Of the things I find it hard to believe, despite the fact that I’ve experienced every second of their truth, is the fact that five years and a day ago I was doing my best not to completely lose my shit while my wife nonchalantly managed, after a couple days of Labor, to give birth to my daughter.

It just doesn’t feel like I have to look very far back to see her first roll over, her first all-fours crawl, or her first steps. I can still hear, plain as day, her beautiful gibberish and remember what it was like to lift her feather-light body up into my arms and to have her small arms and small face tuck into my shoulder as she fell asleep. The look of her face as she built up the scream that followed her tumble off the front porch steps is still clear as day. The first day she went to preschool she seemed much too small and much too young to be in a classroom and it brought tears to my eyes to think of her entering an institutional process she wouldn’t see the end of for at least 15 years. If we’re lucky.

The years are feeling like a ball of snow that started out small and light, rolling slowly downhill. It feels much bigger now, faster, and unstoppable. It doesn’t feel like I get to hold on to the days long enough, now, to savor them as much as I’d like to, and their passing is a little sad. But every one is better than the what’s come before, so it’s hard to be too down about today, every day.

What a splendid young lady my daughter is. I’m so goddam lucky I can hardly stand it. Happy birthday, sweetheart, I love you.

Grampa and Gramma

Tuesday last week, I flew into Quad Cities Airport, located at Rock Island-Moline on the Iowa-Illinois border. I arrived early in the morning, rented a car, and drove the rest of the way to Peoria. My last visit was five years ago, when I’d arrived in time to say goodbye to my Gramma, and then stayed a week until the service. My rental car’s satellite radio meant I had more choices this time than simply browsing through country, latin, and right-wing agitation, but most of the choices were wasted on me. I wasn’t looking for musical stimulation as much as I was comfort, so I settled into a classic rock station and drove. Driving through the cornfields was soothing.

I’d come this time for my Grampa’s funeral and to spend some time with Mom and my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Most of us were born in Peoria, though one cousin was born to my aunt in Germany on the Army’s dime, and another was born and raised in Santa Barbara until she was a teenager. My folks and I left Peoria in the 70’s and migrated to Southern Illinois, where they went to school and worked for years until they split up, and later headed for opposite coasts. Mom’s been in Ventura since ‘85, I’ve been there and half a dozen other cities since then.

The Backyard

By noon I was at Grampa and Gramma’s house, built around 1950 right next door to Great Grampa John and Great Gramma Bea’s house in West Peoria, down the street from the Franciscan Convent. My memories of Great Grampa are fuzzy, Great Great Gramma a little clearer. Great Great Gramma had moved in with John and Bea in her 40’s, claiming to be terminally ill and wanting to be with her daughter and son-in-law for what she was certain were her final months. She lived with them until she died at 99, outliving my Great Grampa John by several years. She was a hypochondriac and loved soap operas. One day she yelled to my Great Gramma, “Bea! Come quick! That’s what I’ve got, just like on TV! I’ve got coma!”

My first night in town, the whole family went to Crusen’s on Farmington Road, a bar and grill with an outdoor deck and gracious wait staff. Several of my cousins are pregnant or carrying infants or both, and seeing them as adults with their critters was both unsettling and delightful, as I tend to think of them all as being about 8 years old. There was something on the menu called a Horseshoe, which is an open-faced two-patty burger smothered in fries and cheese. I opted for the less intimidating cheeseburger, and a couple beers. That night, we sat around the fire pit in the back yard, drank some beer, shared some stories about Gramma and Grampa and things my mom and aunt and uncles did when they were kids.

Grampa and Fish, A Long Time Ago

Wednesday I woke up and realized I’d turned 40 years old, partly because it was my birthday. But also because staying up until after midnight and drinking four beers had left me feeling kinda old. Not hungover, more like my head was cross-threaded on my neck. Preparations were under way for the service, photos and dress clothes were organized and packed into cars. I played some frisbee in Great Gramma’s yard with my uncle and cousin for most of the morning while waiting to pick up my suit.

