Where You Live

Where you live

There will I live also

The place that you call home

There will I find rest

The air that you exhale

That air will I breath in
What you see, I will also see

That which you think, I will know too  

What you ask, that will I obey

Your heartbeat commands me

The grace of your glance consumes me

The scent of you is a sonnet sung only to me

I lust deeply for your embrace
I thirst to hear you call my name

To feel your quickened breath
To feel your full embrace

My life is gray rendering without you
Color first-born when you are near

The Cigar Box

I am not a sentimental person. With few exceptions, I cast emotion aside and discard everything that isn't useful to me at this moment. I purge. Rather than keep an item to see if I might need it a year from now, I throw it out. I have never really understood people who save letters or birthday cards. They just don't make sense. “When in doubt, throw it out.”  Wise words.

That isn't to say I don't keep any memorabilia. My cousin Steve played for the Oakland Raiders in 1973 and he gave me a football signed by the team.  I really like that ball. All of the Raider fans I have met have been absolute freaks, but in a nice way.  If you are a Raiders fan, you know what I am talking about.  That autographed ball is a big deal and I have strong feelings about it, but honestly I would sell it for the right price.

I caught a ball at a Mariners playoff game against the hated Yankees in 1995. I still have that ball but I would sell it for maybe twenty bucks. I don't care that much about the ball, but I do care about the twenty bucks.

I never met my grandfathers.  One died before I was born and while we don't talk about him much, everybody says he was a good guy.  My other grandfather ran off, abandoning his family.  We never talk about him.  I didn't know my maternal Grandmother well, she passed when I was young, but my paternal Grandmother, "Gram", was a fixture in my life up through my early twenties.  She was like a third parent to me and I think about her often.  It's funny now to admit how much of an impact she made on me, but I didn't realize it until about ten years after she passed.

I have stuffed into the back corner of my closet a small cardboard box that contains Gram's white gloves that she wore once in a while.  Gram didn't wear the gloves often, she only broke those out for Easter and Christmas. I don't know how I ended up with the gloves, but the last time I opened the box, they smell of lavender and mildew and I plan on keeping those until the end of my days.  The gloves are all I have left of Gram that means anything and I cherish them.

I can still see Gram in my fading memory, walking my Sister and I the four blocks from her small house on 10^th avenue to First Presbyterian church Sunday mornings, rain or shine. It was a three minute walk, but Gram would drag it out to ten or fifteen minutes, depending on who she bumped into. There was always a wandering herd of eighty year old ladies migrating to the church for the 7:00 AM service and some of them were slow movers. Almost all sported an aluminum cane or walker. Gram fell in with that crowd and it took a while to get to the service.

She usually wore the same outfit, a sensible all-black skirt and jacket combo, with sensible shoes and a little black hat pinned to her steel-grey wig that she wore to church and the odd funeral home event. The hat seemed to make the whole ensemble work.

Gram was from the generation where appearances mattered. She was a card-carrying member of "clean and ironed" guild where the unwritten rule was you wore your old clothes with pride, as long as they were clean and freshly ironed.  She was a true zealot with the laundry.

Gram taught me that we didn't want to put on airs like Gladys from down the street did.  Gladys was maybe 80 years old and lived in a one room flat but she wore a new dress to Sunday service almost every year.  Gram and I didn't think much of that.  We despised Gladys and her ostentatious behavior.  I was maybe eight or nine years old when I learned that the path to heaven was certain if we wore second hand clothes that were clean and ironed.

I used to have a cigar box that my Mother gave me, but I lost it some years ago. I used to look for that lost box once in a while, but I stopped; I finally admitted that it is gone for good. The box was where she kept her acquired treasures from when she was a teenager. It was a standard sized cigar box, perhaps 10 inches long and was tan or brown with an faded orange shade acquired over the thirty or forty years that she owned it. Since my Mother came from a family of moderate means, I know she had few things that she valued, but what she did own, she kept in that cigar box.  She never said it, but I think the box, or the contents of the box meant the world to her at one time. It was just a cheap wooden box with odds and ends gathered by a young girl who was given little, but I could tell it meant something and she chose to give it to me, to keep safe so that those treasures it contained would endure where she could not. 

