a likely story

the carrot bites back

2012-01-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

In theory, the latest plan for rewiring my entire musculoskeletal system has me spinning on the trainer for a half-hour every other day, passing the time in somber contemplation of pedal-stroke mechanics. The first great flaw in this plan is that it's really, really boring. The second is that—with the exception of the biblical deluge I got for my birthday last week—it's not raining. And let's be real, here: indoor riding has nothing on June-uary.

Consequently, I gave up and rode-rode today (all of 30 miles). I had crystal-clear views of the bay; climbing was slow but survivable and descending felt like some sort of rapturous bear-hug from favorable laws of physics. And the-eeen I got home:

Post-Pinehurst-Wildcat. Seriously.

Note the Cheeseboard carcass and the foam roller, intended for my rightfully pissed-off left hip and misappropriated—due to my inability to move far enough to use it—for couch cuddling. Eagle eyes may also spot West Wing DVDs and a pound of Trader Joe's dark chocolate.

Oh, this is going to take a while.

ca-rry me home to-night

2012-01-24T12:06:00.000-08:00

The strategic error was trying to take the house photo at the end of the night. Apparently the moment everybody looked the same direction was also the one the hapas chose to get in touch with their Asian sides₁. Typical.

Photos by Alean ... I think.

There is no further record, which is probably a good thing. Suffice to say, my friends clean up nice—and if any attendees neglected to call their girlfriends, it certainly wasn't for lack of encouragement.

____________________________________

1. Philippe is not actually hapa, just bears occasional resemblance to the young Keanu Reeves.

dreamer's just a vessel

2012-01-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

Remember this? Circa fourth-grade music class, the lesson on singing a round?

My pad-dle's clean and bright
Flash-ing with sil-ver
Foll-ow the wild goose flight
Dip dip and swing

That is not quite the urban kayak experience, but I had a good time dispatching the kayaking list item with Agent Valencia anyway. Zig-zagging clumsily up and down the channel between Oakland and Alameda, I saw houseboats (one with my name, nearly), tugboats (they're not little at all!), sailboats (lurching at impossible angles), and best of all:

Belly of the beast.

Fantastic! I love the Oakland cranes like I love the sound of jets, or tall scaffolding, or the the concrete horizon of a runway. I'm supposed to be a treehugger; it doesn't even make sense.

Anyway, there was also a fluffy bird that the Internet says is called a bufflehead and a man repainting the red hull of a boat named RELIEF. It was a brilliant, stupendous red; he put it on with a roller and it was almost too bright to watch.

feet first, part two

2012-01-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

[This is long for the sake of anyone Googling seemingly inexplicable knee problems. I feel ya.]

My processing limitations are such that I could not simultaneously follow what Curtis was doing and what he was saying. I know there was some poking and prodding; then I got on the trainer and watched my knee wobble around a laser sight indicating a straight line. The slick video setup also allowed me the novel view of my own ass on the bike, a perspective which in retrospect my ego might have been better spared. With some effort, I forced my mind off these mildly unsettling images and on to the Cramblett verdict: "The tail is wagging the dog."

The tail(s)

February 2009. Wa-waaaa.

It's been nearly three years since I broke my collarbone (small bone, big club) and scapula (the opposite). So I was surprised to learn that this stupidass crash is still quietly sabotaging me, the tightness over the point of impact twisting my entire body sideways. I was skeptical of this analysis until Curtis physically pulled me straight—or at least, the mirror said "straight"; my muscles said "turning, hard". It was a little surreal, like being in a really un-fun funhouse. Who knew?

That's one end. The other is my wretchedly pronated, draft-dodger feet. I wear orthotics, but Curtis's take is that those don't retrain the muscles that do the work every time I hit the ground or try to put power to a pedal. So how do you do that? Well, here's a funny video:

It's funny because it looks like nothing. But it's incredibly hard, both in terms of the precision involved and the force—somewhere in between trying to wiggle your ears and crack your back. ETA for the right position being "natural"? Eh, couple years.

The dog

The part I did know is that my core is kind of pathetic. Having been previously told I could get my kneecaps to track correctly by strengthening my legs, I'd focused on that—hundreds of wobbly one-legged squats. No good. Pro roadie Kristin Sanders covers Curtis's "canon on a canoe" analogy, so I'll skip that—but the point is that my disproportionate muscle is affecting more than my ability to find jeans that fit.

The part I didn't know is that I'm "hypermobile". Curtis posed a spectrum, with a creaky old man at one, the average at five, and a Cirque de Soleil contortionist at ten. Here, I made a diagram. Look at the swagger on "average"!

"You're maybe an eight," Curtis said, bending my thumb back on my wrist (painless) to illustrate his point. "Not a circus freak, but ... ." I sat cross-legged with my elbows on the floor, writing notes into a binder. "How many people do you think can sit like that?" he asked. "Can't everyone?" He laughed. Ah.

The most awesome part about this is that it means I won't be assigned a bunch of goddamn yoga, which I hate. The least awesome part, basically, is that if something can go wrong it will. When the tails wag, my overly pliable muscles follow them without resistance into arrangements that hurt.

The rest

I ... don't know yet, actually, what to do with this information. For now I'm trying to stop ricocheting between giddy fantasies of how much faster I might be if I could get this right and despair for how unlikely it seems that I ever will. Check back.

Pffffftttt.

feet first, part one

2012-01-04T16:37:00.001-08:00

I had planned to spend the night before THE bike fit cleaning the cobwebbed Cannondale, preparing All The Right Questions, and sleeping. Instead, I met up with my erstwhile teammate Lee, who in turn made the mistake of suggesting a local establishment that offers free drinks to the builders of record-setting coaster-houses. With my over-budget bike habit on my mind, it was thus ruinously easy to allow beer before dinner to become beer for dinner.

You can't take me anywhere.

Needless to say, I did not enter the Cramblett garage studio the next morning at my most articulate, and I resigned myself to a repeat of the same unproductive interview I've already had with my doctor, my PT, and an orthopedist. What hurts? This, this, sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes that, too. When? A little bit all the time and a whole lot other times. What does it feel like? Oh, it's a sort of numb, buzzing, stabbing, aching, pulsing, hot, cold, searing, dull, piercing twinge ... sort of ... thing?

As someone whose love and livelihood is the neat arrangement of words, a problem I can't corral into a sentence is a problem I can't manage. And chronic pain is all about loss of control; it's like sharing your skin with a medieval despot or an untrustworthy drunk. My legs might carry me uncomplainingly up Half Dome, or I might pinch a nerve walking to the grocery store. I might ride merry laps around Tamarancho in the morning, but pedal home one-legged from my carpool's house in the afternoon. The medical term for this is "episodic". The legal term is "arbitrary and capricious". The lay term is "gggggaaaahhhhhhhhh".

I've spent the past ten months obsessing over why I am sometimes functional, sometimes not. If I could just pinpoint what I was doing wrong—riding hills, riding hard, riding long, riding in the morning, riding this bike, that bike, riding on the full fucking moon, whatever—that would at least give me back some agency, let me plan. But I have gotten nowhere at all playing Whodunit. And one of the first things Curtis did—almost imperceptibly—was steer the conversation away from my breathless recitation of the infinite variables and toward the one constant, which is, of course: my own body.

[More later. Two posts to recap two hours is pretty absurd, but they were a long time coming—and I trust the bike nerds at least are curious.]

since auld lang syne

2012-01-02T20:26:00.000-08:00

Cloud's Rest, Half Dome on the right. And I'm in there, too!
Photo poached from Jacob SB (Jacob IMDB?)

After the snow cave I decided:

1) I definitely want to spend New Year's outside.
2) I definitely do not want to spend New Year's outside.

So I booked a platform tent, with heat. We ran it all night, John Muir, forgive me.

*****
Among my clinical observations from a rather reflective year was this: My body has ceased to manufacture ambition beyond that for friends in/and high places. I feel fine, though.

By Jacob SB and the attending GorillaPod.

*****
Much of the trail is ice. It's slow going but ooh-aah beautiful; I could look at it (and poke it) for hours. As I walk I root around for words and can't find anything even close. Nabakov? Minnesotans? Muir again? Who has the vocabulary to freeze the frozen?

I took this one myself, which is why it's not EPIC. Whatever!

*****
We're watching the sun come up on the new year, looking down the long valley as the shadows fade. The sky is pinned with the pink-tinged trails of ascending airplanes, rising steeply and slowly into the dawn. They seem to stream banners in their wake, to sound a fanfare—it's quiet and dim, I know, but still I'm sure of trumpets and the flash of brass.

*****
I have gone just slightly too far up for my own abilities and shoes and the fact that no one knows where I am. It's fine, really, but I know that the interview with the paramedics would be unflattering. "I just wanted to get close enough to touch it!" I'd be saying as they splinted the ankle or wrist or whatever. "I just wanted to touch the wall!"

*****
I'm crossing the sparse wood behind the Ahwahnee, which looks like a Lincoln Log window display and reeks of cinnamon rolls. A woman walks hand-in-hand with a ponytailed child alternately jumping and kicking up dry pine needles. They're singing a call-and-response I can't quite make out: When you something-something mountain? When you something-something river? But the answer from the little girl is a thrilling, gleeful shout—

You find a way! YOU FIND A WAY!

bless this wine, it is Merlot?

2011-12-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

Christmas at my place

Or, doing what you can

1. Half my family is on the subcontinent for the holidays. My mom left the stockings stuffed and the freezer full, but, you know.

Dinner and dessert

"Fruitcream!" declares my dad, who in halving a dozen grapes has just completed the most meticulous kitchen task I've ever seen him undertake. "It's a dessert!" "That is some bullshit," says my brother. "Or some Indian bullshit," I counter. This turns out to be true₁.

2. We top our mod tree facsimile with the avenging angel, a creepy, balding mess of spray-painted cheesecloth I made in fifth-grade art class₂. I didn't intentionally sculpt a faceless harbinger of death! I just sucked at crafts; that's all.

Hark!

You can imagine what this looks like in the dark, lit red as if hurling curses from some glittering column of hellfire. Merry Christmas, all ye sinners in our living room.

3. I did not anticipate weather like this when I picked December for the Hail Mary bike ban. Half-crazy from watching roadies whiz past the kitchen window, I go outside and just start walking. This is a much more rewarding exercise than it is in the urban jungle, and within a few hours I've made it to Christmas mass₃.

Revere in the shade, exalt in the sun.

It's not a large park, and I'm nowhere far from echoes of garrulous family outings or the thumping tread of runners up the trail. But ankle-deep in leaves and loam in the dim crease of the hill I find a thick and heavy silence crouched amid the noise—a presence, not an absence, something I'm with and not without. An attendant ring of laurels form the buttresses, hold it in. The first, last, best cathedral. The first, last, best hope.
______________________________________________
1. Don't worry, Mom; I imagine the leftovers will still be in the fridge for you to try when you get home.
2. Our tree in Berkeley sports medals and a vicuna that Uncle Anand brought me back from South America.
3. I've also walked my left leg into uselessness, which calls into serious questions the merits of said bike ban. Next (lame) step? Hoping Curtis Cramblett's got some serious game.

and the moun-tains in reply

2011-12-12T17:07:00.000-08:00

After a few weeks of watching the weather—increasingly weird, but still no snow—we decided we'd try Half Dome after all.

2:19 PM Alean: The Rituals of Old were completed to schedule, as indicated by the two days of fog. Then the winds picked up as our air rushed through the now open Gates of Hell. When equilibrium was reached, Hell in turn started to gradually heat up our own atmosphere. When the air is dry and crackling and Hell's heat becomes unbearable, the lunar eclipse will bring the End.

2:21 PM me: this does seem increasingly probable

2:23 PM Alean: So when we hear a song that sounds like a choir of bones dragged across crushed glass, we'll at least be in yosemite

where it's pretty₁.

Alean has been a good friend to the list, loaning me a skateboard, parrying my feeble left hook, and taking some dubious falls in the three attempts it took me to pass my lead test. We have similar interests in general, but in him they come reinforced with a knack for the technical aspects that I find miserably boring. This is why I cultivate a social circle of engineers: Their willingness to deal with details₂ allows me to try things (and drink homebrew) far beyond my own competence. They are my engin-ablers.

The ranger I called on Friday was eating something and typing something else. "Oh, come on in, honey," he said between mouthfuls. "Everything's wide open. All yours." Mine!₃ I thought, O-ho! —and it was true enough. We encountered one other hiker on Nevada Falls and not a soul between there and the top of Half Dome, which in its stunning, sweeping emptiness might as well have been the moon. It's self-centered, I know, to thrill to this thudding, glorious delusion that the world is mine. But who can help but prefer this to this?

Everything the light touches is yours, Simba.

I saw a bear; I saw where trees had swallowed lightening. I saw water come frothing and roaring down dark-streaked walls of somber granite. It froze to dusted sugar on the rocks, pooled and hardened into shifting sheets of pale and crystalline green. In my temperate experience I had never been close to a frozen river. I saw the tiny rivulets still pressing on inside the ice!
_______________________________________________
1. "There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods ... ." — my boy Teddy. And we have him to thank.
2. Here "details" include such minutiae as how to avoid falling 1,000 feet to our deaths, or whatever.
3. My first word, supposedly.

hum(m)us

2011-12-09T18:32:00.001-08:00

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people ... . For a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and I think it’s tragic.” (Gingrich calls Palestinians an 'invented' people, Washington Post)

I suppose I (and everyone else here) am then still British? Regardless, I wish the United States would sustain a war on me—I could use a billion or so a year in extra spending money. And I love jet planes!

bodies of water

2011-12-06T16:58:00.001-08:00

(Don't even say it. I'm still pining for my dumbphone.)

My instructor is an effusive and sinewy 66 years old. It takes her one minute fifteen seconds to swim a hundred-meter freestyle, something I can barely finish without stopping to heave desperately for air at the wall between lengths. Once while doing so I ventured to congratulate myself for outpacing the man in the lane next to me. He emerged seal-like from the pool and walked on his hands to a waiting wheelchair; I recited James 4:12, as if in that moment God could make me less of an asshole.

The climbing-gym lockers are like the backstage dressing room for a Patagonia catalog shoot, a staging ground for athletic feats by bodies so uniformly perfect they seem to vary only by what's depicted in their personally meaningful tattoos. But in the fluorescent basement of the YMCA I change alongside geriatrics whose swaying stomachs preclude them from view of their ankles, which, they inform me cheerily, are just killing them in this cold. They have borne children and cigarettes; they grunt and sway. As I maneuver between the benches and purses and the toddlers underfoot I am never sure whether the feeling in my own maturing gut is one of reassurance or impending doom.

On the pool deck, my lingering tan lines and strange proportions betray me before I'm even in the water. We swim 300 meters; I am rewarded at the conclusion of the drill with a searing headache. "You aren't breathing correctly," suggests Coach Sinew reproachfully. "Or perhaps it is from a chemical," says the Russian, Yuri, dryly. "Perhaps you have been near some chlorine?"

think I might / lie here a little longer

2011-11-14T22:24:00.001-08:00

Sidelines at Sierra Point
Photo poached from Jeff Namba

me: if I'm ever functional again
I'm going to be out for blood
Katie: haha
adorable

when I've got a brand-new hairdo

2011-11-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

Alas, this is an addendum to and not a retraction of a two-year-old lament for women's cycling apparel. These are three new submissions to the Women's-Specific-Design Marketing Hall of Fame.

1. From RealCyclist, via Amazon:

The ladies in your cycling group are so dang competitive that they're always jostling to not only see who finishes the ride the fastest and who can get their heart rate up the highest, but also who can sport the cutest outfit. Which is why you can't wait to show up wearing the Louis Garneau Women's Verano Jersey and watch them turn chartreuse with envy at your stylish gear.

I am cutting this one off, but you should know that the complete version also manages to incorporate mention of a nail file. Whether this item is chartreuse to match the complexion of those jealous bitches is not specified. Also, where are these group rides where we compete for highest heart rate? I think I'm in really good shape for that right now!

2. From Voler, particularly disappointing because my clearance-chamois-clad ass advertises their website probably every other time I get on a bike.

Okay, just because it’s pink doesn’t mean it doesn’t have attitude. Getting the job done in a structured continuous manner with style and grace, gently and sweetly is a feat for the strong (and fair). Look great; the day is yours for the taking.

There's a lot going on here, all of it utterly baffling.

3. From Giordana—an Italian company, to be fair—a special entry for literal embrace of side-boob. Bib-boob?

Whatever, people. The "A" in A-cup is for aero. Yeah, wind-tunnel-test those suckers.

skeleton crew

2011-10-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

In a very short period of playing at racing bikes, I've been lucky enough to meet lots of rad people—rad people whom I fear have become collateral damage in a clunky coping strategy I call "There Is No Such Thing As Cyclocross", or, "la-la-la-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU". This sucks. I miss you.

The problem's erratic, but the general story is that my knee will just about hold up to weekend-warrior MTB and no more, no longer, no harder. The riding I can do places unreasonable demands on the patience of my remaining trail buddies and tends to look a lot like this:

En route to Mr. Toad's last weekend.
Driven up most of the way, still wrecked. Wa-waaa.

In that I can get on a bike at all, I'm of course very lucky. I have my health, if not my fitness. I have amazing friends who wait at the intersections, run shuttles for me, and put up with my whining. I have big blue California skies and I have lichen on granite; I have sun splayed through tendrils of quiet oaks and manzanita; I have dry leaves skittering cartwheels behind me. That's a lot.

Nice and warm in Auburn.
LIME-CUCUMBER GATORADE, people. All it needs is gin.

