Woodog

2011-09-14T21:00:00.002-05:00

My goodness. Mr. Woo is no more. A week ago today Greg and I took him to be put down. He was just so old. Even though I could see it coming, and even through the years joking with the cat about the coming end time, and Mr. Woo's desire to see the cat, if not physically done it, at least crushed emotionally through some trauma.

It was so hard. This is the first I've been able to deal with it. Still too close.

will I come back here to let loose the thought beast? It's been ages it seems. Life is quite different now.

speaking of different, today is day 3 of submission to big Pharma. I need to keep this journal if for no other reason than to chronicle this part of my life.

Day 3. Gonna give it a month and see how it goes. This past Thursday was dark. Friday darker. That made me go to the docs and set up an appointment (which I kept) and got hold of a prescription of Prozac. Well, the chemical equivalent.

Do I really see a break in the sadness at this point, or is it the decision to take action that brings satisfaction? Not sure.

Hidden again

2007-11-08T21:36:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow I'll ride the xtracycle in the homecoming parade. Gonna load it up with stuff and top it with a sign that says 'You don't need a car to haul all your stuff'. Should be a fun do.

The Kid and I ate dinner with Greg tonight along with Jim S. and Paul from New York, the Catskill Mountains. Jim wouldn't be quiet.

So far this year ... 7700 miles on the bicycles, 1500 miles on the car.

Since the last post here way back in May, I've ridden across Iowa (RAGBRAI) on the xtracycle, and decided to become a recumbent rider with the purchase of a used Bacchetta Corsa. Way cool bicycle.

Just in case you are wondering, that was back in the sweltering September heat, not the chilly cool that is Kentucky now.

2007-05-04T00:33:00.000-05:00

Lookit what I got!

(here's a hint, it ain't the car)

That's the only picture I have right now, the guy building it up had to test it out by doing laundry and taking some stuff to a consignment store. He also gave his girlfriend a ride over to my house on the back of it while delivering it.

I've already been grocery shopping with it, and it's everything the xtracycle web site claims it to be.

Very satisfied.

Jim Chaney - Old Guy

2007-04-29T21:12:00.000-05:00

This past weekend our bike club had a treat - free pre and post ride massages. I had a chest cold and was feeling kinda week, but went for a 92 mile ride, the last 20 miles of which was a blistering 21.5 mph pace. I like to go fast, but sitting here with the formerly pesky cold now a full blown take-my-fuckin-energy-away funk, perhaps I should have taken it easy.

Nah. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

After the post ride massage - itself an incredibly pleasurable experience - I went to get an ice cream cone.

Chaney's Dairy Barn had a truck at the park where the ride ended, and I like Chaney's ice cream, so I got a cone. There was an old gentleman there with a twinkle in his eye, and I started a conversation with him. Turns out he was Jim Chaney, the patriarch of the Chaney Dairy Barn. What started out as a howdy do, turned into a long conversation about the both of us. He was a good storyteller and a good listener too. We talked for maybe forty minutes, and had I not needed to be somewhere else I would have talked for another hour.

In the course of the conversation he mentioned that the cost of cattle feed had jumped from 160 dollars a ton to 213 dollars a ton, seemingly overnight. The reason? Ethanol. Farmers are planting corn to sell to ethanol companies instead of planting other crops for human consumption. Fuel being given precident over food. Scary.

I don't remember where I read it, but I recall a statement like 'we're going to use the last 6 inches of good topsoil for automobile fuel'.

Spring

2007-03-22T09:24:00.000-05:00

Spring! Yay for spring.

Reading other blogs I discovered some guy named Snakebite has gained extra weight he has vowed to lose, and so has Woodog. About 15 pounds to be exact. OUCH.

Inactivity and bad food choices.

I've met a guy. Greg is a guy I've known for a long time, but I never considered him romantically because he was the partner of a very good friend of mine, Steve. I set Greg and Steve up (well, introduced them) way back in 1989.

Goodness that seems like such a long time ago.

Greg and Steve. What a great couple of guys. It still seems like they are a couple. They invited me to the Unitarian Church. It was about 6 years until I went and found a home. Greg used to play the piano for the church, and then I played for the church - now we both play for the church.

Greg and Steve sold me my house. I sat across the closing table from them and nervously signed my name, sealing what has become the smartest financial decision I ever made.

Even though our church has never had a minister per se, Steve was our church's minister. He loved the work of the church and loved the people in it. He was either brilliant or a great bullshit artist, I can't figure out which. Actually I don't care. His stories were great whether they were true or not.

Steve died on March 14, 2006 of a massive heart attack at 53 years old. He was a beautiful spirit trapped in a shitty body. Even now, a tad over a year later, I want to hear his laughter, full and healthy and from the gut, reverberate through the church. It's hard, even now, to know his voice is forever still. I weep as I write this. I miss him so much.

I was in South Carolina when I got the news via email. I had planned a tough bicycle ride for that day. From my bike journal on that day

---------------------------
Comments: Sad day. My very VERY good friend Steve Scott died yesterday of a heart attack. I was going to attack the road today, but the sad news was chilling. He was 53. I rode for solace today, celebrating life in the face of this loss. I abandoned most of the planned route and just went looking at the world waking up. Every emerging sign of life, every beautiful blooming thing on the route made me think of him. Where I saw flowers, he saw origins of species, where they came from, how they were bred, when they bloom and why. Where I heard frogs in the swamp, he knew the reproductive cycles, the distinct species that had that particular call, their favorite food (which he knew all about too). Another voice forever stilled. I will miss him deeply.

Weather Conditions: a gift of a day. mid 60's. 15mph wind from the west. Wonderful strong rays from the sun to warm the bones and to remind the living to get on with the business of life.
--------------------

Greg asked if I would play and sing for Steve's funeral, and of course I did.

This past New Year's Eve Greg invited me and some church friends to go to another couple's house (Tim and Elizabeth - too cool for words) for a drink or two. I had planned on being at home - it's what a reclusive, lonely guy does best. At the last minute I called him up and asked for a ride there.

After a nice dinner and some small talk, Greg was getting sleepy, Danny (another friend) was drunk, so we headed back home early. Greg dropped Danny off at his house and took me to my house. A goodnight kiss lasted much longer than it should have. Greg and I welcomed in the NewYear with sweet release.

Yesterday was the first full day of spring. Here it was a beautiful day, warm and breezy and inviting all who are interested in life to open up. Greg and I spent the day riding bicycles in nearby Mammoth Cave National Park. He wanted to ride bicycles because he knew it was something I liked to do. I chose that venue because I knew it was something he could do. Later it was physical communion followed by languid calm and tender, soft words. There's a large picture in Greg's room of our church. I has Steve's face photoshopped in the clouds, smiling over the scene below. It was a gift to Greg by a fellow church member. Greg told me that Steve would approve of me. It was not wierd, or an insult, or uncomfortable to hear that. I got it. In our nakedness there I felt unbounded and comfortable and cared for and wanted.

Sometimes the line between sacred and profane is blurred in soft pastel.

It's Real

2007-02-03T21:46:00.000-06:00

Had quite a few interesting conversations (rather, interactions) today, all inspired by the bicycle. Riding on a frigid day makes folks question you a bit, or pity you, or whatever, but these things give openings in conversation - a way to preach, if you will.

1st one was at a hardware store #2. I was looking for a repacement thermostat for the furnace. I punched my thermostat this morning. I bought it three years ago, a touch screen programmable thermostat, and it has gone all screwy in it's old age. I woke up to a 50 degree house and it wouldn't let me raise the temperature. So I punched it, HARD. An extensive background in Karate-Do and Shaolin Arts and this is the result. A busted thermostat. So I had to get a new one. At the checkout line in the hardware store #2 (#1 didn't have a suitable replacement) the clerk, a lady my age, said 'oh tell me you didn't have to ride a bike in this weather'. Goody! The opening had presented itself.

'I don't have to ride, but I believe global warming is real, so I kinda feel I should.'

Here's the good part. Another clerk, a younger guy, said, "I believe it's real too. So do you stay warm when it's this cold out?" It was 20 degrees, 15mph winds steady from the west. I had ridden 9 miles at that point and was toasty warm. It turns out he had been thinking about riding his bike to work, but had never ridden in the cold. I assured him it could be done, that indeed it was being done all over the world and even in this town. I felt warmed by that exchange.

So on to church, where my study group's service project was to take place. Last Sunday there had been a gathering of folks who brainstormed about the future the church was to take, and one of the categories was the vision for the physical space we have. Of the 30 or so note cards posted up, about 10 of them were variations of the theme of parking. More parking, expanded parking, larger parking lot, etc.

I made the comment that expanding our parking lot to solve our transportation needs was as effective as buying larger pants to control our weight problem. Jim, from a town 30 miles away jumped on this statement and told me 'some of us aren't going to ride their bicycles from Glasgow to get here'. I responded that if the folks who lived within 3 miles of the church would ride thier bicycles, there would be no parking problem. Nancy, who lives within a mile of the church, jumped in and said 'there's no bike racks for people to store their bikes safely..." I countered with 'do you think that'll do the trick? that we put in bike racks and folks will start riding their bicycles? I believe that when you start seeing bikes tethered to trees, the handrail, the nature park sign (where I lock my bike)... then you'll see bike racks being built. I think we should ask people who live within 3 miles of the church to consider riding their bicycles or at least carpooling. Laying pavement is operating from an unsustainable paradigm.'

Cynthia, a lady in her late 50's, a physics teacher at a local high school said, 'you know, I could ride to church, but I want to wait for warmer weather. I haven't had a bicycle for several years now. I didn't drive a car until i got out of graduate school. I'd have to find a bike' then... 'Do you think you could help me find a bike?'

Not only will I help her find a bike, but i offered, and she accepted, to show up at her house and ride with her until she felt comfortable enough to ride by herself.

Last encounter, tonight at the mexican restaurant the waiter, Lolli, asked me if I was able to drive or if I had a car... yes to both, I said, but I drive very little. Are you scared of driving, she asked? No, not at all, but i believe global warming is real.

Well, it's good exercise, she said.

Town Nut

2007-01-02T21:41:00.000-06:00

This past Sunday going to church I rode my ‘cruiser’ bike, the one with the fenders. There was no way I was going to drive anywhere on the last day of the year. Heavy rain was in the forecast, but when I left home it was just drizzling. I packed a poncho and took my chances that it would be somewhat clear when I had to return home.

When I got to church the bicyclist who had ridden last week also rode her bike. If I were straight I would SO ask that woman out! Alas…. At any rate I would’ve lost serious face had I driven the car.

It was pouring after church and it wasn’t showing any signs of letting up. Plus, the usual after church crew wanted to go eat out and I wanted to join them. The offers for rides came fast and furious, and really it wouldn’t have hurt to take anybody up on their kindness, but solutions come to me best when I'm in the thick of things. So I said I would meet up with them at the restaurant which was 5 miles the other direction from my house, donned my poncho and took off.

I figured out how to stay comfortable on a cool/cold, windy, rainy day with a 16 mile ride. My legs got a bit wet at first, but I put the edge of the poncho over the handlebars and that solved that problem. The poncho acted like a sail and the 10 mph wind slowed me down considerably, but I wasn’t getting soaked. In fact, I was staying pretty dry. HOT DAMN! Passing cars saw me grinning the great big smile in the cold wind and rain.

I’m officially my town’s ‘nut on a bike’.

Check out this guy

2006-12-28T20:59:00.000-06:00

I passed 9,000 miles riding today on the bicycle. The car miles are at 6,582. That includes 3 trips to South Carolina. I'll probably have another 250 on the car before the year is up because I'm going to Nashville to pick up the Kid.

He's going with Big Brother (my big brother) to a Titan's game. Between the paintball gun he got from his uncle Mike, the rifle shooting session at his Uncle Mike's, and the football game, and copious amounts of heavily supervised time with his girlfriend, he's been busy in overly heterosexual type activities. All he really needs to complete the ensemble is a cigar, and hopefully condoms.

Which brings me to a delightful turn of events. After spending some time in the LBS looking at 'stuff' the kid comes over to where I was checking out rock climbing gear (though WHY I don't have a clue)... and says... 'check out this guy' and motions for me to follow him.

I expect to see some strange person from the way he said it, but he leads me outside to see a STUNNING sunset. There have been three sunsets to match this one in my life.

One was in October, 1973 when I was traveling to Columbia SC to see Virgil Fox play an organ concert. Another was in the summer of 1980 in the Austrian Alps. The third one was tonight.

He had said 'check out the sky'. Together we stayed outside and watched until the colors had faded away.

Me and the Kid

2006-12-26T12:39:00.000-06:00

Fooled

2006-12-26T09:15:00.000-06:00

Ok, that bit about Queen Elizabeth's Christmas Message? Total tomfoolery on the part of Velorution.

I searched for the message yesterday, thankful to be able to send it to friends and family because it would prove that at least one other person agreed with me, and she was the freakin' Queen of England!

Alas, I found the real message here.

How silly of me to think a leader, even if only a figurehead, would say anything remotely approaching truth.

Oh well.

The Nashbar has a friend!

2006-12-25T09:32:00.000-06:00

Yesterday at church there was another bicycle there! Perhaps the lady that rode it in heard about the Queen of England's Christmas Message?

At any rate, my Nashbar has a new friend. Pretty soon we'll have little tricycles running around!

After copious amounts of bike love this past weekend, the Nashbar is running so smooth it's scary.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T08:53:00.000-06:00

The plan last night had been to crash a church choir somewhere and sing for the Christmas Eve services at either the Methodist, Episcopal, or Presbyterian churches, all just a few blocks (and walking distance) from my house. As the hour got closer, the plans changed. I didn't want to hang out in the fine wool/SUV set gathered to marvel at the story of their savior who arrived in abject poverty, no matter how fine the music might be. I know, I'm throwing a blanket judgement over those folks, but it's how I feel when I'm among them.

I figured the Xmas lights would be at their finest last night, the Kid was deep into a MySpace/Messaging party with his 'posse', so I suited up for a ride through the town with camera in hand.

I felt strange about the ride. It isn't the normal behavior to be riding your bike alone on a night where the emphasis is on being with friends, family, or church, and that was on my mind as I soft pedaled around. It's who I am though. Alone, but not necessarily lonely.

It was a nice 25 mile ride through neighborhoods that ranged from the very rich to the very poor, from magnificent displays to the very modest. I tend to enjoy the poorer areas best. Some of those houses are laughing out loud in the darkness.

Here are just a few of the ~100 pictures I took last night.

This next one is by far my favorite of all the houses in the town. It's just delightful. I wish I had the skills to convey in a picture what this is really like.

Garnet Lowe

2006-12-23T22:29:00.000-06:00

I met Garnet Lowe today returning from a bike ride. Meredith J and I were getting back from a rather quick 48 mile ride into the beautiful Kentucky hillside, and soon after we turned on the road where he lived we saw a cyclist ahead of us without a helmet.

I used to get some internal grief about folks not wearing helmets, but not any more. They are out on their bicycles, and that’s a damn sight better than being behind the wheel of an SUV. I happen to put my chances in the camp that wears helmets, but if folks get out and ride without helmets, good for them!

Anyway, when Meredith and I passed this cyclist, he was an old guy on an old bike, and I made the assumption that he was a ‘have to’ cyclist as opposed to a ‘want to’ cyclist. I remembered thinking that he had an interesting face and Meredith remarked that he probably had some stories to tell.

After Meredith turned off at his house I continued on a bit longer route to get to my house, purely by chance, and at the end of a road that has been recently converted to a bike/pedestrian throughfare I ran into the fellow on the bicycle again. He was waiting for a break in the traffic to get across a major road bustling with Christmas shoppers 'in search of '.

Hello again! I said.

You’re one of the fellows that passed me a bit ago, aren’t you? He said.

Well, yes, but that don’t matter, you still beat me here. I said.