Inside the box, my Mother had lined the bottom panel with a purple, velveteen fabric of some kind. Over the years, the fabric had come lose in one corner and had become natty and worn. I am just guessing here, but I think she borrowed or stole or was gifted that fabric from her own Mother. Maybe it was left over fabric from a dress or a pillow that her Mother made, or maybe she found it.  Whatever it was, I could tell that the fabric was there to cushion and display the contents and it was made by my mother, when she was a girl.  Then, except for a single item that was in the box, I lost it all.

My Mother kept several items in the box, but I only remember two. First, she had an old knife. It wasn't exactly a real knife, it was more of a carving tool. It was made of metal and had a heavy red plastic handle and a crescent moon shaped blade. The handle was fluted so that it wouldn't slip, even if it was wet. It felt solid and substantial and if you have ever held a good tool in your hand, no matter what the tool was for, it felt like that.  If you have bought an 'exacto' knife in the past twenty years or so, it was probably light weight aluminum stamped out in a factory somewhere in Asia. Those exacto knives are sharp, but feel weak and inaccurate in your hand. At least, that is how they feel to me. My mothers cutting tool was made to be held and used over and over. It was a good tool. The blade was old and dull from use.  It was all used up and wouldn't cut butter, but it felt good to hold and to use. If you had to pick between the dull blade on the good handle, or the sharp blade on the flimsy aluminum stick, you would take the dull one every time.

The other thing in the box was a broken bar of soap. My Mother had cut the bar with the carving tool, a small bit at a time. You could tell she spent a lot of time on it. It had incredible detail. It might sound silly, but she had carved a sheep out of the bar of soap. It was an amazingly good depiction of a sheep. Sometime before she gave the box to me, the sheep's head had broken off, so the sheep only looked like a sheep when you stuck the head back on. The soap is sticky enough that if you pushed the two pieces together firmly, it would stay stuck for a minute or two. It fell off again when you bumped it.

That sheep was amazing to me. It was amazing both because it must have been hard to make a sheep out of a bar of soap and it was amazing that anybody would try. Who would do that? You put a lot of time doing something so I assume you would want it to last. Soap doesn't last. I think now maybe the soap was all she had to work with. I think now that the choice of material was a window into my Mother's life. She didn't have clay or stone or a good piece of wood. She had a carving tool and a bar of soap, so she did the best she could with what she had. That says a lot about who she was and where she came from.

Over the years, the box got bumped around and the velvet lining was soapy and the cutting tool was a filmed with the soap. And the head broke off the sheep.

Anyway, my Mom was a talented artist, and she tried to pass it on to my sister and I.  I don't know what she did to interest my Sister in art, but my Mother tried for years to get me to fill the artists apprentice position that she was creating, but I didn't inherit the artistic gene. I tried but eventually, Mom felt sorry for me and excused me from further indentured service. She could see that I had no talent. I feel bad now because art was so important to my Mother and she wanted one of her children to share it. 

Except for the odd soapy sheep. my Mother was a painter. She had both a technical appreciation for the art of painting and the talent to create. I am no expert, but I think that is a rare combination. One day, she and I were alone in the house and she pulled out a book with hundreds of pictures of the great works by Rembrandt, Picasso, whoever. I didn't get it. To me, it just looked like a bunch of really well done paintings.  I mean, I could tell they were really well done but that was about it.  We sat together for an hour while she leafed through the book, pointing out this interesting aspect of that important painter, highlighting some historical fact about each. My Mother spoke with reverence about some of the painters. She obviously liked them. Others, she passed by. I have no idea which was which or why she didn't like some of the painters. I was less than impressed and found something important to do outside like wash a car or walk the dog. How hard would it have been to spend an hour and enjoy her appreciation for something like that? Nope. I wasn't listening.

She did mostly pictures of old people and faces and hands. She told me once that faces and hands are the hardest to draw. It sort of makes sense. If you draw a guy walking and his knee is bending backwards, or he had a hunchback, you might explain it with some garbage about how the light is hitting the subject from a funny angle, or maybe you meant for his knee to bend backwards or he was suppose to be a hunchback, but here is the thing:  Hands and faces, you can't fake. The detail required to get some realistic impression is too demanding. You need talent to draw faces and hands. Mom could do that.

