inadequate as me – just can’t become a normal bike. And that’s all I really strove for; a minimal level of bike mediocrity. But it wasn’t to be. I read some Kent Peterson for encouragement. He can turn a $ 5 bike into a tourer / commuter. Could I do the same? No. I read some Sheldon Brown – hey I can read – for technical information and gathered interesting details on breaks caliper, on breaks cantilever, on breaks this and breaks that. Sheldon’s breaks work. Why can’t mine?

So I learned my lesson. Self-sufficiency is oftentimes self-insufficiency. Self-reliance a brutal mistake. When I saw my wife go head over heels (and believe me this was no love story) I nearly died. Envy’s chain somehow jumped the crown when she shifted on a slight downhill to which she reacted by hitting the brakes, the rear first…but…there was no brake…no stop…so in running wide on the coming curve she hit the front brake hard in a slight panic and JAMB…THERE SHE GOES FLYING OVER THE HANDLE BARS. Nasty gash on her elbow, swollen palm (she was not wearing gloves because her gloves were left on the kitchen table next to the nice cyclamen arrangement…they looked nice next to the cyclamen, sort of blending in with all those spring colors).

I called her Flying Dutchman after the fact – hours after the scary fact. My wife is way too kind and forgiving. We laughed together...until she said: “But you had just fixed the brakes hadn’t you?”

“No, no, dear, I swear. I didn’t fix them.”

Toys

Excess. Need. What is excessive? Too much? Needed?

I’m obsessed, it seems, for now. But I’ve been hanging in there, stopping myself from jumping head-first through the exhibit glass of the my LBS and hopping onto that road bike.

But I’m too much of a coward. I can’t make up my mind or deal with my guilt. Do I really need a road bike? How foolish. None of that is needed. None of this…yet I never imagined one Saturday morning ride with my kids last year would change my life the way it did. I like riding my bike. I really do but this winter will be a long one.

Will my obsession last longer?

Wretches

I’ve no idea why tools should scare anyone. Around here, though, a mere Allen wrench -- in my hand -- is cause for mutiny.

"Mom, Dad’s got your bike discombobulated!"

Now isn’t that what we called squealing squealers back somewhere then?

So I’ve taken the wheel off -- off my wife’s bike (god forbid I did that to my little Piglet) -- and there seems to be cause for alarm.

"Mom, you won’t be riding this weekend."

That was my daughter (little “$%&%$!!!). But my son comes to the rescue. "You’re not riding for sure, Mom!"

Little &"·!;%$&%”!!! Why bring them to the world? Why love them? You can say goodbye to that ivy league community college edu on my account, little squealing b...bikers!

Ok. I can’t couldn’t true the wheel…and now it’s like some sort of round snake, sinuous thing, biting its own tale. It’s still round, though, for God’s sake!

Wrenches.

Fishin'

Sort off. Been out for work to Durban, South Africa, and then to Mauritius; trips for work which have kept me out most of the month. Try as I might during these forays to our commercial fishing vessels I find no energy for the internet, blogging or much else. Miss my cycling, though. In Durban, which is supposed to be a very dangerous city – crime wise – they have what seems like a nice bike club. The East Coast Pedal Power Association does nice routes on Saturdays and Sundays, very early in the morning: out by 5:30 a.m. or so I heard. Sprightly group. Should I return for another week’s work or so I might try some sort of cycling exchange thing. [Do they pedal backwards in the southern hemisphere?] Maybe I can rent a bike or borrow one. (Shihhhh…don’t tell my Piglet.)

This Order

I used to have an uncanny ability to handle disorder. This was so because it wasn’t disorder at all. It was more like a deep-seated desire to piss my Mom off as a teenager; why of course I could find anything in my room, despite what she might think. “You want me to prove it,” I’d say, “well just ask me to find something?” Guess she never did and I’d have to “clean up” my room anyway, her way. Uhhhg!

But I always kept to my orderly way, in a way. Take my books for instance. I could find any book I wanted from any pile whenever I wanted. There was order in my apparently disordered piles. I mean it. I could go from shelve to shelve, from horizontal to vertical stacks, and find the title I wanted as though I knew the exact locations with photographic memory. I’d get this sudden urge to read, whatever, say, Notes from the Underground -- yes, I was a strange kid, an angry kid -- and I’d find it on the fourth pile on the left. Just like that.

That ability has gone. I still have piles: in my office, on my desk, on my night table, but I no longer know where that particular title is to be found. (And you know that you always need that book, the one, the one you can’t find.)

This is somehow connected to bicycles. No, let’s not exaggerate. I do know where I park my bike at work and it is difficult to misplace my Piglet it in my garage – almost. But it happens most often with my bike tools and gear and I have but very few of those, mind you. But damn I had the screwdriver right by the rear wheel! Where did I put the light? My vest? The pump? What’s the pump doing in my wife’s bike when I needed it just on this ride?! (Not to mention the spare tube with the wrong valve to fit my pump; or was it the right pump to fit the wrong tube?)

I guess I’m just not what I used to be; my type of order has finally grown up. I know, Mom, I know. “I told you so.”

Love that to which you return…

Some of you must have had this feeling:

…you are riding along with the buddies, you think you’re strong, you hit that hill and a sudden realization hits you square in the gut:

…you’re not nearly as strong as you thought…you will never be, actually…you realize your limits, for there are limits to who you are…to what you can do....

Depressive sensation or realistic acceptance?

My reading buddy, Marcus Aurelius – I sometimes turn to him in times of distress, old-stoic, meditating know-it-all, he tells me:

Be not unhappy, or discouraged, or dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in acting always by the right principles; but when you have failed, try again, and be content if most of your acts are consistent with man’s nature. Love that to which you return…. [Meditations, V, 9]

But then again he never rode a bicycle up that hill….

