That's All He Wrote
And that down there is the last I've written in the "Pure, Simple, Fantastic" vein. Like I said, it was really more an exercise in the "write SOMETHING, no matter what"- school of thought. I've discovered over time that I'm more of a "write when the inspiration strikes" type of guy.
Thanks for reading.
Maybe some day we'll all find out what REALLY happened to Duke and Rock n' Roll...
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part IX
IX.
The eight-legged creature reached out with two tentacles and delivered the two foreigners from the hopelessness of finding the ocean bottom and a potential eternal resting place. The octopus snatched them out of mid-water and began to pass them from limb to limb to limb to limb to limb to limb like the most skilled juggler of all time, before attempting to feed the plastic men to itself. However, either the taste or the texture of the two misshapen creatures was unpalatable. The humpy beast spit them out and quickly darted back to the anonymous depths, leaving behind a puff of ink to make for a getaway.
As Duke and Rock n’ Roll again sank farther into the blackness they were floating in space, expansive, with no up or down, a great thunderous churning could be heard, parting the water like a giant oil tanker. But it was no oil tanker. This was a living, breathing beast. Lonely, calling out through the void in low moans. The whale, mistaken by ancient sailors as a sea monster, defied gravity as its heavy, barnacled body slowly worked through the water. Eyes closed, he nearly slept as he traveled, no fear of obstacles for miles all around. Mouth open, he sucked up all surrounding insignificant life, a vacuum with hardened, wrinkled skin. Duke’s body and Rock n’ Roll were captured by the direct flow into the whale’s mouth and were soon in slimy, compact world of undigested shrimp and kelp and briny, tiny microscopic cities of translucent non-imals.
But they were not long in the belly of the beast, for the gastroesophageal systems of whales had not evolved to digest plastics and the two commandoes were expelled out of the beast’s mouth like tiny water-to-water missiles. The giant leviathan made a grunting noise similar to an old man recovering from a sneeze and slowly swam away to its lonely, slow-moving future.
Against the Machine
Just got done reading
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel. (Unfortunately the bulk of the book was about how we, the "Internet 2.0" culture, are becoming less human and not about "being human.")Anyway, his last paragraph is a real doozy and pretty much sums up the author's dark predictions for the internet's effect on humankind and very neatly sums up what's at stake:
There is only one person in the world who connects with us entirely, antiseptically, and without fear of judgment or rejection. He is at the very heart of our desire for convenience. He is at the other end of our wrist and finger. The less he needs the actual presence of other people, the more he will depend on goods and services to keep him company and populate his isolation. The more distracted and busy his isolation, the more he will measure people by their capacity to please him, or to gratify him without "getting in his face." For the only face he can bear will be his own.Here's to seeing other people as ends in themselves, rather than as means to our ends!
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by
Eric WeinerMy rating:
4 of 5 starsOther than the intriguing subject matter, a real strength of this book is the author's literary style. Weiner is very conversational and humorous at times, but in that unique way that a trained journalist is able... It was a pleasure to read his adventures.
Equally uncomfortable with the "happiness" and positive psychology movements, Weiner doesn't get bogged down in the surprising amount of available research and science and instead presents a (well-informed) regular person's search for what exactly "happiness" is and why it's so elusive and seemingly counterintuitive. For instance, great happiness and misery can be found in similar environments throughout the world--poverty and affluence are no guarantees of either end of the spectrum.
And the author's struggle to face these kinds of contradictions, along with a slew of others, are exactly what made his voice trustworthy and interesting for me.
Part travel book, part soft philosophy book, all worth the couple of days it took to read it!
View all my reviews >>
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VIII.
VIII.
And then the crabs came.
They descended upon the action figures like the Americans on Normandy. “Peter and the Wolf”-type music played in the distance as they shuffled about, claws and pinchers clicking. A group of three smaller crabs were linked like a crustacean chain, straining together and pulling in the same direction to remove Rock n’ Roll from his sandy grave as if they were either playing tug of war with his lower torso or saving him from falling in ice, Boy Scout-style. Meanwhile two larger crabs had managed to separate Duke’s head from his body and were bandying it about, applying an impromptu game of midnight catch with a face of chiseled, handsome good looks.
Just as the small group was able to extricate Rock n’ Roll and set him right with the world again, a great crashing wave came from nowhere, sending the whole scene into a wash of tornadoed chaos- crabs flying every which way into the sea, Rock n’ Roll and the headless Duke strewn into the ocean as well, powerless, determined by an uncaring universe.
Farther and farther the tide took the two out to the sea. They had been jettisoned out at least a mile before they began to sink in slow, slow motion amongst the bubbles and darkness. They tumbled an flipped in the inky wetness until a fast, flitting shape appeared on the periphery, jetting this way and that-- a mysterious, graceful shape.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VII.
VII.
There is the phrase “…with lives precariously hanging in the balance,” which would seem an appropriate description of Duke and Rock n’ Roll’s situation, were it not for the fact that they were inanimate objects. Their lifeless faces were like Japanese samurai art, frozen in time-locked with an expression of strain, as if damned to forever be engaged in battle. So, in a way their visions of vistas high above the ground were wasted on them, as well as on the gull and its dull, black eyes.
As the wind battered the gull this way and that, Duke and Rock n’ Roll were held above the ground in its claws like potential sacrifices to the Earth. As mile after mile of marshy coastland unraveled beneath them, it was the closest that plastic soldiers would get to the magnificent last few minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or the first Star Trek or The Black Hole or some other movie with a fantastical voyage through spacescapes. The earth might as well be an alien planet when seen from the altitude and vantage point of birds.
Ocean
Hill
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Hill
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Sand
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Hill
Cracked-
Mud-
Earth
Ocean
Hill
Sand
Seemingly all the elements conducive to the creation of life breezed by below them at a hurried clip.
And then, in an instant, it was over.
The seagull let out a screeching cry and released the two soldiers to the peril of a freefall. Falling rigidly for a couple seconds, they hit the deserted grey beach with a quick THWIP! Sound, unnoticed by man, hardly noticed by nature. Rock n’ Roll managed to land with his head buried directly into the ground, presenting his olive-green-pantsed ass to the universe. Duke survived the free fall by slamming into the sand on his side, reclining like an ancient Greek would while partaking of dinner at table.
And they stayed there.
Day turned to night, receded to dawn. Shadows of clouds passed slowly by.
The moon at night cycled through phases. Waxing. Waning. Gibbous. Crescent. Sliver. Full. Never cognizant of this manmade presence splintered into the coastline wilderness
Homework Sucks
I'm currently reading _Great Expectations._ Here's a passage where Dickens could have just written "I wasn't good at school." But there's no ART in that!
"I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemd every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale."
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VI.
VI.
As you were out to sea, nearly drowning, the plastic militiamen were swept away on a most strange and unforeseen adventure. Like most adventures, theirs started in the jowls of a beach-combing sea-mutt. While you were submerged beneath the waves, this scampish young dog with matted hair the color and consistency of wet diapers came running from out of nowhere- on a bee-line course to your collection of bellicose figurines. With equally quick swiftness he had shaken the bag loose with his muscular neck and snatched up the first things to drop out- your precious ‘Duke’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll.’ And as stealthily and mysteriously as he had appeared he disappeared up the beach again with two new playthings in his mouth.“Wow,” I said. “You sure do speak dramatically and insightfully for a crusty old anonymous guy on a beach.”
Quoth the seaman,
Well, I’ve seen many things in…“…I mean,” I interrupted, “You speak like some people write. It’s almost as if you could serve as some kind of ironic, archetypal narrator in a metatextual short story.” I myself was amazed at my well-developed vocabulary for a ten-year old.