My Mother painted with a knife. It wasn't a sharp cutting knife, it was a bent flat metal blade made for painters. It sounds funny now, trying to describe using a knife to paint, but that is how she did it. It was shaped like the kitchen tool you use to get the pie out of the pan, only a lot smaller and narrower. I thought everybody used a knife to paint until I was twelve or fourteen when I saw a movie about some joker using a brush while he painted a pot of flowers. That is wrong on at least two levels, First, nobody painted with a brush, as far as I knew. Real artists use a blade. My Mother used a blade. Second, my Mother thought artists who painted pots of flowers were all frauds. There is no technical requirement. If the pot is really ten inches high, and you paint your pot six feet high, it's still right. You can screw up all you want and claim victory if you paint pots of flowers. A lack of skill is no impediment to pot painters. I digress into that snippet of criticism because it shows you the difference between an artist and the rest of us. The rest of us see a painting of a pot of flowers and think it looks OK. My Mother could see more because her point of view was more correct. A well painted pot of flowers should be of no particular value to anybody. I walk through a store now and see paintings of flowers and laugh to myself. Who would buy that crap?

When Mom painted, she would dab dab dab the knife on her palette that had small piles of different colored paint. Four piles of slightly different colored brown, a yellow, a red and three blues surrounded a big pile of white and another big pile of black. She would pick up a little of this color and a little of that color then mix mix mix to get the color she wanted, then she would scrape one two three times onto the canvas. I can still hear the sound of the knife roughly sliding on the canvas. That sound was there for those years when I was growing up and my Mom was painting, but I didn't remember it until a few days ago. The sound of the knife on the canvas, I can't get it out of my head now.

“Dab dab dab mix mix”, then the “scrape” on the canvas. It was such a light sound and you practically had to be sitting in her lap to hear it. To me it meant nothing at the time, I didn't even know that I remember that sound until I started to write this down, but now, the memory of that sound means the world. You had to be quiet to hear it. You had to be paying attention. You had to sit still. If you tried to talk, or the radio was on, or a car passed by, you missed it. Life is like that. If you just stop and listen, you might learn something.

“Dab dab mix mix scrape”.

“Scrape”.

“Scrape”. The knife ground against the fibers of the canvas, spreading paint. Creating something out of nothing.

“Scrape.”

Picking up bits of this and that, mixing on the palette, then onto the canvas.

“Scrape”. The guy in the movie with the brush was, to me, a complete falsehood. You can't get the good stuff onto the canvas without a steel blade and a steady hand.

Remember the cigar box? The one I lost? I felt bad about that over the years. I felt I lost something of value that my Mother tried to pass to me, but now, I feel great about it. It was just a stupid box with a broken bar of soap. My Mother didn't give me a broken bar of soap. And she didn't give me an old cigar box. She gave me the knowledge she gained in her time. She showed me the tools she used over the years. She taught by example. She just showed me which tools she used, how she used them, what she was creating when she used the tool. What was being created? It didn't matter, the lesson was the same. A bar of soap, a painting or a person? First she showed me the carving tool, to shape the soap. Or shape the soul. Or shape the life that hasn't yet chosen a path to follow. Then the blade, to mix the paint, to scrape on the colors of life, and create depth, to be the catalyst for a greater good.  She spent a lifetime building some worth where none existed before.
“Dab dab mix mix scrape”.
"Scrape".
"Scraaaape".

Capture Life

The cascade of life expresses itself in each of us in different ways.  Some walk the land as Atlas reincarnate, without fear or self doubt.  I have known some of those people and I wish I were more like them.  They never look back, they see the future as their own personal domain.  I stand in awe.  

I do things differently.  I often find myself erratically flailing my limbs, like a bird too young to fly, trying to pull away from the earth, trying to fulfill the genetic imperative.   This happens more often than not and while I may be somewhat surprised at the time it happens, I find in reflection a pattern emerges which reveals itself in the aggregate.   Each turbulent event is in itself unremarkable, while the shear quantity of failures is revealing.

As an example, I drove my old truck for 296,000 miles and at the end of it's duty cycle, it was mostly blemish free.  Sure, it had a few scratches, but for the most part, it was like new when it died at the age of 15 years.  My new truck I have driven into the wall of the garage, ran over the curb, hit a brick wall with the fender and it only has 13000 miles on it.  I don't know why I do dumb stuff.  I just do.

On the other hand, I sometimes am surprised to find I have stumbled into a moment of perfect lucidity. It sneaks up on me like an earthquake.  On those rare occasions, if I am sober enough, I try to capture that moment in time as a memory.  It's like I hit "print screen" at that single moment.  The image of course fades over time, but I know I do it from time to time and it's a beautiful thing.

