Some Titles Are Just Lame

So I wrote a post today. It was a true account of someone I met and briefly allowed my life to intersect, though she was a slave. Possibly an indentured servant, I'm not sure what the nice word would be. The story ends with her family dying. So, I decided to leave that one alone. I think my serious writing has gotten a little too heavy. Desperation held me in its icy grasp. I considered doing a meme. Honestly, I'm afraid Laurel would make fun of me, and her scorn is more than I can bear.



So, to keep it simple, I found some old pictures I took a couple years ago. I like them and will probably throw some on here when I need to illustrate a point. For Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean, I wish I had had this:







It is too late. The moment is over.

When I do finally hit publish on the story of me and Misha, which is not her real name, I have a picture of her home. You can not make out the tragedy from the mists of the Straits of Malacca. You also can not smell the water by looking at the picture, which is probably best.

The significance of the individual is lost on the mechanizations of the Earth. I was reminded of this several times this weekend during the Mike The Headless Chicken Days/Fruita Fat Tire Festival (please ignore the first two government sponsored minutes of this video). The Earth reached up with its mighty paws and smote me. Luckily, no concussions or anything spectacular this time, just some blood on the trail.

I've tried to pick up women in locales unassociated with the cult of mountain biking before. It doesn't work. They look at your shins with the snake track of sprocket damage and scraped knees and bruised bones. Then they ask a reasonable question:

"What are you, twelve years old?"

Distractions

Quick and dirty, I'm going to be away from here for awhile, maybe two weeks. Some of you are already aware of my accelerating schedule, so I won't elaborate. Since it takes no work besides being a pretentious prick, I'll keep up my minor, but sexy, half of The Five if I can. If you need placated, I always thought these posts were my best, proven by the fact I buried them before anyone could read them:

A Tribute To Ray
A Conversation With A Former Life
A Recipe
A Dream
A Rant
A Trip

I'm curious to see what others people may have liked, as this has been around a year or so now. Leave suggestions in the comments and I'll try to chime in sometime around next Friday or so.

In a side note of minor humorous value, I just had to go through all my posts to make sure I said nothing bad about waitstaff in the history of this site. Call me obsessive. I might be a little more self-conscious than I admit to being at times. I am perhaps a softie who hates to think of hurting anyone. Besides, I used to be waitstaff. If the job was demeaning and geared toward the uneducated poor, I have probably done it. Call me obsessive.

Concussion, Contusion, and Minor Whiplash

I have to point out briefly the benefits of a spectacular crash and a new set of contusions.

First among the list is the endorphin and adrenaline rush that courses through you hematos dendrite self for a few hours. The rush I can only describe as euphoric is comparable to any number of chemicals that are fun and enjoyable, though illegal. It is not illegal, however, to place your face in the dirt and slide on it for a while.

The larger benefit is the bump in your personal stock price among the opposite sex. With blood trickling from my nostril and a severe reddish brown stain of bruising over my left eye, I found women enthralled at my mere presence. Yes, children, they love to see a man who has battle damage. Had I known this earlier, I would have spent less on drinks in clubs and more on two wheeled conveyance.

This is OK, I have basked briefly in the attention of an astoundingly beautiful woman whom I have been quietly fascinated by for weeks, I also have a date Sunday with another girl I would normally not consider in my league. She actually witnessed the crash, and she has assured me that it looked as legendary as it felt. She is a lovely woman, but her approach to proposition I can only describe as “predatory.”

In short, the skin I have lost is repaid by the gods of testosterone. Thank you, Ping the enormous and Pong the bold.

On the other hand, I have been phased out of someone’s life for good. She is perfect for someone, though I see a crashing pile of burning parts down our road. Not that it matters, she found my leaving to be too big a burden to bear, and I would not have let her wait for me to come home anyway. We talked things out, and things are still friendly. She was a good girl, and right now good girls are not a priority. Good girls always hate you for leaving, and I am not a fan of being hated.

Not that it matters, I’ve had enough and so I’m getting out. I’m leaving now. I’m a long gone daddy. I wish I could say I don’t need her anyhow. That is true in the strictest sense of black and white truth. I don’t need her. I need air. I need water. I need a drink. I don’t need her, in fact I know I am better off without her waiting behind me, dragging me down for a year.

I apologize to all the good girls of the world. Especially the ones I have met, since I only meet them on my way somewhere else. I'm always crashing something.

