words, words, words
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If I begin to detail myself here, will you understand?
P. I am me
Q. I don't always know exactly who that is
R. I am Quaker
S. I like words and playing with them
T. I like genmaicha tea
U. I like the word napkin more than most others
V. I spend time walking my neighborhood
W. I cook rice often
X. I sleep well most every night
Y. I eat large amounts of fruit and vegetables
Z. I munch, sleep, write, create, cook, bike, watch, walk, listen, hope, learn, drink, live, breathe, touch, know, question, taste, copy, read, stare, carry, talk, dance, finger, try.
raisin@gmail.com
albums:
Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs
Erasure: I Say, I Say, I Say
Depeche Mode: Black Celebration
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On?
David Bowie: Hunky Dory
George Michael: Listen without Prejudice
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
songs:
Wild is the Wind: Nina Simone
Come Undone: Duran Duran
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini: Rachmaninov
My Funny Valentine: Chet Baker
Feeling Yourself Disintegrate: The Flaming Lips
This Must Be the Place: The Talking Heads
Hyperballad: Bjork
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
i took my first bike ride on my yellow racing bike since, well, november or something. the gears on it were really messed up, and i finally got it to the shop for repairs. i've been biking all winter, but on my cheap street bike, just moseying around town. oh, the difference. imagine driving an old chevy for a while, adjusting to its quirks and speeds, the way it turns, etc. and then, hopping in a souped-up BMW that drives like a dream. that was the feeling i had on my racing bike today - it's so smooth, so fast, so comfortable; it's perfect.
i grew up biking - my dad toted us around in a little bugger - a two seater car - trailing behind his bike before we could ride. as soon as i was big enough, i was cycling, up in the mountains of colorado. my dad would come beside me and put his hand on my seat to help push me up the hills when i couldn't make it with my three speed. when we moved to oklahoma, our biking slowed down, but not before we trained for the freewheel, a ride across the state in a week. my dad and i did it on a tandem bike (double seater) when i was eleven, cycling about 70 miles a day for seven days, camping outside at night. my brother rode his own bike at 13. my first time in spandex . . .
it wasn't until I moved back to colorado that I picked up cycling again. once I quit the track team (i couldn't get the hang of the hammer throw and hated my teammates), my dad let me use one of his nice bikes. i started riding it around quite a bit, mostly on the academy roads (18,000 acres fall within the grounds). I even met up with the cycling club for a while and rode with them. i learned that cyclists are mostly difficult, aggressive people i didn't want to be around. but i also learned some nice routes of where to bike and such. the hills, oh the hills around there were murderous. like a roller coaster, up and down so hard. it was a thrill to go down them, who knows how fast - i didn't have a bike computer then. I got into an accident while biking up in Frisco (small mountain town near where i grew up) - a car pulled to the right and parked in front of me, so i slammed into it, flipped over the car, destroyed the bike. i was fine, fortunately. and even more fortunately, my dad bought me a new bike.
i had never had my own bike before. i had always used the several my dad had while growing up. oh, but this one. this one, the same i have now, was bright yellow, with a black seat. it was so smooth riding around outside the shop; it moved underneath you, like it was just made to go so fast. one revolution of the pedal and you flew. i rode that bike hard while at the academy. in the snow, after the snow, in the rain, in the hundred mile an hour winds, up all the hills, loving it. it was my only way to escape the academy and my dorm room (we weren't allowed to drive during the week most of the time). i would ride off base, up into the hills, through neighborhoods of non-military people, of houses. you don't know what four years living in a military dorm will do to you. these things were amazing to me.
when I moved to Sacramento, the bike was one of the first things I pulled out of the U-Haul to use. I learned the suburbs on that bike. found bike trails, bike lanes on the sides of streets even! I saw very few other bikers, but i got hooted and hollered at by women driving by. I learned to really ride in Sacramento - when i moved into the city, I was a mile and a half from the bike trail, which i would hop on and could go 30 miles one way. that trail and my bike were my closest friends - I rode at least a hundred miles a week, up and down that trail, watching the seasons change and the trees bloom - things i had never bothered to notice before. i noticed the time change, the days getting shorter, the bother of daylight savings time, stealing even more time from the day. why do you learn some things so late? i suppose we can't pay attention to every thing, and finally, i was paying attention to things around me. i used to sing all the time on my bike, go through all the beach boys songs i could remember, whatever came into my head - loudly. i did full centuries (100 mile rides), metric centuries, triathlons, so many bike rides through the foothills of the Sierra's, Mark Twain's eventual home. Around Tahoe and Donner Pass, and all through sacramento. I even biked to work, eleven miles one way, a few times. i wasn't even that good of a cyclist, really. i never tried to be all that fast, didn't spend hours a day like other cyclists i met at races. but it still took up a lot of time, focused my energy. i get excited, just writing about it.
I stopped when I moved to St Louis. the roads were so bad, the cars were so angry towards cyclists. when a cop almost ran me over, i gave up. i finally pulled my bike out two years later, last summer, to ride it around some. it felt good then, too. but awkward - i was so out of practice. i rode it a fair amount last summer, but what i really got used to was riding my street bike, just tooling around town, relaxing. maybe i needed that break, couldn't jump onto the fast bike for a while. this past year has been so strange - i've felt like i just needed to do nothing. and so i have, mostly. but i did spend some time on my bike. so riding today was like a welcome home celebration. i'm in better shape than i expected; i'm so excited about biking, seeing what comes of it. i started laughing again - biking and laughing has always gone hand in hand for me. something comes up from the energy inside me - it's like my body tries to get me ready for the exercise, but goes overboard, and i have to laugh the energy off. so yeah, i ride around, cracking up - not the whole time of course, but for a good five, ten minutes, because everything is so wonderful, somehow, all the bad fades away, and all I can see are the incredible parts of life, and this hearty laugh bellows out like a buffoon, i don't care who hears me, i can't stop anyhow.
It's been almost a year now - Saturday will mark the day i put my uniform on after my month-long leave, while the war in Iraq began. Saturday will also mark the day I received approval for my conscientious objection request, and that I was to be discharged a week later. I've been at a standstill since then, necessarily so, to shrug off all of that trash I gathered during the nine years i was in the Air Force. I don't know that's it all off of me. probably will take many more years. but it's time to stand up and move again. i'm not sure what that means, but my energy level is high right now, for the first time in quite a while. something about endorphins released while exercising and laughing. i hope it continues.
3:42 PM
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