Years ago, my kids were playing soccer in the local park league.  If you don't know, the park league is where the kids who weren't invited to play in the club league are made to play a sport by their athletically frustrated parents.  It's cute.  My kids were 5 and 7 years old, they displayed no particular excess of talent in the sport, but they seemed to enjoy it at least as much as playing with the dog in the back yard.  Good enough.

I remember one particular October day, it had rained all week, but on that Saturday morning the sky stopped flooding and the sun almost broke through.  The kids were wearing their brightly colored t-shirts with a team logo printed on the front, shin guards strong enough to deflect bullets and soccer shoes with plastic cleats to allow them to more efficiently track grass into the living room.

My roommate and I loaded up our soccer playing spawn in the family cargo-van, then we stopped at Starbucks to get a coffee for the adults and hot chocolate for the kids.  From there, its a short drive to the soccer park where some masses of somebody else's children were disappointing their parents.  Our kids ran to the warm up area, met with their teammates and discussed the weighty matters that pre-teens discuss on a Saturday.  Then, the games started.

Our kids didn't score and, thankfully, they rarely touched the ball.   The team wandered the field in a pack, following a ball that was kicked simultaneously by six or eight kids at a time, moving inches with each stroke.  

If you have ever seen a youth soccer match, its cute.  Some of the kids try really hard, but sadly, as they have no plan of action, they don't accomplish much.  I have to admit, my kids did run a good bit from the van to the field because there was a long line of parents and kids at the Starbucks and we were late, but other than that, not much happened.  Halftime found my youngsters sucking down water like they just ran the marathon.  It was 43 degrees tops, it had rained all night and they were dying of thirst.

The other item that I feel must be discussed is the obligatory over supply of oranges at youth soccer matches.  My kids would eat, under other less supervised circumstances, perhaps one orange a year.  My daughter might eat two.  She don't eat meat.  But.  However.  On the other hand.  At youth soccer matches, the parents must pool their money and buy oranges by the truckload because those little soccer phenoms are ravenous for oranges at halftime.  The oranges are always sliced by a loving parent into perfect, kid friendly sections and all the kids scramble to grab a bucketful, biting and swallowing the juice like a lion eats an antelope.

It doesn't sound like much, but that day was a great day, I remember it still.  I think I reached my pinnacle as a parent and a roommate on that day.  It has been downhill since then.

Thankful For It All

When I was nine years old, I was involved in two bad accidents. The first accident was a car wreck which was serious enough that I was in the hospital for almost three weeks. I don't know for sure, but I think I was pretty close to cashing in my chips. I probably should know how serious it was, but I don't because I wasn't really awake for a couple weeks. I think they had me on some good drugs and I missed most of it after getting chucked out of the crashing jeep and landing in the street.  

That time in the hospital is just a blur.  I do remember not being able to talk since my broken jaw was wired shut so that was pretty awesome.  I also remember looking in the mirror a few days before I got to go home and being shocked at my own appearance.  I was pale and had bright red scars and stitches running down the side of my face.  I hit the pavement pretty hard when I got thrown from the jeep and it tore a lot of skin on my face.  It was pretty gruesome.  Kids are sensitive about their appearance and when I saw my reflection, I rode an emotional elevator of self-esteem to the bottom floor.  I felt sorry for myself.  

After they released me from the hospital, my Mom picked me up in a borrowed car of some kind to go home but first we had to pick up my Sister who was at a play for kids at Davis auditorium.  It was one of those school sponsored events where the kids get out of school for half a day and go to a play or an event of some kind.  I don't know what the play was but it seemed to be pretty popular because a flood of kids came streaming out of the auditorium looking for their parents.  All the parents were just parked on the street, waiting for their kids.  When my Sis saw us she came over and opened the door to get in, then she saw me and screamed.  She didn't mean to hurt my feelings but I kept that movie of her reaction looped in my memory for a decade.

Several months later, the second accident that year involved a shower door on the Forth of  July.  My Sister and I spent the day at Kenny and Pinky Paxton's house, running through the barn and the alfalfa fields so we were kind of a mess.  Dirt hung on us like the kid on the "Peanuts" cartoon with the clouds of dust that linger no matter where he goes . We went home at three or four in the afternoon because Mom and Dad had some folks coming over for a Forth of July celebration and since we were filthy, they sent my Sister and I to shower. We had one shower, so we showered at the same time. We were kids.  It wasn't weird until I had to explain it.  Now it just seems kind of creepy.  