Stacey'sWalden

Good stuff from Mr. Grahm: I don't want to live a big life I just want to live a small life doing whatever I please.

And:

Stop thinking the world is happy and altruistic, it will squash you like a bug if there is a dollar in it. Turn the television off, stop going to the mall, go for a walk with no cellphone and no money just walk for the sake of walking. Watch the sunset instead of some stupid fucking Nascar race. Think about something anything instead of just letting the advertisers push their shit into your mouth. Do something. Get off your ass.

Caesura

Every once in a while my job demands that I travel abroad; sometimes down to the southern hemisphere, to this island on the Indian Ocean. It is often one week or two weeks, depends, but regardless it always messes up with my inner compass rose. When I return I am never the same exact person, whomever that is, at least for a little while – like something you lose or gain along the way of unnatural miles travelled. It is not like the cycling way or the walking way where you tick off the miles tenderly. It is not like that at all. It’s a huge flash – most unnatural – where you stop doing what you do in a routine way and start anew on something else. I dislike it very much. It makes me abandon things –this all encompassing way of using my time for nothing else but work.

So it’s a pleasure to return from the beginning of winter to the beginning of summer – to return and pick up the bike and curse my way up the hills. That zero summer. So lovely.

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

T.S. Eliot

Bitten

I didn’t go bike riding yesterday – at all – and I was bitten by a horse.

I could’ve been bitten by a number of animals, normal biting animals, like a dog or even a flock of killer geese. Hell I could’ve even been bitten by a snake. But no, I had to be bitten by a horse.

I needed a zero day yesterday ‘cause my legs went from feeling like concrete to slush in two days. I needed to recoup so I ended up visiting my friend Fran, who I hadn’t seen in a long time. I should mention that Fran’s father is a wine-maker-virtuoso of sorts and so makes his own wine – many, many barrels of wine. And so when you go over his farm house you cannot leave without drinking…say …at least one of those barrels. Quite bucolic, these parts are.

If I had ridden my bike like the good boy I should’ve been yesterday I wouldn’t have ended up at Fran’s.

Oh, yeah, Fran has three horses. No bike talk with him. His youngest horse is a bastard…and I assure you he has this most incredibly powerful jaw…literally took my hand and wrist in his mouth and playfully played VICE with my bones.

So there. Ride your bike. Be good. Never know when that horse’s gonna bite you.

Et tu, Brutus?

Never trust your biking friends and surely never trust them when they’re wearing serious amounts of spandex and fast looking bike glasses – those that cost more than my little bike. My so-called friends are nice guys – presumably. They know I’m a beginner; they know I have a modest road bike for commuting purposes (and to defeat my children on half-hour outings). (I can out-ride my children in case you didn’t know.) My friends knew the most I’ve ever ridden uphill without stopping and gasping for life was a mere 12 kilometers (7.5 miles), with one or two rolling hills in between. I’m a beginner for god’s sake!

So why, then, did they try to kill me?

They promised care, kindness and lots of easy learning. This included 26.4 kilometers of huge hills, boulder-ridden roads, tree branches in my face, in my spokes and countless near-falls and gasps for life. I wanted to go out for a ride not to cross the Amazonian rain forest on a commuter bike. (Not to mention the geese strategically placed on the apex of that last hill waiting to attack the last and slowest rider: that was me.)

So I did it. “See? You did it,” my ex-friends said, smiling. It was best I had no breath to respond. (Which reminds me: semi-automatic weapons will now be included on my list of required biking equipment.)

Sheep-Jam

Traffic

"It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be."

- Virgil

Now that’s a crock of shit. Obviously, Virgil had no bike.

I’m tired of reading of urban commuting battles like the rest of us poor, rural bikers face no dangers at all. There we are riding along: “Oh, so fresh and aromatic these tulips, are they not, dear?” No. Well, yes. Tulips are cool; they don’t move either willfully or negligently; they do not jump; they make no animal noises; they don’t cross the road when you do. I like tulips that way. I really do, dear.

But there’s real danger out there, people; bike commuting is brutal. If you guys think otherwise or consider yourselves so well prepared, then tell me how the hell do you experts get a bunch of sheep to continue crossing the road without having them stop in the middle of it to stare at you? C’mon smarties? Have you ever had a hundred sheep stare at you, sheepishly so to speak? Scary shit. Do not trust Virgil.

No. Calling them ugly four-letter words doesn’t work. You can’t bang on their window; can’t slap their hood. They just stare at you. (If they could speak they would say they just didn’t see you.) What then is it they find so interesting and what is it that keeps them from finishing their crossing maneuver just when you arrive? What the hell does the traffic code have to say about that? A bike is a vehicle, a bike is a vehicle, a bike is a vehicle. Bahhhhhhh! No respect. These are real right-of-way issues, people. They’re supposed to stick to the green part of the highway. Why don’t they “shew” away when you shout “SHEW!, SHEW!?”

Hell, you guys don’t know one thing about difficult and dangerous commuting. (They did outnumber me they did, those puffy white things.)

They outnumber us all.

You know what they say about dogs…

Dion-Bouton

Maybe it’s applicable to bikes as well. Do bikes “look” like their owners? I came upon this reflection when Shawn Kielty, blogger-biker, noted that perhaps one ought to find “his inner bike”. Now that’s stretching karma concepts far and wide and deep inside, I suppose.

I’m much more superficial, I guess. I’m content for now to look a bit like my bike or to have it look somewhat like me. Considering my Purple Pig, god rest its karma wheels in the Heavenly Kingdom of Painless Hills, I’d better take a closer look at my looks. Unless ugly, aging bikes look…well, interestingly mature?

I thought not.