The dog-I shall thenceforth call him Cerberus- ran at full speed away from the waves, towards the dry dunes. He weaved in and out of the staggered clusters of anonymous vacationers- around and even between their tanned, coconut-scented legs. All the while he kept in his tight jaws Duke and Rock n’ Roll, chomping down on them as if they would serve as his final meal in the near future.
Cerberus ran.
And ran. Like a salivating running machine, his tongue hanging out. But still he held on to Duke and Rock n’ Roll. Until the time came for a rest and he slowed to a trot. Trot slowing to a walk. Walk becoming a sleepy stumble until Cerberus collapsed on the wet sand of the beach, finally laying down for a spread-eagle nap, loosening his death-grip on Duke and Rock n’ Roll for the first time.I sat in rapt attention listening to this odd man’s even odder tale, wondering the same thing that most sociologists would wonder at this point: where are the parents? Well, when sociologists have dreams of their own, perhaps
they can have parents in them!
Immediately after hitting the ground, the exhausted dog fell into a deep slumber. Caressed by the sound of the gulls overhead, the steady whoosh of the wind and waves enveloping him in their peaceful anesthesia, he drifted far, far away into a dream world of his own…
All men are great in their dreams, Sigmund Freud once said, and dogs are really no different. Beneath their fur and tails and collars and keen senses of hearing are hearts of flesh-pumping blood. But Cerberus was different. He found himself running in slow motion through a watery world of fire hydrants as plentiful as trees in a human’s dream world. He ran without ceasing, without tiring. Yet in his heart was the vague sensation that he was failing. Failing his dog-wife. His dog children. Even his loving human owner and wife were disappointed in his actions. It was the unceasing pressure in his head- the instinct that all of these dogs and people were ultimately let down by his failures. These vague feelings plagued his dreams and had even begun to spill over into his waking hours. Many were the hours he would sit on his haunches, staring at the gray old wooden fence of the backyard where he lived. As if that fence would move or speak some word of worldly wisdom to him.
But it never did.
It was unchanging, consistently fulfilling its unceasing purpose: to keep him in the yard…“Wait a minute,” the dream-me interjected. “How do
you know what this dog was dreaming?”
Sometimes you can just tell, the mysterious salty dog in the overcoat finally replied after sitting in silence for an uncomfortable few seconds.
As Cerberus lay in his unquiet slumber, dreaming his dreams, a lone seagull circled overhead crying out in that lonely way that seagulls and coyotes do, as if someone will answer. While uninterested in the strange lump of mottled fur on the sand, the seagull noticed two small plastic novelties right nest to the dog’s mouth- your ‘Duke’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll.’ Attracted to their bite-size proportions the seagull swooped down to disencumber the dog of the out-of-place toys. For fear of waking the dog and betraying common wisdom involving sleeping dogs, the bird gingerly stepped around in the sand, pecking at the machine gunner and sergeant just long enough to arrange them for transport in his beak. And just as the dog exhaled an unconscious snort, the seagull was up in the air again with what it thought would make a lovely breakfast for the kid-gulls back home.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part V.
V.
(This is the part of the story where you hear a harp glissando and see a fuzzy, white-bordered, cloud scene as a new camera shot zooms onto your screen. If this were a TV show or movie. Which it’s not. It’s written.)
I quickly arose from my near-drowning, still smelling salt in my nostrils, heart wanting to leap out of my ten-year old chest. As I gulped in oxygen like it was kool-aid, I looked around my sun-blocked surroundings to find my defiance of death went unnoticed by all present on the beach that day.
Save one pair of eyes.
As seagulls cried and little kids from other families ran laughing in ill-fitting swimsuits I noticed I was being watched by an unlikely, stone-still figure. Sitting on the remains of an ancient tree, washed upon the beach from who-knows-where, was an old gentleman. He stared in my direction, piercing eyes spanning the distance as if he were shooting a laser-beam into my soul. It was like when General Zod lifted a car without using his hands. When you know you’ve been watched with that kind of focus, you can do naught but go.
And so I went. As I neared the stranger, he neither waved me on nor shooed me away. I saw upon close inspection a gray beard and weathered long trench coat, an odd fashion choice for a coastal day in the south. His clothing and squinty eyes betrayed a man accustomed to the elements, to sorrow. For sorrow is being married to a wench as spirited and unforgiving as the sea. Perhaps he was a whaler or pirate. Regardless, you might say he was an ancient mariner. When I finally made it to the end of the tree trunk, this ghost-like apparition finally spoke, staring off into the distant reaches of the ocean, which connects all humanity.
I have seen your suffering. I have seen your life nearly snipped short, he said. His voice was that of a chainsaw idling in a tank of rock salt.
I have also seen your two small plastic friends, the military men. I have seen their disappearance and I know their shared story.“You mean Duke and Rock n’ Roll?” I said excitedly, half-believing that a crusty anachronistic old man from the sea would actually speak of my playthings by their proper names.
…the same, he answered.
“Please, mister. You’ve just gotta tell me what happened to them! One minute we were winning the war of the Savannah Beach and the next I was drowning and Duke and Rock n’ Roll were gone…”
Sit… he said, still staring off in the watery distance as if he were prophesying.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part IV.
IV.
With ten-year old pride still intact I slowly made my way back up the beach in the way that you do when your previous understanding of the world comes crashing down around you and you receive a new vision of the forces out there. The universe was specially- designed for snuffing the life of a ten-year old kid and all his unassuming promise. Water and tides and the continental shelf-- all of them the wily traps of nature to take back her own. Not to mention the killer sharks that were probably looking on from the distance and smiling toothy grins as I gulped and choked on this new reality that tasted a lot like seawater.
That is to say, I walked up the beach slowly.
Since the sea didn’t kill me that day, I knew my mom would. How could I have been so foolish? To venture into the water alone was an act of stupidity so brazen that it could only be punishable by death. I’m pretty sure I caught a fleeting glimpse of my parents looking over blueprints for the guillotine they were going to build in the backyard to teach me a lesson, discussing the relative merits of stainless steel vs. alloy for a proper blade.
In actuality my near-drowning went unnoticed by mom and dad and the rest of mankind. Reality changed and I internalized it. You, dear reader, are the first to hear of it.
As I quietly rode back home in the rear seat of the station wagon, a wet mess, I held up my Zip-loc bag of heroic miniature friends. Perhaps one of those camouflaged Hectors with chiseled features could deliver a rousing speech to lift my spirits.
“You listen here, soldier. We suffered a defeat today. No secret about that. You go toe-to-toe with Mother Nature like that, you’re gonna wind up ass-over-head a few times. But you survived today for a reason. You get up. Dust yourself off. Try again another day…”
But something was horribly wrong! This was not the full complement of soldiers I started the day with! I was missing two vital members of my team- Duke and Rock n’ Roll! Somehow, amidst the confusion of nearly leaving this mortal coil by way of a watery grave, two of my favorite plastic pals had gone missing. Who was going to make the dramatic speech in front of the giant American flag? Storm Shadow? Not likely. There was never any empirical evidence that he could even talk!
I learned another pretty big lesson that day: sometimes things get lost.
They just “get lost.”
There is no rational reason for it or method for recovery. You can try to retrace your steps, check under the couch and cushions, check in the junk drawer or “think harder” all you want. It will end fruitlessly. Sometimes things are just “gone” and gone for good. Scissors, a black glove, a green They Might Be Giants hat, a leather coat, a Bible, a circular container of needles for sewing buttons…gone.
After a few days of life without the missing object, it becomes easier to just give up thought of where it could be. There comes a time when you have to surrender to the inherent chaotic void that roams the world and accept the loss. Better to do that than live with tension for the rest of your life. Just face it, baby. It’s gone and gone for good.
