Claim Everything

I am thinking about everything up to this point. Over the years I have said that life is like stumbling down a dark hallway with your hands in front of your face. That ignores the fact that you can learn a lot about hallways by stumbling. I should get a medal for resisting things that are good for me. Last to Learn it would read. I get it eventually, and I want a medal for that too. He Gets it Eventually proudly displayed beneath Suspicious of Motives.

To achieve is admirable, to persevere is sublime.

Juancho

Triple Play

Yesterday the Great Magnet saw fit to allow me to complete some tasks that I have been working on for months. You grind and grind and then all of a sudden, boom, it's done. I had to celebrate by breaking my ride fast of 6 days. I got to the trail-head at 3:30 P:M. The thermometer read a cool 96. That number rose sharply as I pedaled into a controlled burn in the forest. The woods were charred black and still smoldering and the air was hazy with smoke and heat shimmers. I stopped to dampen a bandana and tie it around my face as a filter. With that I felt like I was being water-boarded next to a pizza oven. It was still a good ride, as most bike rides turn out to be.

Back in the Safari I trekked over to yoga and slipped into a Pranayama a few beats behind. With no time to stop at the house I was wearing my bibs and a dress shirt I found wadded in the seat pocket of the van. My shins were covered with soot and the sweat rolled down my polished bald head unchecked. Although the room was packed I seemed to have plenty of room for my Warrior Two. I went through the motions and held poses for days, but I played Whack-a-Mole with my thoughts. At its worst yoga is still a good stretch. With the tails of my button-up shirt sticking to my backside I namasted out of there and back to the van.

Swinging by the house I changed, ate a banana (major sugar!) and bumped some Nas on my way to the Tallahassee Rock Gym. The rock climbing revival is still going strong. The Torso and his family were already there and the place was packed for student half price night. I waited patiently, belaying babies and teaching newbies to tie figure eight knots. I climbed on Tuesday and the Torso's beeper fell out of his pocket from 20 feet up and brained me on my exposed dome. He appraised the lump and the nick in my scalp with chagrin. When you are climbing rocks fall, it is part of the game, but who carries a beeper in 2011? I got to tie in eventually and go at it on a couple of stiff 5.8's that were more than enough to satiate me and close out my triple play evening.

The pull-up count is at 4.

-Juancho

Good things come

This time last year I was close to getting my arm out of the sling, and thinking that would end my misery. In fact things were about to get a whole lot worse. Confining a joint for 3 months atrophies the muscle and cartilage resulting in this case with a condition called "frozen shoulder." To move it beyond its stunted radius was to feel broken glass grinding in the socket. The pain meds were gone. The howling nightmare of withdrawal was swooping in with a black lust. I was so fatigued I couldn't walk to the mailbox and back without getting winded.

Then things got worse.

By September I was sucking the scum off the bottom of the barrel. Somewhere deep inside my heart I found a little courage and I fought back. One step at a time. One grain of brown rice at a time. I shut out the world and all earthly pleasures save for sweat and a search for a new way. I stacked the words of the doubters like bricks in my ramparts and thought of the day I would launch my opening salvo. -

For them all a feast of crows. Patience is its own reward.

-Juancho

Boundaries

I drive a sweet van. A GMC Safari that my mom has driven from Florida to the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula and back a few times. She also drove it to California, Ohio, the grocery store and elsewhere. It is silver with tinted windows, and I know I look good behind the wheel. Anybody would. Most of the time my bike is in the back, and maybe some golf clubs, yoga mats, and a dozen empty water bottles. I call it the mobile toy-box. Some people call it the Turtle or the Shovel. This weekend it will be an art collection vehicle in New Orleans for some friends. It will return full of glitter, scraps of fabric, and coffee cups. It makes me happy to loan it to my friends who dare to do great things like make art.

What does not make me happy about it is driving around town looking at my Tallahassee neighbors standing in the heat waiting for the buses, which can take 45 minutes in some parts of town. I don't like passing people by who are walking my way on long, two lane roads peppered with decomposing opossum and sand-spurs. The conversation in my head goes something like this;

It sure looks hot out there. Those people are hating it, and that old man looks like he might fold right over his walker and pass out. I could load them all up and take them wherever they need to go. People will think that is weird, and it will likely scare them, or make them feel suspicious. I better just keep on rolling.