He chuckled. He was riding a very cool gray AMF bike that was quite old, a 3 speed with platform pedals. I noticed that it was well cared for, its brake levers shiny and the steel rims with just a hint of rust, just like the old school metal fenders. He was wearing a few layers of flannel, work pants, and thick leather shoes. His face was leathered and I could only discern one tooth in his head. His eyes reminded me of Master Po’s eyes from the old TV series Kung Fu. Ice gray.

Nice bike! I said.

I got it from Howards (a local bike shop). I think it was sometime in the 60’s. It was used, though. I don’t buy much new except food. He said.

I laughed and we introduced ourselves. I’m Garnet Lowe. He said.

Good day for a ride! I said.

I usually ride every day, sometimes 20 miles or so if I can. I guess I have a few miles on this bike over the years. He said.

Well, that bikes a beaut! (I was telling the truth… a really neat machine!) Are you from around here? I asked.

No, I grew up in a small town 25 miles away from here. My family had a tobacco farm there. I live in a retirement village here now. (that retirement village was 10 miles away).

I’ll bet you’ve seen a lot of changes here, I said.

Well, this cemetery (the military cemetery next to where we were stopped) didn’t exist when I moved here and all these houses were woods or farmland. I’ll be buried here someday. He said.

When did you serve? I asked.

World War II, he said. I’m 86, he said.

Wow. Do you still drive? I asked.

Well, I have a license to drive, and I have an old truck, but I’ve not had any reason to haul anything for a while. I don’t suppose I’ve driven in the past couple of years. No reason to, really.

We talked about stuff for the next little bit. His late wife, his family (lack of), the routes we take through the town, my kid. Stuff. There were several breaks in the traffic that would have allowed us to cross safely, but we were enjoying the connection.

That encounter would have never happened between car drivers. The cosmos gave me a gift.

$2.74 - Da Bastids!

2006-12-21T19:30:00.000-06:00

I got my latest Chase Visa statement, a really thick envelope, and opened it with a certain glee for the satisfaction of seeing a balance of $0.00. Alas, there was a final interest charge of $2.74.. something about the average daily balance computed over the last activity of x days devided by 25 times the weighted average of all past activity or activity of blah blah blah blah blah.

I promptly wrote a check for $2.74. While putting it back in the envelope, and after shredding the 'convience' checks (with a low low introductory APR - because I've EARNED it, you know)... I notice the letter from Chase.

We notice that you recently made a large payment and do not with to lose your business, so please note that your new credit limit is $35,000, available to you for a new car, a vacation, home repairs.... blah blah blah blah.

I am so gonna love the certified letter requesting them to close my account.

Interesting Read - Long but worth it

2006-12-21T13:48:00.000-06:00

This arrived in my inbox the other day from a Social Justice activist in my church. I almost deleted it because of the length and the time it would take to digest it, but didn't. I read it today and even got some good belly laughs out of it. I encourage any who might stumble on this space to do the same.

This is not my writing. It's good.

-----------------------------------------

The Age of Mammals Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century

By Rebecca Solnit

[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]

The View from the Grass

I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade
of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries --
the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad
-- much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused
on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in
North America, not long before the former was be beheaded and the
latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the
dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one
noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early twenty-first
century version might have been called "localism" or maybe
"anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange
way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important
than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for
the future anyway.

That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the
grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and
significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism
and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in the years of the
Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of
dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of
McDonald's, globalized entertainment networks, and information
superhighways -- the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to
be the age of the small.

You can see it in the countless local-economy projects --
wind-power stations, farmer's markets, local enviro
organizations, food coops -- that were already proliferating,
hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars swept the whole
Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the Great
Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send
prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming
container ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled
water, sweatshop garments, and other gratuitous commodities.

The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade
of the century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low,
suddenly elevated the status of peasant immigrants from what was
then called "the undeveloped world," particularly Mexico and
Southeast Asia. They taught the less agriculturally skilled, in
suddenly greening North American cities, to cultivate the victory
gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then beginning to
sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and
decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but
only if you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used
the high-windowed structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The
crisis spelled an end to the epidemic of American obesity, both
by cutting calories and obliging so many Americans to actually
move around on foot and bike and work with their hands.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of
this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists
gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was
actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global
"hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyite
origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so
clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part
of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously
plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet,
near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected
Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009,
followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and
elsewhere.

The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy,
while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of
American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter
how absurd, was called for -- and for a while embraced. The long
view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply
one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a
remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already
doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century
moment, then you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all
fell -- than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian
alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention
in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really
prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a
decentralization policy in the North American states. During the
eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop
what later would become full-fledged independent policies on
everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign
relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as
early as 2004-2007, several states, led by California, began
setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to
address the already evident effects of climate change so
studiously ignored in Washington.

In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously
agreed to join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing
emissions -- a direct rejection of national policy -- at a
national meeting in Seattle. Librarians across the country
publicly refused to comply with the USA-Patriot Act, and small
towns nationwide condemned the measure in the years before many
of those towns also condemned what historians now call the
U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.

It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these
small entities to fight back, to form local administrations and
set local regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they
joined the journey to a viable future. And when their withdrawal
was finished, so was the Republic.

Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that
pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being
are buried in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital
-- known as the Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human
Arlington to the south, which will receive the remains of a few
more nostalgic officers from the Gulf Wars, then close for good.
The whole history of armament, radioactive contamination,
disarmament, and alternative energy research is on display in the
museum housed in the former Supreme Court Building, though many
avoid the area for fear of radiation contamination.

In hindsight, we all see that the left-right divide so harped
upon in that era was but another dinosaur binary. After all,
small government had long been (at least theoretically) a
conservative mantra as was (at least theoretically) left-wing
support for the most localized forms of "people power" -- and yet
neither group ever pictured government or people power truly
getting small enough to exist as it does today, at its most
gigantic in bioregional groups about the size of the former
states of Oregon or Georgia -- but, of course, deeply enmeshed in
complex global webs of alliances. All this was unimagined in, for
instance, the dismal year of 2006.

By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two
adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the
Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of
course, the United States still nominally exists -- we'll pay a
bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4
-- but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal
Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020.

A similar death-of-the-dinosaurs moment was at work in the
mainstream media -- the big newspapers and television networks of
that era. During the early years of the century, as Bush the
Younger dragged the country deeper into the mire of unwinnable
wars and countless lies, most of the big newspapers and
television news programs lost their nerve, their edge, or even
their eyesight, and failed dismally to report the stories that
mattered. Some fell to scandal -- the New York Times was never
the same after the Judith Miller crisis of 2005. Some were
sabotaged from without, like the Los Angeles Times, undercut by
its parent corporation's "cost-cutting" programs. Some withered
away as younger readers fled paper pages for the Internet. But
behind them, below them, in their shadow, regarded as puny and
insignificant back then -- even though their scoops kept
upstaging and prodding the print media -- were bloggers,
alternative media such as small magazines and websites! , the
glorious Indymedia movement, progressive radio, even the
text-messaging that had helped organize the first great Latino
march of the immigrant rights movement at its beginnings in April
2006.

The Latin American Renaissance

The Latino-ization of the United States had brought some long
missing civic engagement and pleasure back into public life and
tied the country (and Canada) to the splendid insurgencies of the
southern hemisphere. The era of post-communist revolution that
would explode from Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana in the second
decade of the century is usually traced back to the entrance of
Mexico's indigenous Zapatistas onto the world stage on January 1,
1994.

One bold reflection of a changing continent in those years was
the election of progressive leaders -- including leftist Rafael
Correa in Ecuador, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Michele Bachelet in
Chile, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales of
Bolivia, all by 2006 -- even eventually Alicia Ponce de Leon in
Columbia in 2014, three years after U.S. war funding dried up
(along with the America that paid for it). Chavez (president
1998-2013) termed this the Bolivarian Revolution.

As a group, they were not bad as national leaders then went, but
one great blow against nationalism proved to be the British
seizure of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998
for crimes against humanity and his in-absentia trial in Spain, a
saga that dragged on until the blood-drenched dictator's heart
failed at the end of 2006. The new world is both more
transnational and more local than the one it eclipsed, and nobody
will ever be so beyond the reach of justice again. (Africans,
for example, recovered from Swiss and offshore bank accounts the
hundreds of billions of dollars stolen by their former dictators,
which gave a huge boost to the fight against AIDS and
desertification.)

Whatever the names of their leaders, the real force in Latin
America -- and increasingly elsewhere -- would be in the
grassroots activism that the Zapatistas heralded, which, in the
view from 2026, clearly signaled the fading relevancy of
nation-states. Latin indigenous movements, labor movements,
neighborhood groups, worker-takeovers in Argentina's factories
from 2001 onward, and the Argentinean ideology of horizontalidad
(or horizontalism) that went with it, were just early signs of
this development.

Like the regionalist policymaking entities of the United States,
these movements undermined even progressive presidents to set
more radical policies and grew to include many indigenous
autonomous zones across the hemisphere. For example, in late
2006, the 8,000-member Achuar tribe (whose region spans what was
once the Peru-Ecuador border) took hostage and defeated Peru's
main oil and gas-extraction corporation in a mode of victorious
resistance that would become increasingly common. In Mexico, the
stolen presidential election of 2006 that resulted in the
inauguration of PAN Party candidate Felix Calderon was the straw
that broke the camel's back, so to speak. In the years to follow,
the Second Mexican Revolution spread from Chiapas, Oaxaca, and
Mexico City, slowly dissolving that nation into a network of
populist regional strongholds. Seventeen of them reinstated a
local indigenous language as their official tongue.

Global Justice and the Drowned Lands

The Latin American Renaissance also created a network of
communities strong enough to take in some of the climate-change
refugees from Central America and Southern Mexico, who fled both
north and south, along with Sunbelt -- and what came to be called
Swampbelt -- ï¿½migrï¿½s from the southern United States. The
great population transitions thus went more smoothly in the
western hemisphere than across the Atlantic, where Europeans
engaged in escalating anti-Muslim confrontations before realizing
that only immigration could prop up the economies of nations
whose native-born, white-Christian populations were rapidly aging
and, thanks to ultra-low birthrates, declining.

The end of those bloody squabbles is generally considered to have
been marked by the election in 2020 of Chancellor Amira Goldblatt
Al-Hamid by what was then only a loosely federated association of
German-speaking bioregional principalities. Similar crises --
and, in some cases, bloody cross-community, cross-religion
bloodlettings --took place elsewhere, especially as populations
moved away from increasingly desertifying, ever hotter hot zones
in Africa and Southern Asia. Some historians have regarded the
devastating global bird-flu pandemic of 2013 as fortunate in
relieving climate-change population-shift pressures; others --
including the noted historian Martha Moctezuma from the
University of San Diego-Tijuana's Davis Center on Public Luxury
-- discard that perspective as callous.

Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can
recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of
Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai
lowlands. And who today can't still sing the popular ditties
about those famed "fundamentalists without their fundamentals" --
the senators who lost the state of Florida as it rapidly became a
swampy archipelago. Most schoolchildren can also cite the World
Court decision of 2016 that gave all shares in the major oil
companies to Pacific Islanders, mainly resettled in New Zealand
and Australia, whose homes had been lost to rising oceans (a
short-lived triumph as the fossil-fuel economy ebbed away).

More creative responses to climate change included the
tree-traveler and polar-bear collectives. These eco-anarchist
clans -- now popular contemporary heroes -- first nursed plant
populations on their unnatural journeys north by means of
extensive rainy-season nursery cultivation and summer planting
programs that have since become huge outdoor festivals. Today,
many city parks and town squares have statues of Cleo Dorothy
Chan, who organized the first small tree-traveler collective in
southern Oregon and is now hailed globally as the twenty-first
century's Johnny Appleseed. ("You can't choose between grief and
exhilaration; they are the left and right foot on which we hike
onward," said the t-shirts of the tree-travelers.) As for the
polar-bear folks, they were initially a group of zoologists and
circus trainers who, inspired by the tree-travelers, mobilized
themselves to teach young polar bears to adapt to changed
habitat. They are often credited with saving that one ch!
arismatic species in the wild, even as thousands of less
emblematic ones vanished.

The Principles of Change

A mature oak tree always looks significant; and, when we look at
it, we're willing to respect acorns -- but the rest of the time
the seeds of the next big thing are just trodden upon and
overlooked. The ideas that made our era and pulled us back from
the brink, the stakes that went through the hearts of the
dinosaurs and the more incremental forces that rendered them
extinct were all at work in the 1990s. They just didn't look very
impressive yet, and people were intimidated by the heft of those
dinosaurs and swayed by their arguments.

The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights,
and criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set
on the era of nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into
scenarios impossible to foresee: for example, the belated U.S.
recognition in 2011 that the International Criminal Court did
indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over Americans coincided with
the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This explains why,
for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited from
Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but
sentenced to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah
diaper laundry. (People who are still bitter about his reign are
bitter too that the webcam there suggests, even at his advanced
age, he still enjoys this work that accords so well with his
skill-set.) His assets -- along with those of his Vice
President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war
profiteers -- were famously awarded to the Vie! tnamese Buddhist
Commission for the Iraqi Transition. After almost a decade of the
bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, had broken into five nations, but
by this time so many nation-states were being reorganized into
more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led by the Women's
Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the Islamofeminists),
was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.

"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just
not very evenly distributed," said the sci-fi novelist William
Gibson in 1999. In retrospect, the arrival of the Age of Mammals
should have been easy to foresee. On every front -- family
structure and marriage, transportation, energy and food
economies, localized power structures -- everyday life was being
reinvented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. From India to Indiana an interlocking set of new ideas
began to emerge and coalesce, becoming in the end the new common
sense that new generations of thinkers and activists were guided
by. Who now thinks it's radical to advocate that decentralization
is better than consolidated power, that capitalism's worldview is
vicious and dishonest, that the public matters as much or more
than the private, that enforced homogeneity is not a virtue
either on a farm or in a society?

The basic tools were already in place long before our era; here
and there, a few at a time, people picked them up and started
building a better future. Some new inventions mattered, such as
the super-efficient German and Japanese solar collectors and
methane generators that revolutionized energy production, but
much of the march toward a more environmentally sane future
didn't require fancy scientific breakthroughs and technologies,
just modesty. We scaled back on consumption and production. For
example, the collapse of the U.S. military put an end to the
world's single most polluting entity, while the near-end of
recreational air travel also made a significant contribution to
rolling back greenhouse-gas production.

The law of unintended consequences continued to prevail: When
touristic air travel withered, so did Hawaii's tourist economy --
making the retaking of the islands by indigenous Hawaiians via
the King Kamehameha Council a piece of cake. Of course sailing
ships still travel the triangular trade-winds route between Latin
America, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest.

Everything was changing then, is changing now, and some years
back the Principles of Change were codified. These simply recited
the history of popular and nonviolent resistance from slave
uprisings (Hochschild

'05) and Gandhian tactics (Schell

'03) to the principles of direct action (D. Solnit '09) and
social change (see Marina Sitrin
on
horizontalism, '06) and drew the obvious conclusions about how
change works, what powers civil society has, how war can be
sabotaged from below, and why violence ultimately fails.

Believers in authoritarian power had prophesied a globalized
world of corporate nation-states (and indeed the 2012 Olympics
featured teams identified by branding rather than nation, such as
the Dasani and Nokia track teams and the Ikea Decathaletes); but
even as the polar bears survived, a different kind of change in
the global climate doomed most of the large corporations. The
outlawing of corporate personhood was launched in Porter
Township, Pennsylvania, in December of 2002 and gradually became
the law of the land.