I’d found a dry cleaner close by, and explained that I’d just flown in and needed the suit for the service the next day. He’d agreed to have it done by 11:30 a.m., which left plenty of time until the service. When I went to pick it up, I saw a man filling five-gallon buckets with water from the neighbor’s garden hose, and taking it into the dry cleaner’s. He turned out to be the owner. He came out to the counter, shook my hand and said, “You’re the one I did the suit for, right? Very sorry to hear about your Grampa.” He told me that the guys doing road construction out front on Western Ave had turned off the water main, but the neighbor had agreed to let him use the hose to fill buckets to fill the boiler, so that he could finish my suit. I was floored, and felt really good about being in the midwest.

The Urn, Springdale Cemetery

The burial service at the cemetery was beautiful. Grampa’s ashes were mixed with Gramma’s, and were buried next to Great Grampa. Two Marines came from Quantico and presented a flag to us, and the local VFW Color Guard fired a 21-gun salute. I found it impossible to have hostile or cynical feelings about America’s military during the service, just as I had at my Grandfather’s funeral 15 years ago. Taps played in the background, every expression and movement was solemn, deliberate, and real. It filled me with pride, sadness, and a profound sense of the honor bestowed upon my Grampa. I held my mother’s hand through the eulogy, and afterwards picked up four shiny buckeyes from the ground around the graves.

We stopped at Schooners for lunch before the memorial service. The grill was down, but the fryer was up, so I ordered a tenderloin. What came out of the kitchen was a pounded piece of battered and deep-fried pork, about a foot square. It was over four times bigger than the bun sitting on top of it, which presumably had a mate trapped underneath. I cut it in half, and into quarters and ate one. Ordinarily I might’ve been game for two of the quarters, and it was good, but I wasn’t very hungry, and it wasn’t good enough to make me hungrier.

That Sucker’s Huge

The memorial service was beautiful. We each told our favorite stories about him, talked about what a wonderful person he was, and how much he’d meant to us. I gave a short eulogy, in which I tried to put into words all the feelings I had about what an amazing, decent, funny, loving, hard-working, and human person he was. It wasn’t possible to convey everything he meant to me, I know I felt like a chump trying to put words together that lived up to how much I loved and revered him. I started to say how much I was going to miss him, when I realized how much I missed him already and my face started failing, so I closed with a thank you and sat down.

That night, we went out to Agatucci’s for thin-crust pizza. One of the bartenders bought me a beer for my birthday. I ordered a side salad, which came out as a handful of iceberg lettuce with a dollop of bleu cheese dressing on top. The pizza and the beer were plentiful and delicious. We went home after, circled around the fire pit, drank beer until late at night and told Peoria stories. My aunt, my mother, and I slept soundly in the Starcraft camper-trailer, set up in the driveway.

The Firepit

Thursday I took my uncle and cousin to Bradley Park and played a few holes of disc golf. Bradley’s not a tremendously long course, and it seems like the flow’s not as good as I remember it after what must’ve been a redesign, but it’s fun to throw on. It was really just a warm-up for heading down to Pekin with my aunt’s boyfriend to play McNaughton Park. He was one of Peoria Frisbee Club’s early members, was involved in designing and building Bradley Park’s original course in 1984 and the championship course at McNaughton Park, and ran tournaments and actively promoted the sport for about 13 years. He and my cousin and I headed to McNaughton and played 18 long, gorgeous holes on a perfect day. I couldn’t have been happier or more grateful. I’m not sure when or how I’m going to make it back to Pekin, but when I do I’ll have my full bag with me.