That's what I do, I keep on rolling. And yet I remember standing at a border crossing on the line between Slovenia and Austria in the middle of the night, desperate for a ride to catch the Croatian bus that abandoned me when I went to the bathroom in the station. Cramped by intestinal disease, dizzy from a stomach emptied by violent retching and diarrhea, my foot bandaged and bloody with 14 stitches received the day before, I had a few seconds to beg in a foreign language to each passing car to take me with them. Hundreds passed me within the first hour. A blue mini-van driven by a woman with blonde hair and tired eyes looked at me and turned to an elderly gentleman in the backseat and he nodded. A toddler was buckled into the bench seat next to the man.

She waved me around to the passenger seat.

What to do?

Juancho

Choices

Happy Birthday Lopo!

It will be 100 degrees by 2:00 P:M today with a suck factor of 107-110 projected by 5:00 O'clock. Ladies and gentleman, I bring you AUGUST. I have been thinking about what to do in August since last September, when I first lurched my XL frame off of the opium couch and decided to choose life over broken-ness, Vicodin and Wife Swap. You must have a plan for August I thought. I hoped to be in San Diego, riding my bike along the western edge of this grand experiment, learning to surf at Tourmaline and playing pirates with my nephew. This was not in the Great Magnet's plan.

The BikeChain crew, whom I will soon join in the black and the orange, rode last night in the stifling confines of the north-side hardwood trails. Early reports from the wounded are that Big Worm roared a mighty roar and savaged the rest of the pride. I was safely in savasana by then after a spirited round of golf. I shot a 57 on 9 and enjoyed every chunker and topper along the way. You must have a plan for August. The bugs are so intense right now that the ticks are complaining about the dog dick gnats and the mosquitoes have to walk everywhere because they are so bloated on on sweet cyclist blood- enriched by Zone 5 cookies and cold beers, that they can't lift themselves from the ground.

You make different choices and different things happen.

I am going to do more rock climbing at the Tallahassee Rock Gym. I'm going to hurl disc golf at Tom Brown Park. I'm going to paddle, swim, and rope swing my way around the Big Bend. I'm going to break 50 at the Jacques Gauthier Golf and Social Club. I'm going to ride my bike early in the morning and late at night. I am going to drop 10 lbs and read The Pale King.

I have no idea what to do about September.

Juancho

Shotgun

I grew up on the back of a bike, riding in a plastic seat strapped to the back of a 1970's Schwinn 3-speed, if I remember correctly. My parents would ride my sister and I around the neighborhood, which was a bunch of trailers spread out along a road I can't believe was paved. It was good living back in the day, when I had the freedom to wander across the fields to my friend's house to watch the Star-Spangled Banner play on television when network television came on first thing Saturday morning before cartoons. Before that though, I saw the world from the back of the bicycle, and legend has it I spoke all things I saw into being. When one parent couldn't take it anymore they would stop and switch. Did they switch bicycles, or just us children? I don't remember this displeasing me. I was happy to have a new audience to whom I could explain all of the wonders of the world through my toddler eyes. I still like to talk on bike rides.

-Juancho

Bike Thief Take-Down

If you have ever had a bike stolen, you know that sick feeling when you realize your ride is not where you left it. When I was 12 my bike got stolen while we were on vacation. when I was 21 a friend hid my bike around the corner from where I was standing to teach me a lesson about not locking it up. My bike was found and returned back in 1982, damaged, but sound. It made me sick to think of some other kid riding it around, showing off my yellow mag wheels. The friend who hid my bike in 1991? I never forgave him. I hold a grudge to this day and I hope he rots in hell. We all lose so much in this life. There's no room for simulated loss. What a jackass. I digress.

A reader out in California (Thanks SY!) shared a video of a bike theft in progress outside of his company, captured on a security camera. The theft itself is illustrative as it takes about two seconds for the thief to cut the lock and ride away. Too bad for him a quick-thinking young woman only needed one second to get out there and shut him down. Click the title to view the heroic save. With moves like hers she is likely to wind up in the BRC Clydesdale Hall of Fame.

Nice work!