By 2015, the "human rights" U.S. courts had given to corporations
in the 1880s had been globally stripped away from them again. Of
course, there were revolts against the new world -- just as the
Republican dinosaurs led a long rearguard movement against
women's rights, queer rights, the rights of the environment, and
science education, so there were corporations that resisted the
new order, most spectacularly when Arkansas was taken over
wholesale by Wal-Mart for seventeen months in the early teens.

The heavily armed Arkansans rose up, Wal-Mart's private army
changed sides, and what was once the world's biggest corporation
joined the dung-heap of history along -- most famously -- with
Monsanto, derailed by the Schmeiser verdict, the
precedent-setting World Court decision to award all assets in the
genetic-engineering corporation to small farmers previously
terrorized for not paying royalties on crops contaminated by
Monsanto's genetically altered strains. Failed presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton, who had been appointed ambassador to
the United States from the Republic of Wal-Mart, was sentenced to
three years as a sweeper at an Arkansas farmer's market and
became locally beloved in the role.

In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern
geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental
Divide), sectarian feuding, which kept the region in a state of
subdued civil war for almost a decade, still flares up
occasionally. Periodic sorties by the Fundaments against new
programs and lifestyles are considered part of normal life,
though Kansas's John Brown Society provides a degree of
protection against them.

The Republic of Northern Idaho was another outpost of
different-sex-only marriage laws and creationism, but the need to
work with downriver communities on salmon restoration and dam
removal eventually dissolved the breakaway half-state into the
Columbia River Drainage federation. Other historians claim that
the tattooed love freaks of the Seattle region, who found common
ground with the ex-truckers and elk-hunters of Idaho, dissolved
the Idahoan Republic via bicycle races and beer fests. Some also
say the same-sex desires of elk hunters were legendary and led to
negotiations for a direct rail link to San Francisco and Los
Angeles.

In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing
five potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the
belief that a better world was one dominated by American military
power -- which is to say, by the threat of state violence. That
they came up with five possible futures demonstrated, at least,
how wide-open the next two decades seemed, even to a
Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the
planet.

Some of their technological, corporate, and militaristic futures
could have come to pass. Had people not come to believe strongly
enough in their own power, in a horizontalist society, and in a
planet-wide ability to work with the environmental changes the
Industrial Age had loosed on us, we might be living in a very
different, unimaginably catastrophic world -- one in which the
mammals would never have proliferated. They might even have
breathed their last without ever emerging from under the fern
fronds and out of the grasses.

The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for.
It is something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas
Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first
century: "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks;
and as one walks, a path comes into being." We make it up as we
go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more
elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can you
do?

Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the
future to which we all belong.

Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San
Francisco, where she is working on a new book. Her most recent
books are still Hope in the Dark

and A Field Guide to Getting Lost

.

Copyright 2006 Rebecca Solnit

INTP

2006-12-21T13:32:00.000-06:00

Over at SueJ's and Howard's blog they both mention being a MBTI (Meyers/Briggs Type Indicator) INTP.

Interesting. I also am an INTP. I scored an obscene 95% on the Introvert side of the scale. All that means is that I derive strength and rest from solitude rather than in social situations. In fact, I believe that's one of the reasons that cycling with a group is an ideal 'social' activity for me. It allows me to be 'with' people (I've been told it's healthy to associate with people on occasion) while at the same time allowing me to be completely alone with my thoughts if I so choose, and I often do.

Because I'm a strong rider, if anyone decides to get chatty and I don't like it, like the fellow who joined me for a hill ride a few days ago who WOULD NOT SHUT UP, despite his lack of things to say, I just increase the pace until they shut up.

Idea

2006-12-18T14:45:00.000-06:00

After nearly being flattened by a huge truck with a 'support our troops' and 'god bless america' bumper sticker while en route to the grocery store late last night, I wonder if my bike could use a sign that says

"Not Driving Until our Troops are Home"

This driver knew what he did. He was going to the same store, and even though I arrived a full 30 seconds after him, I parked my bicycle at the front of the store as I always do, taking my SWEET time to lock it up. He waited in his truck, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited some more until I entered the store. Then I saw him get out and make his way to the door.

Kings are rarely brave outside the fortress.

Stuff

2006-12-15T21:08:00.000-06:00

Our business had it's 'Dirty Santa' party last Wednesday at a local restaurant. The student workers as well as the old timers were there.

If you've never been to a Dirty Santa party, here's how it works. Everyone is to bring a gift if you want to 'get' a gift, and in our case the value wasn't to exceed $20. It didn't have to be new, either.

Each person draws a number, the higher the number the better. The lowest number starts and picks a gift from the pile, and shows it off to the crowd. After that, each person selecting a gift has the option to take another's gift away or choose an unwrapped gift. I was last this time, which means I got to choose from the entire lot of gifts. I got a $20 gift card from BestBuy which I gave to one of my student workers.

I'm in the process of de-stuffing my life (unstuffing?) The trinkets, the plastic doodads, the copies of stuff, the 'gifts', the DVD's, old computers, coffee mugs, candle holders, lamps, old shoes.... stuff EVERYWHERE. I'm trying to limit my spending to just those things that sustain me, and trying to dispose of those things I do have that I don't need without actually throwing them away. (www.freecycle.org)

With my kid came an epoch of plastic things. Now I'm asking him to consider longevity in everything he desires.

Still, everytime i attempt to move something out of the house i haven't used or even *thought* about using for months, years... there's this limiting idea that it could be worth something or I might need it *someday*.

Eco-Community: Changing the paradigm of Environmentalism

2006-12-13T22:55:00.000-06:00

I gave this talk speaking from an outline, not reading from this document, so I went back to try and create the talk as i gave it, as close as possible. I figure that typing straight out with minimal editing might give the same result. Sorry for the typos y'all.

--------------------------------------
12/10/2006

Back in August when I agreed to give this talk it was going to be during the first week of October, but because of scheduling conflicts it got pushed back until now. Back then it was a completely different talk that was rattling around in my brain. I had been riding my bicycle in the countryside and I would see neighborhoods where it seemed that everyone was out cutting their yards on their riding lawn mowers. The thought entered my head that it wasn’t necessary for *everyone* to have a riding lawnmowers. What if communities pooled resources? What if, instead of every household having a drill and a circular saw and so forth, what if we as a church community pooled our resources and cut down on the amount of stuff. What if shopping trips were consolidated? What if cars that weren’t being used by one member were available to other members that needed them? The idea was to have a ‘stuff’ bank, to cut down on the amount of stuff by acting as a community. The American ideal of rugged individualism, and the resulting marketing that makes everybody think they need a complete set of powertools, or dryers, or deep freezers, or (fill in the blank) and the consumption that goes with it, is poisonous. I still think it’s an idea worth exploring, but to be honest the more I wrestled with my talk, this topic, this environmentalism thing, the bigger it became. I’ve ridden my bicycle more than 2,000 miles since I first agreed to present the topic, and there hasn’t been a single mile that this hasn’t been stretching me into uncomfortable places, marinating, growing, gelling. It is a work in process, far from complete, but this is the day, and this is what I’ve got so far.

Btw, when I’m on my bike, during the day, at night, in the city, in the countryside, I’m alone with my thoughts. I’m free from the radio and TV filling me with their nonsense. All the nonsense is purely my own. I’ve also noticed that no matter where I am, there’s an odor of some chemical in the air – car exhaust, oil based pesticides, fertilizers – sometimes it is a faint thing, but it is nearly always there.

I have come to believe that our relationship with energy, specifically carbon based energy (i.e. oil – the energy of ancient sunlight) cuts to the very heart of several of our principles as Unitarian Universalists. If we are serious about the promoting justice, equity and compassion in human relations we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil. If we are serious about affirming and promoting the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all, we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil If …. IF it’s true that as Unitarian Universalists we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, then we need to come to grips with our addiction to oil.

The way I figure it, we have two ways we can end up, a vague/foggy utopian society or a society that is seriously screwed up.

Joan said that I’m passionate about this, and I am. I’ll admit it. I’m a fanatic. But I’m plagued with doubts and second guessing. I suppose that doubt is a common feature inherent in fanaticism.. I mean, NOBODY’S fanatical about whether the sun will come up tomorrow. There are a lot of religious fanatics, however. What if I got this whole Christianity thing wrong? What if global warming is really a cyclical phenomenon like James Inhofe says? What if technology and the markets will come to our aid just in time? I personally don’t believe it, choosing to place my trust in the hordes of scientists that say yes, we are running out of oil, that there is no easy fix.

Incidentally, the folks who say there’s nothing to worry about and are counting on science to provide the easy fix when the oil runs out are also insisting that science is wrong when it points to global warming. You can’t have it both ways.

And, another thing to consider is the very sticky catch 22, that the worst thing that could befall us would be the discovery of vast new oil fields or the burning up of what we already know about.

Cheery, eh?

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was talking with some friends during lunch after church, and the subject had segued to the topic of energy (ok… I’ll admit it, I did it, I usually do… like I said I’m a fanatic and you should expect this from me) and one fellow pointed out to me that not everybody wants to live in a little house and ride a bicycle everywhere like I do. He said this in a way that suggested it wasn’t already glaringly apparent to me. For the record, I know this.

Here’s the thing, if everybody lived like I do, in a 580 square foot house, waking up to an indoor temperature of 65 degrees and having a hot shower from indoor plumbing, riding my bicycle to the supermarket to get bananas from Honduras, oranges from California, wearing a coat made in Bangladesh, a t-shirt made in Haiti, shoes made in China, jeans from Sri Lanka, and socks from Pakistan, on the way to a centrally heated church, and afterwards planning to have a meal at Jumbo China Buffet… it wouldn't be sustainable. It would slow the inevitable, but we would still be headed to the 'we're screwed' place.

By the way, there’s a story behind the t-shirt, more on that later. But… If everyone on the face of the earth lived like me, the earth is screwed. Seriously. Our relationship with energy is so insidious that we don’t even think about it. We think cars, and they are certainly a big part, but it's also shoes, dentures, fingernail polish, computers, plastic spoons, food supply, out of season fruit, clock radios, fiber optics, tires on a bike, insulation, ... almost everything that touches our lives has a carbon component linked to manufacture and supply routes... it's NUTS. Hence the notion of our paradigm with energy and why we need to address it. If we were to totally overthrow the systems that are keeping us in our unhealthy energy relationships, but continue to think the same way, we’ll just rebuild the same old crap.

I wish I had a cookbook, like the joy of cooking is to food. I really do. That vague/foggy uptopian society I mentioned earlier? That’s because I have no idea what that society will be like, what it’s structures will be. It won’t happen in my lifetime, but we as people of faith must begin to work for it NOW. It must begin with US. We cannot wait for the politicians and the corporations and the ‘other’ people out there before we act. If we care about equity, justice, the interconnected web, future generations, this house we call the earth, we have to begin the process NOW.

I’m working from an outline here, so if I ramble I’m sorry, but the outline has three parts and the first part is ‘just the facts jack’. So I suppose you could call this part ‘Just Say Know’… that’s ‘Know’ with a ‘K’.

Over 3 years ago, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq, Al Dodson gave a service where he shared a poem by Helen Weaver Horn, a quaker. It stuck with me, and I want to read it for you again.

--------------------------------------

My Grandma Knew What She Was Doing
By Helen Weaver Horn

Your war is packaged neatly
as a precut chicken-select
facts stacked under headlines,
pale as breasts in plastic wrap-
but Grandma set me straight.

When I was ten she yanked
the biggest Leghorn from the coop.
she made me hold her squawking
on the maple stumps
and chopped her head off.
blood gushed hotly on my hand,
her feet clawed air, her limpness
quivered. I felt sick to death.

But Grandma made me hold her
upside down and dip her
in the boiling pot, pluck out
her feathers, split her open.
There inside, her eggs lay
forming. There her heart
was knotted down. I had to
tear them out, her lungs,
intestines-save the liver-
rinse and cut her up, prying
my knife between her joints
so like my own two knees.

I had to dry and salt and flour
each piece and fry them
in the spitting iron skillet
pile them on the heated platter.
Bring them in to Grandpa
at the dinner table. Eat.

My grandma knew what she was doing.
Never, never will I see
a packaged chicken blind again.

Or buy your Grade A federally-
inspected bloodless war.

--------------
I recently viewed a video by Robert Newman, the History of Oil. Have any of you seen it. No? Good. I mean, I think you *should* see it, but it’s good for me that you haven’t, since none of you will realize how poorly I present the following by way of comparison.

(if you're reading this, check out the video here.
You'll need a fast internet connetion... be warned!)

Among other things, he lays out a convincing argument that the first world war was triggered by an invasion of Iraq. Seriously… but I’m not going to talk about that, I’m going to head straight to 1951, when the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosedek, set out to nationalize the British Petroleum oil company. The US and Britain would have none of that, so they overthrew the government and installed the shah that was such a nasty fellow for such a long time. But something really really important happened in 1971. At that time OPEC decided that all oil transactions would be conducted in US dollars. No matter where in the world you were, if you needed to buy oil from any country that produced oil, you had to spend US dollars to do it.

From that point on, we had a magic checkbook. I didn’t understand what that meant until I saw the analogy that Robert Newman had. Salvadore Dali, at the high point of fame, would buy the finest clothes, eat at the finest restaurants, travel, live a high style with lots of friends and continually pick up the tab. But when it came time to pay his bills, he would write out a check, turn it over, and make a drawing… a *signed* drawing. Needless to say, the checks never made it to his bank.

But what would have happened if high level art critics had suddenly declared that Dali wasn’t such a good painter after all, and he fell from favor, and all those businesses suddenly weren’t so enamored of having signed Dali checks on their walls? And the checks made their way back to his bank? Dali would be in deep doo doo, that’s what.

I promise, I’m going somewhere with this. …..

That almost happened to the US dollar. Right now we are overdrawn in the world banks and have been for a while, but the world needs dollars to pay for it’s oil.

In November of 2000, Saddam Hussein made a request of the French bank BNP to switch from US dollars to Euros. This was the account that was handling Iraq’s 2.3 million barrels/day of oil through the UN oil for food program. The officials told him he was crazy since the Euro was $0.80 to the dollar, but he said he didn’t care. At the end of 2000 the switch was made.

In 2001, the Euro had gained significantly on the dollar, and Iran (axis of evil member #2) began selling its oil in Euros.

By the end of 2002, North Korea (axis of evil member #3) announced that ALL of it’s commodity trading, not just oil, would be in Euros, not Dollars.

In 2002, democratically elected Hugo Chavez, another darling loved by the US, had the chairmanship of OPEC fall to him, and on the table for the April, 2003 meeting was the proposal that all OPEC transactions would be in Euros, not dollars.

That, my friends, would be the Federal Reserve’s WORST nightmare. All of our checks would come back in a great flood and our economy would suffer greatly.

It’s not hard at this point to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a very public beating to make an example of what happened if you mess with our economy. It’s what addicts do to keep the juice flowing. And let’s face it. We are addicts.

We're not any better than anybody else, we just had the military ability. There are a lot of addicts out there who would loved to have had access to that crack pile.

Just as a crack addict will rob, lie, steal, even sometimes kill to get what he needs for that next rock, governments will do the same on a much larger scale. We call it 'Bringing Democracy to the Middle East'. Just say Know. ….

It was at this point in the talk that I was worried that some of you might begin to consider me mad, but two weeks ago I was talking with a health worker on campus, a professional, an educated person with a Masters degree, and again the conversation had segued into energy talk (again, my fault). She said that we needed to find a way to fold time, and then we could farm other planets. We needed another one, possibly two. I thought she was kidding and played along, wondering where we could find such planets and if they would welcome us, etc…. but she was dead serious.

I wasn’t the mad one in that conversation.

Folks, there is no folding time, no extra planets out there to be ‘mined’. This is it… we’re not getting off this planet so we had better come to grips with the way we behave.

I mean, if we were given one body for our entire lives wouldn’t we take care of it?

Okay… bad analogy. How about if you were given only one car for your entire lives? Wouldn't you take care of it?

