On The Sidelines

Being on injured reserve suxx.

As mentioned somewhere previously, there's a foot surgery looming in my near future. Last Monday, I got as far as the surgical prep room. I was lookin' good in the stylin' jacket that opens in the back, they started up the intravenous drip, and were ready to gas me... when the surgeon and anasthezi... anesta... the guy with the drugs, said that my minor chest infection made surgery a no-go.

Per surgeon's instructions, I called his office late last week and tried to reschedule... as you can imagine, I haven't had a callback, and something tells me that the beer delivery man will drop by my house with free Dale's before that callback happens this week.

So the surgery is indefinitely postponed, and I'm down in the dumps about it - to put it really bluntly. You know how it goes when you've been off the bike a few months - your energy level sags, maybe your pants get tight. (Mine get tight... reallll tight. You can hear the top button weeping if you listen close). Good stuff is happening in my life - got my basic sailing certifications this fall, work is going fine, my family is wonderful - just nothing good is happening with the bike and when the fitness and pressure release valve aren't working, my morale craters. This is terrible.

So this past weekend, I did the only thing I could do, I went out and cowbelled for others. My kid raced, so I got him set up and cheered him on, then rooted for a bunch of my other friends as they crushed themselves at AACX. For a first year race it was pretty sweet; they definitely also have good upside potential. Nate Miller and the crew put together a fun even that I really wished I'd ridden. Hills and all. It was great seeing so many of my friends racing, getting to say hi to so many folks. So fun reconnecting. So nice.

Then this shit with the storm happened.

To be really blunt, I don't know what to say about it. Oh, it's making me think a lot, and I've got a lot to say. Just nothing appropriate.

So you'll get the inappropriate thoughts.

First off, most of the time storm hype is just hype. Not this time. It's a frickin' disaster. You can tell when a storm prediction is a lot of hype by learning some basic meteorology, starting with something about low pressure systems. I won't get into it here but if you look up "millibars" and "hurricane" you'll be on the right track.

Second, I don't know whether to shit or go blind about NYC. It's going to be a fucking disaster up there when the lights come back on. I just hope that the casualties are very limited. I fear the death toll will be enormous, in part because the mayor up there is more concerned with cutting down on how much salt and soda pop you consume, and less about emergency response.  Apparently, a lot of people didn't evacuate, assuming that a tall pile of detached irony is just as effective at keeping out water as an earnest midwestern town's volunteer-built sandbag levees.

Third, I feel really bad for my friends around the area. Most are without power right now, and if the local utilities' past performances offer any clue, they may be without power for a week. That's unacceptable in a modern nation.

Fourth, George Bush would be getting hanged right now for this, if not by now, then by noon tomorrow. You may laugh, but ask yourself honestly, at what point he'd be getting reamed out for this. 

Fifth, I'm getting real tired of the political ads. "My opponent eats orphan children for breakfast, and spends most every business day making his Cambodian slave laborers push old cookie-baking-grandmas down the steps of the Library of Congress. I'm Joe Slickyboy, and I approve this message..." Gak. The good thing about election year is it reminds me that I dislike all these bastards. The bad thing is they spend so much time reminding me of that.

Sixth and finally, damn I wish I was racing cyclocross this year. It'd be really nice to have something trivial to think about way too much, to obsess about, to take my mind off all this other shit. It'd be so nice to be saying, "I am damn worried about missing my workout tomorrow." It'd be great to be worried about that, in fact. Instead, my worry is about whether the Toe of Rage is going to be hollering at me tomorrow, if I'll be able to walk around the house comfortably and walk the dog.

And having just written that, it struck me: STFU! People are probably drowning somewhere as I type this. I can't do a damn thing for them, first responders might not be able to do a damn thing for them either, given the enormous scope of this hurricane. My problems are trivial compared to that, so are yours in all likelihood, even if your power is off and the kids aren't sleeping well.

Maybe that's the message that I'm trying to spit out after disgorging all that rambling crap - about the storm, about politics, about bike racing. Appreciate what you've got. It's way better than what almost everybody else has, and it is probably fleeting, and the odds are you don't appreciate it enough.

Now quit reading this on your smartphone. You're killing the battery and you may need that thing to call the utility company.  I gotta go myself and get a couple things done.  That Knob Creek isn't going to drink itself.

Hipsterism... Skewered. Or Through-Axled Anyhow

This is where about 30% of us, the most stylish and hip and progressive among us actually, suddenly realize, "Oh fuck... I'm a pathetic retrogrouch. Nothing more, nothing less." More here, if you have the courage to click through. Have a nice week, don't spill your Fair Trade Coffee out of your hand crafted Oaxacan Indian Commune mug onto your hand knitted hemp pants over this. It may be true, you may be pathetic, but if so, we're in the same boat. Or really, we're in different boats but we're all in the same flotilla. And if you gotta send me hate mail over this, do it by email. Your Smith-Corona has an annoying habit of putting the first letter after every paragraph return into a subtext position. It's precious-annoying, not precious-precious, and you'll never get it fixed because the last manual typewriter repairman died about 20 years ago. Obsolescence: fun to laugh at, fun to partake in, hell to realize that you're just an embodiment of it. As for me... I welcome our new cybernetic overlords. From the comfort of my wood paneled, steampunk mancave.

I Toeld You So

What is it that knocks us wannabe duffer Fred racers off our bikes and onto our asses?

Sometimes it's not the usual ill-managed life challenges like work, paying the mortgage, or the wife's unreasonable threat of divorce if we head out on Thanksgiving Day for even one more 7 hour L2 ride to help us win the January Training Crit Series.

Sometimes it's real injuries, and with masters racers, the walking wounded of amateur bike racing, it's often chronic stuff that kills us year after year. We're talking about herniated discs from starting the Daimler-Puch with a hand crank; blown out knees from helping the Wright Brothers push their aerio-plane to the top of a hill in Kitty Hawk for launch, or in my case a toe broken playing soccer against Fowler H.S. in 1984, when I made a violent slide tackle to stop what would have been a winning goal. I think. It's a bit hazy.

Transitions...

I'm your huckleberry... pie... 

Long time, no blather. I'm sitting here thinking about some minor tumult in my life, changes in direction and how things change for everybody. Life is just so damn busy lately and it crushed me this last year. The kid hit that critical mass point where he wants to do everything - lacrosse, swimming, Scouts, some other extracurriculur activities - and I didn't handle it very well. Training suffered and became non-existent, the racing evaporated... though to my credit I've kicked ass at work. I'm in a highly responsible job you see, and have stepped up from a poo throwing job in a corner of the monkey house, into a poo throwing job in a more centrally located position in the monkey house.  Some even claim that I have learned to walk upright and have achieved what some consider to be sentience, or a facsimile of it, displaying several AMESLAN signs, and fewer middle fingers than last year.