Giro

I rarely endorse a product. In fact, I never endorse a product that is not limestone filtered and comes from Lynchburg, Kentucky.

I would like to thank and heartily recommend Giro helmets. I loved my old helmet, it's fit, it's finish, the refreshing ventilation properties. Now I have laid that helmet to rest, it has been given its due place in the carbon reinforced Valhalla. Fear not, it died honorably.

In all seriousness, I have seen these things take licks from a 16 oz. framing hammer, but today I managed to break one nearly in half. I'm not in the hospital, I don't need stitches, and my pupils are OK with life. The helmet took my 205ish pound bulk and the extra eight pounds of various gear and water I need to get my box of rocks up the hills impacting at whatever speed could make an object my size fly thirty feet over level ground.

The best feature of the helmet was the discount I got for bringing it back in. I appreciate those who appreciate loyalty.

If you need a helmet, check these guys out.

Pyro

A memory accosted me in the street yesterday. I threw a quick jab into the throat, but it swept the leg, Ralph Macchio style. I went down, my knees are not my strong suit, the poor little guys been through alot.

So anyway, this memory was of the time I was set on fire. I've been on fire a couple times, but this was more memorable.

So I was on the flight deck of the USS Constellation, a badass old heap of cold-rolled Bessemer joy if there ever was one, and I needed to make sure my machine could kill innocents and conscripts when an academy educated white man decided that was necessary. The flood of weakened sodium lights washed down on us in the cold, dark night in the Gulf. The machine was a hulk of titanium, boron, and aluminium. You would recognize one if you saw it, it is quite popular. The machine festoons itself with bulbous apparati along its sinewy flanks and under its flat belly that are there to take other machines and put them on heads or in buildings. Or on ships, though the US Navy isn't in the ship killing business anymore. The apparati need checked to ensure that salt and sand and the erosion of time have not rendered them unlethal. First you have to get electrical power to the machine.

Along the non-skid (a combination of epoxy and broken glass) surface of the deck, you'll notice holes. Or you won't and you'll fall in one. It is dark on a ship of war at night. The holes contain the large cables responsible for transferring power from the belly of the iron beast to the heart of the supersonic death machines resting on its back. I will spare you what useless trivia I can about this process.

In the bad old days, when naval aviation afforded you higher risks of maiming and death than being an infantryman in the Marines, we had to manually lock in the cables and power. Meaning you had to start the voltage, 800V worth, from ship and confirm with an electromagnetically held switch under the nose of the bird.

I had a friend named Trim. We had been months out at sea and had not heard from loved ones in a good, long time. When the earnest killing part of a war starts, the powers of good usually remove your ability to communicate off of a ship. I suspect that civilization would be a hobble if it was allowed to represent itself in the form of wives and mothers. Hand lifting of thousands of tons daily and lost sleep over our later confirmed suspicions of occurrences back home had frazzled us. Trim forgot to await my signal to start the voltage. As I rammed the plug home, an explosion of various high current DC and AC sparks shot around me. The sparks burned my hands singed my eyebrows. My shirt, as all red shirts with VF-(insert number) on the chest and back, was soaked in a cocktail of jet fuel, hyd fluid, and whatever other nitrate laden substance I had been playing with. So, the shit caught on fire.

I beat the flames off of me, and since the shirt itself is not flammable it was not difficult. Once the fire was out, the next rational thought I had was of home and Colorado and the girl that was waiting for me. Trim, still kneeling by the rat hole, caught a face full of steel toe. I think I choked him a little. We both left the flight deck bleeding and angry. We were still friends.


******


Unrelated update: If you thought bullshit blogosphere pretense and argumentative subject matter needed a home, it now has one. The Five.

Also, it is raining.

Everyday The Same

So it is uncouth to repeat themes every week or so in a blog, though I refuse to acknowledge that this corner of the Internet fits that definition. The maxim of subject rotation in internet writing limits severely what possibly can be updated.

Got drunk on bourbon and stared at the ceiling thinking all kids of genius into the world. Covered that recently, so it's out.

Girl is on my mind. No, not one I've written about much, one that I tried to keep from getting in and close on me. Spent a night with her dealing with my asshole tendency to be a little too perfect for women when our time is short. Covered that last week.

