Ursa Magna and Diluvian Depression...

"Why do I keep fuckin' up?"
—Neil Young, "Fuckin' Up"

Okay, so if you're local to the DC area, you have a pretty damn good idea of what the weather is doing this very moment, what it did yesterday, what it's going to do tomorrow, and what it will do for the remainder of the week and possibly the remainder of the month. The word—the epithet, to be precise—for Spring this year is "rain," as in precipitation, spelled N-O-D-I-R-T-R-I-D-E-S-F-O-R-Y-O-U, or, more succinctly and poetically, F-U-C-K-M-E. And yes, all caps.

Look, I bike to work every day, come what may, been doing it now for almost three years, proud of it—righteous even. I pedal through it all, pat me on the back, everything a bored child could imagine, rainsleetsnowhailicesmogfoghellfirebrimstonetreacleabsinthe and a pint and a pinch more. You name it, if it falls from the sky or leaks from a car's ass, I'm out in it, on the fixie, rolling through it, wearing it wherever it sticks, sucking it in, every work day, not one missed, dedicated, committed, resigned. You get the picture.

But when the odds run this way, when the bad streak stretches, when things begin to look deliberate, when coincidence and fate join forces and begin to take on the shape of evil, willful intent, well, even the Metrobuses—daily scourges of the inner-city cyclist—begin to look cozy and inviting. It's enough to drive one utterly batshit, this interminable water torture. I'm not going to break, but goddammit, I am going to bitch and moan my share. Someone or thing somewhere needs to get its hands on Tlaloc and give him a swift kick in the ass. And then another (this time like you mean it).

Enough already. The joke is wearing thin, and with it my patience. Have we a deal, oh most inscrutable Lady Nature? Huh?

Bah!

Okay, down to the point. In four short, rain-ridden days, it's on...the Twenty-four Hours of Big Bear. Last year it rained just before the event, and this year looks like—surprise!—a repeater. Let me take a moment to celebrate this good fortune:

yay.

Word is that the team coordinators have been working to reroute early sections of the course to avoid the numerous tar-pit-like mud bogs that blistered the trail last year and sucked at one's tires like a two-bit strumpet angling for early retirement. I applaud their laudable efforts and wish them luck. Well, whatever luck is left after I wish it on myself. I'm riding it fixed again this year. The Outlaw approached me at a MORE party several months back and mentioned it. Having already put down my share of beer at the time, and with a freshly uncapped cold one in my hand still breathing a vapor trail, I smiled and said "hell yeah." It was an exchange eerily reminiscent of the one last year that started this team. And again I find myself at this time in less than stellar form. I think I've ridden dirt three times this year—laziness and la lluvia sharing equal blame. Last year, upon finishing the race, both RickyD and I said "never again" to racing it fixed. Rick stuck to his guns.

Damn. I gotta stop drinking. Ah well, whatever transpires, it'll be blog food, if nothing else. And Pan knows I need that.

All of which brings me around to tonight. The rain outside my window is all punched out now and sits slumped in the corner of the ragged ring that is the metro area, gathering strength for Round 12. It's going to come out swinging in the morning, about the time I throw a leg over the top tube. I'll be ready for it, the fucker. But for now, I'm in the process of busting down the single style of the Monkey and building it up fixed, a nice Founder's Red's Rye PA standing nearby as silent witness, beads of condensation forming on the pint glass like tears of sympathy as I pull the rotor on the rear wheel and replace it with a brand new TomiCOG. It's going to take more than a newly designed team jersey to get me through this.

Full report when it's all said and done. In the meantime, I'm going to keep telling myself this is going to be fun...

Fata Morgana...

There were cathedrals falling out of your eyes
And your arms were the handlebars
I held in an abbreviated dream of crushed petals
Strewn across the limpid avenues.

I said, “I have poems for you”
But my words were lost in the wind.
I said, “I love you"
And you drifted into sleep.

And so I said nothing and rode you in and out of the rooms
Where we had stretched the boundaries of the soul
Like an endless sheet
And I felt you waking up between my legs.
Noelle Kocot, "The Bicycle Poem"

"The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion."
—Herman Melville

Disillusion? Naw. Too harsh. Not even disappointment. When it's not there, accept it, adapt, move on. That, or die of melancholy. And really, what kind of a choice is that?

Wait, we're talking bikes here, right?

Sunday evening I came upon an abandoned bicycle in the underground parking lot of a government building in Clarendon. A Motobecane Super Mirage, to be exact, circa late 70s. A dark little number, a faded beauty, une reine sombre de la France, to use the appropriate language. Despite a kickstand protruding from her belly, she was leaning awkwardly against a support column, half-propped up on spavined tires that had long ago given in to decay. It was clear that she had been jilted.

Slowly I approached her, eyed her for size, for fit, noted her French pedigree, sensed an air of quiet confidence about her, as if she knew her dumpster destiny would be denied, that reprieve was imminent, that she would be rescued soon. I was being manipulated, and I played into it deeply, willingly. It was not the first time.

I promised myself—I promised her—that if, upon my return that evening, she should linger there still, in that clammy catacomb, I would take her in, I would accept Fate's bounty, she would be mine.

She kept her part of the bargain,¹ and I kept mine. Excited, I took her home. But in the days that followed, distracted by quotidian trifles, I put her down for a while, let her slip from my mind like a siren's promise. Until I began to forget what she looked like...

Now, this evening, I find myself standing in my yard on a grimy tarp spread out on the grass like a pauper's blanket. Tools—surgical instruments—litter its plastic surface. My hands are spotted (and Hell is murkier still). Nearby, a sweating bottle of Old Rasputin, lone witness, breathes silently in the dusk air, half empty.

What went wrong?

The sun is shining down with infinite clemency, but a sinister coldness stains the edges of a spring day that is giving in easily like a drunken lover to the lure of the night. At my feet lies her torso, rigid and cold. Around me, placed with the precision of a pathologist, are her many ravaged parts. Gone are my dreams of restoring her intact. I am no great re-animator, no bokor; the blood of Shelley's der gute doktor² runs not in my veins. She will live again, true. She will even begin to enjoy life anew. But in a different form; reborn like a steely Phoenix. We will tour the city streets together, she and I, for what age and abuse and neglect have wrought upon her fragile frame, I have sought to fix.³

1. That anything—even something as innocuous as an old bicycle—could remain unmolested longer than 10 minutes in the basement garage of a federal government building in this age of rampant paranoia and xenophobia is truly mind-boggling.
2. Alas, Wikipedia is quick to point out that Victor Frankenstein, as conceived by Mary Shelley (and in contradiction of the characterization in the eponymous 1931 classic film) was, in fact, not a doctor at all but a college drop-out with a cool idea and a ton of drive. Ah, the useful things one learns upon making a casual reference.
3. Paraphobics take note: all innuendos in this post should be taken with tongue in cheek.