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.

Indulge me in a brief diversion, a short dip back into the waters of politics, and then we’ll get back to the things that make life grand.

John Cole went ballistic the other morning, and declared the Health Care Reform battle over and lost, stating “…the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. If the Republicans had majorities like the Democrats have right now…” etc, etc.

I think it misses the point, believing that the fight is constrained to the Capital, and that Democratic lawmakers have the upper hand because they outnumber the Republicans and hold the presidency. I’ll let J.R. Boyd at Lady Poverty lay out the terms of the real fight:

The problems are understood well enough. With regard to health care, a popular administration with a mandate for “change” has ventured too far into the established turf of private commercial concerns. This has rallied much of the business community around the core principle on which it stands: that government exists to advance their concerns, not anybody else’s. Subsequently, the right of investors to capture ever increasing profit has once again been unfurled from our Constitutional masthead as America’s most sacred principle, on which a government acting for any other purpose necessarily tramples.

As usual, the fight is not fair, power consolidated as it is in the private sector. The Republican Party’s well-established infrastructure of irrationality produces far more than its own weight in disinformation and lies, in large part because its corporate sponsors see no need to challenge them in more respectable news forums. Again, ownership has its privileges; among these, the constitutional right to say whatever you want — all day, every day — in whatever media market you control.

The inadequacy of mere liberalism to confront these problems, or even to frame them properly (the political system just reflects the balance of power in the broader society, after all; narratives about Democrats and Republicans wholly miss the point) should be evident from the pitiful solutions it floats, as above. No, the answer is not that President Obama needs to do a better job talking, somehow penetrating the morass of unmitigated horseshit — Obama’s Hitler health care will kill your grandmother! — which freely flows 24/7 with the occasional press conference and civic appeal. Liberalism has installed Obama and the Democrats to get the job done for the rest of us, never realizing that their power does not create itself spontaneously through the strength of their convictions, but in conjunction with the rest of society. Whatever portion of society is best organized writes the laws.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this last part, where people believe “Obama will get it done for the rest of us”. Whatever opinions one has about the intelligence of the folks disrupting townhall meetings across the nation, or the coherence of their objections, one can’t help but notice that this is not a Brooks Brother’s Riot. Those are not Republican staffers out there, furiously, if wrongly, shouting “Keep your government out of my Medicare!”. The people showing up at these things have been stirred to a boil by the odious likes of Glenn Beck, to be sure. But they’re real people, they’re really angry, and when there’s a townhall meeting they show up.

Are those of us, supposedly in the majority, supposedly with clear perspectives on health care reform, ready to show up at those same meetings to counter the folks on the fringe? Do we care as much about the political process as they do? And shouldn’t we be the ones with the pitchforks and torches, given the state of affairs? Shouldn’t we be showing up by the hundreds, or at least by the dozens, at the studios of CNN, FOX, and CNBC hurling our own spittle-flecked curses at the people who’ve made it impossible to even have an adult conversation about health care reform (to say nothing of the myriad other serious problems that need tackling in short order)?

Or are we just not up to it? I fear that’s the case, that informed folks with common sense have seen what We The People are up against, and have already given up. I hope not, because I’m certain corporate America is one-hundred percent up to it, and I’d hate to think we ceded the fight so early on.

A little over a year ago, I stumbled across a great cycling blog, though it already had an eager following of many thousands of folks in the cycling community. The proprietor, Elden Nelson, is an avid cyclist, on and off-road, and a wonderful humorist. I enjoyed every post, and over time gradually got to know a little about him, his riding buddies, and his family.

I also came to know, through his writing, about his wife Susan, her struggle with cancer, her family’s commitment to fighting it, and the cycling community’s response to their calls to help. I was inspired to join the fight, which is why I’ll be riding my first century in the Philadelphia Livestrong Challenge two and a half weeks from now, and why I’ve been asking for your support. I’ll be riding to fight cancer in the larger sense, but specifically, though I’ve never met or spoken with the Nelson family, I committed to this almost a year ago to fight for Susan, and for the Nelson family.

Susan passed away this evening. If you’re so inclined, you might drop a note of love and support. My thoughts and prayers are with the Nelson family tonight, and we’ll keep fighting.