If you gave more thought to the car scenario rather than the body scenario … well, think about it.

So, the second part of the outline was the paradigm thing. How did we get here?

Jan Garrett sent me a sermon by Rev. Dr. Lucy Hitchcock Seck, Unitarian Universalist. I’m gonna read something right off the page. It was an eye opener for me.

-----------------

“… It is important to understand the history of how we got to where we are now so that we will not stay trapped by that history and mindset. But, I believe it is also absolutely simple and dare I say common sense….. Thomas Berry, a catholic well into his nineties, writes … Within the biblical context, the continuity of divine presence with the natural world was altered by establishing the divine as a transcendent personality creating a world entirely distinct from itself. The continuity between the human community and the natural world was altered by identifying the human as a spiritual being in contrast to all other beings. Only the human belonged to the sacred community of the redeemed. The previous sense of a multi-species community was diminished. …. This is the most devasting critique of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition I have heard and the most telling. The earth’s troubles began with a concerted attempt by religion and the governments who came to expression out of that religion to separate what is religious, what is spiritual, what is good, from what is earthly. …. The wilderness became demonic. The human began to use the earth for agriculture, for fuel, for “development” The earth was deforested, polwed, built upon, paved over, polluted, abused. This process of abuse and neglect of the earth which should have been a relationship of a basic spiritual interconnection and care was defended because of religion - a religion that held the human in higher regard than all else. This same humanism that inspired great books and art, music, cathedrals and museums, and locally sustainable agriculture for a growing population, has also led to the devastation of the planet on which we must surely depend for our future…. “
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Heady stuff, that. … you could spend a lot of hours in discussion groups pontificating on this point or that, and it would be OH so very interesting… As Unitarians we like to parse words, analyze, disect arguments, we are point and click activists a lot of the time, thinking that the online petition we just signed really makes a difference.

Myself, I like Robert Fulghum’s take on it. This is from his book ‘It was on Fire when I lay down on It”

“I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. “

And that, friends, brings me to the III part of my outline.

Getting Off our Collective Asses.

A publisher rep who calls on me at work is a Unitarian, and when I told him of my nervousness in talking to you about this he told me ‘relax… you’re preaching to the choir’.

Well, he’s right in a sense, but the message I have for the choir is that half the time you don’t show up, you refuse to learn to read music, you’re content to sing the same songs over and over, your sense of rhythm is shot, your intonation is way off, you breathing and phrasing is bad, and you continually think that if we could just hire a paid quartet then everything would be okay. Oh… and every single one of you is ready to learn new music, as long as your neighbor starts first. So yeah, I’m preaching to the choir….

He also said I could tell you about some of the things I do and here’s the story of the t-shirt. I won this T-shirt because I wrote an essay that was published on the blog minuscar. I want to read it for you.

------------------------------------- (if you're reading this here... there's more than just the original essay)-------------------

It began as a desire to lose some weight and just stop being tired all of the time. I was nearly 300 pounds in the fall of 2003 and had a cholesterol level of nearly 400 points. I was as good a candidate for stroke as there ever was. So I set out on a quest to use more energy than I took in on a daily basis, and I was determined to avoid big pharma for cholesterol control if at all possible. The age old story of diet and exercise, often told but rarely lived, became my mantra.

During my lunch hour I lifted weights at the gym, and during my early evening hours I rode a stationary bike for an hour while watching the banks of televisions. By August of 2004 I had lost nearly 100 pounds, and my cholesterol was finally under control without having to ‘talk to my doctor’ about Lipitor or Plavix or any of that. I felt good! A woman at my church invited me to join the local bike club and I found out that seeing the world go by while pedaling was so much better than Fox News or Elimidate or Room Raiders or ESPN or any of the other trash that the boob tube offered. I was (and still am) hooked on cycling!

I began to frequent bicycling specific websites and following the links I found within. One day I stumbled across a powerful, simple statement.

Here it is folks, this is the meat… right here… this is the important part of this entire talk today, I found this on MinusCar... it's why I wear this shirt and hope that people will ask me about it...

‘I believe people that think that the globe is warming because of human activity, specifically carbon emitting human activity, might be right. Because I think they might be right, I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.’

Let me repeat that in case you didn’t get it the first time…

‘I believe people that think that the globe is warming because of human activity, specifically carbon emitting human activity, might be right. Because I think they might be right, I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.’

If you ever think about China and the fact that the HUGE population of china wants the lifestyle that we enjoy- maybe I should say the lifestyle that is akin to crapping in our own bedrooms - the cars, the houses, the supermarkets, the long commutes, and you find yourself thinking that if China lives that way, the earth can’t support it… if you find yourself thinking that we need to somehow limit China or India, or your neighbor whose Hummer just bugs the crap out of you... If you find that they need to change, then instead try thinking that *YOU* need to change.

BTW, who is going to feed China? Who is going to feed the estimated 7.5 BILLION people projected to inhabit the planet by the middle of this century?

I have it memorized. Anytime anyone asks me how I can ride on a day like today (98 degrees out, 95% humidity – well, it WAS august) I repeat that statement to them. Once their eyeballs glaze over and the lights go out, that usually gets a response of ‘I bet you save some money’ or ‘it’s good exercise’. Yes, it’s that too, but it’s so much more.

I now ride to work, to church, to the grocery store. I laugh at the idea of parking permits. I’m convinced that my current car will be my last car. Cold days, warm days, frigid days, hot days, dry days, rainy days – you name it, if I have to go somewhere I take the bike. I’ve learned how rich I am and how my 580 square foot home, formerly thought of as a stepping stone to something much nicer, is a luxury rather than a liability. I used to consider it a mark of poverty but now I plan to live in it forever. I’ve learned about the freedom of being debt free because I've learned to live on less than I earn. I've learned that the bicycle is the natural enemy of impulse buying. My previous dreams of new cars, large houses, and secluded lots far out in suburbia have morphed into dreams of simple, chemical free living with plenty of time to enjoy life. I've learned that I can live without a dryer, that it's okay to sweat in summer. I've learned to appreciate the chill of winter. I’ve discovered my neighbors and we know each other by name. I’ve learned that I’m not meant to go fast, that going slow gets me there just as quickly.

I’ve learned to live more deliberately with less.

I’ve driven a total of 3560.2 miles this year in my car, all of them under 55 mph. I think next years mileage should be half that.… and then half of that… and then half of that.

And I’ve learned that I’m not the only one.

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Now you’ll notice that I’ve not ‘pushed’ bicycles or bashed cars that much today. I really think that if you care, that if you are truly intent on action, then you’ll get there on your own or suffer extreme cognitive dissonance in the process. The idea that we are running out of cheap energy isn’t some abstract idea. I’m not talking about something that might happen one day. It’s on it’s way. You can go to the bank with that news. Euros or dollars, it won’t matter that much.

There are ideas bubbling up all over the place, and voices coming together across the world, a rag tag chorus singing of sustainability. Robert Newman calls this thing radical direct action non-heirarchical eco autonomous grassroots organization. In other words… it starts with us. Not the politicians, not the other countries, not our neighbors, US. Me… you. Sitting down, figuring it out. The food thing, the transportation thing, the clothing thing, the money thing.

Now for a shameless plug for just such a grassroots organization and an invitation to whomever will show up this afternoon. (BgGreen)

What can you expect there? I’m not sure, but I’ll be there. I guarantee that this meeting will be the beginning voices of those who care and are searching. And they, we, you, if you show, are bound to screw it up and come back to it, and screw it up again, and come back to it… and slowly, surely, these young voices and ideas, some from the elderly among us, will start to get it right… the important thing is to START and not wait on anyone or anything else… If I think that you should be involved, I should be involved. See how that works?

I want to leave you with a poem from the Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. Archy is a cockroach who leaves messages for Don Marquis by diving onto the typewriter keys headfirst. Early on in the book he is upbeat and full of suggestions to help humans be, well, less human... a good thing according to him, but by the end we're left with this final entry. Maybe we'll listen to the cockroaches, the ants, the scorpions and centipedes...

----------------------------------------

what the ants are saying

By Don Marquis, in "archy does his part," 1935

dear boss i was talking with an ant
the other day
and he handed me a lot of
gossip which ants the world around
are chewing over among themselves

i pass it on to you
in the hope that you may relay it to other
human beings and hurt their feelings with it
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
here is what the ants are saying

it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts

we ants remember
and have it all recorded
in our tribal lore
when gobi was a paradise
swarming with men and rich
in human prosperity
it is a desert now and the home
of scorpions ants and centipedes

what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more
of the future with greed and lust for riches

north africa was once a garden spot
and then came carthage and rome
and despoiled the storehouse
and now you have sahara
sahara ants and centipedes

toltecs and aztecs had a mighty
civilization on this continent
but they robbed the soil and wasted nature
and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes
and the deserts of the near east
followed egypt and babylon and assyria
and persia and rome and the turk
the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane
and the scorpion succeeds the caesars

america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth

men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn

rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots

it wont be long now It won't be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone

dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
archy
----------------------------

Thanks for listening. Now, get off your asses and do something. If nothing else, then KNOW.

Church Talk

2006-12-10T21:46:00.000-06:00

Today I gave the talk at church. The title was 'Eco Community: changing the paradigm of Environmentalism'. It was well received. I wore my MinusCar T-shirt while giving it. I'm still the only one who commutes to church by bicycle.

After church and a nap (yes!) I went to our newly formed group exploring a sustainable community (BGgreen) afterwards, and Nathaniel was there. Whew... being close to him makes me weak. Ah well...

These days I've been riding around town at night looking at Christmas light displays. The cold nights and pretty lights draw me like a moth to a flame. Each night there are more displays. Each of them are wastes of electricity in a sense, but since they are there, it's my duty to enjoy them - by bicycle.

$859.25

2006-11-22T16:14:00.000-06:00

I'm in my hometown, visiting mom for Thanksgiving. I will NOT be blogging during that time, but yesterday I wrote a check for $859.25.

It was the very last check on the very last credit card bill.

As of yesterday, I'm debt free. I've had credit card debt for nearly 25 years, but no longer

WOO HOO!!!!!

Staying warm

2006-11-19T23:14:00.000-06:00

This morning the Kid was in his chair playing a video game in just his boxer shorts.

I'm cold, he says.

Put on some sweatpants and a shirt, I say.

I shouldn't have to shiver in my own house, he says.

You have the 'misfortune' to have a dad who considers the world in a small way. Your goose bumps rate very low. Put on a shirt, some pants, some socks.

He does.

I'm a lucky man.

Winter Clothes

2006-11-19T22:50:00.000-06:00

Tom W called early in the a.m. and wanted to go on a bike ride – 44 miles or so, Clifty Hollow or the Porter Pike route. Tom and I are about the only members of our bike club that like these two routes. They are intense, but with intensity of effort there are scenic rewards that aren't available elsewhere.

I suppose that's true across life in general.

We decided on the latter route with easier and fewer climbs. I’m not much on intensity these days. I'll ramp it back up in December so I'll be able to kick some serious ass by the end of March, but November is my chill out, slow down, get a bit fatter month. Tom, however, is all about intensity. Ah well, off we go.

The last time I was out that way it was drop dead gorgeous with fall foliage at its peak. Now, however, the landscape was sporting its winter attire and there was a frigid northwest wind blowing through the bones. We stopped on Iron Bridge – the halfway point with a view that never disappoints no matter the season, but we didn’t stay long because it was CHILLY.

This was a ride I probably shouldn’t have gone on. I'm in a reflective mood these days, trying to sort shit out and giving the endorphin addiction a rest, but I’m glad I went. We rode quietly, not much conversation since you typically need breath to speak and for me breath seemed in short supply. But there were moments - side by side, intense focus, the breath dialed in, cadence synchronized, simultaneous shifting of gears, leaning into curves, the whir of tires, all of these things speaking volumes to the world passing by and to each of us. People who don’t bike won’t get that last bit. Tom’s a good friend.

Ugly Reality

2006-11-17T22:51:00.000-06:00

A powerful memory from my childhood was when I was 9 or 10 and I read an article in Time magazine about hungry children in New York City. I remember the pictures of the poor huddled around the fires that were set in barrels and reading about those children, my age, who didn't know where they would sleep or what they would eat. I remember that it was around Christmas and I was so sad for them. It was the first time that the reality of poverty struck me. I wanted to make things ok, but I couldn't. My mother tried to console me, but I sobbed.

Fast forward 16 years.

When I was a paid chorister in the Presbyterian Church two blocks away from here, I remember waiting to enter the sanctuary and reading one of the many mission posters describing the work being done around the world. This one read 'Two thousand miles away, someone is going to bed hungry'.

Somebody had scratched out the word 'thousand' and written 'blocks'.

At the time I lived in another section of town and I was much younger than now (22 years younger, to be exact), so even though I knew the edited poster was probably telling the truth, it was still very much an abstraction, something that happened 'somewhere else', no matter how close 'somewhere else' was. There was a twinge of concern somewhere in my gut, but the wrenching emotion that I had known as a child was not there.

Fast forward another 19 years, to three years ago. I had been living in my present house for 10 years. It was around this time of year, maybe a bit later, because I had first started to ride my bicycle to work.

One particularly frosty morning I had stopped at an intersection and there was a latino in a light jacket pushing a shopping cart with cans and bottles across the street. I nodded hello to him, but his eyes were distant and hard, perhaps he was drunk or mentally ill, I remembered thinking. On to work I went.

Later that day I drove the store van to my house to drop off some slatwall, and as I drove up I saw that man going through my trash. I parked some distance away and watched him. People had been leaving trash outside of my bin after going through it for the cans, etc. and it was pissing me off. Then I became suspicious because I saw him get something out and look at it closely. I thought that maybe he had one of my financial statements and might try to defraud me somehow.

Then, ... and I'll never ever forget this... he ate that thing that he had been looking at. It was a cantaloupe rind and he had been looking at it to determine if it might be safe to eat. I felt dirty and fat and callous and mean and cold and so very wrong, but I did nothing. I hurt on the inside, but I did nothing as the shame poured over me. Later that day that I remembered the poster with the edited phrase '2 blocks away people are going to bed hungry'. I realized that this was no longer an abstraction.

The universe had given me an opportunity and I blew it.

I'm writing all of this because today I listened to the message over at minuscar about 'being beautiful' and it talked about this very thing. I don't buy the whole 'do it for the kingdom' angle. I believe that we should be kind to our neighbors because it is the right thing to do. I hope the next time inequity is put so honestly in front of me that I'll not be paralyzed with inaction.

Being beautiful - Be beautiful - beautiful

this message is kicking me hard from the inside.

Focus

2006-11-16T21:28:00.000-06:00

Sucky weather day, and my alarm clock was the Kid’s frustrated voice yelling ‘Great, I missed my FUCKING ride’ followed by a sheepish ‘Dad, can I have a ride to school?’. Of course, I say. After dropping him off at school I head to the hospital lab where I’ll have blood drawn in preparation for my physical on Monday. They don’t know I’m coming and don’t have any ‘orders’. This appointment has been on the ‘books’ since February. I cancelled the Monday appointment and left without having blood drawn. I was a pissed off guy. I’ll do it in March.

Even with my massive indignation the universe continued to whirl about, apparently unconcerned about my mood, and now as I’m writing about it everything just feels silly. I’m glad I could let it go.

I was late to work but what of it? Because of the limited time, I decided to ride the bike even in the cold rain of this pissy day and it was miserable, but only slightly so. I would rather have had the time to walk, though.

Over at minuscar there are a couple of MP3 files. I listened to the one from the Mars Hill Church, about slowing down, because it was the quickest to load. Yes, I can see the irony. There was a tidbit that I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget it - 'one of the central practices of the examined life is we look thoroughly at our soul ad find out what is going on inside of us - There were other gems about the importance of observing an off day, resisting the deceitfulness of wealth, being right here, right now and taking time for nothingness. Good stuff. I’m being ministered to by a site I originally visited because I like to ride my bicycle. I hope minuscar gets a giggle out of that.

