On some good advice that these days of winter are for relaxing a bit and letting the muscles grow supple, I spent last week riding to the Metro, taking the Red Line downtown, and reading my book for a little while in the morning and evening. I figured it wouldn’t be as frantic over the holidays as I remembered, and it wasn’t. In fact, it was pleasant enough that I’m doing it again this week and reading some more. This is the first time in two years I’ve taken the Metro to work instead of riding my bike. It feels a little bit like I lost something, but that something might have been a chip off my shoulder rather than anything important.

Other than that… what’s to say? It’s not that life hasn’t been interesting, after all the holidays have been a swarm of family and friends and events and food, the kids astonish and nourish me in new ways just about every day, there’s some bike and non-bike projects in the works, and there’s no shortage of current events to ponder aloud (or at least to ignite vehement reactions). I just haven’t been interested in writing about any of it.

Unless I become suddenly inspired, this right here’s the year-end wrap-up:

• I should finish the year with about 4050 miles and 131035 not-feet* of climbing.
• Number of rides is a less precise stat, because I’ll list a ride like “Farmers’ Market and Back” as a single ride, whereas the ride to work and the ride home are two, both because they’re broken up by a whole day of sitting and because it makes it easier to use different routes. The number of rides I’ve recorded for the year stands at 558, but there’s a few days left yet to cross 560 for the year.
• My weekly averages came out to approximately 10 3/4 rides a week for 77 miles and change. The biggest week was 189 miles and a little over 11400 not-feet of climbing, which was the week in August of the Livestrong Challenge. That month was my biggest with almost 625 miles.
• I put over 1575 delightful miles on Cledus (the Long Haul Trucker) this year, which is pretty cool. Cooler still was that Nigel, my Trek 930 based Xtracycle, racked up 1925 miles, and logged over 61k not-feet to Cledus’ 54k. No wonder I had to replace his Fat Franks this year, they got all wore out from kicking everyone’s ass all the time.
• I’m not sure how many miles we put on the car this year, but I’m almost positive it was well under 4k miles. Gotta verify it, but that’ll definitely deserve its own toast on New Year’s Eve.

* MapMyRide.com’s elevation statistics are horribly inaccurate, I’m certain that a year’s worth of GPS data from the same rides would yield an entirely different number. But since MMR was my method of measure throughout the year, it is at least consistently inaccurate. Or it’s not.

So there’s the tale of the tape. Pretty good year! I don’t know if I’ll beat those numbers next year, or if I’ll keep numbers for that matter, but this was worth doing and knowing. Even though it sure felt like I was piling on miles before and during the century, those only accounted for 500-600 of the total. The vast majority of the miles I rode this year were just to work and back, with a regular ride to the market on Saturdays. Pity the cyclist that thinks of those miles as “junk”!

Other things to remember and be thankful for this year:

• I lost a good bike. I miss you, buddy.
• I gained a couple more. I love you all.
• The Bike Clinics at Mt. Pleasant Farmers’ Market (and then at Bloomingdale, 14th and U, and H St.) were incredibly successful this year, more than anyone could’ve guessed. Estimates indicate we may have helped as many as 800 people get their bikes back on the road, and that’s pretty darn cool.
• Every day my wife proves to me how smart I was to marry her, and my children demonstrate to me that there’s nothing that could have adequately prepared me for the experience of raising children.
• And then there’s y’all. Or yinz. Or youse guys. Whatever ya call yourselves, thanks for tuning in. I’d probably write this stuff down somewhere, and bookmark these Internet oddities, but it’s much more satisfying to talk to you than just to myself, and there’s less annoying reverb.

I think that’s enough to call it a year, don’t ya think? Feel free to drop a comment about something awesome or not so awesome that you did, or were just in the path of, this year. And when it gets close to midnight on Thursday night, when I raise a glass to the end of this year, consider it hoisted in your direction.

Cheers!

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.

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.