But I have found that, for some reason my subconscious has been unable to let go of Duke and Rock n’ Roll. In fact I recently had a dream, a most wondrous, strange dream that depicted the alternate history of the fate of those two. Maybe it was “a bit of bad mustard,” as Ebenezer Scrooge would posit, but it was a wondrous vision all the same…
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part III.
III.
The memories from this fortuitous day in question are hazy at best. Perhaps a more writerly way to say that would be “I remember it like it was yesterday…” In either case, sitting here in my landlocked adulthood one thing I’ll never forget from my previous life on the beach was how the man-made world seemed to gradually fade off into the naturally-made world. It wasn’t more than fifty yards or so before sandy concrete and parking meters morphed into dunes that you couldn’t see over, interspersed with non-functional staircases crafted with lonely, grayed-out boards made ancient and pitted from lifetimes of exposure to the moist, ceaseless winds originating from somewhere halfway across the world.
On the really hot days you couldn’t run out to the tide fast enough to escape the scalding sand if you were brave and went barefoot. And venturing from parking lot to waterline in shoes and socks was equally treacherous. Every step you took poured more sand through holes in your shoes until, by the time you could actually see water, it was like lifting witches’ cauldrons filled with barbells and attached to your legs.
Even though I was prepared for a most intensive, specialized shoreline assault mission with my Zip-loc bag of Joes, I regret to say that I remember none of the details of play that day. For all I know it could have been an epic, bloody battle like at the end of Red Dawn.
But isn’t that the way childhood is? I know that I know that I know that I spent oodles of time, hours upon hours posing these miniature militiamen into appropriate positions. However, I’ll be damned if I can remember any of the moments themselves.
Like I’ve hinted at earlier, time is measured in different ways when you’re a kid. I have this theory that I’m not quite ready to publish in Scientific American yet, but it goes as follows: as you get older, the basic unit of time increases. When I was really young the basic unit of time was a day. All planning stretched out no further than a day: “Today I’m going to eat my toast, watch Tom and Jerry, hide in the backyard while mom sweeps the house, have some lunch, maybe watch some Disney channel and wait for Dad to get home.” By high school I could never prognosticate further out than two days. By the time I was in college the basic unit of time had expanded out to a week. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have English Comp, Math for Poets, and Fundamentals of Blah, blah. Tuesday and Thursday I have my science lab with that cute Darcy girl, and this weekend I think I’ll hang out with my dorky guy friends.” Now, having reached my thirtieth birthday, the basic unit of time is about two weeks- one paycheck. I’ll bet my parents are making plans by the month. My grandparents…
I wonder what the basic unit of time is for those gray-haired, Chinese mystics who live to be, like, one hundred and forty and learn how to fly.
I digress.
I may not remember the details of how exactly my crack-team of commandoes secured the Georgia coastline that day, but that may be due to one of those moments of childhood singularity- you know, the kind that you remember a couple decades thence and write about in a short story?
At some point that day, as the sun had gotten as high in the sky as it was likely to, I placed Duke and Rock n’ Roll and Scarlett and the whole gang back in their Zip-loc so as to spend some time in the water.
One of the great things about beaches is that they are equal-opportunity bodies of water. Unlike a swimming pool, lake, or pond there are a variety of ways to enjoy yourself without having to commit to total immersion. You can dip your foot in a pool, but eventually you have to jump in.
At the beach, however, you’re allowed to just sit right at the point where the water gives up its advance on the sand and recedes back. It’s possible to sit in an inch or two of water for hours on end and come away feeling like you’ve had a pretty productive day of water sports. And people walk along beaches without shoes but dressed in regular clothes all the time. And being a conservatively timid kid I found myself plopped down at the water’s edge, fascinated with how it never seemed quite possible to dig a hole in the wet sand. Every few seconds the dying throes of a wave would creep up and erase your efforts. The feeling of the earth below you, melting between your toes is a sensation that is difficult to forget. Normally, that sensation- the wet sand, hot sea, seagulls chattering- that was enough.
But this day, this momentous occasion, it wasn’t enough to dwindle in the puddles and tide pools.
Many times in the past, I had watched my brothers wading in water up to their necks, jumping into waves, seemingly miles out (but in reality, maybe fifteen or twenty feet), they laughed and yelled with excitement as they waited for the next wave to splash into them. And I figured I could be just as daring. So, I slowly walked out further, ever so further into the sea- solid, wet sand slowly giving way to inches of water, giving way to water at my knees, giving way to…And upon each new goal set and attained, the ocean kept coming at me, ceaseless, the little white-capped piles of water ahead of me slowly becoming hills, becoming mountains, all unaware of my presence.
It was at that point when the warm water was at chest level that I lost my footing, probably surprised by an unexpected wave. And I learned fear.
It’s amazing how in one flash-of-lightning you can become fully aware of things you took for granted one millisecond before.
One instant before I was swept away that day I lived in a world where there is always a ground to place your two feet, air for your lungs to breathe, and sight without burning. But all of that went away in one frightening instant. For the first time I had recognition of fear. It’s an odd, chilling sensation when your head goes under water, feet touch nothing, you twist and arch your back, squirming to find bottom so as to make sense of the surrounding murk and the sound…Oh my God , the sound. It’s the sound of suspension, stasis, like a low hum, with eery slicing sounds as your arms flail in the water.
The vast expanse of the ocean was waiting for me that day, like some kind of patient predator- one of those that builds elaborate traps and simply bides their time until their next meal stumbles by.
But for some reason, the sea said “not yet.”
That flash of panic was followed by the knowledge that I wasn’t in that deep of water. “There’s gotta be a floor here somewhere.” I had kicked and squirmed enough, stretched and reached out far enough that my fingers eventually felt solid ground again. I could make heads and tails of my situation in space, from which it’s a fairly natural maneuver to get your head above water by leaping off the ocean floor.
That first huge gasp of air after sucking in a nose full of salty water is exhilarating. I couldn’t run up to the beach fast enough, swimsuit weighing me down, hair plastered to my head, all the while looking around to see who noticed my near drowning, to know whether I should feel embarrassed. No one seemed to notice as my world changed from an idyllic romp in the sun to a universe where fear and death were possible. No one noticed as reality expanded one thousandfold in less than a second. No one noticed. I could check off the worry of embarrassment. But was that better?
I could be dramatic and literary and say I remember that event every day of my life and thank God for blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, I go years without even thinking about it. In fact, I only am reminded of my near drowning when I come desperately close to admitting that I can’t swim, an adult of thirty-something years of age.
Thankfully the older you get the less you have to talk about these things.
Pure, Simple Fantastic Part II.
II.
For whatever reason there was one day I indeed had my precious time alone in that rear seat. It was a typical hot Savannah summer day, the sun just pummeling down as if Mother Nature had seen enough and finally decided to get rid of the humans. On top of that was the fact that the station wagon offered little to no measurable air conditioning, especially all the way back in the Crow’s Nest. TV chefs and cooking personalities talk about “sweating” vegetables in a frying pan. Maybe Mother Nature was a carnivore, preparing a chubby kid snack for herself.
Despite the hellacious heat, heaven was simultaneously present. After all, this was a beach day.
It’s about an hour’s drive to Tybee Island from where we lived, which is approximately 4,200 minutes or 70 hours in kid-time. Days at the beach weren’t an all-too common occurrence for the Stutzman clan, probably because it’s no “day at the beach” for parents to cart around three boys constanty fidgeting while they face the prospect of aging at seventy times the normal rate, arguing amongst each other, facing traffic, the heat, the temperamental A/C and just the general ludicrousness of life.