But while I feel guilty for getting frustrated, eight months in I am frustrated nonetheless. For 24, I spend an awfully large portion of my waking hours preoccupied with an achy hip. So here are my current questions for my elders and betters who have succeeded in staying functional past the quarter-century mark:

1. Who do you recommend for (another) bike fit? I got a fit back in April, but at that point was still operating on the assumption that the problem was due to overuse. I'm now looking for a more corrective fit to address, among other things, the difference in length between my left and right legs. I'm willing at this point to get a little spendy.

2. Is there merit to the cold-turkey cure? The one thing I haven't tried is not riding at all-at all, a pretty belated Hail Mary now tentatively scheduled for December—or whenever the rain gets going. But I'm skeptical that there can really be a difference in the restorative value of total versus near-total pedaling abstention.

3. How can I resurrect some fitness without riding? Apart from a slew of PT exercises, I'm swimming (ha!) and climbing a little—but I don't know how to make either the equivalent of a hard ride. Running breaks me, bad. Your favorite alternate routes into the pain cave?

All thoughts appreciated. You can comment all over the Internet or drop me a line: ealiasalim(at)gmail.com.

___________________________________________
1. Roosevelt (I know, I know) once reworked a vaguely lewd portion of Psalm 19:5 to says of his country that it is "glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race." That's the feeling I miss. That and cowbell.
2. L: 94 (H-K 56; K-A 38); R: 96 (H-K 59; K-A 37)

real friends help you move bodies

2011-10-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Three summaries of the Bakery Challenge*
* Presented by rs2energy

Exactly as gelatinous as you'd think/not Anand "Perma-fit" Varma.

The thing on my jersey is the King of the Loaf button. I do not think this was warranted for a mere root beer float, but of course the roadie relationship with food is a little strained.

2. Headed out the door this morning in an optimistic sundress (yes, hand-me-down from my better-dressed sister) on rumors of an 80-degree day. In focusing my self-consciousness on the awkward strips of black tape over my left knee, I forgot the panther wrestling a snake on my right calf.

3. Things that make road riding tolerable: dirt, pastries, wheelsucking, riding down hills fasssst. (I am bullshitting: It's not tolerable; it's fun—which is not actually a helpful thing to have remembered.)

actus contritionis

2011-10-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

Five recent transgressions

1. CLUMSINESS: I see flashing lights in the too-early darkness and a gleaming red truck backing into Berkeley Fire Station No. 2₁. Oho! The engine house! I wonder what's inside; I wonder specifically whether there's a fireman's pole; I wonder so hard I'm almost running to catch a glimpse before the rolling door comes down. Ten feet! Six! The gap is closing. I trip over my own heel or curiosity and eat it₂. I'm up in an instant but all I see before the door shuts are blunt-toed boots; I hear the "Oooooh" of large and mildly amused men.

2. ANTHROPOMORPHISM: When my train passed the port in the morning the cranes were staring down a wall of cloud with the steel of rain showing through in its billows and folds. The advancing front had broached the ridgeline across the bay; it was coming for us like age and winter. In the narrow band of crystal blue above the front was possibility the sentinels might somehow hold it back.

3. IMPERTINENCE:
SFPD: GET. OFF. THE. STATUE.
Me: But why?
SFPD: HOW 'BOUT I CUFF YOU IN THE BACK OF MY CAR AND TELL YOU WHY?

4. MISPLACED SYMPATHY: The man I am sorriest for is Bill Gates, who surely knows there will be no such vigils on his passing. Not for you these teary hipsters, Bill, for you could not have Changed The World in that jacket. I find this brutally unfair, rage for him a little, but imagine he himself is merely sad, perhaps resigned, imagine this, of course, based on nothing at all.

5. IMPATIENCE: In my life I have never been a natural at anything, which is why it is absurd to be irritated, three lessons in, that I am not Michael Phelps. Incurably, knee-jerk₃ competitive, I repeatedly catch myself trying to outpace whatever unknowing, blurred body has entered the lane next to me, usually a ballooning geriatric in a dots-and-dasies one-piece and usually without success. I kick like a furious kid in a car-seat and cannot coordinate how or when to breathe. I pull up heaving and sputtering. "Nice j— well, ok," says Waterproof Eyeliner McSquareshoulders, the instructor. "Why don't you keep trying."
______________________________________________
1. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a master craftsman mends a ladder that may outlive him, works Douglas fir that's been breathing in the city for 15 years. Watch this one; I am dazzled.
2. A lot of that, lately! Though, whenever I trip in front of an audience I think of Maya, another Frequent Faller. She is tall and porcelain beautiful, which somehow makes me feel better.
3. My knee is no longer just a jerk; it's evil. Hence the swimming.

has to know the water level

2011-09-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Blasphemy, dreamscapes

We're two in a throng proceeding down a boardwalk in an autumnal marsh, all brown reeds and rushes and sawgrass. God is at the head of the procession. He looks like the lead singer from Creed, which I suppose makes as much sense as anything.

"Watch ye my right hand!" he shouts above the shuffle of feet.

"Yeah," I mutter to the friend next to me, "because he's going to deck you in the face with his left."

This friend sniggers appreciatively and mimes a blow to my head; I mock-reel backwards. God has halted the march at a wooden fenceline and turned to face the crowd. He's going on about something, bla bla bla.

There's a camera shift and now we're at his back, see the folds in his unsurprising long white robe. "Pass under and ascend, ye Mississippians!" Apparently he's calling the chosen ones by state, like a primary convention. We see a wall of rapturous black faces sweep under his outstretched arm and begin to rise like balloons into the mist. God summons another group. An old man with a cane drifts by. "I sho' never done flew befo-ah," he remarks.

My friend and I seem to be hovering above the fenceline, maybe 15 feet off the ground. God is packing up to leave.

"Hey!" shouts a voice from the boardwalk. "Don't forget me!"

God closes the clasps on his briefcase and looks fleetingly over his shoulder. "You'll get there if you get there," he says, with total disinterest. The voice protests but God is streaming upward toward a break in the clouds that's spewing yellow evening light.

Still suspended, I turn to my friend. "Should we bring him?" He shrugs. God is a speck in the distance.

vestigial limbs

2011-09-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

Five arguments against Intelligent Design

1. Blisters

I backpack rarely and best in the company of other people who spend more time on their wheels than their feet. We all begin by overestimating our legs—because 20 miles sounds like nothing—and our stomachs, packing double the food we actually need because what if you bonk! We sport repurposed spandex, walk the switchbacks outside-to-inside, and by the end of it are hobbling, vowing we’ll never carry anything anywhere again. (Alright, maybe that was just me.)

In any case—as always, dulce et decorum est to revisit basic locomotion. And all sorts of rewards at trail's end.

As I was goin' over / Those far famed ~~Kerry~~ Mammoth mountains

2. Lack of a human equivalent for purring or tail-wagging

What have we got for that? For “yes, I approve; you have my ongoing appreciation” or “hi-hi-hi, I’m so happy you’re here!”—?

3. I can only hold my breath for one minute, 37 seconds.

I try this in the back of the car as Dan talks us through the dive that put dinner on the table. Ryan's driving again; the Mendocino coast is all cresting waves and wallowing fog. I imagine the dark, swirling Pacific, the confounding curtain of kelp, and am even more impressed with the evening meal. I can't think of the last time I deliberately held my breath for as long as I could. But I used to play this game all the time, remember? When did I stop?

Cooking pro-tip: Make friends with divers.

4. My knee

“Race reports?” query a few giddy "cyclocross" folk. "Cycloross" because there’s no such thing, I’m telling myself, there is No Such Thing.

Answer: No, alas. Resisting my PT (and trust me, that's difficult) and all my theories of what’s making it so angry, the thing remains bullshit, will sustain weekend-warrior-ing on my mountain bike but nothing like the volume of sweat and tears historically necessary to get myself in racing shape. This makes me crazy, obviously. Whether it will make me crazier to downgrade and get my ass/ego beat to hell or to go the whole season without pinning a number on remains to be seen.

Gah!

5. What if you need to lick your elbow?

Party foul. And that's an order.

sleepless, yes

2011-09-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Oh, didn't he ramble?
Or, six hours in Seattle

The barista is in Marcus Mumford's uniform, the bastard, and it's totally working. I catch his eye through the window and my bag on the chair simultaneously, go down hard in unsalvageable wrought-iron clatter. Oh, balls.

*****

I'm passing the ground-level offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On the sidewalk, two teenage girls in sequined nightclub getup are taking turns posing for an immense photographer whose mass appears to preclude him from shooting from anywhere but his spread-legged seat on a stone bench. "Super cute, Tanya, super cute," he commends the blonde. She is smoldering away obligingly with one gold-bangled hand on what I suppose is her hip. The brunette is making fish faces into a compact. Immediately in front of them all is a large TV installation looping silent footage of Africans wasted with malaria. I'm very confused.

*****

Pike's Place Market, swarming, socks and sandals. There is a guy playing the banjo. Five stalls down, another, with a bigger beard. Across the street, another. His beard is the biggest; he's also hula-hooping as he plays. Now, that's one-upsmanship.

*****

I spend two hours in the Seattle Public Library. It's fucking beautiful.

If you saw me, you saw me thumbing through the Lewis and Clark journals or holding the door for a woman with a stroller or leaning on the folio table with a pencil in my mouth. But I was at the altar, really, of community, curiosity, humanity; I was on my knees.

*****

New game: climb on every statue of Christopher Columbus I can find.

Evidently I'm so averse to solo travel that I latch on to bronze reproductions of the professionals.

*****

Across the runway, the outline of the Olympics cuts a sleepy seismograph across pink blotter-paper sky. The sinking sun quivers behind an invisible plume of jet exhaust.

As the plane taxis, its whirling propellers reflect quick slivers of the sunset at the height of their arc. The blades slow and the slivers widen to glancing gold wedges, then vanish as the plane-comes-to-a-com-plete-stop.

mixology

2011-08-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Bad science

I suspect an insidious substance in the blood on my brown side. There is an ebb and flow over generations, aberrations—those Indian doctors, yes—but on the whole the poets begat poets, poets, lyricists₁, married actresses, and in a less romantic age spawn directors and graphic designers, other shiny, hip types. Over my strenuous objections, my little brother begins a film program next week; my sister's wrapping up an only slightly less dubious degree in art. Of the three of us, it appears I'm circulating the highest proportion of what for lack of a gene sequencer I'll call Irish practicality₂.

Anyway, the reason I started on that: This is an e-mail from my mother to my visiting cousin—a jazz musician (see!)—on returning his rented double bass to the store.

Well, I have to admit I have more respect for you and your less-than-obvious strength after having (wo)man-handled that ho of a bass into the car today and returned her to the brothel. How the hell do you manage in your car?! You did explain that she sits next to you but, really... Intense. And then the first thing she does around the first turn is slide around like some drunk. Luckily her pimps were perfectly happy with her condition so all is well. I'll suggest flute next time.

Folks, there is nothing like the color of the confluence.
____________________________________________________
1. True story. SICK GRAPHICS.
3. This trait evidently not correlated with our respective shades of beige.

end times

2011-08-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

We pass a battered tour bus full of crinkled and dozing elderly Chinese, casino-bound. There's water between the window panes, somehow, and it's sloshing around like the contents of a jolted fish tank.

"I'm not afraid of becoming a gambler," I announce. "When I'm old I'm going to volunteer at the library."

Ryan's driving. "Do you seriously think there's still going to be libraries?"

The future collapses soundlessly around my head.

et in saecula saeculorum

2011-08-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks for coming out tonight.

You could have been anywhere in the world,

But you're here with me—

I appreciate that.

...

UHHHHN.

1. Vacaville, the day gathering color over hazy pasture. Sean spots a billboard for Liza Minnelli. She's fucking following me. Seething in the back seat, I deepen my resolve to do something drastic.

2. The folksy Sierra humor of the situation—that I should be slipping and tripping in snow, in August, while being simultaneously ravaged by clouds of mosquitoes—is just barely distraction enough. When could I possibly not enjoy myself on a mountain bike? On this of all trails? Well, when I'm not actually on the trail or on the mountain bike, slogging along instead around the blowdown in wretched pursuit of eight people eight times as fit as me. I need slower friends, I fear, at least at altitude, or else one hell of a doping regime. I mean ... training. Training regime.

3. In the fraction of a second before I break the surface there is a cool, close clarity, something in the rush of water and impression, through closed eyelids, of spangled summer light. The sky is miles high but the world beneath it finite and bounded by the shore, perfect, therefore, wet dogs and mozzarella and feet dangling off the dock. Gratitude inundates me like morphine. It's throbbing through my system; it's dripping off me in a thousand teardrop fragments of the lake.

oyster

2011-08-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

I bought a spot at a mountain bike clinic₁; then I bought a dress₂. My bank felt that these "inconsistent" purchases constituted suspicious activity and froze my debit card.

What a world! What a world!
____________________________________
1. This is how I am consoling myself for the loss of my cross season. I don't need good knees to huck-sick-gnar-shred-extreme-booyah, do I?
2. This one is not pink.

all were fine

2011-08-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

A toast! To friendships no less constant for evolving, to refreshing my memory, to Neil Young.

March 2006

July 2011

I'm going to ruin the lyrical subject line game because the song's too perfect: Elbow, "Snooks (Progress Report)".

scenes from long lunches

2011-07-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

I got a camera, but my dumbphone is still the quicker draw.

Evokes certain frames from Free Willy.

O-ho! Aren't we all!

He is re-painting the Indian. Eat your heart out, social "scientists".

COMplete CONtrol

2011-07-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Tour is over, and:

1. Cadel Evans is Mugatu. Observe—

—and listen to the creeper laugh at the end of this one—then watch a Zoolander clip. I've haven't been this sure since realizing that Sarah Palin is a My Little Pony.

2. Contador and Schleck can defuse their obvious sexual tension with humor for only so long. I am waiting for some good slash fanfiction, preferably set on the cool slopes of the Pyrenees and involving non-FDA-approved use of DZ-nuts. Too far! I go too far!

Make out already.
I want to credit a photographer, but this just got barfed up by the bluebird.

3. Jens Voigt is always the winner in my heart, and in the media—esoteric or, increasingly and refreshingly, mainstream. Props. With the triumph of the pro-cancer constituency over Lance Armstrong, cycling could have no better ambassador.

Photo discovery credit to David, via the always aesthetically pleasing Cycling Tips.

on the big blue wet thing

2011-07-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

For reference, the original text of the list item reads,

I've actually been on a sailboat once, as a very passive passenger; I remember only being alarmed by the proximity of my face to the bay. A "try" adequate to fulfill this goal must entail a) tying some sort of knot, and b) correctly using at least ten jaunty nautical terms. Also, I may not quote T-Pain more than once. Twice. Three times, three times, max!

Recycled from the mists of time/Emeryville, circa 2006.
It was a similar sort of day.

Got this one done courtesy my charmingly nautical roommate Philippe, who bops around the Berkeley marina in a found Kenny Chesney hat looking windblown and competent₁. I tied and then promptly forgot how to tie a cleat hitch and a trucker's hitch; I learned my ten words:

Mainsail: Even on a tiny boat, this looks very large—especially when you envision it falling on you.
Jib: Not to be confused with
Jibe: I don't actually understand this process, but I know that when someone calls “Jibe-ho!” I picture a Bollywood dance₂ taking place on the
Gunwale: It’s fun to lean off this until the waves touch your shoulders. Then you can freak out, lurch forward, and unbalance everybody else.
Boom: The thing that hits you in the head; also, somewhat unnervingly, Philippe’s general exclamation for “done!”
Tiller: I pretended to operate this for the approximately 15 seconds before it became clear I was going to dump all parties involved in the drink.
Sheet: Tim does not like to get smacked with this.
Tack: The most fun part!
Centerboard: Philippe rescued two guys who had capsized by telling one to climb on this. "But it hurts," he replied. So will ... drowning?
Luffing: My favorite. As in, “Avast, matey, the jib be luffing!

Debrief:

Fast. Way faster than I expected. Weeee!
Should replace the scuba list item with windsurfing, which I now imagine to be like sailing without the complication of ropes (sorry, lines) or things that could conceivably crush me. More probable than a tropical vacation.
Hail the bay, dappled, winking waves, smile of a span a silhouette on summer, gauzy blue. And when the water bobs to lap at the horizon I am closer to the center, though I couldn't start to say center of what.
Still one of the greatest songs ever:

________________________________________
1. Do all my friends master complicated outdoor pursuits and then charitably take me on field trips? Many, or at least, more than I deserve.
2. My father posted this to Facebook with the comment, "White dudes, Punjabi music and Marijuana ..... here is the result!!"

don't lay a hand on the bay

2011-07-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Three Subjects for Country Ballads

1. Wes grew up in Boonies, Colorado, riding dirt bikes around the family ranch and cultivating an all-American amble he maintains in a very different world even today. He earned his pocket-money "roguing" potatoes, which at no point in my pizza-day, suburban education was I ever informed was a thing. Now that I know, I begin:

He walks down them rows and
He pulls up them tubers!
He's the wand'ring po-ta-to rogue!

"It's roguer," Wes interjects. "Whatever," I say.

2. The guy who plays saxophone scales on Shattuck. Jesus, will he ever learn a song? Can you write a country song about saxophones? A tune about tunelessness? This one is iffy.

3. Witness describes how three people went over vernal fall

"'The couple from the rock hugged each other tightly as they disappeared over the edge, Bibee said: 'It was brutal.'" [emphasis added]

Supposedly the eyewitness actually is a country singer, so this one legitimately might get written.