-------

update: MinusCar has taken the link to this spot down. Good. I can go back to anonymity. :-) His blog has had, and will continue to have, a major impact on the way I live.

Karma (Bike-Ma?)

2006-11-15T22:40:00.000-06:00

I thought I would take advantage of a window of opportunity when it was NOT raining. Well, it rained. Live Doppler radar has its shortfalls, evidently. AND, it turns out that khaki pants are not the brightest choice when there’s rain in the picture. BUT… I enjoyed the ride in more than I would have imagined. I enjoyed it a lot.

One of the best moments was waiting to turn on to Old Morgantown road. Here’s the picture… I’m waiting to turn left this very busy road, and there’s a stream of cars waiting to cross the railroad tracks at the green light. The light turns red, and I make eye contact with this lady in a small car and gesture to her as if to ask if she’ll let me turn in. She looks away and speeds up and closes the gap between her and the car so that I couldn’t even fit between them. The car behind her does the same thing. I’m soaked, and those drivers are MEAN. That’s what they are, just plain mean. Ah… but sweet karma (bike-ma?)is on my side. I hear the train coming, a slow, tortuously slow freight train, huffing just to get up speed. Had she not pulled so close to the car in front of her, she could have turned left and taken a back road to beat that train, but because of her unwillingness to show a soaked bicycle rider the tiniest bit of courtesy, she’s trapped (in more ways than one, I might add). She can’t back up, she can’t turn, she can’t go ANYWHERE. But me, I have options out the wazoo. So I turn left and ride by her on the left hand side, smile (REAL BIG) and wave, go down and cross the tracks as the barriers come down. That line of cars wasn’t going to go anywhere for a while. Long, long slow train. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.

I’m grinning as I write this. I hope she wasn’t late too late to work, because that would just be AWFUL.

Good Month

2006-11-14T22:22:00.000-06:00

Tonight was two meetings that overlapped, but I made both of 'em. One was the newly organized green city initiative, and this is a cause that I believe in with every fiber of my being. The second was the GreenWay commission, with is in charge of connecting the city with a series of paths, bike paths, bike lanes, shared use paths, etc. They were meeting at the same time through a snafu of scheduling. I cut the first short to make sure I had time to book it over to the second.

On the way to the second, a major throughfare that I cross has been widened and ample bike lanes put in. In general I think bike lanes are a bad idea, but in this case they are really well done. I decided to take that road to my destination instead of the circuitous route I normally take.

The route I normally take has few cars. The route with the new bike lanes has LOTS of cars travelling 45+, and it was okay except for the exhaust I kept smelling. Foremost in my mind was that people needed to see a cyclist using the lanes. So there I was, after dark on a somewhat chilly night showing that if you build them, the bike lanes, they, the cyclists, will come. I'll use them sparingly. I still like the quiet streets, commune with trees and folks in their yards, the sound of children and birds and dogs. I like knowing all the back roads.

When I got home I remembered to check the car mileage to see how many I drove this past month. The last fillup was Oct. 4th, and I've driven 82 miles and have used a bit over a fourth of a tank.

I agree with SueJ that 'I can't stomach buying gasoline without extreme provocation, because I really believe it contributes to the greed and carnage we are so thoroughly insulated from'. Folks who know that I ride everywhere have commented that I must really like riding my bicycle. Not always. Sometimes it is a pain in the ass, but I ALWAYS feel good that I made the effort even if the rest of me is worn the fuck out.

In a totally unrelated moment, I was listening to episode #304 (Heretics) on This American Life and my insides felt soft and gentle and able to believe. 20 years ago I would have thought God is speaking to me. hmmmm.

Right now, however, the hifi (Klipschorns and tubes) have Gillian Welch playing. I'm totally spoiled by my stereo setup... it's like she's sitting in my little house playing just for me. I'm far luckier than I deserve to be.

Think Globally, act locally

2006-11-09T13:14:00.000-06:00

I rode to church for the Wednesday meditation group. Tonight we did a 'sound meditation' which used a recording of tibetan monks chanting. The idea was to chant with them, a zen sing along, if you will. Not too sure about that.

The ride home was very foggy... eerie and quite nice. Everything looked like a suspense movie. Before I got home I sopped at city hall to support a resolution supporting the Green City initiative. It passed, but with language modifications that gutted it's original intent... which was to actively consider and support infrastructure that would lower carbon emissions over the future. Sigh... I suppose you have to start somewhere, and even though the new resolution is a shadow of the original, it's something.

I even spoke to the comission in favor of the resolution. I felt like Mr. Smith in Washington... well, without all that moral clarity and ethical uprightness, and certainly without the public speaking ability. :-)

After the commission moved on to other business the 10 or so supporters of the resolution left the building and each one of them got in their separate cars and drove home.

On a related note, when I got home I had received a letter from the Sierra Club. They sent me a bumper sticker to show that I support the fight against global warming. What.The.Fuck??

New Political Landscape

2006-11-09T13:11:00.000-06:00

Well, everybody's whoopin' it up now that we have a 'new day in America'. I like the change. I was VERY involved in the process, giving both time and money. I hope the current madman in chief will have a VERY hard time over the next two years.

However, I can't get over the feeling that all we've done is put a new coat of paint on the whorehouse.

The time for vigilance is NOW. Always has been.

Catharsis

2006-11-07T23:01:00.000-06:00

The country is frenzied with political projections. I'm happy avoiding the political blogs and hanging out with my cat. I'm hoping the outcome of this night will at least be oversight of our reckless, dangerous president.

Tomorrow I continue to learn the new Yang style taiji sword form being taught to our small, extremely fortunate group by Ding Ma Ma. It's the first new martial arts form (and the only sword form) I've learned in 16 years, and the 'learning' mode is definitely different from the 'maintaining' mode or the 'teaching' mode.

I'm almost tempted to return to martial arts study (I earned my first black belt in Shaolin martial arts in 1982) ... but typically martial arts studios are testosterone laden vats of male attitude that i don't have time for. Plus, it hurts more at 48 than it did at 24. Unfortunately there is no school dedicated to the soft styles of wushu around here.

Time for sleep.

Gas Gadgets

2006-11-05T22:15:00.000-06:00

On a much lighter note, or perhaps more alarming... on the way to church this morning and on the way home I saw a lot (more than 10, probably less than 20) folks out clearing leaves from their yards and driveways.

Most were using these gasoline powered leaf machines that turn a calm, peaceful Sunday afternoon into a whining, screeching, cacaphonous mess of blowing leaves.

What ever happened to rakes and brooms? It won't be long before you'll have to have gasoline to take a dump, it seems.

Important Lesson

2006-11-05T20:49:00.000-06:00

I decided to take part in a small group ministry offered by our church. Our first meeting was on Thursday, November 2nd. As always, I rode my bicycle there on a very chilly autumn night.

I purchased the book ‘With Purpose and Principle: Essays About the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism’. It was suggested as a companion to these gatherings – an aid to jump start the thought processes, if you will. Contained within Marilyn Sewell’s essay about Unitarian Universalism’s first principle - ‘We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every human being’ - was this passage:

- Though our first principle is the foundation of our theological and relational lives in community, we must acknowledge that there are questions and contradictions that plague us. One of these questions emerges in regard to the tolerance we profess. Some Unitarian Universalists who have moved away from Christianity, but who have not yet resolved the painful experiences of their childhood faith, find it difficult to tolerate Christian Unitarian Universalists, or even the use of the Bible in a worship service. –

Wow. I’ve been giving non-forgiveness & intolerance towards Christians (and by extension, Christ) free rent inside my head for nearly 12 years now. Not healthy.

The ride home was beautiful. It was a clear, cold night and the moon was nearly full. I took a long route home to let my thoughts tumble by while my breath and cadence dialed in. Time to let the anger go. Pedal over pedal, the faces and places needing forgiveness make their appearance and received dismissal, but not forgiveness, not yet. I’ve gotten used to being angry, used to being indignant, used to being a victim. In a whir of tires, the houses roll by. I pick up the pace and my breath follows. Every inhalation is refreshing coolness and every exhalation welcome warmth inside the balaclava. Let the anger go. I’m a shadow moving fast and dark among the bright yellow halogen light kissed acers, their leaves most beautiful at the end of their lives. I’m new to this. Forgive does not mean forget. Remembering doesn’t have to include anger. The bike becomes my whipping boy and I beat it, and myself, in the process. I stop for a busy intersection and feel my heart racing, my breath an empty, steamy thought bubble. You can learn this…. Question mark or exclamation point?! Practice forgiveness, I hear. Yes you’ll fuck up, but practice forgiveness. I am Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Conner’s ‘Revelation’ screaming ‘Who do you think you are?’ across the fields.

The answer returns to me as it did to her, an echo.

Book and Movie

2006-11-04T22:15:00.000-06:00

Because I work at a university bookstore, I have never had any problem finding things to read during my lunch hour. I finished Griffin's: 'Black Like Me' a few days ago and was looking for something else to read. I picked up the short play 'W;t' by Margaret Edson. It won a pulitzer prize, so I figured it might have some substance to it.

I have not read a play since my college english class, and found them difficult at the time. I've seen Shakepearean plays and had a great time, but reading Shakespeare is extremely difficult for me.

It took me two lunch hours to finish 'W;t', and yesterday in the breakroom of my store I was weeping.

Contrast that with this evening. I rode my bicycle around town to see all the leaves in the last grips of their annual suicide and to do a little exploring on roads I don't normally ride. It was soothing and familiar. Then I picked up my Kid and we went to see the movie 'Borat'. Gene Shalitt (spelling?) had given it a great review on Good Morning America (a trash show, generally) and because he said most of the skits involved folks who had no idea what was going on and because he said he laughed his butt off and because he said it was 'raw' and 'politically incorrect' and 'vulgar' and because I remembered what fun I had had viewing 'Jackass 2'....it was a no brainer that I had to see it. (yes, I see the pun)

Anyway, I laughed my ass off. As deep and moving as 'W;t' was, 'Borat' is crude and unrefined... and funny as hell.

I drove the car to get to the movie - only because I was in no mood to have the Kid whining. In the snarl of traffic I was reminded why I hate to drive the car (unless it's raining and cold... then I like the car).

Halloween 2006

2006-10-31T23:21:00.000-06:00

Went to a party at my friend Greg's house. His partner Steve (who was dear long time friend of mine) died of a heart attack this past March 14th at 53 years old, and this is the first party he's thrown since that time.

Kevin, the organist from the Methodist church that kicked me out in 1994 was there. He kept talking about how that church had changed into our local 'Six Flags over Jesus' church. Last Easter I rode my bicycle by that church on the way to my church (Unitarian Universalist) and remember thinking that it could have been an SUV dealership. Uncomfortable. At one point he asked me how long I was at Broadway (the church). I said from sometime in September of 1992 until 6:30p.m. the afternoon of April 17th, 1994. He stopped talking about church stuff.

Seems like Halloween is a very gay holiday - I mean, most of us gays are masters of make believe - but tonight I left feeling sad. I feel sad as I write this. I've been staring at this screen for some time, and I've decided to leave out other snippets of conversation that led me to this feeling. There were people there I knew, of course, and others that I didn't, but I felt apart and seperate and unable to bridge the gap that stretched like a desert between me and other folks.

I am, however, glad I went. Had I followed my usual instincts, I would have stayed at home and avoided the gathering. I figure that if I ever hope to have a satisfying social life (hopefully with a boyfriend in the picture) I'll have to mingle with gay people at some point.

I should have ridden my bicycle. Even though Greg's house is about 3 miles down a very busy, very dark highway, there is a back way to get there that is about 8 miles. It goes over an old iron bridge that spans an almost magical stretch of the Barren River. The reason I didn't ride is because the last time I rode that particular route, I was nearly wiped out on my bicycle by a herd of deer. That memory added to the certain prevalance of drunks on the road made me think the auto was safer. I still should have ridden the bicycle.

Curiosity, part II: A chance encounter

2006-10-30T20:56:00.000-06:00

It seems that those folks practicing taiji were indeed curious about what the stranger knows, because a couple of days later I received a call from Colleen, one of the folks at the park, asking if I would still like to come to the park to learn with them. It turns out that I knew Colleen, as she studied Tae Kwon Do at a school I attended briefly when I thought my son might be interested in the martial arts. I didn’t recognize her, but she remembered me. I was grateful for the invitation!

So I went. It turns out that they are students of a local kung fu school, and during the recent International Festival our town holds, they met a Chinese woman who is a certified instructor in Yang Style taiji. She is here until January visiting her daughter, who interprets for her. She cannot speak a word of English.

It took just a few moments to realize this woman was the real deal. Her forms are beautiful & precise, and she knows all of them. Even though she is in her 50’s, she is as limber and as strong as any martial artist I’ve ever known.

She refuses to accept any money, saying that her visa won’t allow her to. She says that this is a way she gives back to the world.

So I’m scaling back my usual evening road rides on the bicycle, taking the time instead to absorb what this wonderful woman can teach me, which is a LOT.

There will be time to ride later.

Beauty

2006-10-30T20:47:00.000-06:00

I love this time of year. If I'm lucky, I have another 30 - 40 autumns to experience, and I don't forget that. The last two long bicycle rides into the countryside have just been stunning. My legs are conditioned to the point that riding 40 - 70 miles is easy, especially when travelling at a sightseeing place, so I'm not preoccupied with making it home. All I have to do is take in the beauty around me.

Curiousity

2006-10-22T20:09:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday a riding buddy Tom and I were heading out to take in the beautiful countryside and get a serious lose a lung workout in. While passing a city park I saw a guy and two women doing the Yang Taiji 24 forms and asked Tom to stop so that I could speak with them.

Me: Howdy! Could I join you for taiji practice at some point in the future? I'm on a bike ride now, but if you meet here regularly, I would like to come by.

She: Weelllllll.. she appeared hesitant and her body language said 'no'.

Me: No biggy. Y'all take care.

And so Tom and I took off on a most amazing and fun bike ride. Had the situation been reversed I would certainly have made an attempt to find out what the 'stranger' knew.

I'm always amazed at how incurious people are.

Huh?

2006-10-20T22:38:00.000-05:00

Writing this late at night, I barely remember the ride in this morning, but I took the Nashbar for the first time in a while. Good to feel the cool air on my face. Better than any cup of coffee (ok, I’m lying here. Some coffee is definitely better than any cold morning ride to work, but it sounded good, eh?). After work I returned a borrowed book that stretched out the ride a bit and took me by the route I use for the Unitarian church.

At the corner that intersects with Nashville road, a major route for cars, I always cut through a circular paved driveway. Today a van turned onto the drive while I was heading through it and an elderly gentleman rolled down his window. I stopped.

I told him that I use his driveway all the time, that I had never met him to ask him or thank him, but I wanted him to know how his stretch of paved driveway allowed me to avoid a short but dangerous stretch of road. I wanted him to know how thankful I was for the privilege of using it and how nice it was to finally meet him. (nyuck, nyuck, yuckity yuck, oh how i did go on and on!)

He found a space in my monologue and told me he was lost and was wondering if I could help him find Belmont Ave. Why yes, I told him. It’s right over there.

Sigh.

My Son's mom

2006-10-20T12:44:00.000-05:00

I feel pretty lousy about the description of my son's mom in the previous post. Bitter? You bet. Honesty in my feelings requires me to leave it there, however. Hard, cold, unfiltered.

She had a strong role in the miserable part of my 30's.

I remember once telling her that if there was such a thing as Karma, she was going to have hell to pay. Right after I told her that, it struck me that her entire life was hell. Addicted (pills, alcohol, sex, you name it) and mentally ill from an early age, she lived a hell I can never imagine even on my darkest days.