I don't think my Sister and I ever spoke a kind word to each other until we were in our twenties, so it isn't surprising that we were fighting in the shower. She got mad and turned the water on hot and jumped out, threw the shower door closed and held it closed.   I didn't get burned by the hot water, but I was really mad, so I threw my shoulder into the door to push her back. I broke the door, glass flew everywhere and I was cut badly. This was many years ago, before safety glass, so when the glass door broke, it broke into dozens of long, razor sharp glass shards that slashed me open from bow to stern. I was squirting blood from a dozen holes. I had cut skin, muscle, tendons and arteries.

My sister saw the blood and got scared and started to run in place and scream. I remember her feet were dancing up and down while she screamed. Since there was glass all over the floor, she was cut pretty badly too and she screamed non-stop. I don't blame her, it must have been a scary thing to see me squirting blood like a firehose. My Dad heard the fighting and the screaming and came running into the bathroom, saw my sister and I naked, wet from the shower and bleeding everywhere, and he just stopped. I think he was in shock, because he stood there for a few seconds. He may have said something, I don't know, but I do know nobody should have to see their kids in that much blood. I feel bad that he had to go through that.

My Mom heard the screaming, she comes down the hall, scared out of her mind, whispering 'What's wrong?  Mert?  What's wrong?'. Mom's voice or my sisters screaming cut through Dad's shock and he told Mom "Don't come in here, call the ambulance".  Of course Mom can't follow decent directions to save her life so she peeks her head around the bathroom door and screams like Fay Wray.  Dad finally got her moving in the direction of the phone to call the ambulance and she ran off.

Dad saw that my Sister was mostly OK, compared to me, so he sent her to the neighbors.  He could only deal with one of us at a time.  She had hunks of glass jammed into her feet, but she took off like a shot, naked, to go hang out at the neighbors while Dad tried to save me. She ran though every room in the neighbors house, leaving little girl bloody footprints everywhere. The running just pushed the glass further into her feet, bringing up more blood, so the footprints had to be a sight to behold. I never saw them as I was otherwise occupied.  If your kid had the cuts on her feet that my sister did, you would fly in surgeons from the furthest reaches.  She was pretty cut up.

Dad picks me up and carries me to the front door, naked and bleeding, to wait for the ambulance. I was too weak to lift a finger. We sat there together, he cradled me in his arms, on the threshold of the front door. I remember being too week to put my hand over my privates. From the front door, it was only forty or fifty feet to the street and I could see cars slow and stare at us and then drive off.  Nobody stopped to help.  How weird is that?  There was a man holding a naked bleeding boy in the doorway of a house and they don't offer to help?   They just slowed and drove past. How is that possible that they didn't try to help?  Crazy.

I was getting tired and Dad was afraid if I passed out, I might not wake, so he kept trying to make me talk. I lost so much blood that I was dizzy, but I tried not to pass out. I don't know if I passed out or not. The ambulance fetched me and took me to the hospital. I do remember that they hit every freakin bump possible. It's just rude.

That story is gross and it makes me uneasy to tell it but it is actually just the prologue.  Here is the real story: I relate the following in the hope that it really happened, but honestly I don't know. I was so loopy from loss of blood that I could have imagined it, I have no way to know for sure. The point is that it is real enough for me. To this day, I believe it is real, but even if it didn't happen, it is lodged in me like just like my lungs or my heart. 

I was in the hospital, laying on a gurney, getting prepped for surgery or just getting out of surgery, I don't know which. I was in in no pain, or more accurately I was in much less pain than I had been so I guess they had me on some good meds. They had a lot of sewing to do.  So I was on a gurney in a hallway, being pushed by a nurse, then she stopped pushing me and just left me.  I was alone and scared. Maybe she left me there for a few seconds or maybe it was a few minutes or maybe longer, I don't know for sure. Maybe she needed to fetch something, I don't know that either, but I do know I was alone in the middle of a hallway, laying on a gurney, looking up at the ceiling. The walls were covered in shiny enamel white paint that must have been scrubbed clean every day.   The ceiling lights were the long tube type that were spaced out a bit, leaving ten or fifteen feet between lights and as the nurse rolled me down the hall, each time I went under the lights, they seemed really bright and made my eyes hurt, but they were spaced out enough so between the lights it wasn't too bad.  The place the nurse left me was more dark than light, shadows lay over the walls and floor and it was creepy.  It was creepy like a Stephen King book.  