The drive out to the island was an observant kid’s dream as far as scenery goes: past the Krispy Kreme, turn right onto the long boulevard with palm trees planted evenly in the median, one for every local soldier killed in battle (if I remember correctly), huge rollercoaster bridges that seem to give the car wings to glide above the saturated marshes and millionaire homes and boats and gray sand and the families of crabs that live in pockmarks of the stinking, salty ground, past the old civil war fort where something important surely happened amongst the man-made mounds and tunnels and cannons, the bricks and bars. I’ll never forget the significance of the violin and bow found in the moat and displayed at the fort’s museum, surrounded by black-and-white sepia photos of those stoic civil war guys who all looked like Lincoln, gazing off to the photo’s edge, silent. I always wondered, “Who has time for violins when a civil war is happening?”
But today was not a day for the civil war. I had bigger fish to fry.
In the seat next to me, in a carefully sealed Zip-loc bag, was a crack team of military commandoes, a beach assault team- the likes of which the world had never seen assembled: reporting directly to me was Duke, the First Sergeant and natural-born leader. The importance of this mission could not be overstated and for times like these, you need cool heads in control.
Handling communications was Breaker, whose job always seemed a little nebulous to me. He didn’t even carry a gun. But I’ve never been a technical guy and was sure he was handy for something. Probably making phone calls on his fancy headset.
Providing versatility with the crossbow, (a genius idea- a bow and arrow held horizontally) was the fiery red-head counter-intelligence soldier Scarlett. Also important as a source of boobs for distracting the enemy.
Bringing the heavy firepower was Rock n’ Roll, his blond hair and manly beard a reminder of better times, when toughness could be measured by the amount of hair on your face or the number of keyboards you had on stage in front of you or the length of your cape.
∗ In case of trouble, it’s always a good idea to have a teacher. Thus the inclusion of Spirit and his trusty eagle buddy. And speaking of trusty animal buddies, Mutt and Junkyard were called up for service for this mission. Unfortunately the dog disappeared- probably into the recesses of the house, under a couch or other inaccessible cranny. Mutt never seemed to be the same without his dog. He was a “dog handler” after all. His whole identity was stricken. This is why specialization is a very risky undertaking. Markets dry up. Funding disappears. Schools of literary criticism become passé.
Also storming the beach that day would be Snow Job, the arctic trooper.
Finally, as an early demonstration of my seeking the best in people, the white ninja Storm Shadow was also enlisted, despite his history of working with the enemy and the red cobra image right there on his uniform. Still, if you sent an army of ninjas to
any war… Plus, in a rare reversal of Western mores and fashion, Storm Shadow wore white while his “good guy” counterpoint, Snake Eyes wore black.
I always felt mildly jealous of the kids on the G.I. Joe commercials. They would get to play with the coolest new figures and vehicles amongst the most awesomely exotic locales. Granted, what looked like a swampy landscape on the planet of Dagobah was in actuality a corner in some drafty television studio soundstage. But today I was going to be one of those kids. I would have miles of actual coastline, the wispy salty wind, the sand dunes and beach grass…all of it
real.
∗ Applies only to Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who by all observational accounts was the model for the Rock n’ Roll action figure.
Pure, Simple Fantastic Part I.
Pure, Simple, FantasticI.
There is a certain “schlupping” sound that it makes.
The schlup and the sound of friction, like when you rub your fingers along the outside of a balloon. That strange hybrid is exactly the sound you get when you’re a little kid, say five or six years old, and your soft, white thigh flesh sticks to the vinyl seat as you’re moving around, getting fidgety from a long car ride.
But then, who’s to say it’s a long car ride? Kid-minutes are roughly seventy times as long as adult minutes. And is the fact that it’s a long car ride even important? Does the back of your thigh make the same sound when it slides across the seat during a short car ride? Of course. But it’s MY story and I thought it was an important detail, so back off.
Dateline: Savannah, GA- The early 80s
My hometown isn’t just a song by Springsteen. It’s also an actual place. You can point to it on a globe or map. I remember Savannah being a lot like hell in that people pretty much resigned themselves to being hot and sweaty all the time. I lived there from the womb until about eleven years of age, and it snowed a grand total of once in those years. And by “snowed,” I mean the grass had some frosting at the tips of the blades until the morning sun evaporated it. So, we wore shorts a lot. Thus the shluppy, farty sound my legs made when they stuck to those utilitarian, tan bench seats.
But Savannah was also a lot like heaven. For one thing we had a car.
The legend of that first family car looms large in my memory/ imagination; as transportation of the masses should. This poop-brown 1976 Chevelle station wagon was the wondrous device that shifted the Stutzman clan from one world, with its requisite culture and expectations, (namely our house), to strange, exotic new worlds where all bets were off, like Burger King. Or on really long days, we might ride clear across town to the Hobby Shop so my oldest brother Mark could get some glue or just the right paint for the intricate airplane models he would build. At the time I thought my eldest brother was some kind of magician. I never really got to see the process involving directions in both Japanese and English and time spent waiting for the glue on the plastic parts to dry. I only saw cool airplanes hanging from the ceiling in battle position, held in place by clear thread.
Anyway, that station wagon was something. (I mean that in the “folksy” sense. As in “Man, that station wagon was
something,” not “that station wagon had physical presence.") The most radical feature for my little-kid brain to process was the rear seat. It faced backwards! Don’t let the awesomeness of that concept escape you, dear reader. If you’re reading this you’re probably old enough to have become jaded to the beautiful world of kid concepts and the pure, the simple, the fantastic.
There’s something so delightful about traveling -moving- but not really knowing where
to. Riding in that back seat looking out the tailgate at where you
were, with someone else worried about the logistics of driving and figuring out where to go and how to get there and all that rigamarole; that was just the best. (Not to mention making faces at the other drivers. Even at that age, I got a sense of how hard those adults were trying to ignore us, my brothers and I, with our fingers at the corners of our mouths, stretching them out. The default response was to stare ahead, as if terrified by a thought.) And I am still enthralled when I see the odd train or bus or people-mover or what have you that allows a passenger to disengage from what’s coming up ahead.
So, logically Mark and my other brother Todd and I would fight over that back seat. In one of the cruelest design flaws, the builders or architects or other scientific-type responsible for that seat forgot to make it big enough to fit all three of the Stutzman boys. In fact, it could really only seat one of us comfortably, and two of us rather uncomfortably. Three of us? Forget it.
My parents must have enjoyed opening that tailgate to find, not a dead body like you would see in a mob movie or James Bond film, but a big lump of giggling boyhood. I know that would make me happy these days.
But in all honesty I have to say I enjoyed the times when I had that rear seat to myself. Much like Edgar Allen Poe, I think I might have had a devil looking over me as a child, silently, calmly watching over my bed at night. How else do you explain a child who enjoys solitude?
Well, you could also explain it by saying: “When you’ve got two other loud boys living in the same house, demanding attention, you start to crave time alone.”
That explanation sounds less grotesque…
An explanation
A couple years ago I started working on a "fantastical memoir" type of thing to exercise my creative writing muscles. I'm going to start posting the fruits of those labors here. It has really just been a writing exercise in the "write SOMETHING every day" method of becoming a better writer. I'm not sure that approach works for me but it gives me something to post here on the old blog! (P.S. today marks my five year anniversary with this thing! Wow!)
These posts will be LARGELY unedited, mostly just a typed version of how the pen hit paper. What I'm saying here is that it's still really rough, I don't like a lot of it, and I haven't finished it. I still revisit it every now and then. But here's what I've got so far. Hope you enjoy some of it...
But before I get to that...
The zeitgeist of conversation between me and a couple friends of late has been "The Album." We've been listening to some "classics" and talking about the album as an artform.
Which of course always comes around to discussion of the influential ones in your own life, regardless of(or at least not entirely
dictated by)the likes of
Rolling Stone, The Onion, Pitchfork Media or whatever critics tell you you should like.