[UPDATE]: This is a beautiful eulogy to Susan. Riding for Team Fatty on her behalf will be an honor, of which I’m probably not worthy, but I’m sure proud have the opportunity to do it.

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.

A few days ago, I knocked out my not-very-old Facebook account. I was already feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole enterprise when I got a message from my past that I definitely didn’t expect. It’s not that I bear this person any malice, but the last 25 years of not being in touch with them was going really well, all things considered. There are some loose threads in each of our tapestries, I believe, that are simply better left unrepaired. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that what I ought to do is ask some of the folks I’d gotten back in touch with for their preferred method of contact, and that I should actually write (or at least call) them if I was really going to make the effort to “stay in touch”. So I asked, some have responded, and now the Facebook account’s toast. Good riddance.

Today, as I was scanning Twitter more out of habit than interest, I realized that there was nothing there I truly valued, that I was just spending time. Typically I feel like I’d get more out of watching the Brady Bunch for 30 minutes than I do reading people’s tweets throughout the day, and those are from people I know and love. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep the account, so that’s toast as well.

The problem with these revolutionary digital thneeds, like the consumer crap and cultural detritus that form waist-high drifts of meaninglessness in my life, is that there’s novelty, but little else worth caring about. Each of these toys cost precious and finite moments of my life that I could be doing something worthwhile, unrecoverable time I could be spending with my children before they grow up and I grow old, time I could be spending eating and drinking with friends or cuddling my wife.

I turned the same critical eye to this blog, wondering if it too needed to go, but I stopped short of dropping the axe on it. Updike I’m not (and thank the good Lord for that), or Mencken or Royko for that matter, but art, craft, and skill are part of what I’m doing here. I’m writing, and I enjoy it, that’s what this is about.

I would have a hard time justifying the time and effort I put into this, were it just about the roughly eight of you gracious enough to drop in on a regular basis. But making this blog, to me, isn’t just about the posts or the audience. It’s about thinking and writing and photographing and editing and publishing, about the joy that comes from creating. And it’s about more than just producing any particular work of art or craft, it’s about cultivating the artist and craftsman. I’d find value in that whether or not I ever showed this to another soul.

So the blog stays. Lucky me, lucky you.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind about all this tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see the value in the social media revolution, and decide that the rare, beautiful gem one occasionally finds in it makes all the digging and sifting through mud worth it. But for now, my distilled sentiment on such things is that social media can blow it out its web-two-point-ass. I’m just a blawger, I suppose.

I just signed up to ride 100 miles. In a row. In August. In Philadelphia. With thousands of other people. This strikes me, as someone who’s never done a ride of this scale or distance, as a strange turn of events. Perhaps you think so too. But once I explain, I think you’ll agree that I never had a choice.

You see, I wasn’t able to get the Fat Cyclist jersey I was hoping to score. I hemmed and hawed over which one would be the most awesomest, and then they all sold out. Like, in a week.

So I was kind of down about not being able to have participated in the big Twin Six Fat Cyclist sale, and was thinking about writing about it, and then thinking “no one wants to read about that, and I don’t want to write about it.”

Which led to thinking about what I do want to write about. I mean, I can tell you about the finer points of my goat trails, the ride to Ruby’s school, the commute. I can tell you about the even yet finer points as well, there are truly splendid driveways over by Trinity University that I could fill pages describing. I could do a daily post, in all-caps, yelling at the motorists who taunt and torment me. But you don’t want to read that. And I don’t want to write it.

And then I caught a glimpse of a slide from a presentation by BikeHugger’s own D.H. Byron, a presentation that included a couple points about making your blog better. The seed of advice that took root in the fertile soil of my imagination was: “make yourself more awesome”. Which led to the next slide, the practical implementation of that advice: “Do Epic Shit”.

About the same time, Fatty announced that he was going to put together a team for each of the Livestrong Challenge events that would be bigger than any before, raise more money for cancer research than any Livestrong Challenge team ever before, and would involve a bike ride longer than… well, any ride I’ve ever done before, by probably 75 miles. And I thought, “Hey, that sounds suspiciously… epic.”