Sean took us rafting on that river last weekend. Dumped (along with everyone else and all our gear), I flailed my way to the surface of a rapid called Gauge Hole and duly assumed the "California Lounge Chair". I had time then to consider the sensation, long-forgotten, of immersion in moving, living water, to imagine the river as a cool hand that alternately crushed and cradled my inconsequential human form. Something like that. But a river guide's got more practical concerns.

Sean: Well, I don't want to find a body floating in the river...
me: they probably sunk by now or something, right? or they're in the reservoir?
Sean: maybe? or caught in an eddy like a water bottle
Sean: this is getting dark

*****
Until any of those are written, my favorite ballad for lyrics is Wille Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger". Thanks to KP.

never my money

2011-07-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Too much information₁

The Imperfect Storm

or, ISO Lobotomy

While the clear error in "more mathematical" gives me a shred of hope that there is a problem with the algorithm and not me₂, I am officially accepting donations of cat food.
________________________________________________
1. I made a bet—we won't discuss what, exactly—the losing end of which involved participating in a punitive week on OKCupid. The terms allowed me a choice between a) contacting five random strangers or b) answering 500 (!) inane, would-you-rather type questions in order to generate a breakdown of traits relative to other users in my demographic. A narcissist with plenty of computer time to kill, I chose the latter—in retrospect a strategic error as regrettable as losing the bet in the first place.
2. "Aggressive" instead of "assertive" is like "sex-crazed" instead of "sex-driven"; I call foul.

all things go, all things go

2011-07-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: First-world problems

SHORT VERSION: Anybody want to bro-deal me a fork?

LONG VERSION:

The devil I know is, or was originally, a 2000 Giant Rainier. These days it sports a three-pound downhill stem (this is how you shrink a bike), the always classy electrical-tape saddle repair, and a paint job that cheerily reflects the aesthetic of a teenage boy. New parts came as I wore out or crashed out the originals ...

My collegiate dirt career was brief, reluctant, and characterized by
mechanicals resulting from a gross discrepancy
between skill level and killer instinct.

... but these minor alterations aside, I'm still dancing with the one than brung me. Quite happily, to be honest. I love my bike and, more importantly, don't know any better₁.

But it's looking like end times. The latest report from the shop describes "chunks of badness" in my (second) fork₂, and suggests I replace it for more than half the cost of another entry-level hardtail. Attempting to stave off a financial and emotional meltdown over this news, I've been reading decade-old reviews of the Rainier on MTBR. Some selections:

Way tougher than I'll ever be. I've gone over the handlebars and/or dumped it a thousand times—I'VE gotten torn up, the bike's been fine; adjust this and that and back on my way, I'm bleeding and moaning but the bike is jamming.

That's right, jamming. I can relate to this. I rub the dust (OK, fine, tears) out of my eyes and there's the bike, unscathed and reproachful and possibly lodged in a tree. Similarly,

Recently, my home was destroyed by a tornado, my bike was hanging on the front porch, alongside my son's BMX bike, long story short, I found it about 100 yards away, with not even a tweaked wheel or anything ... both wheels on my son's bike where taco'd ... figure that one out.

Giant: 1, Act of God: ... 1, if you count just the BMX bike, 2 with the house. And finally,

This bike is very strong, I use it for many dropoffs, and jumps. It is a very strong bike and is great for ghost riding into busy streets or your grandparents car.

I mean, really. How could I ever replace such a thing?
__________________________________________
1. The psychology of my reluctance to part ways with the hardtail is boring and not worth getting into. Everything I know about myself I learned from my bikes.
2. To prove I retain at least some sense of perspective, let me say how much I appreciate that this diagnosis is from a mechanic and not an oncologist.

ma'am I am tonight

2011-07-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

Umpqua River Fail₁

or, what friends are for

ONE

We make for a segment named "Dread and Terror", which—rather beautifully, granted—combines my least favorite trail elements of exposure, water, and pointy rocks₂. My ride ends predictably some distance down the cliffside, in a lush bed of ferns from which I watch the green underworld spin while waiting for a more competent member of my party to dislodge me. Sabrina's voice, when I hear it, is more musical than usual₃.

Left: What I saw, in about as much focus.
Right: What Sabrina saw, about as hilarious.

TWO

A trio of high school boys ambles through the automatic door at Alta Bates₄. One has a blood-specked towel draped over the back of his head.

They beeline for a row of chairs against the wall, the last of which is double-wide—one friend sits and pats the empty space beside him, drapes an arm around the guy with the towel as he accepts the spot and pulls him closer. Then he catches my eye and yanks the arm away, quickly rolls up the sleeve of his t-shirt, and flexes, actually flexes. I'm instantly awash in guilt and love. So, I suppose, is he.

"It was as if we went to the batting cages," the third guy is saying, "and instead of a ball coming at him it's the bat."

"Perfect rotation!" interjects the flexer. Heh-heh, heh-heh.

I'm picturing a Louisville Slugger but it's clearly something funnier than that because the flexer is now wheezing, grinning, running a hand through his spiky hair. Heh-heh. "What'd you tell him? What'd you tell him?"

"I said I was playing Ping Pong and my friend accidently hit me in the head. He said, I didn't know Ping Pong was so dangerous."

The third friend has his (normal) chair tipped back against the wall, has his eyes shut as he pictures the scene. "And everybody's face, right? The-Worrrrr-ried-Face. Like, oooohhh shit. Classic, so classic."

Flexer is suddenly serious and forgets me, puts his hand where the frayed hem of his friend's cargo shorts meet bare knee. "You know, we just want to make sure you're OK. Get you some care. Just get you some care and stuff."

THREE

"Did you drive here?"

"He drove me," I answer. I want to add "in a robot car", because it's true, but the triage nurse is in a foot-tapping hurry and I sense it wouldn't help the case for my own lucidity.

She peers over her glasses to give Jack and his splinted hand a once-over. "Cool. He looks responsible." Jack makes a face that salvages my entire evening.

EPILOGUE

The patient across the hall is meeting with the doctor. "Yes, I have very sensitive skin in general because I'm European royalty," he says. "You don't get skin like this with normal Americans. I mean, feel it. It's like a baby. Just feel it."

All's well that ends with these people, people.

__________________________________________
1. More from Bend itself later. Basically, MTB <3 <3 <3.
2. That's the trail. Not a river by the trail, the trail.
3. This is saying something, seriously.
4. My presence here (yet again) pure precaution, mom.

the spinoff

2011-06-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

Who: BART fans, nostalgic Bay Area expats, and recreational stalkers may enjoy my new sideshow—

What: On Transit—listening in and looking over shoulders on public transportation.

Where: Hosted on the dark side at ontransit.tumblr.com.

When: Until I get bored of it or quit commuting ... so, likely not long at all. New posts most days, which is proving surprisingly easy given my innate nosiness and the volume of genuinely weird shit that goes down on BART during rush hour.

Why: An educational exercise in sticking to one subject—never my strong point—and to a much lesser extent CSS. The more personal and infrequent drivel on bikes, books, etc.—plus pointlessly cryptic pseudo-prose—will continue to live here, just in case anyone besides my juvenile need for self-documentation and verbiage (animate, now, for the purpose of this sentence) might miss it.

give us the greens of summer

2011-06-27T13:17:00.000-07:00


Saturday at Castle Rock State Park

A partial history of cameras and me

You know, in case anyone was wondering.

2004: A backpacker's lodge in Victoria Falls. I recall the black-market money-changer in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt with the collar turned up, slouching, legs apart. He took my $50 U.S. and slid the Zimbabwean bills—near-worthless, even then—across the card table in a stack too big for me to hold in one hand. I felt dangerous.

The dark descended quickly, as it does at that latitude; the moths came out and the bar played Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places". The Kiwis, who to a man grew up wrangling sheep and worked as extras on "Lord of the Rings", made it a nightly ritual to toss me shrieking and fully clothed into the hostel swimming pool. This time I had my camera in my pocket. Off-his-head drunk, per usual, Gareth was nevertheless hysterically apologetic and slurred beery promises to lend me his spare₁. It was a film camera that turned everything a little bit gold. In later years I saw that this was true to life, fidèle₂.

2005: Stanford campus. We were at a Cal rugby game—spectating, obviously, but I was nonetheless bowled over by a frat boy the size of a smartcar. He burped, "Didn't see you there!", lost his balance while trying to help me up, and instead stepped on my hand and camera number two. I considered crying over either or both but was wearing blue and yellow face paint and so declined.

Changing the lightbulbs in Hearst Mining Building. O, bright college days!

2006: Bodega. I entertained an idiotic vision of a photo taken while rolling down a sand dune. An hour of canned air and tweezers could not cure number three of my artistic delusions, and I never got the shot.

Bodega Dunes State Park₃

2006-2010: My ban on cameras conveniently did not preclude me from sharing. We didn't extend "What's mine is yours" to the photographs themselves; the best shots inevitably begat intellectual property disputes. Perhaps it was just years of learning to press each other's buttons—as on a camera, in fact—of learning how to wind each other up.

Colombo. Alright, I'll admit now that I probably didn't take it.

2011: COSTCO, electronics aisle. It says "Dustproof! Waterproof! Freezeproof!" on the box. It's shiny and lousy and I have a coupon.

While I'm on the subject, I want to plug three Real Photographers I know and love and ogle: Anna Hiatt, Skyler Reid, Anand Varma. This is how it's done.
_______________________________________________
1. Once we found Gareth asleep in a tractor, wearing a mumu. No one had any clue where he'd gotten the tractor, but the mumu belonged to the cook.
2. Example TK. Those prints are in a shoebox at home.
3. Yes, I'm trying to point out when good times come courtesy our bankrupt state.

oh I guess I figure it's

2011-06-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Gratuitous trail-name-dropping₁

- Knee refuses to play nice with my road or cross bikes. Ergo, fat and slow.
+ Knee does seem to humor a little MTB₂. Ergo,

Santa Cruz, Saturday:

- The weekend warrior plan is not conducive to hanging with boys. Just about barfed up my delusions of grandeur.
+ The whole group was patient. Even better, one of them was already concussed!

- I ended on something other than Magic Carpet. The difference was that fewer of the drops were rollable. I discovered this with my face.
+ Miraculously cleaned the top steep section of Mailboxes for the first time. Bonus: The terror produced enough adrenaline to mitigate the pain of the subsequent climb out.

Annadel, Sunday:

- Old stuff (Cobblestone) I still can't do.
+ New stuff (SHHHHH, SECRET!) that's more fun anyway.

- Descending fast enough that I couldn't actually see. Blew a tire coming down North Burma like a death wish.
+ Rubber and not bone, touch wood.
_____________________________________________________
1. Those here to read something closer to Actual Substance—all I can say is I have a project on the backburner.
2. For which, obviously, I am grateful beyond words.

thalia and melpomene and me

2011-05-31T21:49:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Actual content warning

There are times—say, when waiting for a train home at 9:45 at night on a Thursday₁—that I resent my commute, want badly just to be home rather than get home. I might be dismayed to find the car crowded at the late hour, might then stand in the aisle, might concei-ei-ei-vably look down and catch the trailing end of a message on the iPhone of the woman seated in front of me.

it was all for damn you
it was all for fucking you

I want to point out here that the word voyeur is from the French voir, "to see", and not regarder, "to watch". So can I help it? Can I help what passes before my eyes in these sealed and mobile capsules of homeward-bound humanity?₂. C'est impossible!

did you ever heard me? never!!
did you even beloved me never.
Did you really wanted me
god was a joke

With manicured fingernails she is typing and deleting and retyping a response. A dumbphone user myself, I'm unsure of whether to attribute the peculiar syntax to auto-correct or English as a second language. Either way, in my current state of mind the contents of the little speech bubbles are taking on an absurd poignancy₃. Any doubt about my ethics is quashed by my certainty of the law and I reach as casually as I can for pen and paper, studying as I do the reflection of the iPhone owner in the opposite window. Mid-50s, severe, in black hoisery and bombproof makeup. Conceivably Persian. Immaculate bun. She resumes.

Last year after my accident
you asked to move in with you
I came to you so hurt and only head

Someone, I think, someone in this car is watching me watching her. Someone is going to go home to dinner—kept warm on the stove; it's late—and say, honey, there was this gremlin of a girl taking notes off an old lady's iPhone; it was ab-so-lutely ap-pall-ing.

and what you? you showed me
the most disgusting porn

She stops abruptly, puts the phone away into her purse, sits erect eye-to-eye with herself in the glass. The train emerges from under the bay and she is overlaid on the lights of the cranes at the port. I am dying, positively dying. What Boolean collision of Apple and BART and the San Fernando Valley has made this moment? Oh wounded, wounding, fallible man, alas, oh sordid world!
_______________________________________________________
1. Yeah, my job just got ... interesting.
2a. This is a rhetorical question.
2b. French etymology is only the latest in years and years of of pseudo-academic excuses— "like a 'journalistic ethos' or 'insatiable curiosity for the human experience'. I think in the real world we call this being a nosy bitch."
3. Who am I kidding; I'm always like this.

the other gold

2011-05-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

I spent last weekend in SLO, which nobody told me before is beautiful—wide open, room for light.


Borrowing the Allen family camera finally convinced me to give up on making do with my cell phone and lousy writing_1.

It’s a landscape that lends itself to the shadows of moving clouds, makes me think of Africa. We climbed one of the nine sisters, scrambled on the rocks, looked down on the vultures. George is a geologist and so could inform me that the peaks are “intrusive dikes”—as in, yes, “the nine sisters are intrusive dikes.” Brilliant.

*****

Fiona plays polo, a sport I found romantic from whatever grade-school summer I read “The Maltese Cat”₂. Spectating, I acquired a sunburned nose and renewed respect for other girls’ hand-eye coordination. It’s a hell of a game.

"Who said anything about biting? I'm not playing tiddly-winks;
I'm playing the game." Photo by George.

On a little ride of my own (thank you, Max) I rediscovered muscles I’d forgotten existed. I haven’t been on a horse since that last long camp summer, and not one like Holly in far longer than that. Her mule ears belied a sports-scar engine that even on the best of those tall-boot days I wouldn’t have known what to do with. It's like playing with a loaded gun. I miss it, but, oh, I could never be this girl.

*****

My two oldest friends were probably the right ones to remind me of how to entertain myself without a bike—a timely refresher, as it now appears that my goddamn knee will be a long-term project. I’ve got some reorienting to do, beginning, I think, with the idea (notion?—can I say "notion"?) of play. I can't articulate it yet. It's still coming into focus, like the mad tailspin of the horizon when I lifted my dizzy head from the sand at the bottom of the dune.

Dunes at Morro Bay, after we gave up on the cardboard.
George took this one, too, and was the high-jump winner.

________________________________
1. Yeah, so, I want my own. Priorities: not so spendy, pocket-able, bombproof. Any suggestions?
2. In retrospect, an early episode in my ongoing, reprehensible thing for imperialist lit.

I'll turn the tables

2011-05-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Girl talk

Rewind to cross season number one₁—a time of novel observations, including:

My first little ventures outside of collegiate racing have introduced me to the interesting experience of getting thrashed by people twice my age. This is simultaneously demoralizing and inspiring. On the one hand, all my excuses wilt in the face of women juggling careers, training, 2.5 kids and a dog; on the other, there exist women who juggle careers, training, 2.5 kids and a dog. These minor deities give me hope that maybe I'll get to do this for a long time.

I have no revisions to that sentiment and so recycle it here.

My invite to a "DeMothers Day" ride came courtesy Janet, one such dexterous juggler whose (a-dorable) kids I have on one occasion hand-fed raisins. A venue change from Demo to Upper Campus hurt the catchy name some, but the group still featured plenty of moms on work-release—a dozen or so women altogether plus token male Fabio Rattazi of DZR shoes, whose idea of post-op recovery is to ride around jumping his bike onto trees. Sure!

Rollout photo poached from Lauren.

It's difficult to write what's so great about Riding on Bikes With Girls without sounding like a cross between Trek WSD marketing copy and a gender studies dissertation. Suffice to say that I'm fortunate to have so many proximate models of what I want to be—or at least how I want to be—when I grow up. ... Hooray! Bikes! Estrogen! Butterflies! Yogurt!

Evidently I benefited from the reassuring maternal presence and availability of good lines to follow₂: I had the ride of my life down Magic Carpet at the end of the day, one of those pure-bliss, one-with-the-bike descents that end in a grin so big it hurts your face. My immediate thought after "Fuck. Yeah." was "I will never be able to duplicate that." But in the spirit of the day, here's to years and years in which to try.
________________________________________
1. I think that's Marko in the second photo! Little did I know then ...
2. Also from the sage advice of Tammy Donahugh, who at a mini clinic a month ago told me to turn my elbows out. This totally basic suggestion (which I'd nonetheless never heard before) simultaneously destroyed my make-believe triceps and magically enabled me to hang with the full-suspension bikes. Who knew!

rope-a-dope

2011-05-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

Notes on REAL rocks (!)₁

Lacking the skillz for most of the routes—or any of the setup—I have lots of downtime. Outside, though, this can be spent sprawled in the dust, gorging on sunshine₂. It's been too long since I've seen this much sky, squinted, sweat. Oh, I am photosynthetic.

I'd also forgotten that I like to hike, fast, provided the trail is something I'd never be tempted to ride instead. Tunnels of manzanita and scree to my ankles, stone-staircase squeeze-throughs—yeah, my own two feet are still good for something.

He reaches for the handhold—a pocket—and a lizard falls from it, lands among the bags and food with something between a thump and a splat. It's still alive!