So, not typically being a listmaker, I thought I would at last put my list together. This is roughly in order of preference, yet not very scientific and I feign very little critical detachment. But here are my 107 favorites, (because I can't narrow it down to just 100. In fact I thought of a couple more about three hours after sending this to my friend.) Anyway, these are the albums that have brought comfort, defined a season of life, forced me to sing along, to cry, and made me see life and music differently. I still thrill to see their album covers and enjoy listening to all of them.
Feel free to chasitise me for ommissions or gross miscalculations in ordering:
1. The Beatles
Abbey Road2. The Beatles
The Beatles (White Album)3. The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band4. Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon5. Radiohead
OK Computer6. Led Zeppelin
ZOSO7. King Crimson
Discipline8. Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Imperial Bedroom9. Pink Floyd
The Wall10. Paul McCartney
Ram11. Pink Floyd
Wish You Were Here12. Van Halen
Van Halen13. Jellyfish
Spilt Milk14. Frank Zappa
The Grand Wazoo15. Weezer
Weezer(Blue)16. Stereolab
Dots & Loops17. The Beatles
Magical Mystery Tour18. Adrian Belew
Op Zop Too Wah19. Wilco
Sky Blue Sky20. Genesis
Foxtrot21. Smashing Pumpkins
Siamese Dream22. The Beatles
Revolver23. The Beatles
Rubber Soul24. Ben Folds
Rockin’ the Suburbs25. Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan26. The Beatles
Help!27. Garbage
Version 2.028. Decemberists
Castaways and Cutouts29. Paul & Linda McCartney
Band on the Run30. They Might Be Giants
Factory Showroom31. The Zombies
Odessey and Oracle32. Rush
Moving Pictures33. XTC
Nonsuch34. Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Armed Forces35. Wilco
A Ghost is Born36. Fountains of Wayne
Welcome Interstate Managers37. The Cardigans
Life38. Dave Brubeck Quartet
Time Out39. Sixpence None the Richer
Divine Discontent40. Beck
Sea Change41. Sun Kil Moon
Ghosts of the Great Highway42. Wynton Marsalis
Standard Time43. Wynton Marsalis
Think of One44. REM
Automatic for the People45. Queen
A Night at the Opera46. Sheila Divine
New Parade47. Frank Zappa
Hot Rats48. Radiohead
The Bends49. Yes
Close to the Edge50. David Gray
Flesh51. REM
Life’s Rich Pageant52. Wilco
Being There53. Yes
Going for the One54. They Might Be Giants
John Henry55. Sixpence None the Richer
Sixpence None the Richer56. Genesis
Nursery Cryme57. The Who
Who’s Next58. Dave Matthews Band
Before These Crowded Streets59. The Police
Synchronicity60. King Crimson
Three of a Perfect Pair61. Genesis
Wind & Wuthering62. Brian Wilson
Smile63. Elvis Costello & Burt Bachrach
Painted From Memory64. Bob Dylan
Time Out of Mind65. XTC
Apple Venus66. Bloomsday
Bloomsday EP67. David Bowie
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust68. Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot69. Phish
Billy Breathes70. Coldplay
A Rush of Blood to the Head71. Rush
Permanent Waves72. Miles Davis
Kind of Blue73. Pedro the Lion
It’s Hard to Find a Friend74. U2
The Joshua Tree75. Josh Rouse
Dressed Up Like Nebraska76. They Might Be Giants
Flood77. Led Zeppelin
II78. Radiohead
Pablo Honey79. Paul Simon
Graceland80. The Cardigans
First Band on the Moon81. Bob Marley & the Wailers
Legend82. Of Montreal
Aldhils Arboretum83. Pink Floyd
Meddle84. Dire Straits
Brothers in Arms85. Stereolab
Sound-Dust86. Fountains of Wayne
Fountains of Wayne87. Stevie Wonder
Songs in the Key of Life88. The Beach Boys
Pet Sounds89. The Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night90. The Beatles
For Sale91. King Crimson
THRAK92. MxPx
Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo93. Red House Painters
Songs for a Blue Guitar94. Tom Petty
Wildflowers95. John Coltrane
A Love Supreme96. Portishead
Live at the Roseland Ballroom97. Ivy
Apartment Life98. High Llamas
Hawaii99. Jeff Buckley
Grace100. Tom Waits
Rain Dogs101. Elliott Smith
XO102. Metallica
…And Justice for All103. Old 97s
Satellite Rides104. Weezer
Pinkerton105. Blink 182
Enema of the State106. Eric Clapton
From the Cradle107. Liz Phair
Whitechocolatespaceegg
Stay With Me...
I will have a pretty large update in the next couple days.
I'm going to be laying some creative stuff on you in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned for some prose-writing...
Change of Seasons and An Invitation to Witness Awe-Inspiring Glory (aka Mike finishing a race)
Well friends, the changing of the seasons is bringing with it a change in focus for yours truly. I was a biking nut for the whole summer. With the purchase of a new bike in June (and a little spandex…largely against my will) and lots and lots of training miles I now feel totally immersed in cycling culture. Riding a bike has become one of my favorite ways to pass time.
But the time has come to go back to the activity that largely turned the tide for me over two or three years of massive weight loss—running.
Running is an equally interesting thing to decide to do. One of the best shirts I saw in the marathon said: “My sport is your sport’s punishment.” Through the whole process of dropping the lbs I had a love/hate relationship with the mere word “running.” For, the pace at which I was tripping around the lake and park could more accurately be described as a “jog.” “Running” is for skinny, fast people.
Here’s something that has me excited, though.
Somehow over the summer I’ve become accustomed to a more aerobic (as opposed to a “fat-burning”) workout. Consequently, over the last month I have been running much faster than I ever have in my life! So, I transition into this time of the year with new hope. I will be smashing my previous times in the two events I have coming up:
Race for the Cure 5K this Saturday 10/10 and the
Tulsa Run 15K on 10/31. (By the way, I would love to see people I know at the finish of these. Anybody wanna “Save the Boobies” or take a road-trip to Tulsa?)
Progress is addictive.
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by
David A. KesslerMy rating:
4 of 5 starsIf you struggle with overeating, you must keep one thing in mind when deciding to read this book: you MUST finish it! Otherwise don't start it!
For the first half of the book is pretty much filled with reasons why American people trying to gain control of their appetite routinely fail over and over, again and again, against a seemingly unconquerable enemy.
Backed with all kinds of research studies on what goes on in our brains when presented with foods we love (usually foods loaded with sugar, fat, and salt ad infinitum) Kessler is like a clanging symbol of behaviorist hopelessness. It's REALLY hard to resist these foods! And the fast food and chain restaurant industry has a vested interest in people failing. I found it to be scary the amount of chemistry that goes into concocting these hyperpalatable foods.
The second half of the book presents a little more hope in outlining some mental tricks in REPLACING the habituated behaviors of overeating terrible foods with other, (sometimes non-food-related), healthier behaviors.
So, in this book you get both the negative and positive aspects to viewing the human body and brain as a machine... It can learn procedures by which it can destroy itself or keep itself running at optimum efficiency and health.
As a former hopeless, unhealthy overeater I thoroughly enjoyed this book! (Even if the science got a little overwhelming.)
View all my reviews >>
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by
Rob GiffordMy rating:
4 of 5 starsIn this book NPR correspondent Rob Gifford offers a fascinating view of China’s past, present, and potential future. A twenty-year resident of the country, Gifford weaves together an enjoyably readable book that is equal parts travel journal, (the narrative thrust of the book recounts his two-month journey of Highway 312, China’s three-thousand mile equivalent to America’s Route 66) and political, economic, and spiritual history book.