Juancho

Cutting the sleeves off- a meditation on Dave Baton, by his friend Scot Benton.

last night i cut the sleeves off my favorite jersey
for dave
because of dave

last night i sat in a straight-backed wooden chair
no air conditioning
bolt upright
waiting for dave to show up

i thought of once when he looked at a bike i was working on
and said under his breath with a smile, "that'll never work."

he was right

i thought of once riding - full gas - off the front of some silly group ride
thinking i had things stretched out real good and proper
and suddenly realizing i had dave in my shadow
breathing words of encouragement - he was

i asked him to "pull-through," looking at him over my shoulder
"this'll never work," i heard him mutter under his breath...

he was right

tonight a million years ago
i sat waiting for dave to show up
to ride across town for beer
to stand over our bikes on the tops of hills
- listening to the cicadas and the breeze

one night as we sat quietly off Gaines street breathing in the glorious "nothing" that tends to happen
we saw a rider approaching
as the person passed going up the long hill toward the capital building
dave and i both instinctively stuck up our hands in greeting
the guy looked right at us - kept going - and did not wave back
realizing we both knew the guy, we sat for another moment in silence
then dave said, "that guy needs to raise his saddle."

he was right

a year or so later, on another hyped-up group ride, i overheard the guy dave and i saw that night -

he was talking about how he had changed his riding position - it looked very much like he had raised his saddle

last night i cut the sleeves off my favorite jersey
for dave
because i need to hang on to dave in my heart
because dave had this special way of being "right" about things
that taught me something
i will never forget him

Scot Benton

Thanks Scot, for sharing this with us. We will see everyone at Joe's Bike Shop @ 10:00 A:M on Saturday, sleeveless.

Juancho

Going all Tarzan on Wednesday

Deep, deep water under overcast skies with a condensing mist floating just above the surface. Paddle through that curtain and the temperature goes up 10 degrees and the air gets sticky and damp again. "The cold water can make you cramp and sink to the bottom! Nobody is coming down to get you!" We laugh and swim to the middle, treading water in the crampiest, sinkiest spot possible. We don't cramp or sink, we float and spiral down like the otter, an animal bearing no resemblance or relation to a stalking king-beast cat. There is nobody else here, so the spring is ours and nobody else has ever been here as far as we are concerned. Dive in, climb out, dive in- performing our Jefferson County ablutions.

"You won't see no black people here" said the old coach in the parking lot. "Too many mean white people in Jefferson County." He has a look on his face like something is dead and rotten, and I like him for knowing what stinks. It never once occurred to me, but he's right. I have never seen a black person at this river. My own white skin purchasing the privilege of my extended stay in la-la land. Surely I'm wrong, and this river is everyone's river now?

An Osprey lights 20 feet above us, feathers a wet mess and head swiveling about like a mad scientist. He looks like a dangerous, vigilante chicken about to go buck wild on your ass. He looks down at us and I am concerned for my eyes, but he flies away.

There is a limestone arch beneath another little spring and you can swim under and through it. We all agree it looks easy enough, but nobody feels like giving it a go. Get a cramp and you will sink like a stone. I can guarantee I will get my foot caught on something, although my luck has changed this summer. No need to test it right that minute. Three young braves show up in a john boat and one of them does it. The others are afraid of cramps.

Back at the parking lot the rope swing deck is finally empty. The homecoming queen and her coterie have clocked out, so there is nothing to stop us from climbing the tree and swinging out above the concrete platform and over the hole to come ka-splashing down. The water shoots up your nose and into your brain, where it can do the most good. All of our bent and busted shoulders work, even if they might look funny to some.

-Juancho

Panther Update

For those of you long-time Circus carnies, you remember the Jaguarundi I'm sure. If you are new to the site I am referring to a remarkable event about 5 years ago when I and my friend Hambone saw a large, dark-furred cat with a long ropy tail on the trail off of a local road in the middle of a dense suburban metro area. I was in front (of course, yo) and Hambone was right behind me and we saw the animal at about the same time. It heard us and bounded down a steep bank and into a drainage tunnel that leads into the woods. In that moment the rest of our party appeared and we were unable to find a definitive print or evidence of any kind. You can read the back-story by searching Jaguarundi, or Black Panther in this blog and I suggest you do. It would be good to familiarize yourself with the derision and scorn we absorbed for stating a truth beyond the comprehension of the existing shared paradigm. Impossible maybe, but true nonetheless. We accepted the compromise of an obscure species of cat known as the Jaguarundi (indigenous to South America.) The state wildlife office classified the sighting as " Likely Otter" which is a good argument for deep Republican cuts to their budget (the punks!)

I share this with you now as a preface to this new information I have learned which indeed proves that the shared paradigm is a fragile thing.

Click Here for and reconsider the Jaguarundi sighting anew.


Juancho