Moment of Zen

An oldy but goody.

This is a .50 cal. The projectile makes the round trip b/t/w the gun, a steel target 1000 meters downrange, and the shooter's ear protection. Out and back, and if it'd been an inch to the right homeboy would be dead or breathing out of a tube.

Danger close with the .50 cal is anywhere within earshot - and some places out of earshot. Pretty hella sick invention for a pacifist mormon dude.

Public Service Announcement Involving Your Junk

Fatty's recent post on Power Faces, and the strain & hurts that come with riding real hard, put me in the mind to post a Public Service Announcement on a very important topic: how not to blow a testicle with an internal firehose gout of misdirected urine as you ride a mountain bike.

I ride with this guy, Earl (not his real name), who is a really nice guy. He's a faithful family man, devout Christian - in the good good way, not the Jimmy Swaggart send-money-for-hookers-and-blow way; he's a strong triathlete, a real straight arrow, and strong like an ox on a mountain bike. What he may lack in skill as a relatively new mountain biker, he makes up in sheer power and determination. He is a guy I like and generally respect, and I love riding with him because he's always pretty good natured, even when the going is very tough. So naturally I bust his balls constantly. And on that same topic, bad things seem to happen to his junk while riding.

Earl had suffered from significant pain all summer from "stemming" his Robert "Purple Guitar Neck" Johnson really hard on this epic ride we did in July. So it's not unusual to see him grasping his ham & eggs with his face showing a mixture of moderate pain and deeply philosophical thoughtfulness.

Then a couple weeks ago we were going out for an early AM ride with the Diesel, the Beard, Smooth Sven and some other folks, and as we were strapping the lights on Earl mentioned that he had to go see the doctor a couple days earlier.

Earl had noticed some unusual lumps on his testicles during a regular self-exam. Unlike everybody else I know, i.e. all my pervy friends, when Earl says he checks his pants yarblies regularly due to a family history of cancer, and not just as an excuse to Juggle The Boys, I believe him. Shoot, if I had a family history of cancer, I'd be locking myself in the bathroom twice a day just to, um, check. Not that I'd be using that as an excuse to fondle myself or nothin'.

I think Earl was having some trouble peeing too, and other unusual pain in the Hobo Bag. You know, beyond the pain you get from ramming your junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 20 MPH. (Official Thomson Advertising Slogan: your bike will break before the stem does. Unofficial Mountain Biking Reality: so will any part of your body that hits it).

So Earl went to the DownUnderOlogist, who did the requisite 'ow's yer father?' on him. Earl was sure that he'd be referred to another NetherRegionOlogist for a consultation about testicular cancer, but as it turns out there was an innocent explanation for the lumps and peckerwreckage, besides his predilection for slamming his stemmage into his stem at 30 MPH.

The doc asked Earl if he'd been "lifting something really heavy lately." Earl hadn't, but he told the doc about bashing his Wedding Tackle off of a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 40 MPH. he also mentioned something about doing some really gnarly climbs a few weeks earlier on our rigid singlespeeds, stuff that takes a maxed out, full body effort to clean. It's like deadlifting on the bike, and sometimes your hands hurt, the knees get tweaked, the forearms burn, you burst blood vessels in your eyes, get twinges in the arms and the lower back, and you get the very unsettling feeling that somebody is removing stitches (without cutting them) from some unspecified locations in your gizzard. So Earl told the doc about that and the doc asked a few more questions. In particular, he asked whether Earl had been riding on a full bladder when he made these exertions.

As it happened, Earl had been doing so. Unlike the rest of my reprobate friends, who are probably in a state of near collapse from dehydration due to constant boozing and other forms of dissipation, Earl stays well hydrated and sober, drinking the government-recommended six to eight glasses of water daily, and an extra glass or two on hot days. Nor does he take joy in pissing in public; he holds his water until it's possible to discreetly offload. In fact it’s amazing that he tolerates us because he’s fundamentally moral, sane, well-mannered and tasteful. In other words, he’s completely freaking nuts.

The doc was relieved to find out that Earl drinks a lot of water and regularly rides with a full bladder.

He said that under a severe strain, urine can be forced down the wrong tubes into the testicles. This causes inflammation and pain in the Asparagus and Broccoli, and that sort of thing was completely consistent with Earl's symptoms.

That, and slamming his junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 60 MPH.

The doc said that this is a fairly common condition, but I suspect he only said that to get Earl to stop crying.

So as it happens, when Earl makes a Power Face, it is only a prelude to super-pressurizing his bladder and blowing the stuffing out of a ball valve in his kidney plumbing. Earl's superhuman climbing efforts are obviously fueled by shifting urine around at high speed, in the same way that you could get a Chevy Nova to go real fast by rolling hand grenades out the back window and having three of your fat friends sit in the back seat and rock forward and back in unison. Yeah, it'd go fast. But it would be mighty tough on area around the exhaust pipe and possibly even damage the whole back end.

Earl is now undergoing treatment with various drugs that are fixing the problem. He can even ride a mountain bike again, but the doc advised him to make sure his bladder is empty when he rides. Apparently, if he doesn't do this, his testicles could blow up just like balloon animals, except they wouldn't be as much fun.