Along the road, Gifford meets all kinds of interesting people, each one voicing their own hopes and struggles. As an interesting hybrid of “foreigner who speaks the language” the author deftly exposes these individual’s lives as demonstrative of the larger life of China as a whole-- an impossible, multi-cultural whole. Gifford’s China is hard to pin down, hard to define: at times too Western in its greed and environmentally- damaging technological progress and at times not Western enough, (see the country’s treatment of the ethnic minorities in Tibet and Muslim northwest.)
But it’s the people that are most fascinating. One of the more heart-rending passages about a karaoke bar prostitute:
“[…}there is a dangerous tendency for everything in modern China to be given an economic impetus, as though financial pressure is the only reason anyone ever does anything. We often fail to see that Chinese people are living, breathing, loving, hating individuals, who do things for complex psychological reasons, just like Westerners. And as Wu Yan sits talking about her life, her story doesn’t have that standard tone, which says, “I must do this or I won’t be able to eat.” She is slightly laconic, and cynical and angry.
“So why are you working here?” I eventually ask her.
There is a long pause.
“There was a boy…” She pauses again for a long time, rattling the dice in the cheap plastic cup. “
Wo ting xihuan de…who I liked a lot.” She is looking at the floor.
“But he liked another girl.” She stops shaking the dice, then looks up at me with large, hurt eyes. There is a long silence as I try to compute what she is saying.
“So…you’re…doing this to punish him?...Or to punish…yourself?”
She doesn’t answer but reaches out her arm to me, the palm of her hand facing up. There are two jagged scars on her lower arm, as though her wrist had been cut. She looks angrily into my eyes.
“It’s difficult being a person isn’t it?” she says finally.
I look at her and nod slowly. She shakes the cup with the dice inside and slams it down on the glass table.
Coming to this book knowing pretty much nothing about the country, the author kept me in it the whole time. Great read!
View all my reviews >>
New Directions in Music Appreciation
It was two or three years ago when I quit a band. When I think about those sad times, it’s often accompanied, strangely, by The Who.
In tears I had already told my compatriots that I was done. There was just one more show on the books. Just had to get through that one last hurdle- one last concert, and a life of freedom and promise awaited me.
And anytime I hear The Who’s album
Who’s Next I am transported to that time of my life- the rush of things winding down, friendships entering into a new phase, the hope of time and ordinary concerns, the unknown. I was discovering the album for the first time the week of the show. Snatches of a lyric here and there would pierce me as I drove around that week, succinctly and sharply defining the moment.
“No one knows what it’s like \ To feel these feelings like I do…”
“No one bites back as hard on their anger\ None of my pain and woe can show through”
A wild drum fill here or a strange synthesizer sound there would somehow speak peace to my busy mind and heart.
It’s the strangest thing in the world to say. After all, this
is rock n’ roll we’re talking about here.
But in Pete Townsend’s artistry, his collected oeuvre, you have the entire set of possible emotions—anger, rage, silliness, spiritual depth, love, skepticism, sadness, loneliness, lightness…Listening to this music reminded me: just as all of these things were possible for Pete Townsend to write about, they were possible for me to feel. If Pete was able to experience all these things and exist, so could I. Everything would be ok.
As the day of the show drew closer I had to routinely skip a song every time it came on just to be able to get through the night without breaking down: “The Song is Over,” which I
guarantee is not about a guy leaving a band he was in for most of his adult life. It’s about a love relationship ending, but I knew it would have been too much to take at the time.
“After the show is finished,” I said to myself. “After I’ve packed up the guitars and amps for the last time. Then I can hear this song.”
If you’ve not heard this song I recommend you listen to it somehow, if only for that aching chorus.
The Song Is Over
The song is over
It's all behind me
I should have known it
She tried to find me
Our love is over
They're all ahead now
I've got to learn it
I've got to sing out
Chorus:
I'll sing my song to the wide open spaces
I'll sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I'll sing my visions to the sky high mountains
I'll sing my song to the free, to the free
I'll sing my song to the wide open spaces
I'll sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I'll sing my visions to the sky high mountains
I'll sing my song to the free, to the free
When I walked in through the door
Thought it was me I was looking for
She was the first song I ever sang
But it stopped as soon as it began
Our love is over
It's all behind me
They're all ahead now
Can't hope to find me
(Chorus)
This song is over
I'm left with only tears
I must remember
Even if it takes a million years
The song is over
The song is over
Excepting one note, pure and easy
Playing so free like a breath rippling by.
Let This Be a Lesson To You
Last week I learned a lesson about bodies. It turns out my body’s “memory” is pretty short-term.
Having reached my two biking goals for the last three months (1) complete a century and (2) a sub-30 minute lap of Hefner, I decided there was no time like now to start adding running/jogging back into the mix so as to prepare for the Tulsa Run 15k at the end of October.
Let me present my stupid heresy and then I will present the result…
Proposition (what was in my head): “I typically bike for an hour, I should be ok if I run for that long. Back in the marathon training I was doing that kind of distance just about every day.”
Result: Soreness from hell! I mean like “hurts to get out of a chair and walk” soreness. I haven’t felt that bad since the three days after the marathon. (Happily I am mostly over it now as I write this.)
I had always heard that cycling and running are utilizing different sets of muscles, but thought that was mostly hooey. However, after this weekend’s debacle I am a believer. An hour on the bike is nothing. An hour running after three months off? Well, let’s just say I paid for it big-time.
It kind of sucks to feel like I’m starting over with the running, but this might turn out to be a good opportunity to unlearn bad habits, learn faster paces, etc. Like
Charlie I am looking forward to braving the cooler temperatures, and come December and January or so, seeing the crowds thin out in the mornings.
Whatcha Listenin' To? (Special Billboard Edition)
For those not in the know, Billboard is the organization that keeps track of chart data of popular and classical music, (music within a lot of genres, actually.) They publish this info in a fascinating weekly magazine. I say it’s fascinating because it so grotesquely reminds me of the business behind making music, getting it on the radio, etc. etc.
I’ve always found it strangely creepy to see the photos of insanely popular, beautiful pop divas and tattoo-ed gangsta rappers, and cowboy-hatted studly dudes, and mopey indie rockers, and past-their-prime dinosaur rockers making the state fair circuit…all of these kaleidoscopic performers and entertainers glad-handing the record label execs that pay the bills (perfectly tanned rich white guys in expensive suits) at press events. Those photos always seemed kind of out-of-whack somehow, as if the business were a kind of image-driven circus with out-of-touch Great Oz-type guys controlling it all.
When I worked at a music store in college, we used to consult the Billboard to try to translate when customers would come in looking for “this song I heard at the club” or “you know that song on the radio? It goes ‘doot doo doo…”
Billboard’s been around for awhile and the CDs they compile of each year’s big hits (along with the “Have a Nice Day” series) serve as a great document of what gooey, transient treats the culture was producing way back in the day. Well, our public library has a lot of these discs. And me being…well…me, I decided to start methodically working my way through these, having finished experiencing the 90 or so albums the library had from the
Rolling Stone Top Albums of All Time.
The library’s collection of Billboard discs starts with the year of 1975. Here are some highlights so far:
1976-
It was an auspicious year, in that yours truly came on the scene.
“All By Myself” by Eric Carmen- I have an untested theory that the chorus of this song can be overlaid by Harry Nilsson’s “Without You.”
1977-
“Undercover Angel” by Alan O’Day- I’d never heard this song before. It’s one of the goofiest mish-mashes of pop/rock and over-the-top studio production I’ve heard in a while.
“Rich Girl” by Hall & Oates- I leave this little aural adventure of mine with a new appreciation for these guys as they had several hits in this time period. Fantastic funky Rhodes piano and triumphant B section.
“Don’t Leave Me This Way” by Thelma Houston- It took Baz Luhrman’s
Moulin Rouge to really hear the darkness underneath the bubbliness. I like it when songs can trick you like that. (See also most of They Might Be Giants’ catalog written by John Linnell.)