Near the top I suddenly hear my own breathing. In the gym my ragged heaving's smoothed by the crowds and endless repetitions of RJD2; on the rock the sound is strange, arresting. Unnerved, I take the next hold without conviction and come peeling off the wall, leaving minor shreds of my fingertips behind. I put my hand in my mouth and sit on the rope, look over my shoulder to the unreal spread of the valley some endless distance below. It's neat and hazy under the warmth of the day, still like the plaster landscape of a model railway. I'm stunned. There's nothing now but the wind in my ears and the world turning₃.
__________________________________________
1. This list-item excursion to St. Helena₄ made possible by a generous invite from Adam, who is awesome.
2. It could perhaps also have been spent learning said skills, but, eh ...
3a. Also my belayer, probably very bored and waiting for me to quit with the rapture and get on with it.
3b. Yeah, it turns, alright: "I could never be bothered with ... "
4. There's a climb on the list called "Theodore Roosevelt". Had I known about that in advance I would have of course insisted on it.

wel-come ho-o-o-o-o-ome

2011-04-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

A month later and at the risk of a jinx, I think I'm ride-ready again—or at least, I survived another Murphy Mack fun-fest over the weekend. I have good company to thank, including Emily, navigational genius; Caitlin, who for five-thousand-whatever feet of climbing mashed a gear I could hardly stand to look at; and Jenny, whose magnetic wheel has now been my saving grace two Saturdays in a row.

Jason's also been sick. His cure involved losing some internal organs,
so I should quit bitching. Photo by Jenny Oh.

Love also to Grilly's in downtown Fairfax. It's unclear to me whether their burritos are actually transcendental or just feel that way after a long ride, but I'll plug them anyway. A vision of Spanish rice slathered in sour cream had me skittering down the branch-strewn ridge trail at twice the speed I should or would normally go—grins and grimaces, glorious. There was the crack and shudder of the bike, the green glow of big trees, the thrill of exhaustion earned and not inflicted, dearly missed. Hey, everybody, it's good to be alive!₁
______________________________________________________
1. Now, to temper all this new joie de vivre/velo with everything I learned the hard way about mileage-jumps-or-whatever. Good thing I also like to sleep.

ashes, ashes

2011-04-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

So, the radio silence: not dead—just feel like it. Evidently my knee enlisted the help of my upper respiratory system to keep me off my bike; the Boggs flu transitioned into a mystery plague and I've been fit for absolutely nothing for the past two-plus weeks. Not even inane blog posts.

I've got some new big-gun drugs that, fingers crossed, will kick in Any Day Now. In the interim, please enjoy the following recent products of my questionable policy regarding surreptitious photography on BART₁.

Initially I took a picture of this guy because his California Maritime Academy windbreaker validated my snap judgment that he was a sea captain, possibly even packing a spyglass. But he also sort of looks like Ulysses S. Grant₂.

Matching bags, glasses, buzz cuts, and Threadless tees. If I were this similar to either of my siblings ... well, I'd be more artistic and have better hair.

This one was too much for my ridiculous little phone, but I promise that her name tag is from Lucky and her name is Joy.
_____________________________________________________
1. But not illegal! I don't think.
2. More footnoted presidential lookalikes.

buh-lurrr-ed

2011-04-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

Eight positive spins on Boggs 2011 ... !

It served as a tantalizing preview of how much fun I'm going to have at Boggs 2012—May 2012, good call—when I will not permit my devious, uncooperative body to contract the flu the Friday beforehand. Even spending the majority of (everyone else's) race day curled/drugged up in a camp chair (note purple lips), I could still tell that it's a pretty rad event. I look forward to actually participating next time.
Mike's iPod. Unrivaled—and that's Real Talk.
Similarly, there's nothing quite like the sound of karaoke in the forest.
One dignity lap and a little peripheral singletrack was probably much better for my knee at this stage in the proceedings than actually doing an eight-hour.
I learned two new "guy walks into a bar" and one new "I like my women like I like my liquor". Life skills.
There was a truly impressive campfire and I don't even think anybody got hurt.
Xton's piratical beard, also unrivaled.
So many dogs!

you're excused

2011-03-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

I am considering writing a missed connection for this guy I saw walking down Montgomery with his nose in the AP stylebook₁.
_______________________________________
1a. I'm not really, just as no one actually hit me in the head last week—though I appreciate the concern.
1b. A Google image search conducted to verify the edition (2009, alright, and so what if I'm thorough?) yielded this. Real cute.
1c. From the Daily Cal night log archive, early '90s: "Sasha told us that she brought her AP style guide to Vienna and read it whenever using the bathroom, so now that she’s back she feels like peeing whenever she picks it up. We are still laughing at her."

carmelancholy dolly

2011-03-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

I'm off the bike in a last-ditch effort to salvage my knee (gimp again after a year of good behaviour) before Boggs₁. This is a great opportunity to get a lot of useful things done, so needless to say I'm spending a lot of time moping around the house with the subletter's cat₂. Her vaguely professorial expression when half-asleep is contributing to my rainy-day comp-lit spasms. Ready?

Graham Greene, "The Comedians":

Perhaps there is an advantage to being born ... without roots. The rootless have experienced, like all others, the temptation of sharing the security of a religious creed or a political faith, and for some reason we have turned the temptation down. We are the faithless; we admire the dedicated .... for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause, but through timidity, or through lack of sufficient zest we find ourselves the only ones truly committed—committed to the whole world of good and of evil, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and the mistaken. We have chosen nothing except to go on living, rolled round on Earth's diurnal course, with rocks and stones and trees.

Alexandre Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo":

... until now, no man has found himself in a position similar to mine. The dominions of kings are limited, either by mountains or rivers, or a change of the public mood, or an alteration of language. My kingdom is bounded only by the world. For I am neither an Italian, nor a Frenchman, nor a Hindu, nor an American, nor a Spaniard. I am a cosmopolitan. No country can say it saw my birth. God alone knows what country will see me die. I adopt all customs, speak all languages. ... You see, therefore, that being of no country, asking no protection of any government, acknowledging no man as my brother, I am not restrained or hampered by a single one of the scruples that tie the hands of the powerful or the obstacles that block the path of the weak. ... Unless I die, I shall always be what I am.

In keeping with the day's theme of abject sloth, I'm not going any further than "Hmm!"₃
_______________________________________________
1. Which currently looks like this. I remember how badly my frozen feet hurt in Bend, and that was a 90-minute jaunt that started and ended with hot beverages and central heating. Knee drama or not, it's going to be interesting.
2. Her name is Lightbulb.
3. Perhaps I should get a Tumblr. OH SNAP.

funny peculiar

2011-03-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

Rode over hailstones and cherry blossoms, you know, on ruptured pavement that reflected the oily orange light of streetlamps and flashes of dry and silent lightning. In recalling this I have an impression of being hit in the head very hard and very suddenly—which of course did not happen—an idea that it's a scene from the inside of a concussion, the revolving, darkening, transitory dimension through which one falls into the vacuum of a faint.

tournez a droite—ou, l'optimisme

2011-03-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

A partial list of our encounters while lost in the forest₁

"That's a HUGE bike! Is it an XL? How tall are you, anyway?" Katie and her new Blur are pretty remarkable, but I attribute these guys' wonderment more to the fact that they're drinking beer at 10:30 in the morning.
An older man looks up from putting the finishing touches on a ramp up and over a fallen tree. "Just in time to test our trail work!" I reluctantly walk over to inspect the pile of logs. "You gotta just ride it," says the second man. "You risk paralysis by analysis."₂
Meanwhile, Katie is detained by the third member of the party, who launches into a dogged recounting of his life story. She is subject to such monologues more often than anyone else I know. She posits it's the open, Midwestern face.
"You're lost again already!" A pair we asked for directions ten minutes earlier rides by, somehow, from the opposite direction. "Aren't we going the right way?" "Ah, yes." How we could be at once lost and going the right way is unclear only for another 500 yards or so, when I fuck up something familiar and realize we've ridden in another circle.
We are now following a mother and her eight-year-old daughter whose bike sports absurdly loud rainbow spoke beads. Also absurd are the child's calf muscles and handling skills, both of which are making me feel like a chump₃. On parting ways, I express hope that I'll never have to race against the freckle-faced talent. "You did a race once, didn't you, honey? At Northstar?" "Yeah"—chin goes up—"and I came in first."
A small swarm of downhillers gallops past us on a stretch of fireroad. The pleasantries clatter amongst the pebbles. "Hi!" "How's it goin'?" "Take it easy!" "Stay cool!"

___________________________________________
1. Nowhere else I ride has such a farcical, wonderland feel. Trails peter out into bogs and pine needles and barbed wire, loop back on themselves, fall abruptly into creeks. You can sense the forest's boundedness but never see the edge; there is no direction and the trains call hoo-oooooo like a warm wind from everywhere₄. It's light and leafy and still when you stop but full, on a Saturday afternoon, of every sort of rider—people appear out of the woods like deer. Inevitably they are allegorical. I feel like Candide.
2. To be fair, I also risk paralysis by breaking my neck.
3. Or rather, more like a chump than I felt already after crashing 45 seconds up the trail. This would be a personal record but for that stupid tube at Tamarancho.
4. In case you were wondering (...), my two favorite poems about trains are Night Train by W.H. Auden ("And gossip, gossip, from all the nations!") and Adlestrop by Edward Thomas. The latter stops time for me, honestly, total magic.

in addition to drug-resistant bacteria

2011-03-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

"Dr. Lee, MC" is San Francisco-Milbrae-bound.

Yo, shorty, nice bag!
I like it!
Is it from Tar-get?

The entire car has been studiously ignoring the MC for at least the past three stops, when the erratic clapping element of his eyes-shut, arms-flapping dance between the doors first pulled my attention from (ha!) "The Comedians." Those closest turn their backs and feign absorption in books, phones, cufflinks—anything to avoid eye contact. There is palpable irritation at the disturbance in the force₁.

But now that Dr. Lee's "mad flow" has progressed from self-promotional vagaries ("rhymes so ill/they crazy chill") to other passengers, we're weakening, cracking smiles. The MC makes his way down the center aisle in a sort of loose-limbed shimmy; his fur-lined hood comes down and I catch a brief glimpse of a broad, Asian face and ear-to-ear grin.

She got a Kindle!₂
She readin' it!
She literate!

I lose it. The bearded man across from me catches my eye with some reproach, but with headphones in and his back to the scene of Dr. Lee towering over the blushing Kindle owner he can hardly know what I'm giggling at.
____________________________________________
1. Months ago: Transferring at MacArthur and already late, I shove my way into a packed car with a step-off glare and perhaps a little more elbows-out than is necessary. I bounce off the stomach of a balding man who blinks down at me from behind very round glasses and asks, "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"
2. Every week I overhear someone with a book politely interrupt someone with a Kindle and inquire as to whether they like it. Inevitably the follow-up question is whether they "miss the feel of turning the pages". Bulk is certainly the main thing keeping me from Don Quixote, but how will my soulmate recognize me if they can't see what I'm reading?

long rein

2011-03-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

I was cheered at the invitation to a Murphy Mack production with the word "fun" instead of "enduro" in the title₁. Despite the later posting of finishing times as evidence to the contrary, Murphy was adamant at the start that the day was Not A Race. We were warned to therefore play nicely with the ponies, instructions I enjoyed as I do any small opportunity for overlap between my current and former riding styles₂.

Photo by Matthew Blain, king navigator.

In this picture I am dirtier than everyone else because I very incorrectly evaluated the consistency of the one serious mud pit on the entire 40-mile route. "Why are those guys walking? I can totally— SPLATyeurrrrgloooook."

Anyway, so, the route was 40 miles out—not, as I had somehow convinced myself , 20 miles to Fairfax/Gestalt/sizzling bratwursts and then 20 more back to the city. I have made most of the other elementary mistakes₃, but never straight-up run out of food on a ride before. Though generous and better-prepared folk were quick to share (<3), my allergy drama meant pretty-princess refusals of everything but Gu and Shot Bloks ... which evidently only get you so far.

At the top of the last climb it seemed the only thing to do was flee the imminent bonk as if it were a rabid animal. More shameless than usual when in survival mode, I invoked pirate code, grabbed some Team Moustache wheel, and careened down Mt. Tam in a jelly-legged daze, only vaguely cognizant of such details as the relative uselessness of cantilevers and total glory of the view.

One burrito inhalation later and life had improved tremendously. I love my bike, I thought, I love the bay, I love ... burritos, actually; man, I love burritos.

This ride brought to you by my Motobecane's new mountain cassette, which is a) totally awesome and b) totally cheating. I'll pay for it in October when all I can do is spin like a hamster and get punked by 10-year-old girls.
______________________________________

1. That "fun" was in quotes was admittedly cause for concern.
2. Trail-use trivia: both photos taken in the same park. While looking for a picture of myself on a horse (it's been a long time), I also found this, proof that while I may have since changed vehicles I have always been self-congratulatory and a mortal dork.
3. Including but not limited to: resisting spandex, trying to inflate tubes without unscrewing the valve (...), failing to consider the relationship between elevation and temperature.

littoral

2011-02-26T21:32:00.000-08:00

The current object of my geekery is Lawrence of Arabia₁. His "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" wasn't where it was supposed to be in the stacks, so I settled for some random, 1955 biography by a Flora Armitage₂. It's not good, but it'd be impossible for anyone to completely botch a story so heavy—both on compelling elements like spying and plane crashes and in general. So, I'm reading.

"When I fight it's with everything anyhow and everywhere."

As my existing familiarity with T.E. extends only so far as coveting his motorcycle, I am anyway not above checkout-aisle thrills to the more sordid details of his life—the masochism and self-loathing, the gore of Dera'a—and trivia like the name of his favorite camel (Wodheiha). Don't get me wrong; I'm still asking what he'd think of the current protests—as a strategist, an Arabist, and as a soldier—I'm just, you know, not volunteering to be the one answering the question₃. My commute might give me more reading time than I ever had in school, but the rest of playing grown-up is a real intellectual-rigor-suck₄.

Fortunately, on the sliding scale between Entertainment Weekly and Middle East politics are some midrange moments of resonance in his letters:

It is a pity to go and it would have been unwise to stay. I feel like a man who has suddenly dropped a heavy load: one's back hurts when one tries to walk straight.

And in Armitage's profiling, too:

There was in him an ... exaltation of masculinity for the sake of those things which men can do which women cannot: the fellowship they ... enjoy around a campfire, in war, in adventure, which only the odd woman here and there seems capable of achieving.

A toast, then, to the odd women, here and there.
____________________________________________________
1. British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn ...
2. Random enough that I had to add it to Goodreads myself. Exciting times, people, exciting times.
3. Paging Agent Adriana V. ...
4. Rigor-suck?!

and turns, and turns

2011-02-23T22:24:00.000-08:00

Stopped writing bikes because I stopped riding bikes because I stopped racing bikes. Turns out there's only so many 6 a.m. renditions of Grizzly Peak I can take.

In light of this I spent the weekend at home in the south bay₁ trying to resurrect some semblance of an interest in road₂. My old friend Page Mill was cardiac arrest; Kings Mountain the next day had me cursing phantom flats and my aversion to yoga. Alright, alright, I get it—bla bla bla, "not a natural athlete". Fine, but:

Dumbphone does OLH West.

1. The descents: Yee. Haw. If you had told me three years ago to loosen my death-grip and imagine a day on which I'd plan my route around a desire to bomb down Alpine grinning all the way from the crest into the big trees ... absurd. I am ever more demanding of my bike and centripetal force; I am re-reading my clavicle epics to replenish The Fear.

2. The snow: Tried and failed to resist a sloppy singletrack detour across Russian Ridge to find it. I know everyone else was waist-deep in Tahoe powder₃, but come on: that magic on the ground and the Pacific in the sky? Here is a cell phone abstract:

Ok, well, use your imagination. Or Flickr.

3. The dirt: I already raved all over your newsfeed, so, enough. The sooner I get some gearing on my cross bike appropriate for climbs of longer than a minute, the better the prospects of my poor little Cannondale living to see its fourth (!) birthday.

4. The rapture: What I see on that ridgeline spine, above that blue-lit bay, that city in the mist and midst of bridges—everything under the towers of cloud, in the easy tumble of umber hills into the arc of the ocean—I try and try and never have the words. That's love, isn't it? Up there you sing into the wind and it blows away.
_______________________________________
1. I see that post proclaims a love of climbing. Ha! I have since solved the "too small" problem, too. Hooray, beer?
2. Also to get my Young's fix at the Rose and Crown and remind my family that I'm the best at Bananagrams.
3. You guys know how ridiculous you sound when you say "pow-pow", right? I'm just checking.

I'll be good

2011-02-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

A hundred:

I am summoning—trying, anyway—a stonemason, up to his ankles in the seeping, lesioned earth of the foundations. On the inexplicable heath of my imagination, he is laying the groundwork in a cold and crawling fog. There is dirt in his knuckles.

I'd kill, you know, to look forward with the same placid eye he turns to the blueprint, for a fraction of his patience. But I don't have it in me; I don't—I may set the stones as slowly (no choice) but my head hasn't the ballast, rockets between giddy possibilities and the wretchedness of the wait.

sheer dint

2011-02-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

On the reasonable suggestion that it might help keep me honest, I've posted that list that I won't shut up about lately. I argue a distinction between this and (la-a-ame) New Year's resolutions: those are for eating vegetables and filing taxes on time. Rather, it's a non-comprehensive, unordered, and impractical collection of new things I'm going to try this year. Inshallah₁.

Why and why now is pretty boring, the product of too much commute time for BART-car philosophizing and too many college lectures on Maslow. In short: 1) New things are scary and 2) Predictably:

Practice, practice, practice!
________________________________________________
1. There's a need for a secular equivalent of this talisman. We English-speaking godless lack an expression as concise or emphatic to convey acknowledgment of our precariousness, reverence for the fragility of our dreams. ... In other words: I'm not trying shit if tomorrow I get fired or run over by a bus, and I know it.

make like a raccoon and ...