So when we ride now, I stop about every half hour remind Earl to go water the trees before he blows a testicle, shatters a bladder, or pulverizes a pipe. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t remind him about this constantly to bust his balls. My goal is solely to help Earl out and make sure that he stays in peak condition.

I don’t do this just for the Lulz. I do it, because I care so much. Seriously. You people know me better than that.

New Horizons

I'm still buzzing a little from the Singlespeed Punk Bike Enduro at the 'Shed last weekend. Riding up there - and getting broke in with a lot of super strong folks on singles - pretty much blew me away. There were more rocks than I could have imagined. Given that rocks and hills are kryptonite to my weak-ass Superman impression, I was over my head pretty much all day. It was good though. I spent most of the spring and summer pushing my limits outwards just a little bit at a time. Each ride usually had a little feature or two where I stretched just a touch. By diving so far into the deep end in the company of excellent riders, most of whom ride the 'Shed constantly, I had to stretch hard all damned day. No crashes, even rode decently in a few places. A couple times, on some very long twisty descents, I had to stop though - just to let my mind unspool a bit. Technical mountain biking is only a little bit difficult physically. Mentally though... it's hard. It's all about reading the trail, processing your options, picking lines, and putting all those inputs into context using the feedback that the trail and bike are giving you.

"Skill" on a mountain bike does have a physical component to it, but it isn't really a physical thing. It is mentally being able to process all the inputs, make good choices, and to be able to adjust on the fly dynamically as the bike slides or the trail throws you into different places or as trail features get closer and become clearer and more detailed. Each time the bike or trail adjusts your trajectory, the thousand little calculus operations performed by your brain have to be re-run to reflect the new angle of approach. After a while this becomes mentally exhausting and on a twisty, rocky trail strewn with babyheads, sharp rocks, logs, drops, trees and tight turns, you can feel the formulas and vectors backing up in your head the way the keyboard buffer on your old computer would fill up when you typed too fast. You have to pause for 30 seconds, let the buffer empty, then begin again with a clear head.

Mountain biking skill, in some ways, is nothing more than having ridden enough features to have built up a ready vocabulary that allows to you intuitively read the trail. A "skilled" rider glances down the trail and quickly understands how particular little chunks of the trail will ride, where the front wheel will get tossed to the left a few inches, where the rear will slide out a bit, which line looks good but will ride bad and throw the bike into the weeds, which pile of rocks looks deadly but actually offers three or four good angles of attack. I am not a skilled rider.

I'm looking forward to riding some rocks at Patapsco tomorrow. Should be a lot easier in a lot of ways than it has been in the past. The flowy easy bits will seem exceptionally easy in comparison to most days.

It's good to blow through your limits once in a while. It opens up new horizons. I'm definitely going to make it a priority to spend more time at the 'Shed and Gambrill.

In honor of Joe Whitehair and the whole crew on the SS Punk Bike Enduro, Watershed Edition... Have Some Punk.

A Lisa Salerno Fb comment put me in mind of this one.



The Minutemen are a band that just doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. RickyD was playing this on the boom box during the ride and I immediately recognized it... So nice. A little chunk of the mid-80's in the middle of a very tough ride. So comforting.



This is a pretty good song too. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it's tight.



Then you got Black Flag. I have no idea why I liked this so much at the time, but I really likede it. It's possible that as a young man I had some issues with rage.



I liked the Ramones a lot too. They had a different sort of energy, a little more upbeat.



Then there's one of the more underrated punk bands of all time - the Dead Kennedys. Listening to these guys now, I realize that they are really tight musically. This song is a pretty good example of it. Looks like they were 25 years too early for the Occupy movement, but a bunch of dudes who toured in a van would have fit in better with (upper middle) class warrior protestors than that rich cockroach Zack de la Roche.



They weren't just transgressive. The DK's had a fine sense of humor, and they were pretty happy to skewer political correctness wherever they encountered it. In addition to Penis Landscape - a scatological album cover (then insert) for their Frankenchrist album, they came up with this little video - an all midget version of Rawhide.



Yeah, that's a tall glass of WTF right there. Here's something that's a little more conventional, and a version of a classic song that fits the amped-up version of Las Vegas that we're familiar with.



There is other good music lurking around there in the punk movement. Seminal garage punk / psychobilly band The Cramps were pretty good. I think that most of the early rockabilly stars would have been surprised to find a groundbreaking punk act relying on their stuff. But hey, you get good music where you find it, and you shoudln't discriminate against genre. If you like it, you like it. Be happy.



You know who they remind me of a little bit? These guys:



Wait, am I saying The Trashmen invented punk? Maybe. And I have The Authorities on my side.



Maybe Dick Dale had something to do with it. That California surf music scene was pretty dynamic. It's really not fair to call it surf music - that ghettoizes it. The influence of songs like Dale's "Nitro" was much more widespread. You see the roots of LA punk, speed metal, hardcore, all sorts of modern musical forms in his driving guitar riffs.



And check it out - a 1960's version of a mosh pit.



And with that I'm outta here.

Draw Your Own Conclusions

You're grown ups. I don't need to tell you what to think. Draw your own conclusions.