It is a big event thought out and managed by people who are good at those kinds of things. It’s not a race, the ride’s well supported, and I’ll be undertaking this quest with my teammates, who will (hopefully) be about a thousand strong. So it’s kind of beginner level, as far as an Epic Adventure! goes. In other words, a perfect fit. And, it’s for the best of causes, under an auspicious banner, and I may get a FatCyclist jersey out of it after all, hopefully something smaller than an XXXL.

So, between now and next August, I’ll be training for a big long ride, writing about the process, and perhaps bothering folks about sponsoring me just a little bit. If you’re interested, this here’s my personal fundraising page, and I’ll leave a link over on the right in case you’d be interested in stopping by it later. If they make a thermometer widget or a bat or something, I’ll put that up too.

If you’re interested in joining Fatty’s Livestrong Team for one of the events in Austin, Seattle, San Jose, or Philadelphia, visit this post for quick links and info, as well as the rundown on all the nifty rafflings he’s personally doing for folks joining his team. You’re worth a million in prizes. You don’t have to walk, run, or bike to join, there’s plenty of ways to help. And you don’t have to ride 10, 20, 50, or 100 miles, but you sure could.

I’m excited and nervous and ready to get on this, like I’m at the beginning of something… epic. Feels good.

[UPDATE]: Kent Peterson also asks that you join the team. I imagine that when you’ve done the Great Divide Race on a single speed, you’ve probably got a hundred-mile ride laying around under your couch cushions.

[ANOTHER UPDATE]: I found a thermometer on the Livestrong Challenge site, but it appears to suck. I put it on my sidebar, it was bright yellow with heavily aliased white text and an obviously white background. Not gonna do it. If I find out they have something like an RSS feed, perhaps I’ll whip something up that doesn’t suck.

You know I’m just a bike rider. You know I don’t race. You know I like my bikes heavy, with big cushy tires. You know that if there’s a Girl Scout behind me when I’m on my way to work, it means one thing, namely that I’m about to get dropped by a Girl Scout.

Nevertheless, I think it’s time I bought a jersey, perhaps in XL for “eXtra Luxury”. And I think it’s about time you bought one too. Sure, you could do it because it’ll support some really wonderful folks that could use the help right now, or because the company that’s making them is the kind of company that restores your faith in the goodness of humanity. You could get one because you’re a serious racer, and when the competition sees “WIN” in all-caps on your sleeve, the competition will whither and crumble. You could get one of these jerseys because you will look even haw-haw-hawter in one than you already look when you’re firing yourself down the road like a sexy two-wheeled missile carrying a warhead filled with 50 megatons of Sassy. You could do it for any or all of those reasons, and that’d be swell.

I’m doing it for one reason, and one reason only. I’m doing it because these jerseys will make me faster, and I’m tired of getting dropped by a Girl Scout with a messenger bag full of Thin Mints.

You’ve got a big decision to make tomorrow, citizen.

There’s a lot to think about as we approach this historic election. There’s more than one dire problem to solve, more than a few turds hurtling towards the blades of a big, angry fan, more to be resolved with higher stakes than ever before.

We’re mired in geopolitical conflict, and the way home is difficult to find, harder to navigate. We’re hooked on an energy source that’s dirty, expensive, and often comes at the cost of supporting some nefarious organizations. Our economy is shaky, fragile, and everyone’s looking over their shoulder for the axe to fall. Health care is skyrocketing, and getting sick often means bankruptcy. Bridges are falling into rivers, cities are falling apart, our manufacturing base is much diminished, and the guy you’re trying to order that Bacon Cheeseburger from doesn’t seem to speak much English.

What will be in store for America as we enter the next chapter in our history? Which candidate is better equipped to handle these challenges? What’re we gonna do?!

I know that when I ponder issues of these magnitudes, I try to imagine how the best of our presidents would tackle them. I contemplate Washington’s moral rectitude, Jefferson’s master statesmanship, Teddy’s cunning diplomacy, FDR’s inspiring leadership. Ultimately, the path of my meditation will lead to Lincoln, whose counsel is always the same.

You’ve got a big decision to make tomorrow, Superstar.