2011-02-02T17:05:00.000-08:00

On Friday evening I met my new carpool buddy Mike, who drives a sweet pickup truck for professional reasons only and who told me all about the Thai heritage of Red Bull. After the directions to the mystery spot petered out, we spent a long time casing the lonely stretch of highway between Caspar and Fort Bragg while growing progressively more confused as to the location of the ocean, never mind the campsite.

In daylight the next morning, I was reassured to see a lot of:

a) Food₁
b) Hardtails₂
c) Local guides. With super-trustworthy mountain-men beards.

Wary nonetheless of the great Mendo unknown, I took the “mellow” option. Second to double-layering my socks, this was the best decision I made all day₃. Between a frenetic cross season and sunsetting out of the Cal women’s team, it's been a long time since I've been out with a group willing to stop and pick the mushrooms. Who should mind waiting for the last rider down when it gives you a minute to ogle big trees and the rusting shell of a lost Plymouth Fury? This, truly, is how I like to ride.

Which brings me to my point. Let me search-engine-optimize:

Mendocino, mountain biking, singletrack, rad

Photo poached from May Woo.

The aforementioned locals have put some serious hours and love into this place. Not since Bend have I ridden trails so clever: tight, twisty, rooty, hearts-and-minds stuff threading through the trees, plus fast, swoopy, Ewok rollers, all on nice friendly loam with hardly a rock in sight. All the fun, minus most of the terror—maybe not everyone's idea of perfect, but it sure as all my scars is mine.

The catch, of course, is that very little is signed or mapped. If the Mendo men wanted to keep the secret, they easily could; there's certainly a very compelling, very Fern Gully argument for that. But they're practical. "This area is dying," said one. "Timber, fish, all of that is dying out." "We don't want to be another Moab," said another, "but we want people to come ride."

Guys, say no more. I know where I'll be this October 7-9. And many times before then, I hope, picking up my Gu wrappers, yielding amicably to hikers, and buying local.

Mad thanks to our guides, mastermind Murphy, and my fellow-mellows for a fun weekend. Again, again!
___________________________________________________
1. Inevitably, 75 percent of my calorie intake for the weekend came from the Costco brownie bites.
2. Photo included not for the number of hardtails, but because Sasha's new pink one demonstrates just how awesome they can be. Mine got some ribbing ("Great ... uh ... power transfer?"), but I love it anyway.
3. We rode Sunday, too, but I'm leaving that part out because I was really incompetent all day. Hey, acc-en-tu-ate the pos-i-tive.

eyes on the prize

2011-01-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

CONTENT WARNING: Wonky

Haiti is beyond writing; I’ve tried. It is two centuries and too deep in implausible fiction, in breathless, cruel “and then” after breathless, cruel “and then”. One begins to suspect it is not a real place, or else is adrift, has come loose from the sea floor to bob with the wreckage of Earheart’s₁ Lockheed Electra in those strange Caribbean latitudes where things go when they're gone. What else? What other possible explanation?

Consider a service passage beneath the Hotel Karibe2. Under the blaring halogens, a teenage bellhop is breathing the cigar smoke heavy on Baby Doc’s camel-hair jacket. The scent pursues this bellhop as he trots ahead and dissuades him from turning to look at the man—whose picture he has never seen, whose name on the radio had his rheumy-eyed grandfather on his feet and rasping, “Pas possible, pas possible₃.” “Mais, qui est-ce?” A rooster had crowed outside, then, and the news switched to a jingle for powdered milk. “Il a vendu leurs coeurs. Il a vendu leurs foies.” The bellhop unlocks the door and

at that moment, Aristide is flat on his back on the skin of a zebra. "The pain," he begins. "The terrible ... the unbearable pain." There is a dark cloth over half his face and he is gesticulating blindly at the spot on the wall where he supposes his assistant is standing. In reality that place is taken by an imitation Zulu drum; the assistant has moved to the doorway so that he can roll his eyes at the secretary seated in the receiving room. Her ample thighs strain the houndstooth of her skirt. Nothing wrong with my vision, observes the assistant, thank God.

"The many surgeries," continues Aristide. "The harsh South African winter ... the healing climes of my native island home."

"Healing climes," repeats the assistant. He rustles the pages of his notepad to mask the sound of his voice and whispers over his shoulder to the secretary. "Peut-être il a oublié le cholera!"

"Il ne trompe personne," she hisses. "Pourquoi prend-t-il la peine de faire ça?" She is Senegalese. Her scorn is that of someone also far from home.

"C'est ... comment dit-on ... 'keeping up appearances'."

So is this man, in another office, far away. The only light in the room is from the computer monitor and so his glasses are reflecting the new and improved image of a rapturous bluebird₄. To fo-cus on the fu-ture. He is typing with two fingers in the dark.
______________________________________________

1. Dude, dreamy!
2. You think he stayed in a presidential or a junior suite?
3. Also not possible: writing even that much French without the assistance of Google Translate and my new roommate. Six years evidently perdu.
4. #totallycoupscoups?

westcoastin', part two

2011-01-19T15:32:00.000-08:00

Between the week that was and the jitters that were, I felt… yeah, rough₁. A few exploratory efforts in warmup (I actually do that now, having learned my lesson) produced some very pretty fireflies and the impression that my stomach was being suctioned out of my mouth.

Despite all signs reading “ass-kicking ahead”, my spectacular hubris and I claimed a prime starting spot between two SoCal riders. One of them cleverly requested and was granted a countdown for the purpose of taking off well before the whistle. Slick! So off we went.


Can you spot the countdown advocate? Photo by Larry Wells

The start was a long pavement climb of the variety I could once use to smoke a B’s field like a branded calf. Now it’s me getting scorched: I lasted approximately three seconds before smoldering to midpack, where I remained, achy and irritated and grinding along in pure-sweet-survival mode for the 45 minutes that followed.

I marked the passage of time by the announcer’s progressively more hysterical expressions of awe at Emily Thurston’s lead: “A minute!” “A minute-forty!” “TWO MINUTES! Thurston is putting on a clinic, ladies and gentlemen!” Damn right/HELLA NorCal, I thought, now if she’d only do me the personal favor of lapping my ass before I have to hit that run-up again2 …

HEAVE
Photo by Larry Wells

A few hours later, I'd recovered enough Positive Attitude to register for the men's race in order to score some participation points for the home team. Arena had billed this encore as a lark, but it was obvious from the whistle that she had other, more painful plans3. Any hypothetical interest I had in matching her enthusiasm ended when I hit a feral cat (seriously) and decided I was no longer in any condition to safely handle my bike. Time, clearly, for a retreat to the beer tent.

While the other girls rode on to more nobly represent women's cycling4,
I continued only as far as a better vantage point for Josh Snead's thrill of a win5.
Photo by Cycle Masters of Turlock

____________________________________________
1. Dustin, dammit, did that photo really need to be taken? Really?
2. I'd written it off— better footing than Watsonville, way shorter than Toro Park. Well, true, but there are other ways to make it hurt.
3. Said whistle was delayed several minutes by yours truly, whose scandalously bare shoulders in a borrowed Sheila Moon halter-top (hawtt) apparently violated the USA Cycling dress code. Oops?
4. Also to represent why I will not be racing mountain this summer: I'm good for an hour; they looked fresh as daises.
5. Thanks to Cyclocross Magazine for indulging my dormant byline fantasies—and to Lee, of course, for actually paying attention all day.

westcoastin', part one

2011-01-18T17:03:00.000-08:00

Two things about the team vehicle: First, it once was (and so still closely resembles) a public transit bus—forcing Murphy to fend off would-be boarders as he collected the East Bay contingent from MacArthur BART. “Sorry man, private shuttle. Bunch of special needs kids.” Oh, indeed.

Second, under the highway code it is effectively a recreational vehicle. A very recreational vehicle, therefore, and between this distinction, intermittent napping, and a half-dozen food stops, the drive flew by. Want to hear a funny noise? Open a box of Animal Style fries in front of a curious vegan₁: “REEOOAARRRUGGGHH!”

Ready to roll. Photo stolen from ... ?

The valley lay hidden under a weird yellow nuclear fog. When I saw the course it broke my sedentary heart: fast as hell and largely un-technical, it would have been my dream ride a few months ago when I was feeling less gelatinous.

The worldly Mr. Snead informed us that we were looking at a classic SoCal grass section. “It’ll always seem a lot wider and have one 30-foot mud pit. If there isn't, they’ll turn the fucking sprinklers on and make one so they can look like they’ve been riding in the rain all year.” A pause to reflect. “Whatever.”

Murphy shocked me by charitably fixing my rear brake instead of cuffing me around the head and telling me I didn’t need it₂. Thus equipped, I proceeded to misappropriate my pre-ride for repeated failures to hop a tiny curb that was later sandbagged anyway. Real strategic.

The remainder of my race prep comprised a feeble attempt at a solid meal (feeble on my part, not that of the child labor), a chamois-clad soak in the tepid motel hot tub₃, and a few hours of ribbing Shia Labeouf. I fell asleep telling myself to “bring the rain” but instead had vague nightmares about the meth-heads we hypothesized had stolen the coffee pot. Goodnight, Bakersfield.
_____________________________________________
1. I personally put the cheesy headline on that article, back in my bike-less life. How the world turns!
2. "Brakes just slow you down!"
3. Here I had some nostalgia for my first collegiate race, when Josie and Kim demonstrated the most efficient way to fit four bikes in a Motel 6 closet. Roadie life skills.

put me in, coach

2011-01-14T15:13:00.000-08:00

Diary of an Accidental Taper, or,

Why I Did Not Ride My Bike for the Week Preceding THE BIG RACE₁:

Monday:
Stiff from a first attempt at skiing. Evidently there is a reason most people learn how to do this when they are two feet tall and blissfully careless of gravity.

Tuesday:
Eh, it's sort of raining.

Wednesday:
Up too late last night chattering at my long-lost roommates, whose return I confess to greeting with all the dignity of a home-alone Labrador puppy₂. How I ever lived in a studio I do not know.

Thursday:
Emergency rooms are tricky: Either you will never get in or you will never get out. The triage interview had the makings of a bad SNL skit ("Did you swallow the nuts in the sausage?"); the attending doctor found me annoying even before I started citing things I've found on PubMed. But, but ... !

Friday:
I escaped the unimpressed MD by agreeing to take a ton of drugs. Error! In that I am not hallucinating frog-men it's not so bad as all those painkillers, nonetheless, I'm about to find out what happens when I try to race cross on a foundation of total inactivity and a liquid-only, 300-calorie-a-day diet₃. Oh yeah, SoCal, bring it ON.
_________________________________________________
1. We are promised marching bands, a flyover, and a course routed directly through the beer garden. Which makes sense, really, because you've got to go pretty big to get people to friggin' Bakersfield.
2. Not quite this bad. Potential tearjerker, fair warning, right up there with "Letter from Home". Yeah, warmonger that.
3. Actually, pretty sure I've heard this one before. Ah, balls.

people tell me slow my roll

2011-01-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

Sacto #7 at Laguna Del Sol₁, take a wild guess₂

I decided that I shouldn’t race B’s any more. It certainly isn’t sandbagging—there are plenty of B women who always destroy me₃—but lately I’ve caught myself expecting to do well and find this somehow dirty. If the point of racing is to suffer, surely it defeats the purpose if you assume you won't suffer that much. Right?

...

Ok, so that's the noble version. Real talk? Heavy-duty self-assessment?₄ I have no mental framework for success. Having reached a goal (be competitive in the B's), my addled brain immediately initiates a pincer attack on my ego. Left flank—Devalue the achievement: B's doesn't count! Right flank—Apply unreasonable pressure: Podium or die! Ouch.

In the face of that wretched logic, it’s not surprising that I’m actually finding it less stressful to line up behind Katerina Nash (!). Less surprising still that I am getting absolutely annihilated: My (hilarious) accomplishment on Saturday was that I wasn't last the entire time ... just, you know, when it mattered. The lap times don't lie: Even making allowances for some very vocal mechanical problems₅, I was, and am, spectacularly out of my league.

And it's kind of nice.
_________________________________________________
1."Not a nudist colony," one of the (clothed, cold) residents corrected me. "It's a clothing-optional resort."
2. The first race in which I don't DFL, I'm throwing a party. Mark your calendars for ... 5-10 years from now, optimistically.
3. They are the sandbaggers, of course.
4. Turns out you can learn a lot about yourself from running around in an orange jumpsuit. Who knew?
5. It also turns out that "nothing new on race day" applies to your cassette, cables, and chain as well as your breakfast. Hey presto, instant single-speed!

family of trees

2011-01-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

The one in the big blue parka is doing pull-ups on the overhead handrail. He’s got a sweeping mess of brown hair and fist-sized shadows under his eyes. There’s string tied around his wrists and neck and he’s wearing, for some reason, black dress Oxfords. They’re really clean.

“I love Humboldt,” he says. The man he’s addressing has his back to me. “I have, like, a metaphor for Humboldt, it goes”—I look up from my book because he’s singing, sort of—

Sunshine! Tall trees!
Walking with the cool breeze.
Going where the wind blows.
Blooming like a—red rose—

“—that’s it, man, that’s, like, my metaphor for Humboldt.” His face has flushed to match his eyes, but I can’t tell if it's because the outburst’s made him bashful or elated.

“I dig it, man, I dig it, for real!”

“I love Humboldt,” Parka affirms. “You’ve got farmers’ markets. Twenty different kind of tomatoes.”

“I hear that.”

“The vultures and the seagulls share the same airspace, you know? I love it!” This is clearly a familiar, favorite thought. I rifle through a few variations on the visual in my head, turn it over—you know, like a mint—and decide that I love it, too.

Parka’s companion is sitting next to their new friend, smiling and slouching under a Yankees cap with a white pizza box and an abiding interest in his left thumbnail.

“Y’all smoke?”₁ asks the man with his back to me. He laughs—a heh-heh-heh—and goes on without an answer. “I see that, I see that.”

“I don’t like to smoke and watch TV,” declares Parka. “I like to smoke and walk in the forest.” I consider that it’s superb to come from the redwoods, to have that option. I consider video game sales.

The conversation drifts to nursing school and Craigslist ride-share and I wonder without malice if this could conceivably get any more typical. Even so, I am on an open cliff under a big sky, that tall sea grass in matted taupe and umber to my knees. The wind’s so soft and close, hand to God, I slide into the aisle seat to make sure it's not coming from the window. I’m baffled. The sing-song had no tune, no words, but there was love and conviction enough to move me 300 miles. The weirdest fucking thing₂.
___________________________________
1. Me? Under the influence of nothing but my own addled fascination with public transit, I swear.
2. I wrote. But then I thought about it and it's not strange at all.

Ludlow, at length

2011-01-03T23:32:00.000-08:00

My first priority for New Year's Eve is to avoid any situation in which I might be tempted to throw bottles or sing Death Cab for Cutie. Avoiding situations in which I might find myself in over my head is necessarily a distant second.

You can do this ... I think!

*****

It's called "breaking trail" and not "blazing trail" for a reason. A single step involves heaving myself and my pack out of (in places, because I'm short) thigh-deep powder. Thankfully, wheelsucking transfers neatly out of cycling and into the snow. I spend lot of time in others' hard-won footprints.

*****

My first glimpse of the new year is a dim blue dawn framed in the mouth of our cave. I've been waiting. Still and somehow Seussian pines stand at angles, watching back and wearing white. The snow is steady and silent and I'm struck, as always, by the small flakes' carelessness, the quiet woods' disinterest in the date.

*****

Can you spot the person re-purposing a cycling jacket for snow?
Photos by Sean

Heat is easier. All your instincts—drink water, find shade, be still—are correct, whereas in cold the impulse to lie down and do nothing is, far beyond being unproductive, potentially lethal. "Don't give up!" suggests Sean, chipper. He and the other talents are bustling around our campsite like beaming REI models, which is baffling to me because—the horror!—my feet are numb. I feel decidedly un-hardy.

*****

I am on a frozen lake. A frozen lake! It's sleeping under perfect snow, all around.

There's a vertigo in the view, something that pulls me out of and over myself so that the scene spins below me even as I'm looking to the shore. The sensation of smallness is a comfort and embrace; I'm at once enveloped and untethered and it's peace. Why only out here? Why, elsewhere in life, is insignificance a worthlessness, a wound?

*****

On the one hand, sub-freezing temperatures are rendering many of my camping standbys—bananas, baby wipes, duct tape—totally useless. On the other hand, it's also too cold for food to fester. This opens up a world of possibilities inadvisable in warmer conditions: fish, meat, cheese ... I could have my hand in an open jar of mayonnaise if I wanted. The ambient refrigerator in combination with the convenience of the hut (once we found it) and pleasant company of some talented backcountry chefs means I eat very well all weekend. Is it either desolation or wilderness if there's pizza? Don't know, don't care, nom, nom, nom.

what goes up

2010-12-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

We ride by just after seven. A man is standing between his sedan and the benches overlooking Moraga. He has a bundle of balloons. He is releasing them one by one.

I watch them rise into a sky of pale rose wash, here and there briefly ablaze in the red bellies of rainclouds coming and going. The balloons bob and nod, and when a breeze tugs them away they trail their reluctant ribbons over the quiet hills and mirror of the lake₁. I feel sure I am in a Magritte.

"Infinite Gratitude"—Rene Magritte

In my (public, California) grade school we had science mostly when volunteers deigned to present it in the spare portable₂. I remember the delight of dry ice and bottle rockets, and, on a less engaging occasion, our Very Special Guest from the aquarium telling us we should never let go of a balloon₃.