1979-
“Heart of Glass” by Blondie- There are a scant few songs that even have a remote chance to get me to bob my head, much less dance. But this one is definitely on that list. Let’s be honest. A large part of this band’s appeal was how good Deborah Harry looked. But this is a very tightly-constructed disco-pop song, regardless of the band’s image. The melodies will stick in your head but they are delivered with such a lackadaisical sigh. Also of interest to me is the unconventional 4/4 bar followed by ¾ bar in the B section. Maybe I won’t be dancing to this after all…
“Just When I Needed You Most” by Randy Vanwarmer- I wonder what good ol’ Randy Vanwarmer is doing these days… The gentle falsetto vulnerability of this song is pretty creepy in my book. And I'm pretty sure I'm hearing an auto-harp solo in there too! I wonder why you don’t hear this kind of thing on the radio anymore.
1982-
“Eye in the Sky” by Alan Parsons Project- This is the best Pink Floyd song never written or recorded by Pink Floyd. Lyrically, it’s a thing of ambiguity. Is it about God or a creepy lover? You tell me. Also of interest are the extended chords which employ quite a bit of dissonance, but it’s all dressed up in such a comforting soft-rock kind of way, you don’t even notice the complexity of the harmony you’re hearing. This is probably my favorite song I’ve heard off of these Billboard discs so far.
1983-
This was apparently a schizophrenic year in music. You have Men at Work’s Australian version of The Police with “Down Under,” Eddy Grant’s Jamaican funk heard on “Electric Avenue,” Culture Club’s reggae on “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” (probably deserving of an award or medal for “most times to repeat a refrain so as to avoid writing a verse,”) and the epic “best impression of a Meatloaf song by a female artist” in Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” And don’t forget Michael Cembello’s “Maniac.” And yet somehow the Stray Cats’ “Stray Cat Strut” is still an anomaly, even amidst such a mixed-up year.
More later…
A Nice Sunday Ride
Yesterday was a beautiful day. Here's a good way to spend a beautiful day: take a leisurely bike ride downtown, thrill at the 20 mph cruising speed as you descend the best hill on Shartel. Soak in that lonely, weekend feeling of tall, empty Sunday buiness buildings and relatively dead streets, normally chaotic and stressful during the week. Have a free cheeseburger (or two) at SchlegelFest, an outdoor party/bicycle-shop-perusal. Ride back home, smell the bakery as you blow past it.
Even better, do it with a couple friends and Life Is Good!
(I think we shall do this route again, for both Coffeeslingers AND Cuppies and Joe are within reach!)
Abandoned Ideas Volume 4
Whenever the weather is bad I wind up having to spend some time at the gym. I like to see people there and look at their faces while they are pounding out miles on treadmills and elliptical machines, sweating it out on stationary bikes. As I look at them, I many times see the same faces and wonder “what keeps” them (me) at this?” What motivates us to spend our valuable time in this manner? Is it health? Mutual well-being? Stress-relief? Escaping feelings of guilt? Running away from bad habits? Pure enjoyment? A desire to improve at something? To look more conventionally attractive? Anyway, I look around at these familiar, yet anonymous faces and feel a strange camaraderie. We’re all WORKING for something.
And I got to thinking about that “work” part. Work is merely the expense of energy- burning calories. “What if,” I thought to myself, “we could find a way to harvest all of this energy we’re expelling in the name of fitness?”
What if the sum total of the mechanical energy I’m producing could be captured and stored by that stationary bike? And then sent on to a master collection point at the gym? And then multiply that by how many people use that one bike in one day. Multiply that by however many other bikes, treadmills, and weight machines are used in a day, week, month…Now multiply that by however many fitness centers there are in the country, the world! Whoah! There is your alternative energy source!
The Century (Full Report)
Today I bring you a report of the second huge accomplishment of the year for yours truly.
Saturday was the cycling century and I finished that mofo! The course was basically from the Children’s Center in Bethany, west to Hinton, and back.
Common questions:
Did your butt hurt? Surprisingly, no.
Was it a race? No. It was an endurance ride, which means there were rest stops every 10-15 miles. Overall, these were the best rest stops I’ve seen with an event like this. The people working them were excited, helpful and they were well-stocked with powerade, water, snacks, medicines, etc.
How long did it take? Time on the bike was 5 hours and 54 minutes. Total time, including rest stops, was about 6.5 to 7 hours. I wound up averaging about a half mph lower than I wanted to.
How was it? I got off to a really fast start. I made a point to get up close to the front at the start, to try to avoid the mass of humanity and find the faster people to try to keep pace with them. This lasted for about the first 20 miles or so. I have found that the field tends to thin out after the first rest stop. And I got passed by a couple pretty disciplined pace lines, which I've yet to learn about, being fairly new and all.
There were two factors that made this ride difficult: the heat (at the end) and the wind. I chose this particular century because the course was largely east/west, banking on the fact that we typically get north-south winds in Oklahoma. In biking, crosswinds are easier to deal with. However, the wind was probably blowing 20-25 mph on Saturday, which made the two jaunts heading south just brutal.
And then, as the morning turned into afternoon and my body started to get mad at me, the temperature rose to the mid 90s. The last rest stop was my longest, as I was getting light-headed and cranky. It felt good to just sit and soak up those big winds blowing across the dusty plains outside of Yukon. I wanted to stay there for the rest of the day.
But I didn’t. I had a goal to meet and I was close enough to push through. The one bummer was that police support at the intersections was mostly a forgotten memory after the halfway point and cruising through Yukon, I and a handful of other people hit every damn red light! You would think a chance to rest would be welcome. It was not. For at every red light my body kept thinking “we’re done! Great!” But we weren’t done. In fact there were still a handful of hot miles to go. I was fading fast.
I finally reached the Children’s Center to one lone anonymous stranger’s half-hearted cheering and immediately found a shady spot on the lawn to collapse. I laid there for a good ten minutes, too tired to care about what I had just done, the muscles in my calves twitching. I guess my legs hadn’t gotten the message that we were done now.
Other than the weather there was one other unexpected difficulty for me on Saturday: fueling. In total I burned something in the neighborhood of 8000 calories doing this thing. Your body has to take in energy to continue as it’s burning at that rate. It’s usually not a problem for me. I’ll have a big breakfast, and take in granola bars and Gatorade to replenish every hour or so. Unfortunately the rest stops didn’t have Gatorade but had Powerade instead. I didn’t know this before Saturday, but Powerade + Heat do not mix well in my stomach. So, the last thing I wanted to do was eat. But like I said, I needed food for energy. Water alone will not cut it. So, I faded at the end because I ran out of gas, not motivation.
So, all in all, a tough day.
One interesting thing I am noticing, though… The residual toll was much tougher on my body when I did the marathon (a scant three and a half months ago.) After the marathon I was literally too sore to walk for about three days.
However, this time, I was ready to ride again the next day, feeling no pain or soreness. This could be due to the fact that I was MUCH more well-prepared for this event, having already done the goal distance plus a few more miles in training.
What’s next?I plan to keep biking for the next month or so, since I love my new ride so much and to try to become a social creature again. Then I will switch over and try to learn how to run again for the Tulsa Run 15k in Tulsa at the end of October.
It’ll be nice to have Saturday mornings off for awhile!
Never Let Me Go by
Kazuo IshiguroMy rating:
4 of 5 starsThis is a stirring book of unaffected beauty. The prose style is not futzed over. It's simple. Deceptively so. And Ishiguro is able to evoke the thoughts of a woman looking back over her childhood and early adulthood very convincingly. Nice trick for a male writer.
The other nice trick he pulls off is setting a wistful, evolving love story against the strange backdrop of a school with an unusual, mostly unspoken secret drama. (And that's all I'll reveal...)
