Here's to Now...

This is the world
Why are you waiting?
Everyone's standing by hesitating
So many people halfway there
Between two points in the middle of nowhere
And all those things you thought you'd be
Did you know that it doesn't come free?
Have you seen yourself of late?
[...]
Can you hear the sound of?...
Machines all breaking down
The fuel is running out
Severed lines
Destroyed by too much time spent down
My head forced down
My hope forced down
Between my legs I've come unwound

All my preaching stems from fear
You're my concern, I hold you dear
You must break out of this old cage
Do it now, this is no longer safe
—Jawbreaker, "Down," Unfun

[...]
Yet when we meet we seem in silence to say,
Pretending serene forgetfulness of our youth,
"Do you remember but then why should you remember!
Do you remember a certain day,
Or evening rather, spring evening long ago,
We talked of death, and love, and time, and truth,
And said such wise things, things that amused us so
How foolish we were, who thought ourselves so wise!"
And then we laugh, with shadows in our eyes.
—Conrad Aiken, from "The Nocturne of Remembered Spring" (1917)

The good times ain't so bad, and even the bad times have their secret charm.

It is illusion, of course.

Aiken is dead, and having become an authority on the subject almost 38 years ago, speaks no more of it. He roams the aery halls of the House of Dust now, takes tea with The Tsetse, sups with the devil-bearded Rabbi Ben Ezra. His words, his poems, his opus vitae, as with any great writer, are only as immortal as the mind of man, which is to say they are increasingly volatile.

What is the past to a present hellbent on reinventing itself every minute? It is only valuable to the extent it can be plundered, rebranded, and put up for sale. And even now, even the present, isn't good enough, though its proximal horizons are as far as anyone is willing to look.

No rest for the wicked, hurling ever onward to the next big thing, the next upgrade, as long as it's right around the corner. Endless, limitless progress. The American way of life is not negotiable. Yeah. Let's pretend...

And Baudrillard, too, is belly-up. But there is good news: The facade he so dispassionately spoke of, like Borges' beloved map, is falling apart, and with it the neglected structure behind it. It's all makeup on a dying actor, a mix of Dorian Gray and Faust. But if you don't look too hard, if you keep it just on the edge of periphery, if you don't think, well then, it almost looks, almost feels, natural, doesn't it?

This is the calm before the chaos, the plush interlude between the faux idyll of the recent past and the implacable vengeance of a future that is learning how to sprint backwards to catch up with us. The "devil's due" is a concept little acknowledged by Homo Avarus. We get it, but we love to ignore it. Some other time, Old Nick, when your spikes sprout velvet and you're heart swells with sentiment. You see, we're a little short on funds just now, and, well, you understand, don't you?...

But Lady Nature is tired of the shakedown, the strong-arming, the sterile, myopic emptiness of a civilization driven by rampant self-interest, molded by market forces, and immersed in an artificial reality it loves to create and tweak and improve, one so accommodating (if you have the cash), so instantly accessible, so easy that it makes the real thing—with its archaic and intransigent insistence on presence of body and mind and its immunity from complete commodification—almost unbearable to most people. We contain the seeds of our own destruction, and we are sowing them like there's no tomorrow. And this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nous finirez tous par crever du confort.

Sadly, and not without a hint of irony, adding to the abyss is looking more and more like the appropriate strategy. Partake rabidly, belly up to the bar, storm the trough, abbagnarisi la pizzu, embrace Jevon's paradox. It all accelerates a noveau retour a la normale (Sous les pavés, la plage!), one that likely will lack an articulate observer to study, assay, judge, rewrite, and "improve" upon it.

Oh well.

On a lighter, slightly less profound note, I got this bag of bones out on some dirt a couple weekends ago for the Swill d'Ville, an annual mountain bike ride on the trails surrounding UVA in Charlottesville, starting and ending at Mellow Mushroom. Absent minded fool that I am, I forgot that I had set up the Monkey with a road-sized gear (44:19) to use as a foul-weather fixed-gear commuter. So about a mile into the SdV, I notice my rear tire rubbing rudely on the chain-stays every time I lay into the pedals with mean intent. I take a moment to try to pull out whatever little bit of slack exists in the chain, with the hope of moving the tire back far enough to stop the rubbing, when another rider asks me a question. The conversation went something this:

Him (staring at my upended bike): Hey, man, what size ring you runnin' up front?