“Why not?” we ask, though we are wondering if perhaps she too has brought dry ice. Because all things, evidently, proceed to the sea, and some things, like balloons, wilt and wash clean of their party-fun pigment and so resemble jellyfish and tangle in the adorable guts of baby sea turtles₄ who then die, boys and girls, die forever.

I righteously repeated this factoid at park-picnic birthday parties and graduations for years₅. I might congratulate myself for holding my tongue now, but in truth my restraint is not adult, nor am I hushed by the art or whimsy in this tableau of new day, no, I am imagining—and then sure—that it’s the anniversary of this man's daughter’s death, that there is a balloon for every year she lived and laughed before she

was
eaten
by
a
sea turtle.

I will not get graphic. It's an exhausting place, my imagination.
________________________________________________________
1. Reservoir, technically. Another rhythmic lie.
2. My school was as rich as California and public comes. Regardless, I claim fellowship with every child to whom science smells like spare (read: moldy) portable. Incidentally, best "center" ever₆.
3. Though their "something in the water" ad campaign is horrendous, I would still like to go the Monterey Bay Aquarium and pet the sting rays. There have been worse campaigns involving fish.
4. In the words of the illustrious C.J. Cregg, "That's how I like my irony served, my friend."
5. I know, it's surprising I kept getting invitations.
6. Except for this one, obviously.

remember I'm just spittin'

2010-12-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

CONTENT WARNING: Abuse of JSTOR, abuse of moose. Moose abuse?

From a 1906 Collier's Weekly. Text reads: "A Few Shots at the King's English: 'What Mr. Roosevelt means is to scrap the English language. He is a patriot, not a pottering philologist,' according to the London Saturday Review."

The cartoon's a reference to a minor failure of Roosevelt reform, a 300-word list of simplified spellings suggested by a committee (which included Mark Twain) and foisted upon the government printing office by presidential edict. Pretty minor, really, but the news media then—as it would now—saw the opportunity for a good laugh and went to town. Admittedly even I, Teddy's number-one fangirl, would have a hard time writing that I "sipt whisky"— if only because no one could tell whether it was Scotch. Anyway, Roosevelt had better things to do than force the issue. "It was evidently worse than useless to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten."₁

This rendering of Teddy as a gunslinging academic somehow evokes Cecil Rhodes astride the continent, another brilliant, punchy image of dubious policy. If I had any legitimate claim to academia (or gunslinging) I would totally have that part of the drawing tattooed across one shoulder blade₂ ... is where I was going with this.
_________________________________
1. qtd. in Dornbusch, Clyde H. "American Spelling Simplified by Presidential Edict." American Speech 36:3 (Oct. 1961), pp. 236-238.₃
2. As it is, I am (was?) a mediocre student and not really into weapons—so I'll be confining myself to "BULLY" down my right calf₄.
3. That was an actual footnote!
4. I'm totally kidding; one of my life coaches talked me out of this long ago. Though, if you happen to be good at hand-drawn lettering and want to do a few sketches for me ...

the way you drop, drop

2010-12-19T19:04:00.000-08:00

Monkey Cross #4 at Galvin Park, deee-effff-eelllll, I assume₁.

By the time we got to it—five races and a a lot of rain into the day—the Galvin Park course was a glistening circuit of uninterrupted, ankle- to shin-deep mud₂. I pre-rode only about 100 meters of this and still managed to crash—into a fat puddle, meaning water in my ears, and onto concrete, meaning two goose-egged knees.

Within seconds of my (uninspired) start I was running—and passing people. This seemed to suggest that I should just keep running, which I did ... for, seriously, 90 percent of the first lap. It was miserable.

Photo by Nick Gaetano

Murphy was not impressed: "Sure, Alia, why don't you just run some more?" Mmhmm. Duly goaded and completely toast anyway, I switched to riding—less painful, but maddeningly slow. My earlier mishap had made me overly distrustful of the course: Any standing water (and there was plenty) seemed likely to disguise another wheel-eating monster. I rode like a baby, cursed the barriers (too tall!₃) and prayed for the moment I'd get mercy-lapped by the actual A's.

I picked Galvin as a skill-builder more than an actual race₄, and I did learn some things—for example, that I do not have the fitness to run with a mud-encrusted Motobecane for 45 minutes. I rode smarter each lap, but had zero fight. Bad dog!
____________________________________________________
1. Technically I would have made the B's podium, but I raced A's—in part out of a strange neurosis and in part to help the field pass quorum for a cash payout. So basically a friggin' Olympian owes me money.
2. Levi supposedly showed up and deemed the course too silly to race.
3. "Too tall" meaning UCI regulation height. Rats.
4. Also because it meant I could tag along with Joanna's family to a wine tasting beforehand and two breweries after. These are the strategic decisions a wannabe's race calendar is made of.

48 hours of Bend, part two

2010-12-14T13:32:00.000-08:00

—snow.

Snow is new to me. I have seen it before, of course, even watched it fall, but that was long ago and far from the electric predawn maw of this dim highway. If I arose to it then it was as a child, not from crumple-can dreams and sleepless visions of proffered hands withdrawn on waking.

The flakes are tumbling into the headlights like lost ghosts. But on the steep and streetlit driveway they were calm and I imagined that they fell and settled in the empty space, filled it quietly, made it whole. Melted into nothing again.

...

My front wheel cuts through the thin white crust like the bow of a ship. It shoots a perfect chevron of sleet and ice chunks back toward my feet and I am hypnotized by this, drop my chin to my chest to watch. A black ribbon of bare asphalt unravels after Jacob's blue Kona, then re-freezes, I assume, behind us both.

Photo by the post-hypothermic Sean Sevilla.

On the trail things get magic. In the summer this was buffed, flowy singletrack, with no rocks and no reason to touch your brakes—just as well, as mine are now nonfunctional under heaps of accumulated snow. The Moto's derailleurs likewise on ice there is nothing to do but pedal or not pedal, steer by leaning and hoping. It is big-grin fun; I am sorry to reach the blanketed fire road and sorrier still to agree that going on would be unwise. I pretend for a moment that I am in a snowglobe and begrudgingly recite the obvious. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, wrote Robert Goddamn Frost, but I have promises to keep ...

...

From "This American Life" I learn that the town of Snowflake, Arizona, is actually named for its two Mormon founders, one Mr. Snow and one Mr. Flake. Seriously? I am more incredulous of this than of the story that follows, of the alien abduction in "Fire in the Sky". Between the dark high desert beyond the window and the strange and varied lights of oncoming trucks, that part feels, frankly, almost plausible.

48 hours of Bend, part one

2010-12-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

—in which I reaffirm my status as an insufferable cyclocross fangirl.

EDIT: My. Friends. Are. Badass. With bikes and with cameras.

So, if there was ever any doubt to whether it was worth it to drive₁ nine hours to Oregon just to spectate a cross race ...


Photo by Wil Matthews. Jacked from the front page of VeloNews. Full series here.

That'd be the game-changing crash in the pro men's race, two feet from my face₂. Mmmhmm.

The crowds for the elite races (5,000-plus, supposedly) were batshit, awesome. Cowbells, trombones, drum lines—plus my vuvuzela; Santas, Gumby, an Easter bunny, the obligatory Speedo-sporting wrestler. We ran around in ankle-deep mud₃ and sopping straw yelling at our local boys (and girls), watching cross done right. Brill.

Not actually racing was strange, but unavoidable unless I wanted to line up behind (way, way behind) Katie-Fucking-Compton₄ and then get pulled three minutes later—the only option the rules afford 23-year-old pack fodder once out of college. Any reindeer-game ennui about this was eased, however, by the privilege of cheering for the two most awesome skinsuits on the scene (one, two₅) and eventually admitting to myself that I would have found the course frustrating and scary. But maybe next year. In Wisconsin. Ha!
____________________________________________________
1. Well, I didn't drive so much as DJ, terribly, and take up car space.
2. Specifically my "OH snap!" face, as you can see from the photo. The next shot in the sequence has Joanna and me as delighted vultures.
3. That was just the sideline mud, obviously. Course mud—substantially more impressive.
4. I am not being mouthy; that's her name.
5. Krishna Dole sadly its only model. Krishna, if you're reading, I'm sorry if chasing you with a cowbell was unhelpful—you looked moderately horrified, but fast!

move the target

2010-12-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

BASP #5 at Coyote Point, 3rd of 16

Technically, I have now realized my life's dream of a BASP podium₁. Ignore for a moment that I owe this mostly to Specialized's unbeatable Amy Shreve, whose convenient absence on Sunday spared me another turn in the near-miss four-spot. Whatever! Desiderata, right?

Paper victories aside, it was not my finest 45 minutes. Dismayed to discover that there are consequences to near-total cessation of "training", I figured the next-best thing to feeling strong was to ride a clean, calculated race focused on climbs, straightaways, and Not Doing Stupid Shit (cruising through the tape, breaking my bike, crashing myself out, etc.). In the context of a series final, we can call this approach "conservative" rather than "lazy as sin". In any case, it got the job done and saved me some skin—even if I didn't make any friends negotiating technical sections so ... uh ... thoughtfully₂.

I am a little tired, I think. On the theory that nothing makes me want to participate like not being able to participate, I'll probably head to Bend this weekend to cheer on my alma mater (hail, hail, hail). After that, the holiday interlude means long, gorgeous south bay climbs, where hopefully I can rediscover my lungs. You in?
__________________________________________
1. I do not care to give any thought to "life" beyond cross season.
2. "You can ride this part faster," someone behind me hissed. "Probably!" I replied. I blame the guy who got catty with me in warmup for making me ornery.

in the bags

2010-12-05T22:15:00.000-08:00

"Bike people" are complicated. As a rule, our proclamations of thriftiness accompany chronic swag-lust and a cheery willingness to spend money on opportunities to "compete"—at anything, for any reason. There's no shortage of events that harness this illogic for charitable purposes, but the Supermarket Street Sweep (benefiting the San Francisco Food Bank) may win for charm and aesthetics. I went this weekend in a limited capacity as domestique for the coffee bike , which Jacob and Wes somehow managed to load down with 300+ pounds of beans and rice. Check it:


Finish line photo from the offensively talented J.Koshi. Not sure if I'm qualified to declare someone a creative genius based on a 30-second conversation/at all, but ...

Additional thumbs up to: TaKorea (hybrid vigor!); 21st Amendment's Watermelon Wheat; the SF Bike Coalition, whose lane advocacy I appreciated even more since I've hardly ever ridden in the city; and photog Pamela Palma, who here captures my enthusiasm for carbs.

and all trades

2010-12-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

Editor: There is an abrupt and jarring pronoun shift. It reads terribly but is true and so will go to press.

Bartender: Do not mix friends and scotch. You will only ruin a perfectly good scotch.

Chemist: One could never be sure of its function before it was removed from the solution. Now one sees what it does when it doesn't, sees its essence in its absence, obvious, noxious.

Optometrist: It's a loss of pigment in the iris that occurs in 10 to 15 percent of the Caucasian population. At your age it is not cause for concern. Unless, of course, you have other symptoms. Do you have other symptoms?

tell the punch line wrong

2010-11-30T11:32:00.000-08:00

BASP #4 at Golden Gate Park, 5th of 27₁ (!)

BEGINNING: I felt really bad on the line. My roommate and minder Jacob SB saw me with my head on my handlebars: "What, you want some beer?" I posited that I couldn't feel much worse. "Uh, yeah, actually." A few raised eyebrows₂ and cool mouthfuls of "west coast attitude" later and my stomach was shocked into cessation of its cartwheel routine. Interesting!

MIDDLE: When I am Doing It Right, there is a distinct, identifiable moment when I seriously consider quitting. It's not even necessarily at the most painful stage of the race, just the point at which it occurs to me that the pain is completely optional. Nobody's making you race. You don't even want this. Just stop. Unlike athleticism, the discipline to own this moment can be practiced and learned. I'm working on it.


After careful discussion/rationalization, Joanna and I decided that we actually went 1-2 in this race, as pictured here. Roll on! Photo by Ted Ketai.

END: A series of unfortunate events. Last lap, superwoman Linda Elgart passed me through a corner. Confusing her with another masters rider who'd held me up before, I made a vicious₃ and unnecessary pass over the tree roots to take back my spot, over-corrected, and hit the "puddle" (lies, stream crossing) with no momentum. Splash, swear, stagger through the slop.

Having ridden up the punch-bowl on the previous lap (just as well, with Murphy megaphone-ing at me to "do the skinsuit proud"), I figured I could duplicate this feat and then sprint on the pavement. Yeah, right. Adrenaline, exhaustion, and cowbells conspired; I toppled over and jammed my rear wheel. A hundred-odd spectators screamed conflicting things at me. Panic, indecision, squirrel on the centerline. By the time I'd unhooked my rear brake, convinced some well-meaning volunteer mechanics to leave it unhooked₄, and fallen over again trying to remount ... yeah, ballgame.

I was initially pretty frustrated about this, but have since noted the following things:

The "six or seven riders" I saw pass me while I floundered at the top of the bowl were hallucinations—or maybe flashbacks to last year. So, the only spot I lost was at the puddle ... and that was to Joanna, who, like I said, doesn't count.
I didn't get hurt. Occasionally I need to read accounts of, say, a more badass teammate breaking her nose as a reminder that there's pain, and then there's pain.
Everybody fucks up₅. I am apparently so self-centered that it was actually a novel realization that I am not the only one in the universe/race to whom shit happens. I know, right?

Phew. Also: The Moonies make good shawarma.
____________________________________________
1. Biggest race I've ever done, best finish ever. I'm trying to confine my self-congratulation to the footnotes.
2. Only a few. This is cyclocross, after all.
3. Vicious mostly to my bike; Linda I'm guessing has seen worse.
4. "YOUR BRAKE IS UNDONE!" / "I KNOOOOOWWW!"
5. Even Georgia Gould fucks up, and she just laughs and puts the pictures on her website. My hero.

can't sleep in the city

2010-11-22T15:05:00.000-08:00

CCCX #6 at Toro Park, "1st" of 6

A world apart from the mania of Brisbane last weekend, and just as well: A month of late nights and "robust" porters has finally caught up with me. I was yawning on the line, unresponsive at the whistle, and had no intention of moving on the (vastly more competent₁) Specialized rider until the end of the last lap. My dismay at having to do so sooner and thus sit on my own in the wind was part of a total competitive shutdown—one humored with bling by luck and the 90 percent rule. All hopefully temporary. Riding like that at a bigger race will get me annihilated, and I will deserve it.

However! It was a well-designed course₂ (yeehaw!) and a begrudgingly appreciated opportunity to practice actual cyclocross on lots of barriers₃ and a long run-up (below is my "begrudging" face). The CCCX promoters are minor deities of race organization, who furthermore manage to yell something genuinely encouraging to every rider, every lap. Yes, cross is supposed to be all cowbells and malice ... but there are days I prefer family-friendly and sweet little lies. "Go Orangeade!" and "Moto Betty!" were good ones, too₄.

California love shot by Steve Anderson

________________________________________
1. I swear that log was bigger in real life. But yeah, there's Mallory Burda making me look like a chump.
2. Which just got picked for districts next year, very cool.
3. I can fly! I can fly! I can—THUD. Awkward!
4. However, the next person to call me Betty dies₅.
5. Unless that person is Paul Simon. Incidentally, second-best idea ever—the best idea being to spend all morning listening to everything YouTube's got.

some fruity little drink

2010-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

CONTENT WARNING: Cryptograms, life of the mind

If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely.

This is Murakami in "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running". It is a little book of elegant statements of the obvious, and so of course it can be made to be about anything—even as it is only and utterly one man writing himself. Perhaps the more comprehensive thing to say is that it is a book of reasons I can never be Murakami. Whatever. He's in a big club, these days, and if I need permission to indulge myself further I switch to the CMS, now in a soothing shade of toothpaste and just as cool. It reassures me,

5.220. I; me. When you need the first-person singular, use it. It's not immodest to use it; it's superstitious not to.

But it's a style guide, so, sadly, the rule applies to everyone.

the devil you know

2010-11-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

BASP #3 at Sierra Point, if not DFL then ... PDC?

Short version: Well, so much for BASP. Maybe next year.

Long version₁: Being both cheap and incompetent, I figured my entry fee justified willful misinterpretation of "neutral support" as "personal slaves". After miraculously transforming my rear brake from decorative to functional, the mechanic suggested I do my own fine-tuning by spinning a barrel adjuster—one that turned out to be not for my brake, but for my rear derailleur. "Make sure you check that in warmup," he cautioned, on realizing the mixup. "Right," I said. Right!

Everything seemed just dandy. In retrospect, this was because nerves and laziness limited my warmup to listless circles around the parking lot. Had I instead gotten off my ass for an effort or two, I might have made the discovery that I had approximately three working gears prior to the critical moment on the first lap that I hit pavement and moved to make The Big Pass. Ch-ch-ch-ch-grrrrr-CLUNK. Balls.

But it's surprising how far you can get just spinning like a hipster/hamster. After settling in to the course and my gimpy bike, I caught the leaders going into the barriers. In my excitement at having somehow pulled off that much, I executed a catastrophe of a dismount and slammed the long-suffering Moto into the wood. Repeated attempts to untangle the chain left my derailleur looking like tortured modern art. Cue sprightly (I swear!) run to the pit₂.

It's Super Awesome that BASP has pit bikes. Here I am, a mediocre, mid-category wannabe, and someone's handing me this thing with Zipp wheels like I'm Belgian royalty. Fancy! Too fancy, as it turned out. Double-tap shifters? Make no sense. Make no sense₃. I ground out one hugely overgeared lap trying to be a grown-up before I gave up and turned to a heckler for assistance₄. "How the fuck do these work?" I asked, politely. "No idea," he said. "Do you want a beer?"