Ran across this interview with Berkeley Breathed on Salon, discussing the end of Opus and his children’s books. I’ve been a fan of his work for years, and Mars Needs Moms! is one of Ruby’s favorites (she even has a pair of red and orange striped Milo jammies).

He said something in that interview that’s been rolling around my braincase like a roller derby.

We aren’t returning someday to any sort of golden era of political civility. The line heads heavenward and has been since the Republic started. And with the intersection of two rather dramatic dynamics — the cable and Web technology allowing All Snark All the Time … and the political realities of No More Free Lunch in America, it will spike in the coming years like Don Draper’s sex life, and I hereby pledge that that’s the last pop reference I use.

Aren’t dark times exactly when satire is most needed?

It’s not so much dark times now, as profane and loud. Satire you’ll have, oh dear me, indeedy yes. “Vomitous” and “awash” are two words that come to mind. It used to be that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. How antediluvian. Rather, everyone will now want a satirical YouTube film with 15 megabytes.

Satire we’ll have. Rather, the real dearth in our world will be sweetness, comfort, thoughtfulness and civility. If I could do “Peanuts,” that’s what I’d be doing. Alas, I’ve tried.

(Italics mine)

Sweetness, comfort, thoughtfulness, and civility.

The four horsemen of the Antipocalypse. It’s these qualities that I feel have been sacrificed to the gods of Cable and Freeways and the Internet, I sense their absence by the way the world feels like it’s colder and full of sharp corners. It’s why I believe Garrison Keillor is a national treasure, why the News From Lake Wobegon always seems to grab me deeper in the chest than it ought to. It’s the reason my memories of eating pot roast and potatoes while watching Andy Griffith and Hee Haw with my Gramma and Grampa and aunts and uncles are priceless treasures to me. It’s why I jump at the chance to watch Sound of Music and Mary Poppins with my daughter.

And I wonder, after a lifetime of consuming media that eschewed these qualities in the name of realism, edginess, satire, and impact, music and books and movies and TV shows that I still consider essential for having provided the materials that comprise the rich inner life I enjoy, whether or not I can connect with my better angels and become a source of sweetness, comfort, thoughtfulness, and civility for my children and community as times get tougher.

I hope so, it’s important, and I’m workin’ on it. I hope there’s more of us that think it’s worth doing.

The last few days since Hanna came and went have been cool, overcast, and beautiful. I’ve been dropping Ruby off at school in the mornings and then shooting downtown via my regular southwest slash through the hospitals, Howard University, down to R and through Dupont Circle. It’s a nice ride really, with some lovely neighborhoods, but I get to work feeling like a great part of my day has come to an end sooner than it had to.

Wednesday after work I drove Nigel down to Georgetown after work to hook up with a buddy, and to ride longtails north into Rock Creek Park, then east to hook up with the wife for Hefeweizens in Columbia Heights. The trail going through the park was narrow, frequently creased by roots coming up through the asphalt, and strewn with joggers. It was outstanding, I loved it. So this morning after I dropped Ruby off at school, rather than shooting southeast across the city, I rode the long way.

With the creamy Fat Franks rollin’ steady and chewin’ up pavement, I rumbled west across town on Columbia, turned onto Adams Mill and got pulled into the funnel of streets that empty into Rock Creek Park at the National Zoo. The trail runs through the woods all the way around the zoo, follows Beach Drive until it merges with Rock Creek Parkway, meanders along the parkway past the entrance to the C&O Canal Towpath in Georgetown, and finally follows the Potomac all the way down to the Arlington Memorial Bridge. From there, I turned back towards the Washington Monument, then headed north to Downtown. It was still over much too quickly.

Rebbie and I were talking about New York the other day, and it occurred to me that, given a choice, I wouldn’t be so hasty to jump at Brooklyn today as I would’ve been a year ago. I mean sure, culturally speaking, New York still has the edge over… well anywhere in the U.S. for us. But I have to admit, the more of D.C. I get to know, the more I like it.

What a beautiful morning! What a great ride! My sweet dick, it’s magic! Click on through if you’d like to see just a couple pics I snapped along the way…

(more…)