For me to pile on the invective after her death... well, I'm not very proud of that.

A brief religious history of Woo

2006-10-19T22:56:00.000-05:00

I realize the statement of not wanting to be ‘loved’ by ‘these people’ might have appeared a bit harsh. So here goes….

A brief religious history of Woo (btw, my life is much richer and waaaaay happier than this account would leave you to believe, but I warned anyone stumbling on this site of 'shitty first drafts' fairly early on)

1958 – Birth! I’m # 3 of 5 this order - Sister, Brother, Me, Brother, Sister.

1962 – After Birth of # 5, Dad disappears. My mother never remarries. We are raised by a single mom and her parents (my grandparents) who live next door. All of our meals are eaten at our Grandmother’s house. I remember her coming into our house only once in my entire life.

1963 – I remember my mom telling me that the president had been killed. It’s the first I know of death. At this time we attend a Methodist church where my mother is the organist/choirmaster. I have a vague recollection of the pipe organ there… a musty, wheezy thing.

1964 – I’m reading by now, the Laundromat we use has a sign that says ‘White Customers Only’.

1965 – We begin attending a Presbyterian church where my mother has a new job. I begin singing with the adult choir at 7 years old.

1968 – My first kiss with a girl named Crystal Barwick beside the honeysuckle vines
outside our 4th grade class. I had heard this was supposed to be a big deal. Eh. Most of the other boys are playing with the other boys, I like playing with the girls.

1969 – I find out the teenager who lived up the street, Michael Christmas, died in Vietnam.

1970 – I attend the Columbus Boychoir School in the summer (later renamed the American Boychoir school).

1971 – I begin piano lessons. I’ve taught myself for two years and my mother’s old college professor takes me on.

1972 – Late in my 14th year, puberty. Finally. Now I want to play with the boys. Well ain’t that fucking great. 9th grade gym class is pure torture. I come to believe that if I knew how to fight like the guy on Kung Fu, everything would be okay.

1973 – I start martial arts classes. I still want to play with the boys. I see my dad for 2 hours one Sunday. He’s just passing through.

1974 – I have a crush on Taylor Wells. I learn to play basketball so I can be around him. I can’t play basketball worth a shit. I hate myself for having sexual feelings for Taylor. He never knows.

1975 – At a church outing, I smoke my first joint. I suppress any notion that I might be gay within myself. I don’t share myself with anyone because I’m so afraid of what they might find out. A fag is something that you definitely don’t want to be. At summer camp that year I run into a completely different kind of religious person. A group of teenagers and their adult overseers introduce me to Jesus. I pray the sinner’s prayer and receive salvation. The remainder of the summer is a desperate, feverish study of the bible with the promise that since God can do all things, and since all I had to do was ask, that God would free me from homosexuality.

1976 – Freshman year of college and continual thoughts of suicide. Everybody has fucking girlfriends. I finally go to see a psychologist, Ken Caroll. He recommends a program of techniques for which they’ve had good success at conversion. At least I don’t want to kill myself when I think I could be straight. Ken probably still counts me as a success story. I lie to him because telling the truth would mean the Devil and his demons had won.

1977 – my first rock n roll concert ever. The Grateful Dead. 5/18/77. That’s a religious experience. Later that summer, as a camp counselor at the Christian camp where I was saved, I’m baptized in the holy ghost. Talking in tongues, healing services, church services where ladies spontaneously burst into tongues and someone else interprets, dancing in the aisles. I have the demons of homosexuality cast out when a young fellow named Shannon Smith lays on hands. It’s the beginning of two years of spiritual warfare. Me against the demons. Ever cute guy’s butt I see is the work of a demon at battle for my soul.

1978 – Horrible year. Constant prayer and bible study and guilt. Desperate for friends.

1979 – I venture out on a street known for gay men and go home with a complete stranger. I pray extra hard for weeks afterwards.

1980 – I pray for grades but do not study. The results are predictable.

1981 – My first boyfriend. 2 months. I flunk out of college.

1982 – I earn my black belt in Shaolin martial arts. I’m the senior student.

1983 – My mother loses her church job when it is discovered she had a man spend the night. Fucking Presbyterians. My martial arts instructor tells me not to come back. He doesn’t want a fag in class.

1992 – Fast forward! I’ve moved to KY, re-enrolled in college and graduated with a degree in piano (magna cum laude) and direct music for a Presbyterian Church. Oh yeah, I have a son now too. Evidently my penis works. I still think I can be straight. I still desperately want to be straight. Life would be easier, I think. (silly, eh?)

1993 – I’ve accepted a position with a Methodist Church. I’ve been coaxed back into a religious relationship with Jesus through the Emmaeus movement. Life is good. I’m in the closet but barely. I feel safe at any rate.

1994 - I’ve been asked to do the music for a Chrysallis gathering, the youth equivalent of the Emmaeus movement. A father of one of the participants ‘outs me’ to the church board and I’m summarily dismissed within two days, one week before my 36th birthday. He didn’t want someone with homosexual tendencies around kids, especially his kids, he says. An old friend, a wise man, my first boyfriend (the two monther), asks me why I continue to try and have relationships with folks who will never truly accept me. He tells me that nature will continue to serve up harsher lessons until I finally ‘get it’. My son’s mother, in the meantime, evil witch that she was (she’s dead now, found dead 3 days after Christmas, 2005 – she was horribly unhealthy) seizes on this moment to cut me off from seeing my son. She claims that I have molested him because I took a bath with him. He’s two months from being three years old. I have to go to court just to be able to visit my son. I fight tooth and nail.* Her lawyer, a Christian man, a deacon in his church, a partner in his prestigious law firm, represents her lying, drug addicted bi-polar alcoholic ass for free while I incur mountains of debt. It’s a surreal time when I actually hear folks calling into the local religious station to pray for me. These are folks who won’t talk to me directly but will air their prayers (and my sexual orientation) for a listener base of 100,000 people. Pray for his deliverance, their fervent pleas go forth. In the meantime, I’m proof positive that agreement in prayer doesn’t work.

*I grew up without a father. There was no fucking way i was going to do that to a child of mine. Unbelievably, one of my gay acquaintences suggested that i walk away from the 'drama'. i walked away from him instead.

1995 – I’ve missed my son’s entire 3rd year of life. It’s been a year that I’ve been severely depressed. Since being dismissed from my church (only two members called to see if I was okay) I go out to work and to the store, but that’s it. I’ve lost my religion, closed the door on a paradigm that will never accept me without violating its handbook. It is the very best decision I’ve ever made with regard to my mental health. Finally in the summer of 1995 I get to see my son. I start attending an Episcopal church here but only because it is ‘expected’ of me as a father.

1996 – I get custody of my son and there’s no way his mentally ill mother can contest it. I stop the ‘Christian’ church charade. Goodbye religious insanity. I wish I had never met you.

So, just in case you consider my request that Christians ‘leave me the fuck alone’ a bit harsh – you now have a little bit of history.

A fine autumn day!

2006-10-18T22:04:00.000-05:00

The plan was to ride the Iron Bridge route today. I hadn’t ridden that one in a long time and I knew that it would be beautiful. My bike riding bud Tom W had indicated that he was up for a longish ride today and I was able to take the time off to do just that. Today was just perfect for cycling. It’ll be the last day in the 70’s for some time.

Tom had to pick up a package at UPS by 6, and since we both hate deadlines looming when we’re out riding, we stopped by UPS first. At that point we scrapped the original plan and decided to ride up Blue Level Rd. When we got to the top we would decide where to go.

We decided to ride the Clifty Hollow route in reverse, something neither of us had done. This is a hilly route with 3,200 feet of climbing in 40 miles, and Tom is a strong rider. However, we didn’t ride UP the steep side of Hammet Hill since we were already at the summit, but we did ride down the backside of that bad boy. It was the only other deviation. That is one seriously fine/fast/get yer blood going descent, and that’s why we did it! I topped out at 51 mph. YeeHah!

Taking the Clifty Hollow route in reverse was exhausting. The usual direction has longish screaming descents with short, ‘stinger’ climbs. The reverse direction, the way we went today, had short, steep descents that we didn’t dare to fly down because of their hazardous nature (how a cornfield has changed me!). Afterwards there were the tortuous, long ascents. The stretch of road from 626 to Hadley was especially brutal.

I read somewhere that you don’t really know a ride until you’ve ridden it in both directions, and that proved true with this one. Stretches of road that I usually rocket down were 1st gear slow, leaving me plenty of time to see entire sections for the first time. And what a great time of year to see the land! Everywhere…. COLOR! The misery of dead legs and desperate lungs was balanced with views which had, as friend described last night, ‘Postcard Jesus’ light. The sunlight streamed long, low and clear against a canvas peppered with golden yellows, reds, oranges… Mother Earth has dressed for Mardi Gras..... one last blowout before winter's Lent.

When Tom and I got to the Halls Chapel/ Jennings Road loop, I was shot, but I turned down that road anyway since I had never done it in reverse. I told Tom that my brain was making a decision that my body would regret - something that's happened often in my younger days, but never cycling related... anyway, this time it was worth it. There were moments when I seriously thought about walking some of those rolling ascents, but then I concentrated on turning one pedal over, then the other. Finally we reached the top and it was easy pedaling from there, with premier views of my city from the heights of Glen Lily road as payoff.

After I got home and cleaned up, the kid and I drove the car (horrors!), picked up Tom and headed off to a Mexican restaurant to pig out. Yummmmmmm. There is nothing quite like a good meal when extremely hungry.

What a good day.

Bach

2006-10-18T21:54:00.000-05:00

I came here a good 20 minutes ago to make a post. Just after I turned on the hifi (a passion of mine... Tube amplification and Klipschorns.... sweetness!) Bach's French Suite #6 came on our public radio station.

Few things can move me like Bach played by someone who 'gets it'. I was lost in the beauty.

Just another bike ride

2006-10-17T22:06:00.000-05:00

Everywhere the campaign signs are going up. Noticeably absent are Ron Lewis signs, but his challenger, the democrat Mike Weaver, has signs everywhere. I know precious little about the local candidates, but for the most part this town is run well. I will vote, I always do, but I can’t help feeling the hooks of corruption are set early and deep.

Tonight was our bicycle club’s last Pizza night until the new season starts. The days are short and the group ride was bound to be short, so I took a jaunt around the town to check out the ever changing view. I rode my old bike, a heavy, cro-moly steel machine with downtube shifters and side pull brakes, 36 spoke steel wheels, 27 x 1 ¼ – a familiar ride. It feels like an ever faithful friend. It is everything my Lemond Zurich is not, sluggish, crude, rusty and rough about the edges. I love the ugly ‘ole thing.

Tonight after I got home I had ridden 30+ miles. They passed quickly and I could have ridden much more, but it was time to get home for the night. As I passed the Kroger gas station I felt a strong sense of satisfaction that my car spends most days parked in the driveway. I feel for those folks who are still trapped in the car paradigm. This morning I rode into work in a light rain and cool temps. The rain on my face was delightful and the sounds of the wet morning sang me into work. I received some looks of pity from the drivers line of cars waiting at the light, but what they didn’t understand, and probably never will, is that I pitied them.

Over at MinusCar the ever weary debate that occurs when Christian doctrine and gay folk collide is rearing it's head. And, as usual, the issue of children are the catalyst. I'll avoid that debate because the floodgates of anger are already bulging. I don't want to be 'loved' by these folks. I want them to leave me the fuck alone.

Vacation

2006-10-16T19:19:00.000-05:00

Went on vacation to SC since last time, taking the ‘slow’ roads there. The goal was to limit my top speed to 55 mph and enjoy the scenery at the same time. Therefore we only traveled on the interstate briefly. On board were my 15 year old child, a 15 y/o friend of his and our dog Charlie, aka Mr. Woo, the amazing talking dog. All of this, our luggage and my road bicycle in a 1996 Ford Escort Station Wagon. I’ve come to appreciate this car. It’s no hassles for the most part, totally paid for and sound. It should last forever since I rarely drive it except for these long (ish) trips. But with all the cargo it was a VERY tight fit.

We took in the Cherohala Skyway, an amazing 45 mile stretch between Tellico Plains, TN and Robbinsville, NC. No commercial buildings whatsoever on this route, it winds and climbs over a mile high on pristine roads and affords stunning views on the southern side of the Great Smokey Mtn’s National park.

I kept wishing that I were on my bicycle. I was occupied with driving, which meant that I had to keep my eyes on the road and also on the traffic that often backed up behind me, mostly motorcycles, who were intent on getting from one place to another as quickly as possible without regard to the 35mph speed limit.

Taking the interstate @ 70+ mph gets me to my destination, my hometown, in 10 hours with a fuel economy of 32 mpg. Driving the slow roads (<= 55mph) takes 17 hours with a fuel economy of 39 mpg.

We took a couple of tents borrowed from a coworker since I knew we would be camping overnight in NC. When I rode RAGBRAI this past July I camped every night and had a blast. I decided that we would camp at least once on this vacation too. The kids had a great time. As far as I can tell, so did Mr. Woo. His tail was always wagging.

While in SC I searched out and went on several road rides with cycling groups and was not embarrassed by any of them. It’s difficult to figure out roadies sometimes. New riders (like I was) size each other up like dogs sniffing. At any rate I was able to keep up with their fastest riders even though I think one group was trying to drop me in an ‘alpha dog’ statement. My favorite group ride was with a couple of guys from Summit Cycles in Elgin, SC. They showed on a chilly morning and we took off on some beautiful routes through the sandhills. They were really strong riders but didn’t feel the need to pull the Lance wannabe schtick like the other group did. Next time I’m in SC I’ll get with them, for sure.

My next vacation will be a cycling vacation to Mammoth Cave Natl Park. I'm just not meant to go fast.

Peace

2006-09-22T22:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday our UU church had a peace vigil as part of world peace day. I was in a foul mood because of the long day, little sleep, expectation to play, a week of no riding because I’ve been getting over a cold, and not nearly enough to eat for the day. So this account of the vigil is certainly coated with an unforgiving edge, but here goes.

I got there early to set up the sound system. I found folks setting out luminary candles and snacks and getting the list of speakers together. I was going to sing 6 songs and lead the group in four of them. I didn’t want to be there as a ‘performer/entertainer’. It turns out that I wasn’t there and didn’t perform in a monkey’s paw type of quantum physics moment (does that shit work?), but more on that later.

With every car that showed up I sighed just a little. Nobody used human power to get there, and even folks who lived within 2 blocks drove their cars. Then someone put Peter, Paul & Mary on, and while Puff the Magic Dragon wafted over the church grounds I thought what a lazy people we are. We can’t stand the silence, can’t stand the exercise. It was such a cliché of an event and there was no urgency. The participants wanted entertainment – this reading here, this song here, this poem there. As far as I can tell, there was no room for reflection. There was certainly no call for personal action. No call to handwrite letters, no call to use less, conserve, to get out the vote, to write to soldiers, to sacrifice on any level. Just the ‘peace is good, we need peace, pray for peace’. And lots of pretty candles on a beautiful late summer night. Meanwhile the bloodbath goes on and on in a land far removed from us, unseen and sanitized.

Before the first song I got a call from my son. He had broken his ankle in a skateboarding accident, he thought, and my neighbors had taken him to the emergency room. These are neighbors I’ve discovered while riding my bicycle, and knowing your neighbors has its advantages, that’s for sure. Three folks from the church offered to drive me to my house, 3 miles away, but I was on the bicycle, home, into my car and at the emergency room within 20 minutes. You can go fast when you’re appropriately stoked. His ankle was not as bad as it sounded (or looked). He’s definitely okay, attending his school homecoming dance as I write this.