"But hey, that's racing!"^TM

__________________________________________
1. A failed race is usually a long story.
2. Almost everyone said something nice as they passed me. I feel most roadies would not do this. Hooray, dirt!
3. I truly don't understand how this is now the system of choice. If x gets me y, 2x should get me 2y, not z, 46.42/3, or a cross-chained, inoperable hunk of carbon worth more than all my bikes combined.
4. Which also made no sense. They're hecklers. Though, they've rescued me before ...

flying pigs alight to wallow

2010-11-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

BASP #2 at Coyote Point, 4th of 17

That went bizarrely well. For some fleeting fluke minutes I even (!) led my field—in a big-bad BASP race, in the mud. I mean, really, the hell₁? Of course, I cracked long before the finish and spent the last lap clinging to the cliff-edge as the podium girls₂ breezed around my smoldering shell ... so I'm definitely not there yet₃. But still. Still!

Dunno what's sloppier: the dismount or the course. Badum-CHHH.
Photo by Steve Anderson.

Anyway, I need to work on my head game: The pre-race doom-and-gloom is a silly but genuine symptom of totally mismanaged stress. I'm consciously thinking "who cares?" while my body independently directs huge amounts of energy into the freakout. I would love, also, to learn how to enjoy any minor accomplishments without the terror of unrealistically raising my own expectations. This is getting heavy. The point is: Shut up!
_____________________________________
1. This was last year. I think the course is more difficult dry.
2. Including my quasi-housemate Joanna "It's fun to beat people so that's why I race bikes" Bechtel, my complete awe of whom prevents me from ever truly considering part of my race. Or species, for that matter.
3. "Yet" might imply some sort of upward trajectory, when in fact my current beers to miles ratio is inappropriate even for cyclocross.

and everything emptying

2010-11-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

The BART line's southern reach is into white, a permanent and pervasive still washout of a sky with its belly to vistas of undulating concrete. The train operator announces my empty car's arrival to Daly City station like jazz. "Fogtown," he says, after the tone of the opening doors. "Fogtown, Daly City."

One more. Have you ever gotten off at Colma? It is the strangest, most desolate place, and though there are two more stops before Milbrae I think, immediately, end of the line. On howling El Camino I have one shoulder to wet chain link and the other to indifferent traffic and am surrounded on all sides by cemeteries₁. Italian, Chinese. Greenlawn, Woodlawn. Holy Cross, Holy Sun. On and on, on and on.

Amid the waves of hillside headstones, incredibly, is a faceless mall of retail staples—where I'm headed, also incredibly, to stand barefoot under blaring fluorescence in a little pink dress. Between the affront of mirrors and the sick cognitive reflexes of a liberal arts education I am assaulted by the obvious from every angle. My ears are roaring with it; it sounds like the train. Here I am, clothed awkwardly in one beginning, and there they are, outside in the cloud, a hundred thousand ends of things with no recourse₂.
___________________________________________________
1. It didn't fit, but I should clarify that in real life I love cemeteries. While the existence of this tremendous site suggests I am not the world's only graveyard geek, I don't know any myself and am ever on the lookout. Colma has William Hearst and Charles de Young! Definitely going back.
2. More than 1.5 million, actually, but I don't let facts get in the way of my rhythm/opinions.

to an empty theater

2010-11-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Surf City #1 at Harbor High, 2nd* of 16

* Bank errors in my favor: A steep pavement start, a lovely long track section as the home stretch, and terrain that conveniently conspired against everyone else's flying remounts. All that plus seven hours of Santa Cruz sunshine to firm up the mud before my start ... it was almost cheating, really.

I do not know this brave soul, but he is my hero. Photo poached from here.

Racing helps motivate me to "take care of myself" by being incredibly boring on weekends₁. But occasionally events transpire and I find myself hiking home at 2 a.m., wrapped, symbolically, in the Culpepper flag, with my cell phone wiped clean (...) and my stomach empty of anything but chocolate chips and Jungle Juice. Inadvisable.

Fortunately, I had all morning to lie in the tanbark whining. My usual horrendous nerves meant I was still twitching and bilious on the start line, but I dutifully went out hard at the gun and spent the first lap making passes that were either evil or inspired, I'm not sure. Thoroughly unused to the sensation of a dozen Actual Athletes bearing down on me (rather than disappearing into the distance), I rocketed into the little dirt bump like a rabbit before the hounds and proceeded to eat shit on the other side₂.

As the Motobecane is evidently indestructible₃, I had only an awkwardly bashed-in shifter and my own shock-and-nausea to contend with once I got up off the ground. The rest of the race was a straightforward matter of riding myself into limp-limbed oblivion with the eventual third-place finisher snapping dangerously at my heels. Appropriately scary all around.
_______________________________________
1. I have quoted Fatty on the subject before, but: "If I want to spend a lot of time around people who constantly monitor their bodies with electronics, can't drink alcohol, and go to bed early, I'll volunteer my time at a hospital."
2. Doing it wrong. Doing it right looks like this. Yup, hard-crushin'.
3. Also because I "strategically" took most of the impact on my own entry-level frame. Generally very conservative/a huge wuss, I rarely do high-speed crashes—my entiiiire body is currently reminding me why.

straight into the ground

2010-10-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

10/24—Sacto #2 at Howard Park, 3rd of just 5. Ninety percent of success ...

I've raced sick, sicker, gimpy, and gimpier, but that still could have been the worst I've ever felt on a start line. Once I got moving, things drifted between vaguely Zen and an otherworldly achiness ... either way, it was a definite relapse into "meh" not helped by the wind and rain and absence of anywhere on the (bumpy!) course to put my head down. Minor miracle, though, really.

Oh, right, I'm "racing". Photo by Ellen Evans.

If it's going to be this muddy all season, I suppose₁ the things to focus on are handling and acceleration₂—the latter not so breezy on the Moto. I think I will interpret this as an excuse never to ride for more than an hour at a time. Perfect!
_____________________________________________
1. Read: I overheard Men's A's with attractive calves₃ saying ...
2. True of life, true of life!
3. Like, legs, not cows. Though ...

to Shah Jahan

2010-10-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Well, it's like the Taj Mahal. You already know what it looks like, you always have, and you go anyway. You go anyway and you know that your photographs will be identical to everyone else's and that all these guides are reciting a piece, a piece and a very old story besides. But even knowing this, even with a perfect knowledge of the domes and spires, symmetry, even having been told it will take your breath away, you're on the floor. Realized, the anticipated is just a shadow in the shade, plus, there are details you did not consider—your bare feet on the marble, the absurd intricacy of the inlay, the oxen pulling the lawnmower. It's going to stand, indifferent to your surprise, for another 300 years.

on the up and up

2010-10-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

Climb like a mountain goat. Kill or maim and tower creepily over your enemies like a ... mountain goat?

see me after class

2010-10-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

BASP #1 at Merritt College, who knows what place. The debut of chip timing was perhaps not an unqualified success. The debut of the skinsuit, on the other hand ...

Photo poached from Dennis McGovern

... was certainly successful in eliminating any risk I might have had of taking myself too seriously.

In sum:
- Remounts, of course₁. Flatted. I mean, tons of people flatted, but of course it's only a dropped-my-ice-cream temper-tantrum tragedy when it happens to me.
+ Stayed upright on a reasonably technical course. Made aggressive (dirty?) passes₂, returned thrown elbows, generally did not ride like a baby₃. Which I am apt to do.
___________________________________________________
1. It pains me to imagine a race in which I don't expend half my energy re-passing the same people seven times.
2. Where's that thin line? Perhaps I should ask the people I expended half my energy re-passing seven times. Sooorrrrryyyy. :(
3. My dad posted that clip on Facebook with the comment "so true". I suspect he is not referring to my little sister.

intro to spelunking

2010-10-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

Sacto CX #1 at Del Paso, 1st* of 11

* Full disclosure—the course looked like this:

Note the long, straight lines. You could have done it on a road bike, possibly with your eyes shut. This is exactly how technical I like my "cross" courses. Factor in what I'm told was heat₁ and the healthy distance from the stupid-competitive Bay Area₂, and, yes, the stars aligned.

A clumsy start₃ begat wretched cycles of hauling myself past more competent people on the straightaways and then returning their spots with a gift receipt while I fumbled my remounts and took idiotic lines through the grass. Eventually, I recognized the lion of Flanders on the ripped calf of the rider in front of me as belonging to Angela Aldrich, my personal hero and newly minted A-rider. A split-second of relief ("I must be going fast!") quickly yielded to dismay ("I must be going much, much faster than I can possibly sustain!").

They showed me five to go. "That's a joke, right?" I yelled over my shoulder. The card girl laughed. I laughed, too. Gosh, the cross community is just full of comics, I thought as I rode what I fully believed was the penultimate lap drooling onto my drops. They showed me four to go. Wait, seriously₄?

Basically it turns out that 50 minutes is a lot longer than 30 minutes. Way, way too long—but I resisted the urge to turn down the hurt. This is not natural behavior for me₅. In the sick schematics of bike racing, I think that was the real win.
____________________________________________

1. Photosynthetic, I am perfectly happy up to 90 degrees.
2. A substantial drive kindly donated by Dustin, who also cured the Motobecane, prevented me from running tire pressure appropriate for someone three times my size, and introduced me to this brilliant Jay-Z/Dolly Parton mash-up. Thanks!
3. Find me on the line. Oh wait, you can't, because I chose to start behind freakin' eeeeverybody.
4. Next weekend I bid adieu to "Bear Butt" and don this, uh, vibrant little number for my debut with the Moonies.
5. Or anyone else in their right mind.

o I have slipped

2010-10-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

At Coit Tower, I'm sitting on the shoulders of Christopher Columbus and watching fighter planes skim the sailboat-spangled bay. The navigator's craggy features make excellent handholds; with my fingers up his cobwebbed nose and my bare feet in the folds of his bronzed cloak I survey what he's wrought: wide eyes, a hundred upturned faces, variously agape at the blue belly of a Hornet as it rips directly overhead. The noise is glorious, sends a shudder down both our spines. I am vaguely considering atmospheric particulates and flag-draped coffins but, really, America, fuck yeah.

"Hot day-mn," declares Gold Teeth, with the appropriate slap of a knee. "They be rolling! They be rolling! Can't nobody stop them now!"

"Sheisse," breathes Grandmother Tourist, and the knock-kneed child is as amazed by this as anything else.

The planes are regrouping in a series of casual arcs over the east bay and the crowd is briefly silent. In the lighted haze, the Golden Gate stands like a smile. A man below me clears his throat.

"LET's-go-GI-ants!"

of-the-doors

2010-10-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

We are up against our reflections; we press through them at the tone as we offboard. We all—step-a-cross-the-plat—form for a San Francisco train that isn’t waiting, isn’t there.

We are fanned out the length of the station, our bodies, our things—our paperbacks, backpacks, packed-lunch lunch-date datebook bookmarks, market-share, shareware, wherewithal, all of us, on our way, go—ing-to-be-late. We look once. We approach the yellow tiles, the safe-ty-zone-for-our-pro-tec-tion and we peer narrow-eyed down the tracks to look again.

We set our jaws and we lift them, together, toward the scrolling red text; we together check our watches, cell phones, gadgetry. There is a collective sigh and a collective turn—stunningly, beautifully choreographed—a mass about-face back toward the other set of tracks. And the lines reform and we wait.

as Cecil Spring-Rice would say ...

2010-09-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

CCCX #2 at Manzanita, (lucky) 7th of 12. Apparently all I can bring myself to write any more are inane, geeky race reports.

What's especially demoralizing is that the course could have been designed for me. Drag stretches, low barriers, and, once I remembered what to do about sandy descents₁, nothing scary. Best of all, no run-up. A cross race without a run-up is like a pecan roll without pecans. Everyone else would say it defeats the purpose; I'm relieved to be offered something I might be able to finish without requiring medical attention₂.

Photo pilfered from the prolific and stealthy Steve Anderson.

I got off to a lovely start, breezing up the inside with all the false confidence that comes of riding in straight lines on pavement. I liked that section; I hoped it would never end—so much so, in fact, that the second time around I wishfully omitted the eventual 90-degree turn and instead hauled ass right through the course tape. Extricating myself from this tangle allowed me plenty of time to recover from the effort, and also to watch as a quarter of my field sailed without incident around me and away. Things proceeded apace. I got tired. Then I got really, really tired.

I'm outclassed, outgunned, and maybe-somehow-slowly getting stoked anyway. It's certainly easier to pretend that racing's a good use of my time and funds if I'm awarded beer and toys and shiny objects at the end, but with a little imagination it's possible to read accomplishments between the lines of the results tables. Aren't we all gluttons for punishment?

In actual racing news, Scott Chapin is an American hero.
__________________________________

1. Nothing. Do absolutely nothing except, if you're me, grit your teeth and repeat "Surf it! Surf it! Surf it!" like the drug-addled fixture of a Santa Cruz sidewalk.
2.This is a more compelling analogy if you know that I am allergic to everything.

case in point

2010-09-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Quelquefois, quand je marche du travail, j'aime regarder les autres. Je veux dire, vraiment les devisager—j'aime les prendre par leurs yeux et m'accrocher jusqu'a ce qu'ils passent. N'importe qui, quiconque je remarque le premier. Ils ne me connaissent pas; ils ne me verront pas encore; ca ne fait rien s'ils pensent que c'est bizarre. Je les prends par les yeux, et enfin j'espere qu'ils croient que c'est parce que j'ai vu quelque chose de beau.

tell me that you want the kind of thing

2010-08-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

CONTENT WARNING: Self-righteous public transit story

Summer is the internship high season for Haas-holes, and the FS undergoes a dramatic and grating culture shift. The fact that these brave new suits are my age or younger and making double what I am probably explains their enthusiasm, which sadly I can neither match nor tolerate. I know what they make because they rarely fail to work the figure into their conversations₁, which are—or seem, at 8 a.m.—unbelievably loud. The volume facilitates eavesdropping and has allowed me to conduct an informal survey of the next three most common topics of discussion:

The comparative strengths of McKinsey vs. Morgan Stanley on a resume. Occasionally one or the other is switched out for Goldman Sachs.
Whether one ought to accept an offer at the end of the summer if the starting salary is under $50,000
Phones

Recently I heard a new one. The subject was journaling—the girl in front of me mentioned that she was keeping a detailed diary of her internship so as to remember what she did each day. Her seatmate proposed the less writing-intensive approach of collecting all her receipts. "So, like, for example, you'd be, like, oh, yesterday I bought those jeans, and then you'd remember you were with me and Carie, and then you'd remember that we went to get sushi after with those guys from D and T₂."

I found this Very Interesting and opened my wallet.

Walgreens: This one says, "I'm lotus. Thank you for allowing me to serve you today." Were I reconstructing my life from this particular receipt I might assume I had been in a massage parlor. Of some variety.
Mike's Bikes (3): Once I asked if the cashier could pull up my customer profile and tell me how much I've spent on the stable in the past three years. "Do you really want to know that?" he asked, cursor hovering. It was only the latest in a long, long series of stupid questions I have asked those guys.
Beckett's: The most notable item here is coded "BOURBON X". This is apparently what registers when you ask the bartender for "very cheap whiskey", which Denise observed came from an unmarked bottle underneath the bar. I am in this respect hugely thankful that there are very few 21st birthdays left on my social radar.

So anyway, that's why I don't write any more—it's easier just to keep the receipts₃.
___________________________________________________
1. "'Once and for all, sir, I tell you I will not hear cash named; it is a style of language I never heard in the house of my parents ... .' / 'Oh! I can well believe that, for neither of them was worth a penny.'" I am reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" and hoping it never ends. It is amazing.
2. Deloitte and Touche. BAM!
3. Lies, of course; I have far less interesting excuses.

to fall in line

2010-06-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

Correction appended

CONTENT WARNING: Waxing/waning lyrical

I am breaking this silence only to say, inanely, that: Last weekend I caught the tail end of “What’s My Age Again?” on the radio and realized, with all the force of Tom DeLonge’s nasal faux-punk keening, that I am 23. There were long lawn-shadow afternoons of TRL₁ and the odd problems in the back of the book, and Blink 182 cavorted down the street tattooed and strategically distorted for the FCC, and the whole thing was hypothetical, a rhyme. And now?
_______________________________________________
1. Only on the days it didn't conflict with Crossfire. Oh, Tucker.

Correction: June 17, 2010
Wes just informed me that Mark Hoppus sang "What's My Age Again?", not Tom DeLonge. Man, so much for a comeback!

a zebra cocktail

2010-04-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

The bus turned the other day and sent everything spinning through the windows. A ricocheted reflection transplanted a man safely crossing one street into the maw of moving traffic on another. His breeze-blown trench coat was as near and real as the advancing Chevy, as the sliver of light that slipped off the seat next to me and onto the floor as the driver hauled the wheel around. No sooner had I lamented the impossibility of saying any of it than I returned to Nabokov and read:

One way to do it might be by making the scenery penetrate the automobile.

Damn it! And of course it would turn out that the man's a genius with reflections, sees everything, has even, apparently, looked up from his work in the North Reading Room on a January evening—where perhaps he was sitting next to me all along—and

… fixed his mild gaze on the window above, where, gradually, through his dissolving meditation, there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines.

I cannot stand these writers, the ones I like. They have said everything already.

full time, part three 1

2010-03-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

2:50 p.m.₂ — People in the park:

Exhibit A. This is a Sikh whom I unfairly assume drives a cab₃. He has yellow checkered shirt and is asleep, barefoot and open-mouthed, at the base of a lamp-post whose shade has moved on. He is lying in the grass like a comma.