We headed home after our round to clean up before meeting the family at The Burger Barge. This is where your diet goes to die a swift, violent death. I opted for the outstanding Peacemaker Barge, which is the result of a head-on collision between a fried-catfish sandwich and a fried-oyster po’boy, served with a pile of freshly fried potato chips, and it destroyed me. But the monster of the menu, the challenge I couldn’t even conceive of taking on, was the Red White and Moo:

2 – 9 oz. Burgers smothered w/cheese, our Butterfly pork chop slid in between with lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion and Dock Sauce.
(Now that’s All American!)

The Peacemaker

That night, we got some more beer, gathered around the fire pit, and got into our folklore. I really, really want a fire pit.

I spent Friday with the family, and got to visit with Great Gramma Bea. She’s 102, and though she admits that there’s a lot she doesn’t remember, there’s lots of light left behind her eyes. I drove back to Quad Cities Airport that afternoon and got back to D.C. late. Saturday morning I chased and wrestled my laughing children, and worked the Bike Clinic later on.

We had my birthday party Sunday, which featured hot dogs and ribs and rice tomato salad and baked beans and mac and cheese and plenty of beer and plenty of high-grade socializing. We counted 20 children, mostly between two and six, running laps around the house. It terrifies me that these psychotic ferrets will make decisions about our end-of-life care one day. The Wife made a chocolate cake that had 5 iced layers and one red-cake layer on top in the shape of a sprocket. It was a spectacular and exhausting weekend.

Over the course of the last couple weeks, I’ve gone from a manageable one-ninety-ish to over seven hundred thirty five pounds. You’d think I’d be much bigger, but it’s mostly density, so I wear it pretty well. My first thought Monday morning was that I needed to have my intestines bead-blasted. I’m hoping that a couple months of vigorous bike miles and salads for lunch will bring me back to “reasonable”, maybe even on the way to “fightin’ weight”.

But right now, all I’m fightin’ is the desire to eat two burger patties with a pork chop slid between.

[updated for red-pen offenses and to add a pic]

My mom’s in town, and with an extra hand to wrangle children, I had an opportunity to tackle some tasks this weekend…

This part was awesome.

Saturday morning, the wife and I got up together, had some coffee, and headed off to the Mt. Pleasant Farmers’ Market. I helped with some setting up of InstaShelters for the musicians and bike clinic, then got on the bike and started the first of two laps around the northern part of the city.

I’d stripped Cledus of fenders, lights, and other luxury commuting accessories, getting him down to a svelte sub-30 pounds. Actually, I don’t know how much weight was saved, but the placebo effect was noticeable. I dropped into Rock Creek Park, took the trail to the Capital Crescent Trail, got into some tunes and found a nice pace for the first lap.

I was tempted to fire it up a little, but remembered my commute from earlier in the week and exercised restraint. Last Wednesday, I’d hopped onto the tail of a paceline with some superheroes on the Georgetown side of the CCT, spent five or ten minutes with them, then decided to overtake them. I wasn’t racing or throwing down any gauntlets, I was just listening to Blondie and Debbie wanted me to raise my cadence. But I became aware as I did that there’s no way that a guy wearing a teeshirt and Dickies, riding a steel touring bike with platform pedals, can overtake 5 roadies in skinsuits on skinny tires without making a statement. And so, with great pride and questionable judgment, I stood behind my inadvertent statement and pushed Cledus hard for about 15 miles, feeling their imaginary heat behind me the whole way home.

Racing with unsuspecting commuters is pretty fun and a great workout, but the effort had eaten me up pretty quick, so this time I got comfortable and paid attention to the gorgeous day and the thick, lush woods. After about an hour and a half of steady pedaling, I’d come full circle to home, where I slugged a quart of milk and re-filled my water bottle. 5 miles later I was back at the market inhaling a pint of Tree and Leaf blueberries, and some outstanding peaches.

At about 45 miles I was feeling some fatigue, but I could still keep the chain from slacking, still keep the cranks spinning, and anytime I needed to I could still get off the saddle and fire it up. Once I hit Sligo Creek Park, I left the trail at the first opportunity to ride the road. It’s fairly twisty, and the speed limit’s 25, so I figured some nice smooth asphalt and a little pressure from traffic would be good for the pace (and it was).