I remember that I was scared but I wasn't in distress, if that makes any sense.  I also remember I was feeling sorry for myself. I was alone, and I had just been cut to crap and it wasn't my fault and I wanted my Mom. A lot of self pity there, I know, but considering the circumstances, I don't expect much of a critique on that count.

Then I noticed a boy a year or two older than myself lay on a gurney next to me. He was getting pushed down the hall too, but in the other direction, and he was abandoned by his nurse too.  We were two kids, about the same age and we were both a mess.  I assume he either had been operated on or was going to be operated on shortly, but I don't know for sure. I think he had been in a car wreck and he was screaming. He kept saying 'Please, make it go away!, It hurts, please help me, make it go away!' He was screaming this over and over and I just wanted him to stop. I felt sorry for him, but I wanted him to stop screaming. It scared me. His screams echoed down the hall and nobody was there to help.  I don't remember anything after that.  I passed out.

Years go by and I forgot this whole thing, or to be completely truthful, I chose not to think of it   I put it out of  my mind for these many years, until recently.  It comes to mind now, from time to time.  I think of the boy on the gurney, asking for help, I think he was in worse shape than I, and I think I don't know if he made it out of that hospital alive.  I don't know why,  but I think he died.  I think that I couldn't help him, but I could have tried to get somebody else to help him and I did nothing. I think that I didn't know his name, I didn't even ask. 

Self reflection is something I can do pretty well and when I think of that day, it reminds me that no matter how bad I have it, my life is blessed beyond any reasonable level. Others have it worse and I have been given so much. No matter how bad it gets, other are worse off.  I think that self pity is a thing that can consume you, and in my life I tend to be consumed by almost anything.  

Like I said, the part about the other boy on the gurney may not be true, but I remember it like it did happen, so for me, it is true.  I  hope that the other boy didn't die that day, but if he did, I hope he went someplace where he wasn't in pain,  and if he did make it out of the hospital, I hope he forgives me for not helping him.

The STP

My Seattle to Portland Bike Ride, as related by a first time rider suffering from a moderate case of mid life crisis and a fairly serious case of hemorrhoids.

Saturday morning, my riding partner picks me up at 3:45, we get to the start line at 4:45 and are on the road at 4:50. I pushed about five organic granola bars in my pockets, of which I only needed two, but I forgot a spare inner tube and lip balm, so I suppose that was a fair tradeoff. The sun still wasn't up, but the city lights lit the road enough so that I could see if I didn't have my sunglasses on. Since the sunglasses are new and help complete the ensemble, I rode blind for the first hour until the sun was up.

The start line was incredible. Thousands of riders, just in the short time I was there, and they continue to roll out for hours after I left. Ten thousand riders total. They sold out all the spots in May and I think there were several thousand that wanted to sign up and couldn't get access. I suppose a few spots weren't used, but mostly the resale market for those spots was pretty hot, so I don't think more than just a very few weren't used. Ten thousand guys and their bikes. It was amazing. They had crowds of people cheering everywhere you went. The start line had I would guess 200 or more people standing on the start, cheering and clapping. They had really good loudspeakers going with good upbeat music that got you charged up. Pretty amazing.

In the first mile, there was maybe ten items that had fallen off of peoples bikes. Lights, water bottles, fenders, you name it. I could have started a used bike parts store and made a fortune.
It was so busy with riders, you had to be careful not to hit somebody. Cops had all the crossroads blocked open so we could go through for the first ten miles or so without stopping. After that, it was hit and miss.

There were four official stops on the route, about every 50 miles, but the first stop was at about mile 25. There were plenty of unofficial stops. The official stops are well stocked with good music, food (healthy candy bars, fruit, water, NUUN drink mix, ) maybe 75 to 100 portapotties, that were jamb packed. For some reason, I had to pee all day. Not sure why, I usually don't. I must have peed eight times on Saturday.

In the first half of the ride, we rode up several climbs, but mostly it was fairly flat. The problem was the second half of the ride: The first half had some climbs, but I was fresh. My buddy and I were doing 20-24 mph for the first 100 miles. We were almost always behind somebody who was out front breaking the wind and we just tucked in behind him, so our workload is fairly low.