Me (distracted): It's a 32.

Him: No way that's a 32.

Me: Huh? (Takes a look.) Fuck!

So, I run what I brung, worked a little bit harder than everyone else, and did damn well, all things considered. I even managed to win the derby with a novel strategy composed of 9/10 avoidance and 1/10 luck.

Since then, I hit Rosaryville with a proper fixed gear (but, alas, sans helmet—oops!) with Baler and crew, rode to a flick with Bootch-wah and G-spot at the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse, and did a 75-miler (out-n'-back) to support some SSOFTies and vicariously experience the mucky mayhem—thanks to a ton of rain—that was the Leesburg Baker's Dozen race this weekend.

The Vaya is creeping along toward completion and should be up and rolling before RamJam comes around at month's end. The shutdown (er, lapse in appropriations, hahaha) ain't happening, and with that nonevent is the nonevent of my forced vacation that I was really looking forward to. Damn, it never fails: if you want something too much, it never happens. On the flip side, this should open the gate on the new job, if I understand things clearly.

Should have gotten out when the getting was good.

Ah, well, here we are. And I am just winking dreary thoughts into a tiddle cup. The posts will take a turn toward the upbeat now that spring has arrived. I'm off tomorrow, and the weather is supposed to border on obsequious. Enjoy the week.

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
—Voltaire

forgetters, "Not A Track Bike"...

Blake's got a new band. Lots of energy, I dig it. Live at The Barbary in Philadelphia, September 25, 2009.

Hope this one stays together a little longer than the last few, ha.

Pedal Every Inch: The 24-Hours of Big Bear, 2009 (Act 1 of 3)...

Don't push, it'll come.
Everything is gonna be alright, be alright.
Steady now, don't fall apart.
Keep yourself upright.
—Jawbreaker, "Rich," from the B-sides compilation CD, Etc.

There's a moment, lying on my side in the tent just after lap one, when it all comes home to roost. Stretched out, just trying to relax a bit (no hope of falling into the arms of Morpheus), I move my legs up habitually toward my midsection, assuming the classic fetal position.

That's when the cramps set in.

Without warning, the searing pain pierces my adductors like molten talons. And with the pain comes the equally searing truth, burning bright like Blake's tiger. I think—as I pound with both fists at the opposing contractions—without the least tinge of humor, the agony forcing a sort of instant honesty that no amount of alcohol could forestall, an epiphany: Fuck, I'm too old for this shit! It's over, can't even fake it anymore...

The body, you see, never, ever lies.

And this realization, this simple truth, brings on a despair that is alien and wholly unwelcome, not just under the current circumstances. Last year, this shit—this bodily betrayal—didn't happen until after lap 2. And now here it is, early, an ugly, unwelcome bellwether.

Amidst the pummeling, the pain succumbs, recedes. I search frantically around the tent for the bottle of Endurolytes, find it, pop the cap, and gobble a handful of the little white pills like a speed freak in need of a fast fix. I chase them with a couple mouthfuls of water and check the time: "The Kid" will be pulling in within 30 minutes.

Jesus, time undergoes all kinds of distortion during a 24-hour race. Fuck you, you smug physicists, with your glib, facile explanations of how moments pass, running your fingers absently through your graying beards as you speak with the utmost confidence about how seconds become minutes become hours become days become etc., ad infinitum, all of it along an immutable continuum, a nice, tidy, simple, linear progression, following an utterly unsympathetic and wholly indifferent plan set down from some nebulous beginning. That's fine for your models, for your in-class lectures, for simplicity's sake. But outside, amid reality, in the field, I call bullshit. I know. I have experiential data. Are you fucking kidding me?