On the bicycle ride to the house, adrenaline pumping, I thought about what an old girlfriend (hey, it happened, okay?) told me a couple of years ago after I had gone off on a rant about something or someone. She said that the world is full of young souls, all trying to find their way, and that I should be gentle with my thoughts of them. That to someone else I was a young soul. I ended up thinking that if even one person showed to protest this insane military action, it was worth it. A sobering thought.

I heard later that only a few dozen showed up at the vigil. I expected more, but the reality is this: In Kentucky, the right side of history is the wrong side of ‘now’.

Today was World Carfree Day. I spent the day driving my son to the doctor and school and work on an extremely tight schedule. Not an inch on the bicycle today. Karma?

What the Bleep Do We Know?

2006-09-20T20:40:00.000-05:00

I've been watching a DVD that has been recommended to me for quite some time now. 'What the Bleep do we Know?' I’m still trying to digest it. Don't know if I'll be able to, actually. It’s about quantum physics, or, in the words of one of the presenters, the mathematics of possibility.

Part of my interest is the film’s exploration of emotional addiction. The same chemical receptors that hooked me with nicotine, a painfully difficult drug to shake, also keep me in the same relationship (or lack thereof), the same job, the same state of mind.

I’m left to ponder what emotions do I experience on a regular basis? The feeling of being outcast, of being misunderstood, not included, seperateness, competiveness, fearfulness, subjectiveness, judged, not quite good enough. I wonder if those emotions are the ones that I’m addicted to, addicted to melancholy, addicted to aloneness at the same time desperately trying to find a place where I belong, feeling as if I have to have the correct answer or have to climb that hill faster than the next guy or make better grades. Who in the hell am I trying to please? On the other hand, I have been experiencing contentment more than any other time in my life. Sometimes when I practice taiji I feel a connection with the ‘other’ that is just eerie, while at the same time I am hoping that someone is watching, someone is seeing this extraordinary thing that I do. Narcissistic? Surely! (anyone with a blog has to be somewhat narcissistic, I think – to what degree, though?)

Do I just need someone to show up out of the blue, slap me about the face and tell me to just deal with it? Quit whining?

I’m intrigued at the ideas that float about in my head regarding intimacy. I’m really pissed that I’ll not have an opportunity to know someone as a lover for 50 years, and know that kind of history with another, but on the other hand I don’t even know if I’m meant for a lover or that kind of intimacy in my life.

The DVD also puts forth the idea that I can undergo a paradigm shift. I can correct negative thinking. I can alter reality with thought and thought only. I can build a world far beyond and different than what I currently perceive if I break those emotional addictions. I want to know how.

Another Bike Ride

2006-09-19T22:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday night, 9/16.

I left the house at 8:00pm to get 'stuff' to fix spots of corrosion on my 2004 Lemond Zurich. Against my better judgement I head to WalMart where I've not set foot in since last year. Well, hey, they *are* open! Imagine that. The security guy asks me to leave my backpack and pump at the door, so I do. I also pick up some stuff to tackle the rust on my vintage Nashbar bike. I figure since I'm there, why not?

Anyway, after leaving Wally's world I head to the bank and make a deposit. Then I decide to ride some more since it's *such* an excellent night out. I head over to an unfamiliar area to do some exporation riding, to see if I can locate some connections to other familiar roads. These new developments are the Cul de Sac overloads, but I finally do find connector streets to another of my favorite city routes. I'm about 24 miles or so into the ride at this point and decide to head on back home on an oft travelled route.

While going through the parking lot at a local factory, I hear my rear tire flatting. No problem, I have all the time in the world and nothing pressing me for time. I'm free! So I head over to the well-lit (electricity sucking) parking lot of a local mega church (think Six Flags Over Jesus - apologies to Garrison Keillor) to change the tire. Ok... I have a PROBLEM! I've left my pump at Walmart. I totally forgot to pick it up. DANG! It's 11:00pm. After a brief reality check I decide I'm still having a good time. BUT, I don't think it would be a good time to bother/wake someone for a ride home. So I walk to the nearby Minit Mart and attempt to call a cab from my cell phone, but Singular infomation gives me an incorrect number for yellow cab (3 times they do this). The MinitMart clerk was no help. He wouldn't look up a number in the local phone book for me), so I walk to the liqour store across from Lost River Cave. They have just closed for business, but I knock on the glass anyway.

Inside the liquour store they are counting out rolls of bills by the open cash register. 'They' being a man, a boy (14 maybe?) a woman, and another man who is sitting in a chair and spinning the chambers of a loaded revolver. They all look up in unison when I knock on the glass door. The man with a gun stops spinning the chamber and locks it into place. They see a middle age man in spandex with a helmet, dorky mirror, reflectors and blinky lights everywhere walking a black bicycle with a rainbow sticker at 11:15 on a Saturday night. I see potential felons. I ask the man without a gun if he would call a cab for me. I figure he's had experience. He calls the number from memory. I thank him, remove the wheels from the Nashbar (for the cab) and do leg stretches in the parking lot while waiting. I figure it can't get any stranger for the folks on the other side of the glass, so why not? The boy observes me from the door, waving when we make eye contact. A half hour later the cab shows up and takes me to Walmart where I find the pump exactly where I left it. I buy a new tire since the old one is ripped, and the actual changeout takes only a few minutes.

I *finally* get home at 1:05a.m. Sunday morning, 5 hours from the time I left. This has been the longest flat thirty mile ride I've ever been on. Good time? You bet!

Sick

2006-09-19T22:10:00.000-05:00

I've been sick the past couple of days. No bike riding, no work, etc. The 'bug' that's got me happened to choose the two most beautiful days of the year (well, my memory is short). Bleh.

I usually wait to see if the sickness will go away on its own, but tomorrow I'll go to the doc. I can't help but think there are nastier germs at the doc's office than my house.

Meanwhile, I can't tell if my legs are sore because of 'the bug' or because I haven't been on the bicycle in the past two days.

Change

2006-09-19T22:06:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s official. I’m no longer music director for the UU church here in Small Town Kentucky. I feel shell shocked, even though this is what I wanted. I think.

On 9/5 I talked to the Sunday Services committee (effectively my Boss) and talked to them about my feelings about being ‘the musician’ for the church. I told them about my ‘questions to the ether’, my wanting to sever the label that’s kept me apart. I suppose they heard ‘I’m quitting’.

The committee arranged another musician to take this past week’s service and they let me know this. When I went to church I had folks come up to me and relating to me in an odd way, different from the usual paradigm. Well, it was different since I was not playing, just attending.

This past Sunday the following insert was in the bulletin:

“Our music director, Woodog (not my real name), has stepped down from his position as music director. If you have musical talent, please let us know what you can do (play, sing, etc) and if you would be willing to serve as part of our musical service.”

I was surprised by this announcement. It is certainly what I wanted, but perhaps not so abruptly. Then again, I’m not sure what scenario I would have been comfortable with. Saying goodbye to an unhealthy relationship has always been difficult for me, especially one with which I have nearly 40 years experience with. During the ‘Joys and Concerns’ segment I felt the need to explain this to the congregation, saying that my spiritual search led me to feel that I didn’t need to be ‘the music guy’ but that I might be ‘a music guy’ from time to time. The concern was the way the announcement was worded. Folks might think something unseemly had happened (like voting Republican, owning stock in petrochemical companies or having an orgy with the youth group) or that there were bad feelings. There is, of course, none of this. I love my church, these people who’ve brought me back from a very dark place – this strange herd of cats, these Unitarian Universalists.

Still, even as I type this I feel unsettled. I’ve started a journey without a clear map or guide.

Respect

2006-09-15T22:00:00.000-05:00

I have a new respect for those folks who blog daily. It's rewarding, yes, but this shit takes time!

Fill 'er Up!

2006-09-15T21:28:00.000-05:00

Saw the caption "Fill Er Up!" on the TV yesterday as our local talking heads excitedly discussed how wonderful it was that gas prices were 'down'. One SUV driver after another were shown happily feeding their addictions, relieved that their dealers were reducing the price of their drug. It's obscene, really, how short our memories are, how incomplete our understanding is (including mine). As long as we can 'afford it', we don't care where it comes from, whose lives are impacted, what the long term impact might be.

No snowflake will ever claim responsibility for an avalanche.

Meanwhile, during work today I had to travel to one of our remote locations to pick up some books, and I took my bicycle on a different route through a poor neighborhood. I saw a fence covered with incredible blue Morning Glory flowers. Around the corner from that visual treat there was a porch with four handpainted rocking chairs. Each had a different, very detailed scene, a sunrise, a parrot in a tree, children playing, and a trumpeter. In a neighborhood where most of the houses mope about in plain sack dresses and hushed voices, these two were laughing out loud, dressed in bright purple and gold.

If I had been in a car I would have missed the joy that washed over me.

God's Favor

2006-09-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

I turned over 7,000 miles of riding for the year on my commute to church this morning. I remember the first 1000 mile marker but none of the others until today, and this one only by chance. It would be nice if it occured while climbing one of the scenic ass-busting hills around here, but here's what really happened.

7000 miles came and went as I passed an SUV with the words 'God's Favor' written in prominent white letters across its rear window. I'm not sure what that meant, exactly, but a bit further down the road I saw a squirrel that had had a make over with a tire-track coif and a permanent eye-bugged 'o shit' expression across its fuzzy little pancake flat face. Apparently it had had a run-in with one of 'God's Favors'. A bit later yet another of God's Favors belched noxious gasses on me as it accelerated from a stop light.

A few months back I remember a load of children and a harried woman on a cell phone in a van. The van had a 'Prepare to Meet thy God' front bumper sticker. Nothing came from this encounter other than a smile from me, but I remember thinking how such a combination (cell phone, screaming kids, mini-van) would be a bicyclist's worst nightmare.

I like to recount these stories and others like them to my mom (actually anyone who'll listen). My mom tells me I've got to stop riding my bike in town. I tell her that if I didn't ride the bike I would never see and enjoy and giggle over mind-fuck moments like these.

The bike is a well of joy I visit again and again.

Sharks

2006-09-06T22:52:00.000-05:00

One of my student workers, Ergi, was very excited today about having gotten a credit card. He told a couple of us that 'the lady' approved him even though he was a foreigner. He was happy about his chance to establish a credit history, since everyone had to have a credit history, right?

I told him to run away from the card. Run and don't look back. Then he told me that he had to charge a set amount each month or pay a fee. At least $100 each month to avoid the yearly fee. I asked him what interest rate he had. He didn't know. How much was the yearly fee? He didn't know. Could he just cut it up? He would have to pay a fee if he didn't use it. How much. He didn't know.

Later in the day I was in bathroom and I spotted a bunch of small fliers for a free pizza! It was hard to miss them since they were on the urinals, on the toilet paper dispenser, the towel dispenser, the sink.

One day only (today) and at an address close to campus. You had to have your student ID and complete a 3 minute 'student activity' to get the pizza. Having a flier wasn't necessary. Another of my student workers showed up later with a pizza, telling his coworkers how easy it was to get the pizza. You guessed it. He had gone and completed the '3 minute student activity'. It was an application for a Discover card. Did you read the fine print? No, it was just a 'standard' application. You signed a form without reading the entire contract? It's not a big deal, he said.

Sharks. Why don't they just give out free trial packs of heroin instead? I can imagine the pitch...

'Here, try this. It won't cost much if you want more.'

Sex and the Sitar

2006-09-05T22:54:00.000-05:00

Ok... sorry about that play on words.

Two weeks ago a sociology student interviewed me. She was studying the 'social world of church musicians'. The following analogy came up, I'm not sure how, but I think it is an apt one.

I used to play in a band with a fellow who was a phenomenal slide guitarist, a master of tone and phrase, as well as a total asshole. We could find a groove and get totally lost in it. I told the interviewer that music was sometimes like really good sex with someone who you would not associate with otherwise.

Yeah, he was a jerk (still is), but the music was soooooooo good. So I would tolerate behavior from that guy that I would never tolerate from any other friend because I didn't think I would get that 'cookie' anywhere else. Come to think of it, I haven't jammed with someone at that level since I decided his musicianship wouldn't quite cover his karmic bad check.

I've also felt that way about choral singing in the past. These days I'm not even interested in the sex.

Back on the Bike

2006-09-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

My good friend Tom W and I set out for the hard-ass hills of Southern KY today. It was good to be pushing the body again after 12 days of scant riding. I ride to live, both physically and metaphysically. I feel more connected with the world while on my bicycle than nearly any other time. Must be the endorphins.

Notable sightings included a raccoon that had climbed a tree and was eyeing us warily with it's bandit face, a blue heron taking off from a pond (I thought of T-shirt #18 at minuscar), a hawk waiting on a haybale for a careless mouse, a donkey with a face that made me think Shrek was just around the corner, and finally, a little old lady. She was notable because even though she was only about 5 feet tall, her hair soared at least 2 feet skyward, jet black and thick! Echo's of 70's era televangelism.

You could have driven nails into concrete with that hair. It was marvelous.

When Nobody's Watching

2006-09-03T23:39:00.000-05:00

'Ok if I go out and skate for a while?' the kid asked.

'Sure,' I said.

'It's awesome out, you should go for a bike ride,' he said.

'I think I will,' I said. But I was still in the house when the kid returned, over an hour later.

'Did you ride?' he asked.

'No,' I said.

'You're a wierdo,' he said.

'Perhaps, but why do you think I'm a wierdo?' I asked.

'You're still here. You should go out and ride. It's awesome out,' he said.

He had a point. It -was- awesome out, a perfect change-of-season night, crisp and cool, a hint of crunchy leaves and football games and sweaters in the air. Out I went. It was the first time in nearly 2 weeks that I covered more than 5 miles at a stretch, and it felt good. Plus, as an added bonus, 16 miles later a question that's been chasing me for a while finally got the seeds of an answer.

The question: Do I want to 'do' music at this point in my life?

I do know the importance of having the question correct before you start peeling away the layers to the answer. I've screwed up the questions before, especially the BIG questions - this one is big - but I think I have the question correct. I've wrestled with it for nearly a year now.

Do I want to 'do' music at this point in my life?

Some history will bring the search into sharper relief. I've 'done' music as long as I can remember. My mother was/is a fine musician, playing for churches and musicals and weddings and funerals and schools and just about anything and everything. I sang in my first 'adult' choir when I was 7 or 8 years old. I attended the American Boychoir School (then the Columbus Boychoir School) one summer in 1970 on a scholarship. I played air piano at nine years old and later majored in piano in college. 'Musician' is an identification card I can whip out to show strangers who I am if necessary.

I've been the 'music guy' for the local Unitarian Universalist Church for over 10 years now. I was a hermit when I started playing there, seriously depressed after being dismissed as music director of a United Methodist Church here in Conservativesville, USA. That dismissal occured after I was 'outed' by a member of the Emmaeus community, a Christian community I belonged to and believed in. I still remember the hot shame, the embarassment, the sense of powerlessness. For a long while I would leave my apartment when I had to, longing for human contact yet being caustic to those who did try and reach out to me. The phone finally stopped ringing.

Just prior to that, my son's mom had cut me off from seeing my boy, 2 years old. She alleged molestation, and I had just begun a legal battle to get visitation rights when the 'church crap' went down. I'll spare you the details for now. It's another epic 'I got screwed' tale, but it has a GREAT, SATISFYING, UPLIFTING ending (really). However, I wouldn't know that at the time, and that battle falling on my shoulders at the precise time I was losing my religion didn't help much.

My ability to play, to 'do' music, brought me back to life. My friend (and landlord at the time) asked me to sub for him on piano at the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship. Over the next two years I became the music guy. He wanted to get out of having to play and I found that playing brought me back into a community. It worked, even as distrustful as I was, so gradually I found myself 'doing' music every Sunday again. It was therapy.

The church wanted to pay me and I said no. Then they finally demanded I take a salary and I did for a while, long enough to buy a really kick-ass sound system, before refusing a salary again.