At the half way point, the road changes and it gets hilly. There are a lot of rollers in the second half. The rollers just take it out of you. You climb a small slope, then descend. Then climb, then descend. One climb isn't that bad, fifty in a row get to you. Also, the second half had fewer roads that were blocked open by a cop. So you have a lot of stops. Stop, wait ten seconds, then dash across the road before you get hit by a truck carrying dogfood. Stop, wait, then dash in front of the sports car doing eighty. For a 40 mile ride, you wouldn't worry about it, but for a 204 mile ride, every stop is tough.

It seems odd, but I was climbing better than almost everybody except for the 120 pound 22 year old Asian kids. Those guys don't get tired. I was blowing past everybody. Maybe they were smarter and were saving their strength. Whatever, I climbed great on the few climbs that we went up.

At mile 110, I was in the wrong lane. All ten thousand riders turned right, but I was in the left lane so I couldn't turn right where I was suppose to. I went straight. Then, to make it worse, in trying to fix my mistake, I turned into a really run down convenience store with a bad smell coming from the bathrooms. So now I was on the wrong side of the road and to make it worse, it smelled. That was in a town that not only had 10 thousand riders going through, but they also had their "heritage days" weekend. So the streets were packed with motorcycles going 15mph and really slow baby carriages being pushed by unwed moms smoking Marlboros. Between the smoking unwed baby carriage Moms and the streams of fat motorcyclists, I couldn't get across the road to join the bikes.

My buddy didn't see me turn into the smelly convenience store, so he is trying to go fast to catch me since he thinks I am ahead of him. So I finally get back across the road, and I beat cheeks to catch him. I do that for about five miles. I am toasted. It just took all my strength out of me to go that fast and catch him. I died.

At mile 120 or so, we stopped at a highschool and I just plopped down in the grass, pretty tired. I rested for the first time. At the earlier stops, I went to the portapotty, grabbed a handful of grapes and hit the road. At mile 120, I rested for 15 or 20 minutes. It really helped, I was a lot stronger after that for about an hour. Then I died again.

At mile 165 or so, we went past a rest stop, just trying to pound it out to the end. At mile 175, my speed dropped way off. My riding partner waited for me, and I slowly recovered, got my speed back up to about 20. We limped in to portland at 18- 20, which is slow for us. We were in a group of 20 guys, everybody was limping in at 18-20.

The last 2 miles is really frustrating, the route goes through Portland, stopping every stoplight, going really slow.

The finish line is great, lots of music, maybe 100 kids age 8-15 behind the barriers reaching their hands out for you to touch hands as you ride under the finish banner. Pretty cool, it makes you feel like a rock star.

My left achilles is sore. I needed to ice and elevate all day yesterday, I had family duty, so I didnt get to rest it. It really hurts.

The weather was cold. We shivered for the first four hours, every time you got a sweat, you had to stop at a stop sign, then you froze. In the cold, you get hurt.

All in all, a great experience. This is suppose to be one of the four or five best 'big' rides in the country. I really think everyone who reads this should ride in an organized ride. Think about it.

The Galactic Wheel of Fortune

I have come to realize lately that the great comedic punchline of life is the idea that some few successful people have always been, and always will be successful. The rest of us, the unblessed masses, we are condemned to the oddly ironic incarceration of watching them stomp and waste the puddles of fortune, splashing and squandering the bounty of life, over and over, without thought or reason. They suck from the trough of life while we the masses stand helplessly, hopelessly by, waiting for the million to one chance that some bejeweled spittle will fall from their fattened lips into our stretched open mouths.
That is it, the joke of life. Most of us have to sit and listen to the retelling of that same joke, being told over and over.
We get to hear the joke told over and over and, here is where it gets really funny, we hear the joke so often that we start to like it. We like knowing that somebody is richly rewarded for nothing more than being the random genetic product of two people caught up in the rush of animal reproductive instinct, because if somebody can hit the jackpot, without effort or some intentional use of their pea-sized-brain, then it can happen to us too. It’s the Galactic Wheel of Fortune come to the rescue, and we all, secretly, are hoping that the wheel lands on seven for us too.

The End, or something like it.

This blog isn't about anything. At least, it isn't about anything of note, and therein lies the allure. By setting expectations as low as possible and expending no more effort than necessary to meet those expectations, I hope to relive some of the few victories of my life. That is my goal with this blog; finding some small measure of success without really trying.

Now, in all honesty, I didn't think it would be this easy. Think about it. If I measure this first blog entry against a strict interpretation of the above stated goal, I can now claim a resounding victory and vacate the battlefield.

Some songwriter summed it up best, "Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am".