Out on the lap—in situ, if you will—time is immeasurable. Yes, there's a dubious sense of how you're doing, at least during your later laps, when you have a sample or two under your belt. But you've got it all wrong, you silly tool, and it doesn't matter whether you think you're moving faster or slower. And it's not all simply a matter of subjectivity or even relativity (yeah, Einstein rode a bike...so what?...he never raced...and he looked pretty goofy doing it), whatever those are. Don't be so dismissive. It's malleable, this thing we call Time. It lives. It bends and flexes and stretches and contracts and twists and accelerates and slows and inverts and folds and squirms and button-hooks and corrects to the cues from an ever-changing alien script. Take your eye off the second hand—even for an instant—and Time misbehaves. It's easily as fucked up as sister Fate. And like Fate, it'll eventually do us all in. The two conspire.

The only constant here is that I'm getting slower. And older.

My first lap seems (note this word) to fly by. I'm riding in the 4th slot, by choice, by design. Though I falter very early on, at a steep rock slab greased with mud the consistency and color of baby shit, and get pissed at myself for a stupid error, I begin to settle in as the lap begins to play out.

The fixed gear offers a clear traction advantage, instantly feeding unmediated data up my spine and into my mind, letting me correct on the fly. DT's sage advice about riding fixed off-road and avoiding pedal strikes drifts back unbidden to instruct me time and again, as it did last year: Sometimes it's better just to ride over it, instead of around it. This simple but counterintuitive strategy aids me time and again as I approach tight sections where pedal strikes mean a yard sale.

I swap places with other riders again and again, passing gearies on the climbs, only to cede precious ground back to them on the downhills. The 32:18 I'm running on the Monkey is spinny when the trail points south, and I can only pedal so fast over the rocky, muddy terrain with my ass mostly planted in the saddle. It's all a bit frustrating, but on balance, I come out ahead of what I assume are ordinarily better riders, owing to the mostly upward direction of the first half of the course and the sick traction I'm getting from my tires [a Kenda (team sponsor) Nevegal at the stern, a Panaracer Rampage at the stem], both recklessly under-inflated.

As I said, the first lap seems to pass quickly. Before I know it, I'm into the pine grove around mile 6, arguably the most pleasing—esthetically and physically—part of the course. Here, beautiful conifers laid out in a majestic grid pattern crowd out the sunlight as they rub shoulders and try to outreach one another. Years of accumulated needles have left the trail below them like a sponge, and the softness and concomitant damping quality provide great relief to my nether parts. I take comfort in the knowledge that I'm now about halfway through the lap.

Then it's on to the rocky downhill, the "forearm fryer," as I like to call it, the only real question mark on the whole course. Oddly, it seems neither as long nor as brutal as it did last year, but then again, who the fuck knows? I'm all hopped up on adrenaline and not a reliable witness. At the bottom, after an interminable session of skip-jacking (if you ride fixed off-road, you'll understand the neologism) my way down, it all spills into a stream bed that is equally rocky, though much less steep. I realize immediately that I managed to make it down the hell-hill without using my front brake. Bizarre.

I move on, no mishaps, and find my way eventually to the endless climb that starts somewhere (a guess) around mile 10. I ride most of it, sparing myself, however, the humiliation and pain that would come with taking on most of the ridiculous rock gardens (forests?) that add muddy ichor to injury, and, lo and behold, it seems to go by supernaturally fast. Before I know it, I'm past it and slaloming through the rooty, rocky final stretch to the narrow bridge that signals the end of the lap. I rocket up the bridge ramp with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, sucking in cubic yards of air at the start to let out a long "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...:" that ends with a predictable "...HAW!"—a clarion call to Baler that I'm coming in—at the crest where the bridge proper begins, carrying me over the dirt road below where the first-lappers began their LeMans style start hours earlier. I skid my way down the ramp on the other side, then it's into the left-spiraling turn that brings me into the start/finish booth. I dig around for the baton, hand it over, slap down my badge on the sensor, and feel a huge wave of relief rush over me. I pull a 1:44. Baler heads off for his second lap, his expression and demeanor betray nothing.

I'm done for now. Lap 1 is in the hopper. And this old man needs a beer. Cue the curtain on Act 1.