A little while later I was home, hammering another quart of milk, filling the water bottle again, and then headed back to the market. Once market was over, the whole family headed over to Wonderland for burgers, Yuenglings, and pink lemonades on the patio, and then home. My total for the day was 61.5 miles, and even with the half hour of crawling Xtracycle pace from early in the morning, I averaged about 14 mph.

A moment to reflect.

Saturday’s ride made for 180 mile week, hopefully put me on pace for another 500 mile month, and brings the year to around 2160 miles.

I’m not quite ready for 100 miles with climbs yet, but I will be. And I’m a long ways away from anything remotely resembling this kind of crazy (Christ, she’s smiling, such a bad-ass).

But it wasn’t that long ago when I rode up to the Metro station on my bike and decided I’d rather ride all the way to work (all five miles!) than take the train. Soon after, Sylvie and Nigel joined the stable, which allowed us to eliminate most of the short car trips, bring the kids with us, and bring home four flats of strawberries when the opportunity arose. Do you have any idea how many daiquiris that is? Let me help you with the math: it’s a helluvalotta daiquiris.

My life with bikes in it is awesome. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to discover this, but I’m grateful to know it now, and I’m not wasting any more time.

This part was also pretty awesome.

Sunday was pretty clear, thanks again to help from Sainted Mother and Lovely-and-Talented Wife, and the bike room had been left in a catastrophic state since last weekend’s workbench odyssey.

Well, not complete disarray, necessarily. The kind of mess the room was in demanded that everything be disassembled, sorted into heaps, and put back together. Last weekend we’d gotten two steps into that process when I realized a workbench would be part of the solution, and then set about not quite finishing it. So the homogenized heaps of parts and tools have been on the floor, slowly disintegrating and mixing as the two-year-old discovers the nifty doodads they contain. Kind of like Brownian Motion.

It was pretty clear that the workbench drawer and pegboard tasks would need to be completed before order could be restored. Given the late start and the overhead involved in deploying my backyard-workshop, I knew it was gonna be close.

Home Depot went quickly, and without much pain. Mounting the drawer slides into the workbench took some effort, but went mostly without a hitch. Building the drawer itself went really, really well. In fact, I’ve gotten good enough with my homemade jigs and modified router bases that levels of squareness I wouldn’t have thought possible several months ago have become “almost good enough”. I was totally annoyed with Home Depot’s pine stock when two of the boards I was using for the drawer sides were clearly off by at least a thirty-second of an inch in width.

It was hot and sunny, I was pouring sweat and could feel the skin on the back of my neck getting crispier with each passing hour. It cooled down enough, later in the afternoon, for the gnats and a few mosquitoes to come out and play. But by five o’clock, the drawer was built and installed, and by seven I’d framed and mounted the pegboard to hang on the wall behind it. The pegboard’s layout will change, I’m sure, and there’s still a bunch of heaps to put away, but they’ll all have homes in no time.

Behold, a decent workspace!

This is going great.

This part was not so great.

It seems, at this point in the tale, that the whole weekend from the waking moments of Saturday to the waning moments of Sunday were perfect, what could go wrong? Nothing, really. But a tale without some pain and adversity isn’t terribly interesting, so here’s a little spice to finish it off.

My two-year-old son is a joy, I love and adore him, his two’s are going really well and so far haven’t been at all terrible. But last night I was playing keep-away with him, passing his book of cute animals from one hand to the other, letting him jump over me to get it before I passed it back. He was enjoying the game, smiling and laughing giddily.

But over the course of our game, in say five minutes, he punched and kneed me right square in the balls no less than five times, laughing the whole goddam time. When we got to lights out, I gave him a hug and a kiss and said, “Good night buddy, I love you… quit punching and kicking me in my goddam balls.” I mean, five times? It’s hard not to take that a little personally. Ya know?

