Input

After I chopped off the eds of my bicycle handlebars, I plugged them with the corks from some old bourbon bottles. The corks were just the right size to fill the tube, and the black end caps made neat stoppers for the bar ends. Over the course of a few seasons, the corks expanded and contracted and wiggled and crumbled; one at a time, they fell out. The second one was lost this morning between my garage and my office.

I can hear when cars are unhealthy, and I wonder if their drivers know. The sound of a screaming fan belt deafens me as the car limps past, and I want to catch up at the next intersection, pound on the window, and ask the driver to service his damned engine. I can smell when oil is leaking because it burns acrid smoke that ends up so far behind that no one inside is likely to smell it.

Someone on my block fries garlic, pepper, and onions on a regular basis, and I smell it whenever I bike past. I don't know if anyone who drives past notices.

#daily#pedaling ends. Over the course of a few seasons, the corks expanded and contracted and wiggled and crumbled; one at a time, they fell out. The second one was lost this morning between my garage and my office.

I can hear when cars are unhealthy, and I wonder if their drivers know. The sound of a screaming fan belt deafens me as the car limps past, and I want to catch up at the next intersection, pound on the window, and ask the driver to service his damned engine. I can smell when oil is leaking because it burns acrid smoke that ends up so far behind that no one inside is likely to smell it.

Someone on my block fries garlic, pepper, and onions on a regular basis, and I smell it whenever I bike past. I don't know if anyone who drives past notices.

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31 March 2014 22:41

Month of Desire

Adventure season is right around the corner; in the past, I have cheekily claimed that it is never not time for adventure, but the usual sudden onset of spring makes me tempted to quit my job on the spot and wander off for the indefinite future.

There's a headwind no matter which direction my bicycle is pushing and it only forces me to work harder for every unit of velocity. I climb until my hands are raw and my joints pop, and I loathe sitting indoors when I can still see the sky taunting me with its cerulean leer. Slowly, I realize that it is okay to stand up hard with both legs and throw my off-hand for the lip that doesn't look like it will hold; I'm tied in and nothing that bad can happen if I miss.

I want to be barefoot for at least a week straight and let my socks and shoes and slippers air out; I want to strap the hammock to the porch and watch the sun go down over a beer and a book. I'm pummeling my todo lists to death out of aggravation that I do not yet feel like there is something big on the horizon. Big things only happen to people when they ask for them, so what am i waiting for?

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30 March 2014 17:00

Call Your Mother

Some Saturdays fly by, but it doesn't help when I don't crawl out of bed until just after noon. I try to resist planning for things to happen on Saturday, because it is my only explicitly unstructured day of the week, and I enjoy not giving that up. As a result, I generally plan to do all the things I don't tend to plan to do. I can't think about that too hard without falling into a feedback loop of hand-wringing.

I've put off laundry for days, and the food production aligned itself so fresh bread and fresh hummus happened at the same time. The sky is pressing a slow, drenching cold rain onto the earth, and my mother sent me a text declaring herself as having a couch potato day. I don't understand how anyone can purposely have a couch potato day, because there are few things that agitate me more than sitting in front of a television for more than ten minutes.

My father flew to China to spend a few weeks with his family, and my mother asserted that this means I have to call and text and email her so much more because he's out of reach. If she wanted to claim that she was lonely and needed the contact, I would have been less annoyed about the request, but it was bundled with her anxieties of getting robbed, slipping in the shower and hitting her head, or having a stroke on the kitchen floor. Given that she lives a five hour drive away, I'm not sure how sending her a text message every day would allow me to prevent those things from happening to her. In any case, within the first day that she was left alone, she used up all of the minutes on my phone plan for the month telling me about her grocery shopping.

I wonder what she did for the two weeks when my father and I were both in China. I'm conflicted between wanting to give her the support she desires and wanting to believe that she's not so emotionally helpless that she can't deal with being in the house by herself for a little while. I'm conflicted between letting myself get stressed out for two weeks so my mother is less stressed out, or taking care of myself by not allowing her to monopolize my energy when she requests hour-long phone calls every day.

And I'm sad that there are two states that cannot exist in harmony. Either my mother suffers, or I suffer.

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29 March 2014 16:03

Street Symphonic

My front rim sings a close E from the vibrations of the new brake pads scrubbing friction into them. As I pull my weight off the frame, the more slides up to a flat F. I listen to songs in my head that make use of these two notes, and the clacking of my brake levers offers a percussion line.

The beeping of the walk sign clashes with the quiet melody line, and the symphony becomes one of discord. Car suspensions rattle over sinkholes formed through a rough winter, but still I hold on to that single high E as I scrub my speed so I can wiggle through the traffic. I'm humming a song that weaves together noises no one else understands, and the group waiting for the bus (a staccato C chirping from its pumping brakes) gives me a set of strange looks.

I once dreamt I sat at a piano and composed an entire opera at once, going on to bring instruments out of the earth to play it for me, and when I awoke, I tried desperately to scribble down the lines. Dreams are never sensible enough for such a thing to work.

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28 March 2014 16:08

Legs

I can stretch them out again, I can hit a stride that isn't tangled up with neurotic watch-checking, I can fly through the trails without worrying about when I will hit the walking segment and lose all my hard-earned body heat, I can slip through the mud and bounce from the stones, I can spook groundhogs and squirrels.

In the corners of my eyes, I see leaves fluttering as the wind flips them over, and I flinch, but it's nothing. My hair bounces against my head. There are misbehaving dogs that smash into my shins, and I just run them down and laugh, and they stare at me, torn between pursuit and obedience.

The trees are full of secrets, waiting to burst.

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27 March 2014 18:40