I Want to Ride My Bicycle

I haven’t ridden my bicycle all summer. Not once. The tires are flat. The tires are flat. That should be a crime. I should be in handcuffs.

The other day a kid was flying down my street on his bicycle (I live near the top of a hill). In front of my house, he lost control. He went over his handlebars and onto the pavement, face-first. His eye was bleeding, swelling shut, and his radius or ulna, probably radius, was broken and made a protrusion of skin on his arm. There was much screaming. I was napping and his cries woke me. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. He was sitting on the neighbor’s stoop, a bloody cloth held against his eye. The expressions on the faces of those around him told me it was serious and they were on the phone with 911, there was nothing I could do, so I callously went back to bed.

I thought about the time I was a kid, probably ten, since that is my go-to age for my childhood — the truth being that I don’t have a good mental clock for memories — and I was riding my bike around a gym at a park. As I turned a corner, I collided with an older gent on a bike. I flew over my handlebars and onto the the black asphalt, head-first. I looked back to see what happened, almost instinctually, like when one trips on a crooked sidewalk and instantaneously feels embarrassed and inquisitive. The older bicyclist cursed at me, told me I had “better not messed up [his] bike”. I loss consciousness. I came to with my head in my mother’s lap and on the picnic blanket we had set out for lunch before my fateful bike ride. A cool damp cloth rested on my head, a red-stained towel laid within my periphery. I could feel dried tears and matted blood-soaked hair. I had been bleeding from a scrape across most of my scalp.

Some people can be so cruel.

Complement

My PhD thesis is nearing completion. I’m excited and stressed. I’m fairly certain I am developing carpal tunnel syndrome and have initiated steps to combat it. It seems like forever ago that I was in San Francisco running up and down hills, making observations, and relaxing. Since then I’ve been to Boston twice, Michigan, Canada, Britain, and Scotland, but San Francisco was somehow the most relaxing–despite the fact that I was overwhelmed by a terrible cough.

At a conference in the UK, during the conference dinner, a speech was made wherein the attendees were asked to stand if they were at their first conference in this fifth in a series of conferences. I was at my third so I remained sitting. Then those who were under twenty-eight were asked to stand, again, I remained seated. Then those who had been to three or more and were over forty were asked to stand. Seated again. There were no more calls for attendees to stand. Does that put me in limbo? In the gaps of Venn Diagram of those who are worthy of being called out. The complement of the union of all that matters… mah ha ha.

Regardless… ugh, wrist… regardless, I feel as though I seem to often reside within these gaps.

Accidental Drawings: Control-Shift

Is it still vorticism if I am using archaic command line programming tools?

Self-Immolation

A day or two before completing Quim Monzo’s two-part novel Gasoline I told my friend how much I was enjoying it, how familiar it was to me, which she was surprised to hear because normally familiarity makes me feel unoriginal and depressed, but this was somehow different. I tried to explain that there was a frailty and honesty in the characters that was a welcome change from other instances of shared brain syndrome.

But then, upon reading the last few sentences where a character is describing what might be his first bout with insomnia, a strange thing happened within my brain. A tingle developed near my brain stem, followed by a sudden wave that surged through my brain and which I rode to the completion of the book. It felt like the reawakening and release of a stored train of thought, perhaps from my own first bout with insomnia. And the description was so on target and familiar that I wanted to throw the book across the street of the cafe I sat at and curse at it. I could feel the corners of my lips furl, my eyes narrow, and my eyebrow scowl as an unexpected rage surfaced from my mind. The feeling of familiarity was too much and it sparked an unexpected reaction from within.

After the smoke cleared, so to speak, I was sitting there quietly thinking to myself, how did Monzo do that? It is as if he was soaking me in gasoline and those last few sentences ignited me.

There was a young man on the television, he was on the verge of tears, saying that this was the most important thing in his life. You could clearly see and hear the passion he must have felt, I thought he was going to light himself on fire in protest. He was upset that basketball player Lebron James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. The song, “We are the World”, was produced to raise funds for and awareness of the famine in Africa^wikipedia, Cleveland Cavalier fans sung a parody of this song in an effort to keep Lebron James in Cleveland. The late Manute Bol, another basketball player, spent all the money he earned from his 10 years in the NBA, and many say his life, trying to improve the conditions in Sudan.

I am just saying… and I’m not doing enough, or anything for that matter. I listen to songs on repeat for hours on end, but to what end? Familiarity with a sentiment at the cost of strangeness to the spectrum? Or to a severe crush on Julie Doiron, all you need is unattainable love, to paraphrase a pop group from the past.

Revelations from Edinburgh

Edinburgh, Scotland — Subterranean garden porch at Wellington Coffee, above me, luckier patrons have a street view. In my view are a ring of doors, in full “pick a door, choose you fate, only behind one of these doors lies salvation”. These are half-sized doors made of brown-painted wood and probably give access to under the street. Neil Young’s Cinnamon girl is playing on the cafes sound system. I am taken back to high school and listening to the classic rock station which played full albums overnight. I would set a tape to record every album. If I feel asleep, I would try to wake myself up in thirty minutes to flip the cassette. I often failed. Hence my collection of half albums. 

Cinnamon Girl was the last song I managed to record from that overnight piracy session. Helter Skelter is the next song and I defintely do not have that song on that cassette, it wasn’t until college that I heard that song. If this is the album I recorded then and if it is playing in order, which seems to be the case as I haven’t recognized the remaining songs, then Sugar Mountain is also on this album. I remember writing down the lyrics to Sugar Mountain during a free journaling session in my high school senior English class. I didn’t know what to write, just as now I often find myself staring at a blank page thinking of writing, and this comes out “today I went to the store for a quart of milk and when I paid the woman at the counter she asked if I wasn’t a little too old for milk, which caught me off–this is stupid and boring, my journal is stupid and boring, why do i even bother! Why am I so boring!?” Thus, in one such instance, in high school, the one time where my life should not have been boring, but in fact was very much so, I opted instead to write down the lyrics to Sugar Mountain:

Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons,
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you’re thinking that
You’re leaving there too soon,
You’re leaving there too soon.

It’s so noisy at the fair
But all your friends are there
And the candy floss you had
And your mother and your dad.

After the lyrics I posed a series of questions: just what is this sugar mountain? Heaven? A coke-induced nirvana? I think there were other questions but I have since forgotten. It turns out Sugar Mountain is a town in North Carolina.  Following that, some speculation and analysis.  Thus was born the haphazard and oftentimes pigheaded and wrong critic you now read; living up to, if not epitomizing, the all too true adage, “Those who can’t, criticize.”  

I write best when I criticize myself honestly, somewhat honestly.