So, that’s all I got, how was your weekend?

Here’s some images from the weekend’s bike camping expedition up the C&O Canal Towpath.

It was a great trip. We loaded up both longtails and Clovis with 3 adults, 3 kids, gear, water and food. Then we rode about 7-ish miles through DC, another 16 and change up the path to the campground at Swain’s Lock, stopping at several amazingly beautiful spots on the Potomac along the way.

The campground was great, nestled between a canal lock and the river with a rushing waterfall nearby. There were about 60 Boy Scouts and parents next to us with their tents and bikes, they’d gotten on the trail about 18 miles north and were headed the rest of the way to Georgetown.

There’s much more to be written about the experience, we had a great time, it was a great shake out for our gear and an opportunity to see how the kids would handle a longer ride. But I’m busy. Busy, busy, busy. So for now, grab some popcorn, enjoy the slide show, and I’ll share more impressions when I get a moment to breathe and blog.

We’ve returned from the West Coast safe and sound, and what a wonderful trip it was.

We had a splendid time at Sorenson’s Resort, just south of South Lake Tahoe and right up the road from Kirkwood, with lots of family. We spent a great day snowboarding, a couple more doing some cross country skiing in fresh snow, played lots of Scrabble, ate a bunch, and enjoyed several early happy hours. We even spent some quality time in a hot tub, listening to a fork of the Carson River below, while the snow fell in big fat flakes all around us. Glorious 8000 foot fat dry snowflakes.

We headed back to the coast and relaxed for the rest of last week. I played a bunch of disc golf at the world-class DeLaveaga, the kids and grandparents got to spend a bunch of time together, we hung out with friends (though not enough of ‘em and not for nearly long enough), sank a pitcher or two at Zeitgeist, and had delicious chile verde burritos in Santa Cruz. The weather was awesome, and the mountains, typically bright, sandy brown with patches of sun-bleached green scrub, were covered in lush dark green foliage. It’ll be fuel by summer, but it’s lovely in spring. I also saw more people in Santa Cruz on bikes than I see commuting in D.C. on a typical day.

But perhaps that will change now that we’re into the meat of Spring. In our absence, the wildly fluctuating 67-degrees-this-week-17-the-next weather has settled into a partly cloudy 50’s and 60’s with nourishing light rains. I was pretty sure that coming back after 12 days off the bikes would be kinda rough, but it hasn’t been. Perhaps it was the cross country at high altitude, or hiking around the course all week, or maybe we just needed a rest, but I’ve been feeling strong pushing Nigel’s cranks around town so far this week.

So it’s back to work, and the bikes need a spring cleaning, and the market season’s about to begin, and it’s just weeks until the warmth yields to heat and we move family headquarters to the community pool for the summer. There’s a lot of planning to be done, tough choices to be made, actions to be taken, bales to be lifted and barges to tote. Winter’s over, the cherry trees are blooming, and we’re ready to rock.

It’s good to be home, anything important happen while I was gone?

(Pictures from the trip after the jump, enjoy!)

(more…)

I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

Happy birthday my son. If your sister was any indication, the next 365 days, give or take, are gonna be a challenge, but I have abundant faith in your wits, resourcefulness, and unbounded cuteness, you’ll certainly survive and thrive.

I would consider it a courtesy, however, if you would kindly defile, mutilate, soak, burn, use Sharpies on, and otherwise wreck the items and furnishings that your mother and I are looking for reasons to dispose of before moving on to the irreplaceable items.

Once you reach that point, though, don’t bother differentiating between things too expensive to replace and those of merely sentimental value. And remember, once you cross a certain line, there’s no difference between fubar’ing something a little or a lot, so go big, learn what you can from the trajectories and remains, and enjoy the moment.

This is gonna be a great year! Woo!