Exhibit B. The voice is blessed (by God, as we shall see) with a resonance and endurance unfettered by tune. It is engaged in the production of that manner of sound somewhere in between song and sermon and distinguished from oratory by a distinct undertone of crazy—crazy at a frequency that Berkeley residents, well-practiced, can pick up and tune out like bats. This is what I've been doing, in order to read₄, but there’s a sudden crescendo that breaches the plot and it's all over—

“Oh what will you say! On judgment day! What will you say! In par-a-DISE! Where everything's nice! In para-DISE! In par-a-DIIIIIIIISSSE!”

“Shut up, motherfucker! Shit, you’re in the motherfucking park, why don’t you just shut your fucking mouth, crazy piece of shit motherfucker!”

“OH! He calls me crazy! They-called-Jesus-crazy-and-he-was-a-prophet! A prophet of God! A proph-et- of GODDDD!”

Birds twitter₅.

“Shit, man!”

“To turn the other cheek! To turn and be meek! To turn the other cheek! To find what you seek! In para-DISE! Where everything's nice! Para-DISE!”

Now I’m watching—mostly in case there’s a fight, but I can’t pick out the angry one among the several dozen bodies sprawled out on this corner of the lawn with arms and jackets and newspapers over their heads. The singer is exactly what I imagined, down to a floppy white beanie that makes him look like a Smurf. He’s ambling toward an aviators type hunkered down in his popped collar against a tree.

“Hey man, can I have some soda? I need some soda so I can keep on singing.”

Aviators, to what I’m sure is everyone’s disappointment and surprise, hands off his 7-11 Big Gulp. “Take it,” he says.

Exhibit C. People from the boonies would never think to feed the birds, would know all the responsible reasons not to if they did. Urbanites, adept in their own ecology, understand swarming and Hitchcock and how much it would cost to dry-clean pigeon shit out of cashmere. This guy, therefore, must be from the suburbs—regardless, I’m struggling to maintain contempt in range of his beaming smile each time the mean-eyed blackbird takes a stab at his proffered sandwich crumbs. He’s nodding and gesturing at this thing as if it had the cognitive capacity to unpack the meaning of his directive finger; he’s in his late twenties and he's straight-up giggling each time his new friend hops closer. The shadow of the first seagull passes overhead and it's time to go.
______________________________________________________

1. Moderately close readers may deduce that I've skipped part two. Yeah, well.
2. I take late lunch breaks. Makes the day go faster.
3. It's OK, everybody; I'm Indian.
4. At the time, Kavalier and Clay. I liked it very much, but now I'm on to the next, completely unrelated book and am still reading eagerly for gay liasons. This is certainly an interesting lens through which to view, in this case, Nabakov's Pnin, but it's probably not what the author intended and I sense I'm going to be let down.
5. Not one would mind, neither bird / nor tree / If mankind perished utterly

full time, part one

2010-03-16T22:29:00.000-07:00

5:50 a.m. — No. Please, no.

7:20 a.m.₁ — The early bird, among trail users, gets all the cobwebs in his face; he feels them mostly across his eyes because his cheeks are numb with cold. He gets the frost on the nettles and the white backsides of retreating rabbits in the scrub, the indignant thrashing of the wild turkey who didn't see him coming. He gets the steam—gold—rising off the glass of the pond, and there's the moment the sun hits the top of the hills, explodes off of hidden windows; that's his, too. The ridgeline is dipped in daylight. Looks like a cookie.

8:30 a.m. — On the absurdly overstuffed 8:38 from MacArthur, some airport-bound harpy with two leopard-print suitcases and a passport pouch around her neck informs the rest of us—commuters!—that we "are going to need to make room". I'm glaring bullets (unnoticed) at her, this blasphemer among my bleary-eyed brothers in transit. Ours is a cool and wordless fellowship. It is a placid and unspoken understanding by which I may pass the stops from 19th to Embarcadero with my nose buried in a one stranger's shirt buttons and the breath of another whistling weirdly through my hair.

9:06 a.m. — Every morning, the bar stools are still upside-down on the counter and the door is wedged open with a napkin.

...

_______________________________________________________
1. Close readers will deduce this was written before the time change and the warmer weather. I have a blacklog; I have things going moldy in the fridge; I have Not Enough Hours in the Day.

enormous

2010-02-28T22:49:00.000-08:00

Six million years ago, there was Argentavis magnificens:

Four million years before that, there were volcanos in Sibley. Today there are the strangely sculpted shells of onetime quarries; they are under a cow-cropped carpet of new green. We were each of us licked by a big calf with marble eyes. Its tongue was rough like a cat's₁. We watched another drink from the marshy ground, saw how it sipped and dripped from its wet, white chin. I suspect that many things are huge up close.
________________________________________________
1. How come, when horses' tongues are so slimy? They eat the same thing. Please explain.

all that class

2010-02-24T23:41:00.000-08:00

I'm no longer on Craigslist looking for jobs or housing, so now I just read missed connections₁.

You looked at me with a mildly guilty expression as you sped by. I appreciate that you never even flinched as you passed within inches of my curvy hip. You look fantastic in Ray Bans. —Excerpted from "you are not bald yet - w4m - 19 (berkeley)"

I'm sorry, but if he was wearing Ray Bans, how the hell could you tell whether he looked guilty, or flinched? Isn't that the whole point? I know that's why I continue to wear my dollar-store knockoffs to work even though they're being held together with a paperclip₂.

Well, you was doing 55 in the 54.

I only ever got in trouble twice in elementary school, and once was for rolling my eyes at something or someone I found stupid₃. "Eyes are very expressive," my fifth-grade teacher told me in the punitive minutes after the bell. "It doesn't matter that you didn't say anything."
______________________________________________________
1. I know, the latter clause makes the former reeeeaaally surprising.
2. For me, this is a major feat of engineering that rivals my trash-bag backpack-cover.
3. The other was for refusing to participate in colonial dancing on re-enactment day. My petition to instead join the wooden-gun drills with the boys (a la "My Brother Sam ...") was denied, something I like to think would not happen to a military-minded little girl today.

lucky fellows

2010-02-23T21:46:00.000-08:00

I was going to complain—about the puddles in my cleats, about the very unpleasant choice between wet denim and the cold cling of a chamois still dripping from the morning commute. But I caught the eye of another rider in the opposite lane of San Antonio—6:30 p.m., the rain horizontal, someone leaning on the horn one intersection back—and there was that fantastic, ridiculous exchange of nods that says, "Shit, man." / "Oh, we love it." / "We do." / "Ride safe." / "Rubber side." / "Goodnight." It's a split second, it's inane, but I swear, it puts the feeling back in your toes.

dream I'm dreaming

2010-02-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to miss the riding down here; it doesn't get any better—especially if you like to climb (and/or are too small to do much else). There are, for example, three especially charming things about Montebello:

"TAMARA LIEVELING ... WILL YOU ... MARRY ME?"₁ : This is spray-painted on the pavement at intervals along the top portion of the road. It would be merely adorable rather than intriguing had someone (unrequited?) not made attempts, in places, to black it out.
Lord of the swings: The range's feet splay out into circuit-board flatlands that bleed to the bay. It's full of haze, or fog, or radiance. Near the top of this fold of the hill is a house you can't see, somewhere under the oaks, and a yard you can see, because it's been carved out of the earth and made flat and trim for a swingset overlooking the world. On these swings, I'm sure, you would own the whole thing, and the view of your empire would fill up with sky as you rose in the arc, would empty of sky as you fell.
The very locked gate: Montebello dead-ends onto a washed-out gravel service road up to the summit of Black Mountain—on a road bike, challenging enough to make me feel clever without being too scary. There are radio towers, outcrops of something granite, windswept grass. Anyway, the gate keeping cars out has 18 padlocks on it. I counted₂.

___________________________________________
1. The first time up I thought the question would be "WILL YOU ... MAKE IT?". My legs hurt.
2. Counting this high was apparently very distracting, because I left my sunglasses up there. Now if it's ever sunny again I'll have to wear these.

mad, mad, mad, mad

2010-02-16T19:04:00.000-08:00

Silence is due to vertigo from imminent changes in employer, zip code, citizenship, and dominion over my own destiny between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. It's complicated, and I'm kissing my quads goodbye ... except not literally, because, like this idiotic concept of "normal business hours", I'm not very flexible.

Also, cross season is officially over, meaning I managed to complete 12 races without ever figuring out how to do a remount. Don't ever let them tell you it can't be done, is all I'm saying.

nina, pinta, santa maria

2010-02-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

Scenes from a civics test:

My sister is mistaken for a translator. Some weeks earlier, at our biometrics appointment, we both left the race box blank. The agent playing gatekeeper uncapped his pen and made her white and me Indian₁.
"Sorry I'm running a bit late; I had some problems with my database." Gray INS man is shuffling papers₂. I swear there are no lights on in this shoebox office; between his beard and his sweater-vest and the drizzle out the window I feel like I'm looking through tissue paper. He begins a rambling story about the tech department which I calculate is meant to gauge my English. "The guy said it was 'fubar'; I don't even know what that means. It's like they have their own language." I've never really thought about "FUBAR", but I'm pretty good at acronyms. "The last part is probably 'Beyond All Reason'," I offer, helpfully₃.
When asked whether I have ever committed a crime for which I have not been arrested, I am busy reading the spines of the binders on the bookshelf. One says, "Deniability Training".
The only decorative item in the room is a book-sized print of the twin towers, which is not hung but set on top of a filing cabinet and propped up against the wall. It bears the Homeland Security seal and the instructions, in an italicized Helvetica, "Never Forget". The frame looks dollar-store; the whole thing reminds me fiercely of Africa—to the point that the gray light warms, the keyboard becomes a ledger, that I begin to imagine the tick-tick of a ceiling fan and the bleat of baby goats. I cannot even begin to say why.
You have to write them one sentence. I misspelled "Columbus"₄. I'm serious.

____________________________________________________
1. Mere details to my brother, whom a year before that the INS rendered female.
2. "USCIS" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
3. Actually, "Beyond all Recognition"—the term is a Vietnam War survivor, its cute little phonemes stand-ins for years of sordid detail.
4. "When is Col-UM-bus day?", repeats Gray Man. "Oh, right."

but in spite of all temptations

2010-02-03T23:23:00.000-08:00

Relative confidence in my understanding of why there are 13 stripes on the flag is not preventing an irritating internal jukebox oscillation between West Side Story and H.M.S. Pinafore. At least I'll never have to change my opinion of the French.

Speaking of which, this is Kazuo Ishiguro's Mr. Faraday in "The Remains of the Day":

Frenchmen. Really, I mean to say, Stevens, Frenchmen. And to think we have to be seen by the world to be in arm in arm with them. One wishes for a good bath at the mere reminder.

While checking my spelling of Faraday (I know; you care deeply), I found an awesome site on "poco" literature that foretells some giddy library time ahead. Seriously, all it took was getting out of school to remember than I am, in fact, a colossal nerd.

left, right, left, write

2010-01-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

Primo Levi in "The Periodic Table":

Autumn, in all the countries of the world, has the same smell of dead leaves, of resting earth, of bundles of burning branches, in short, of things which are ending, and you think “forever”. … I found the sea, which was not blue but gray, bellowed like a bison, and hurled itself on the land as though it wanted to devour it: at the thought that it never rested, never had rested since the beginning of the world, my courage failed me.

I would punctuate this differently (you know, in the event that somebody asked me to edit Primo Levi), but damn. The chemist also succeeds in telling several interesting stories about wood varnish and dubs lactic acid "the grim harbinger of fatigue".

I also enjoy Tom Lehrer's version. But then, I enjoy Tom Lehrer's version of pretty much everything.

goin' ninety

2010-01-25T22:05:00.000-08:00

"I don't care if it rains or freezes / long as I got / my plastic Jesus"
—Cool Hand Luke

The one thing about the ark-status rain is that it makes for Euro-status cyclocross. Apparently "real" cross is that which occurs in ankle-to-shin-deep gloop, something neither I nor my bike have seen much of in the past. And how to prepare? Practicing on the slime my local parks have to offer would a) require effort and b) make me an Inconsiderate Trail User, so, nothing to do but show up. To this:

Rad photo stolen from Steve Anderson, who sat in the tall grass waiting for people to eat it coming around the corner₁.

I'll admit to being sort of relieved that my two-person category removed any sense of obligation I had to think about other people. A real competitor would have pushed herself to hang with the big girls; I just wanted to learn a little mud-physics (without ravaging public singletrack) and concentrate on staying upright. Except for a truly awkward reunion with the Halloween hill₂—re-cast in traction-less slime—I'd say it went OK. Apparently the key to riding in mud is to make zero attempt to control your speed or direction. Great!

Anyway, true story, here are my sweet prizes:

Beer (a Santa Cruz Aleworks hef) not pictured. I would say that taken together these items constitute a mixed message ... but the message is clearly, "CROSS OWNS ALL OTHER FORMS OF RACING"₃.

While I'm doing product placement, it's worth mentioning that my cheap-o Motobecane behaved flawlessly in the slop. A-riders earn bike changes; C-riders douse their knockoffs' factory-skinny tires in nonstick cooking oil and hope one day they'll get fast or clever₄. And whatever you paid for it, they all come out looking the same. Hurrah!
____________________________________________________
1. Oh, I do it too.
2. Really, really awkward. Like, halfway between this and this. It was so bad, even the hecklers stopped heckling and tried to haul me up by the neck of my jersey. I hope desperately that nobody has video evidence.
3. Also, "JESUS WANTS KATIE TO RACE CROSS WITH ALIA".
4. Alright, maybe that's just me.

apres moi ...

2010-01-21T23:04:00.000-08:00

My serious-business headlight casts the front tire of my commuter in relief. On wet pavement, the wheel spins a spray of diamonds into the night; seen through the fog of my own breath this is dazzling, hypnotic. I'm brought back to the road by the noise the bike makes cutting through standing water; in my mind it's something like the sound of tearing flesh.

Less ridiculously: Between the produce bags over my socks and the lunch-lady gloves over my real ones and the trash compactor bag over my backpack, I would like a break from (low-budget) wet-weather commuting. On the other hand, I'm probably still having more fun than all the people sitting on the freeway listening to their wipers. Squeak-swish ... squeak-swish ...

flee fly flew

2010-01-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

I'm reading V.S. Naipaul's "A Way in the World" (category: imperialist lit). It's writing about writing, and it's fiction ... something I forgot in spending 20 minutes trying to find any record of "Seedtime" by Foster Morris, who, it turns out, is not a real person and therefore never wrote anything. I'm disappointed.

An aside: Did you know that Graham Greene ran away to Mexico to avoid libel charges by Twentieth Century Fox? He wrote a film review (scroll down) in which he suggested producers were intentionally marketing Shirley Temple's "neat and well-developed little rump" to middle-aged men and members of the clergy. I am, like, 85 percent sure this story will one day surface in pub trivia, at which point you will all owe me a beer.

au-dela les montagnes

2010-01-13T22:41:00.000-08:00

Haiti, by the way, marked 200 years of independence in 2004: It's the second-oldest republic in the western hemisphere, after you-know-who. In that amount of time, it's had 21 constitutions and 33 coups. By the 31st or 32nd (something like that), U.S. State Department officials weren't angry, just disappointed:

If this problem is not solved, it won't be because of a failure of the new world order or a lack of political commitment by the White House or the OAS. It will be because Haiti is Haiti.

And the U.S. State Department would know plenty about how it came to be so ... but that's a very long story, and I prefer disjointed quotation and wobbly chronology. Let's begin, then, on an island where Lonely Planet reassures us that a throat-slitting gesture is an appeal for food.

Toussaint l'Ouverture's would have been the signature on the deal with the devil. It looks like this:

No one's got a drawing of the man done from life; depending on their politics, artists render him either simian or Washingtonian. Whatever his true jawline, l'Ouverture fought the Spanish, the British and the French with whatever came to hand. "Endeavor, by all the means of force and address," he wrote to a commander in 1802, "to set [the capital city] on fire; it is constructed entirely of wood ... . Do not forget ... that we have no other resource than destruction and flames."

Napoleon's officers also believed in any means necessary. They invited l'Ouverture to discuss terms for a peace treaty, then shipped him off to prison in the French Alps, where he died. This is how you know that Pat Robertson's theory is bogus: Charlie Daniels says the Devil honors his arangements ... he is certainly more trustworthy than the French.

Baron Samedi is a Haitian Voodoo spirit (lao), of death but also sex and resurrection. He likes rum and cigars. So did Papa Doc—a.k.a. Francois Duvalier—whose "national security volunteers" were better known as the Tonton Macoutes. They liked rum, cigars, and additionally to hang gasoline-drenched car tires around the heads of their victims and set them alight: "necklacing". After Papa Doc, incredibly, was Baby Doc. I'm 50-50 on whether that's a terrible or excellent name for a dictator.

One time, Haitians elected a guy: Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Do you remember that? In 2004 it's possible the U.S. government kidnapped the man and exiled him to the Central African Republic. Possible! Or perhaps it "took steps necessary to protect [him]" from events utterly beyond its control—as of course events in rafting distance of Miami historically so often are. What can you expect, though, really, for a onetime priest whose poetry promised that "the rocks in the water shall know the suffering of the rocks in the sun". Steady on, old chap, steady on.

Now he lives in Pretoria and studies Zulu. This is only the latest, is what I think I'm trying to say, only the latest and simplest thing.

measures

2010-01-13T00:37:00.000-08:00

It's as simple as opening the windows when it rains at night, so I can hear it better.

(That was my impression of Lydia Davis.)