I was sad at the end, both for plot reasons, but also because I would have to begin the search for another good, highly readable book.
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Hopefully not a bad omen...
Tomorrow is the day! I shall be doing the 100 mile ride for Spin Your Wheels, benefitting the Children's Center in Bethany.
If all goes well, I should be finishing at the Center around 1:00 if you want to stop by and be amazed at the Triumph of the Will!
I'm not normally a superstitious type of fellow but I do like order and my routine, and this week has seemed to be out to rattle me.
It started out with a flat tire right before Wednesday's morning ride. After pumping it up again I was only able to get in 2/3 of the distance I wanted to cover that morning before it was going flat again. And Thursday morning's thunder and lightning show forced me to hit the stationary bike at the gym, which I hate. And then this morning's flat tire reappeared after setting out on what was supposed to be a nice, easy short ride. Unfortunately I had to walk the bike about 4.5 miles to get back to the car. My only consolation was: "at least this didn't happen tomorrow." (Fingers crossed.) So with a brand new tube, I will set out confidentally tomorrow morning.
Conditioning-wise, none of this is that big of a deal. You're supposed to taper off your weekly mileage before a big event anyway.
But mentally, I just feel off-kilter, having had to go with plan B and C against my will for the last three days of training.
Like I said- I like predictability and routine, especially the week going into the thing I've been training for literally for months.
This has not been that kind of week at all.
I don't subscribe to Netflix, but...
Richard Corliss has written a curmudgeonly article in this week's
Time called "Why Netflix Stinks" in which he bemoans the disappearance of his favorite corner video store called Kim's. I must say I was struck by the following observation:
Beyond the mail delays and the botched orders, the lack of human interaction is the big problem with Netflix and its cyber-ilk. Thanks to the Internet, we can now do nearly everything- working, shopping, movie-going, social networking, having sex- on one machine at home. We're becoming a society of shut-ins. We deprive ourselves of exercise, even if it's just a stroll around the mall, until we're the shape of those blobby people in WALL*E. and we deny ourselves the random epiphanies of human contact.(While I agree with the thought and am determined to not become as insular as he suggests, I find it amusing that one of his main illustrations was from a movie!)
I don't want to be a shut-in! I want to LIVE life!
Stop reading this and go outside and INTERACT with someone right now!
This Friday's Ride
I'll be doing this bike ride on Friday morning, (planning to start around 7), if you wanna come share some miles.
I messed up on it last week and ended up riding an extra 35 miles. I won't do that this time!
Anyway, it's not too hilly and has luxuriously wide shoulders for most of it.
The Satanic Verses and the Art (?) of Provocation
I recently struggled through Salman Rushdie’s infamous book
The Satanic Verses. It was a little over 600 pages of gobbledy-gook alternatingly about two plane-wreck-survivors-turned-angel-and-demon-turned-back-into-regular-guys, an obvious re-working of the early days of the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a butterfly-eating prophetess leading a village to a possible watery grave in the Arabian Sea, and a bunch of other stuff that I barely remember, which may or may not have incited any brain activity in the first place.
This was a complicated book that reminded me how much of an insulated dumb American I am.
Of course, when it came out, this book infuriated influential Muslims to the point that they wanted the author dead. Officially. As in “if you know where the author is hiding and don’t think you have the gumption or wherewithal to kill him, let us know. We’ll find someone who will kill him.”
This all got me to thinking about art and the goals with which one goes about creating art. I’m going to make a pretty big assumption from the outset- namely, that Rushdie knew that some ideas in the novel would upset some Conservative people of the Muslim faith. You don’t title your book after a possibly heretical story of errantism in the Qur’an and expect everything to be peachy keen. My favorite example of a similar action in the Western World would be if I were to write a book called
The Whorish Wife of Jesus. (Of course, my book would be about The Church, “the Bride of Christ,” so it would be ok. Heh.) Nor do you talk about the wives of the Prophet and prostitutes in the same breath and expect there to be no discussion among the faithful.
Rushdie is obviously no idiot. Even though I’m kind of surprised that the literary critics and English teachers of the day didn’t issue a fatwa against him for creating such an incoherent mess of a book, I can readily admit that he obviously has an extensive body of knowledge serving as the inkwell in which he dips his pen.
If Rushdie knew that people of the Islamic faith would have problems with some of these elements, then surely at least one of his goals was to provoke these folks. We sometimes soften this impulse by using language like “I wrote this to make people think…to question…to take their faith seriously, etc.” (see also Kevin Smith’s
Dogma.)
But I am now wondering: is provocation a noble goal for an artist? Does art
need to be noble? Does art
need anything at all? (I personally can’t escape the notion that art should uplift us out of negative states- of intolerance, of hopelessness, of base, cruel lives. I’m kind of old school that way and I also realize how subjective the notion is. So I’m not married to it.)
Another question- is a mere exercise in the freedom of speech necessarily “art?” For instance, when whoever it was that put the crucifix in urine and called it an artistic utterance did their thing, was the obvious shock and outrage that resulted a valid, complete appreciation of the creation? I don’t know.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes a guy like Rushdie wants to encourage thought and critique of ideas and open up the windows and let in some fresh air with provocative material. But as the publication of the
Verses showed, the result can sometimes be the exact opposite of his intentions. What happened instead? An influential cleric denounced the work as offensive, therefore well-meaning people of faith didn’t read the book, denounced it and the author as offensive (possibly evil) and demanded his life. The intended audience burned the book, bombed bookstores, et cetera, et cetera. So much for discussion and honest critique of one’s cherished ideas.
No, trenches were dug even deeper. Instead of fresh air and productive discourse, the same sides just retreat further away from each other.
It seems to me that human nature has always been thus and thus it shall ever be.
What say you?
Norman Conquest
Saturday’s long ride was a nice change of pace.
I was convinced by a friend at work to do The Norman Conquest- a benefit ride for the JD McCarthy Center- the longest distance being a 66 mile ride in and around Norman that claimed on the website to be “VERY hilly.”
They weren’t kidding. While, training-plan-wise, I wanted to get in a few more miles than 66 on Saturday, the elevation changes MORE than made up for it since I do not normally train on those kinds of grades. What a workout! A bunch of steep hills, and rolling country roads made for very interesting terrain. It’s interesting to do that kind of ride with other people. There isn’t a lot of talking. It’s kind of a ghostly quiet, the only sound you hear being a bunch of clicks as people shift at roughly the same time.
And as you probably know, the weather on Saturday morning was fantastic! Not hot, not windy. Unlike, I don’t know,
the last three months?!
After averaging 2 mph better than I expected to, (long descents and being around other people certainly helps), I feel like the relatively flat 100 mile ride in three weeks shall be no problem.
Bring it on!
Tongue Twisters
While entering doctors' information into a database I have created some tongue twisters in my head. You will notice an overall theme. They all involve languages spoken by one doctor in particular.
Say the following phrases to yourself as ridiculously quickly as possible. You might find that they have a pleasant ring to them:
Spanish Spinach- spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach
Urdu Underwear- urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear
Hindi Hyundai- hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai
Terrible Arabic- terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic
Last Saturday's Ride
"How was it?"
It wound up being 76 miles.
I'm not going to lie...76 solitary miles are tough.
Almost 5 hours of myself, my mind, my bike and that's about it.
The relatively short section where I wasn't sharing the road with cars was mercifully broken up with some music, but it didn't last for very long.
Turns out I need people.
Why wasn't this an issue with running? Probably because I could have my tunes for the whole time, I suppose.
Friends of the blog--if you own a bike and haven't forgotten how to ride it, please consider getting up early on a Saturday soon and breaking up some of the monotony with me!