Curled 150 pounds. I am a badass. Cover that with some regularity.

I rode away my hatreds and frustrations, or at least beat them back into their cave in my worried and troubled mind. I love that damn bike. Covered that.

Women I know are having troubles that I can't assist. I can't help but wish that I could beat the holy fuck out of anyone who hurts people I care about, regardless of how much they deserve it. I am a violent person. That's been covered.

Leaving soon. Got it.

All this going on and nothing to write about.

This Is Indulgent

The motivation to improve one's body physically defies explanation. The body is obviously a machine in working order if you are able to even consider improving it. The explanation of your need to change that body at the expense of comfort confounds those who view the state of their carnality good enough. You'll get no explanations today. I make excuses about needing to be in good shape and requiring absolute physical readiness imminently, but it has nothing to do with that on any deeper level.

Today I sat on a bench surrounded by the smells of humanity, and I very much hate the vast majority or humanities offlacatorially detectable qualities, and fought a battle. I won't say it was a battle with myself, or with and ideal, or even a battle with weakness. The battle was with two chunks of iron. I sat on the bench with them in my hands resting heavily on my thighs. I could feel their weight settling onto the ciclismo hardened quadriceps that I love in a very vain corner of my soul. The iron keeps sinking farther into them while I try to match my breathing, my thoughts, and every vibrating breath of my metabolic monsters that are aching in my chest to Lemmy Kilmeister's invitation to riot.

I lay back, intensity screaming from the large muscle groups that have already taken a beating. The last four sets, every lift and breath and focus was leading up to this. These weights have always sat next to my last maximum ability. When I would grab the hexagonal barbells to the left of these, the greater size of the weights in my hand would bourgeon and they would glow in haughty distaste for me. For my inability to master them.

I pull them away from my thigh and let them rest on my chest. With one last breath closely monitored escaping me, I move the weights outboard until their heft is held by my shoulders and chest. That's the way I like it baby, I don't want to live forever.

I shove. There's no need to control the speed, I haven't the power to move them any faster than a steady crawl. But the crawl is steady. Power chords ring in my ears as the two weights meet above my straining neck and ring out like bells. Four more. My spotter is ready for my shoulders tortured in their short life to fail me. The weights move up again with a determination. They ring again as iron and iron meet above. One more. Slow and unsteady, but still lifting. The weights rest on my bent arms, my chest feels torn under their gravity. My spotter is bored. I hate spotters.

I look up at the ceiling and tell him, "Two more."

Steadier, breathe out going up, in coming down. My awareness of the room is gone. There is nothing but me, Lemmy and the dumbbells. Two more down, the last straining. "One more."

I hate people who make noise in the gym. I don't grunt or yelp or make any of those other noises men make. I blow air out of my nose, clench my jaw and shove. And don't forget the joker. I get the weight up without effort, but with my chest failing.

I bring them down as I inhale. They sit on my chest while I kick with my feet to lift my body back up to sitting. The weights hit the floor, small and insignificant. They no longer matter as the stench of men and exertion touches me and the four walls of the dungeon gym pull in out of the dark.

Love

I am in love, brethren.

But, you say, you don't believe in the convention! And no, I do not. Love is a loosely cemented conglomerate of several tasty states of being unless you are formed largely of bauxite and scandium. If you are a pleasing shade of aggressive and light to the touch, then I love you, or at least could were not my heart stolen.

So, with all the rocks (literal rocks, I eat them) eating up most of the displacement of whatever body cavity we love others with, where can this loose conglomerate of affection and commitment and lust among other, larger ideal nouns, this love, where does it live? See, love is a many splendored thing, but it must have some fairly light calcified cementation properties to its conglomeration because it easily is salted into small spaces. That is neither here nor there.

So, let us name what a loved one does for us:

A loved one supports.
A loved one enables.
A loved one obeys, though it gives commands.
A loved one likes to be ridden very, very hard.
A loved one responds to the slightest caress, but does not flip the fuck out when you over-correct.

Could this loved one use as little more rear travel? Maybe, but my affinity for hard-tails has left me cold for the soggy, soft bottoms of some black diamond beauty. Me and my Element, we went out into the wilds of the desert where the single lines of freedom run freer that the wind and we found our bliss. We were unable to capture it, but the pursuit, the following of our Bliss made us two in love.

My search is over.

I love you.

Pictures forthcoming.