Nowadays I just don't want to 'do' music, and that is a huge paradigm shift. I would rather be a member of the congregation singing the hymn, or (perhaps, maybe) a member of the choir instead of the choir director.

Yesterday during the bike ride another question presented itself. I love my time on the bike because disparate thoughts often organize themselves into interconnected ideas. Here is the new question: What do you do when nobody's watching? What talents do you pursue when other folks aren't around.

I do taiji, I ride my bicycle. I meditate, I read, I write (if you can call this writing). I listen to music. I enjoy music. It still grips me in a magic way, but I only 'do' music in public, never in private.

I'm still rolling this around in my head. I feel really at ease with the process.

The Company We Keep

2006-09-02T10:44:00.000-05:00

Wow. I see that minuscar provided a link to my blog. I'm honored. If I were you, however, I would pay attention to some of the other links provided there. All you'll find here are a bunch of shitty first drafts from a guy trying to find his voice in the world. That's about it. Really.

I write because I found a powerful statement there. Here 'tis...

The MinusCar Project exists because I believe people that think that the globe is warming because of human activity, specifically carbon emitting human activity, might be right. Because I think they might be right, I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.

The last part 'got' me. This part:

I think humans need to change. And because I think humans need to change, I think I need to change.

I couldn't get away from that statement. It got inside my head and wouldn't leave me alone, demanding either a different set of beliefs or a change of behavior. I recently wrote an article about that change. In the process, I learned something.

Writing and wrestling with ideas strenghthens me. Putting it down, stripping it to the bones, enlarges my life. Fertilizer for change?

(shitty first drafts as fertilizer - ok, that's just wrong)

I need to change more than my carbon footprint, but in the spirit of keeping track of the carbon footprint for this past week...

A/C - two nights
Car miles 4.6

Proud Papa

2006-08-31T23:20:00.000-05:00

No, this isn't bullshit, unconditional pride. This is earned pride. I'm proud of his character. He made a hard choice and made the right one.

A couple of weeks ago the Kid (15) called my cell and asked me to take the short way home from a group ride because he needed to talk to me. I walked into the house and the Kid had a very concerned air about him. From head to toe, he was covered in angst.

Turns out he and his girlfriend had been busted by her parents while they were having sex (she's 16), and now her parents were forbidding him from coming over to her house. The immediate request was that I call her parents and let them know that the Kid really cared for their daughter.

Here I lower the veil of secrecy and keep a lot of our conversation secret, but it was a good talk. Fast forward to last night. I get home extremely late and the Kid tells me that he has found a way to see the girl. He tells me that he's planned to get up really early in the morning on Friday, like 3a.m. and go over to see her before school starts.

'Wow, her parents are okay with that?' I ask.

'They don't know,' he says. 'They won't let me visit with her,' he says.

'You realize your planned action is based on dishonesty,' I say.

'Dad, they're not going to let me see her!' he says.

'Ultimately, I'm not able to stop you, you know. You'll do what you want, but I can't help but think that being dishonest is a bad move in most situations and certainly in this one' I say.

His eyes are full of hurting.

Tonight I come home late (as in the past few nights) and he's up chatting away on the internet. I ask him who he's chatting with. The girl, he says.

'We're not going to meet up in the morning. I'm pissed off about it, but I think you're right,' he says.

Proud Papa, that's me.

On a totally unrelated (well, slightly related) note, I remember when he got his first girlfriend (at 13) and his mom's mom (mee-ma) found out. Mee-ma is an interesting character, steeped in the Church of Christ tradition and scared of her own farts. She grilled him for all the details of his girlfriend, and he related her unrelenting questioning during the ride home.

You know what that's all about, don't you, I asked.

Yeah, I think I do, he said. If I'm straight they are going to thank God, but if I'm gay they are going to blame you.

He got it. At the age of 13 he got it.

More News from the Rush

2006-08-29T22:09:00.000-05:00

Day two of the college retail madness and I make it through using the internal 'I like you' technique. I keep the irritable veneer thin, but my face registers the fatigue. I'm sure my voice follows suit. I'm not a good actor.

I've been reading a book by Anne Lamott titled 'Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life'. I'm hooked. One of the appealing aspects of the 'blog' is being on display yet remaining intensely private. I like the attention, but shy away from the limelight. Feels like it would be a good fit, if I can keep at it. The point she makes is that you have to be honest.

So in the event that you stumble across this space you will have to put up with a lot of shitty first drafts. I'm committed to writing a little bit every day, regardless of the quality (since I'll rarely have that much time to edit), and to make it brutally honest. Brutally honest shitty first drafts.

I'm fairly certain my mother will stumble across this at some point. She's really talented with the mouse, and google seems to be made for her brand of curiousity. Hmmmmm. Well, so be it. She's one of the voices that hangs around inside my head, forever reading over my shoulder and offering advice whether she's present or not. And many if not all of my actions to this point have been something of an attempt to get her approval, if not just her attention.

That tells me something right there.

Buttered Bread

2006-08-28T22:52:00.000-05:00

The start of the semester at our college is always a hard, stressful time for me. Today I tried to blunt that intensity by saying an internal 'I like you' to every person I met. It's a technique that I applied willfully, and it worked. Instead of the 'edge', when my personality is covered with a veneer of irritation, I was more pleasant and for the most part felt at ease and less tired when I got home.

Still, there's always this pressing feeling that I've missed a calling, that I should be doing something else in life. These days I go in at 7a.m. and get home at 10:30pm. There are only a few of these long days, thankfully. Usually the days are a retailer's dream, plenty of time off and with a Thanksgiving and Christmas break! That time is spent handling book listings, returns of overstock, typical retail stuff. Market, market, market... numbers, look at the numbers, always drive the numbers higher. Our profits are earned on the backs of the hopeful who still believe a college education will lift them out to a higher standard of living. I see a darker side, where a college education serves as the gateway to crushing debt. It is precisely this moment when the banks start owning your ass. That hurts me to be a part of the machine that way.

The thing that hurts me most, however, is the feeling that I have no control. During one of my breaks (I can't really call it a lunch break, more like a furtive excursion to stuff something down my throat) I was thinking of a friend's question to my expressed interest in living simply. She asked if I thought this nascent paradigm shift would take me to a new 'place.' This happened 4 weeks ago, and I'm still tossing the many meanings of 'place' around in my head, trying to find sense of it.

I hate putting this post out there without more editing, but I need to write a little every day, and if I wait until it is perfect this week I'll not get any sleep. So whatever. The question of 'place' isn't going away.

In the meantime, I'll pay attention to what butters my bread.

The Face of Leadership

2006-08-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

Riding home from work tonight I was zipping across the final stretch of asphalt before I got home when I saw some movement along the sidewalk coming towards me from the left. A closer look revealed a bicycle with a very faint light, barely discernable in the dark. I slowed down. Then I saw another bicycle that had already crossed in front of me, also unlit. Then I saw the faint light was a cellphone. Finally I saw that they were both police officers. In the dark. On the sidewalk. On duty. One of them talking on a cellphone. They were not in stealth mode, they were in stupid (or uneducated) mode. Tsk tsk.

In this small town there aren’t really that many traffic issues for me, but I’m an experienced commuter whose been riding in a vehicular manner for many years. I’ve never had a wreck involving a car. I’ve been fortunate, sure, but I’ve also chosen my routes with care and employed common sense riding techniques, avoided busy roads and behaved as a vehicle should. Even so I’ve had drivers yell at me to ‘get the Hell off the road’. I’ve been buzzed with inches to spare on my left. I’ve had drivers look right at me and still turn in front of me. I’ve even had one guy play ‘cat and mouse’ with me once after he buzzed me. In all fairness, I did flip him off immediately prior to the ‘game’ because I was pissed, but I also learned a lesson: the vehicle will win, don’t engage them. It isn’t worth it.

Thankfully, these incidents are rare. Most motorists are kind and considerate and patient (and even perhaps a little envious).

I’m not really a big proponent of the idea that we model our behavior from the police I’m not a huge fan of wearing black or carrying guns or confronting criminals, but in this case I expect some leadership. I expect police officers to model proper behavior on their bicycles since I know that law enforcement officers riding their bicycles are uber-visible. Folks may not think twice about me or any of the ‘unseen’ cyclists in the city, but trust me, they notice law officers on bikes. If they see them riding on the sidewalks they will erroneously assume that this is where bicycles belong, and that will make my life and the lives of my friends in the cycling community less safe.

Get your ass off the sidewalk, light your bicycle if you use it at night, use some reflectors while your at it, and for the sake of all of us, hang up the cellphone and pay attention to where you are going.

About that Fag thing

2006-08-24T22:25:00.000-05:00

I was thinking today about the word 'fag' and why I opted to use it prominently on this webpage, blog, online diary, whatever. It's a harsh term, used with derision by those with no understanding of just what it means to be gay, queer, homo, or, yes, fag.

I'm a gentle guy with none of the rapier wit or mannerisms I associate with the word 'fag'. I think of a FAG being someone who struts above the din of the ordinary and possesses a wicked ability to pull the perfect rejoinder to any situation out of his ass. I'm not that person.

But I have had FAG spray painted on my house before, and that caused me to have several nervous nights wondering what was next. Evidently nothing was next.

I've been called FAG by guys whose asses I could easily have kicked with both my arms tied behind my back (let me keep my legs free, however).

So I took ownership of the word. Consider me the face of FAG. Just another guy trying to find his place in the world.

And a fairly ordinary one, too.

Too Tired to Type

2006-08-23T22:52:00.000-05:00

I had a good road ride tonight, and right now I want to sleep. No more rides for a couple of weeks while the retail sunami hits.

Help Me! Please!

Woo

The Kid Gets a Haircut

2006-08-22T20:26:00.000-05:00

What's so special about a haircut? Well, it's been about a year since the Kid had his last haircut, and a few days ago he asked for another one. It's a big deal.

Because of work, I missed my evening lung-buster with the hill riders, so I talked (semi begged) the Kid into riding his bike with me to the promised haircut appointment. We ended up going to one of the local boxmarts, a move that hurt my spirit since I really dislike giving any coins to the bigboxretails, but it turned out to be nearly 9 miles, a stretch for him, enough to (sort of) satisfy me.

At an intersection we saw a lady with a nice commuter bike and a basket with a small load of groceries. I pulled up beside her and said 'Hi, I'm a bike person too! It's good to see other bike people out!' I think I made her nervous. She was anxious to scurry away, and that left me scratching my head a bit. Oh well.

Over at minuscar I wrote an essay, a simple, embryonic composition, to articulate my thoughts and feelings about trying to live simply, and that changed me. I feel more committed as a result of taking the time to write it out than I did before. Years ago a guy named Tamas told me to write, just write, that the act of writing was transformative. Tamas was scary, a stalker and a hosebag, but that advice, to write, was like a pearl from a sewer. I should have listened then, I think. Today I left another comment there that I'm nearly 50 years old and I've never had an intimate relationship (i .e. boyfriend) that was satisfying to me. No connection where I truly felt understood, safe, or cared about. Not one. That's fucked up.

I felt vulnerable putting that 'out there' - but stronger and richer too.

So this writing 'thing' - I struggle with words, with the cadence and possible perceptions. Oh, and btw, just how honest do I really want to be, I ask myself. But this is more than just a narcissistic foray. Sure, it's 'out there' and sooner or later someone is going to stumble across it, but I have to find my place. I can't help but think that writing will help sort out the jumbled core of 'me'. (ok, so narcissism has a place here too)

If this blog is anything, it will be an honest place.

Cheers

Snowflakes in August

2006-08-21T21:52:00.000-05:00

First day as a petit juror in federal court but I didn't get picked. Normally I would enjoy serving on a jury again except that it's that crazy time where the students are crawling about the store like maggots on dying flesh. Ok, bad metaphor, but you get the idea. I'll move quickly to another metaphor.

After leaving the courthouse, but before returning to work, I stopped by the house to make sure the windows were open. However, when I returned from home after work, the Kid (my kid) had closed the windows and turned on the A/C just as he had done the past couple of days. The past couple of days I had left the A/C on, opting to keep the house quite cool and dry, breaking the streak of 8 days and nights without A/C. Tonight was going to be the start of a new 'streak'.

Why? I spent the morning listening to the conversations of my fellow jurors, and I was amazed (not really) at the amount of conversation that surrounded gas, gas prices, parking, and, you know, car culture in general. And the building was ungodly COLD. Unhealthy Cold. brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr cold. Cold on a day when it didn't need to be that cold and in a building with functional windows, large windows, a building made when A/C wasn't even around. So I entered the house with my rhetorical guns blazing for the kid.

'When I make an effort to open up the windows and turn off the A/C, I don't want you to close them and turn it back on. I don't want our house to be a 'no sweat zone'. You have an A/C unit that is perfect for your room (100 sq. feet) so if you can't live without the chill, then please close your door and cool your room only. Don't cool the whole house (all 580 sq feet of it) so you can sit and play video games in a small part of it. I'm passionate about this.. do you have a clue why?'

His face told me no, that he had no clue, and frankly, he was unsure as to why his dad was on a tear.

'When you get to school tomorrow and have a fast internet connection, google 'mountain top removal and coal' and check out the pictures of what happens to the mountains in appalachia. These mountains that took billions of years to form and only months to level because of the coal they contain. The coal that goes towards making the electricity that powers our addiction to our notion of comfortable. I really don't think I'm going to change the world, but I have to change myself or I suffer on the inside from cognitive dissonance.'

His face told me that I was acting all wierd and stuff, and that the term 'cognitive dissonance' was a 'WTF' moment for him.

It's like this, I said. 'No snowflake has ever claimed responsibility for an avalanche.' Do you understand that?

Yeah, he said. He got that, he said.

Tonight he closed his door and turned on his small window A/C.... but he did set his thermostat higher than before. I slept on top of the blankets, with a chorus of insects and night creatures singing me to sleep.

Small steps for two snowflakes.

Rainy Sunday - Reflective Mood

2006-08-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

Rode the bike into work without preparing for the rain. I was in a predicament about having to ride to the church in the downpour when my secretary suggested I take her vehicle, a Hyundai SUV. That was awfully nice, but the experience reinforced every reason I've avoided cars. From the parking hassles to the sitting in traffic hassles I felt like I was going to go nuts. It's so easy just to ride right to the stockroom, push the bike in and go upstairs. Of course, the 'arriving dry' part was nice, but if I had been smart I could've done that on the bike too.

At the church this guy I used to date said 'oooooo... nice vehicle'. It was clear that somehow I had been elevated in his eyes with this SUV. I had a chuckle on the inside precisely because this SUV is the antithesis of everything that is me. I felt like I was doing the earth wrong, going backward just by accepting a generous offer. He thought I was moving up. Conflicting paradigms.

The service was especially calming today. The sound of the rain (and the absence of the air handler noise) provided such a fine ambience this a.m. that I let my fingers pick music to match the gentle feeling. One hanging tone turned into two and then a phrase and then counterpoint and then a conversation with a life of its own. Peggy S told me afterwards that she appreciated the offering, a comment that warmed me. In that moment I felt understood. I felt valued.

I so enjoy deep water.

Then there was another one.

2006-08-19T16:11:00.000-05:00

Another blog out there in the vast rolling electronic sea of blogs. Woo hoo! Or is that more appropriately, Who's Woo(dog)?

Well, hell, I don't know who Woo is and I'm supposed to be Woo. Consider Woo a work in progress. I've tossed around the notion of writing a book titled 'Fag Diary from the Midwest'. I really think it's a good title and would make an interesting book - that is, if I could actually write. Perhaps this 'blog' will be that effort. A Fag diary from the midwest. hmmmmm.

When writing I almost always imagine 'vast hordes' reading what I write, but I'll be surprised if even one person reads this post.

Stay tuned, if you will. I'll write more. Maybe better, maybe worse.

But in the meantime, surprise me, please.

Woo