Monthly Archives: April 2016

Damocles

I’m lucky to have this hit man follow me around telling me he will take me out if I ain’t careful. I don’t know his true identity as I hired him on the internet, but I imagine he is from Walker County, AL as everyone knows that is where you go if you want to contract a killer. One too many steps in the wrong direction and POW, I won’t ever know what hit me. Go ahead and act natural, walk like everything is fine, but know I will be right behind you the whole time so don’t try to run or make any sudden moves he says. At first it bugged me that he was back there watching me, listening to all of my private thoughts and conversations, staring over my shoulder when I check my blood sugar. The number comes in- 96- and I hear him un-cock the pistol and sigh, relieved or disappointed who can tell?

Saturday morning I felt the urgency more than usual, like if Hit Man was going to follow me I should make him work for it. I am the one paying his retainer after all. I met the Hard Man at the park and we tried to scrape that son of a bitch off on every tree in the woods. We plowed through lush carpets of poison ivy and rode the downhills as uphills and the uphills as side hills. We wore his ass out, and even when I bounced my face off the trail and rode out the inertia in a skittering spin down a splintered ramp, the hit man was nowhere in sight. Blood ran out of my arm, but it was well within a healthy range. I tasted it. Nothing but savory.

Juancho

Bikes

All I used to write about was riding bikes. Riding bikes fast. Riding bikes slow. Riding bikes alone. Riding bikes with people. Bikes, bikes, bikes.

I got married. I started a new job where I wear pants and go to a building with other people in it. These two significant events both impacted my understanding of what was fair game to write for the internet at large. If I posted one of my Juancho brand-certified rants would my sweet wife take that as a sign of unhappiness in our relationship? Would the job be concerned about being associated with terms like “sweat-soaked chamois see-through ass-crack window?”

I chickened out. I pulled in my talons.

But that was a long time, and no matter how I tried, these years just flow by like a broken down dam.*

I also started experimenting with fiction, which is really the most truthful of all writing forms, except for maybe poetry which, when good, is so truthful I can’t look it directly in the eye. Writing stories is tough, and it comes to me in pieces and parts without any instruction manual. I would throw away the manual with the packaging anyway.

I look up to a lot of writers and artists. Practical advice is hard to come by, and harder to take. Even when I admire someone’s art that doesn’t mean I can do much with it to further my own. One key exception is a quote I always attribute to Bob Dylan, but that likely has far more ancient roots.

“All it takes to write a good song is 3 chords and the truth.” So, with that advice in mind. Here we go. The truth.

I got the shit scared out of me a few months ago at the Doctor with a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes, which isn’t so much a disease, as a state of dis-ease. There is no bug crawling through your body agitating white blood cells. It is actually a checklist, a set of qualifying factors that permit you beyond the velvet rope into an exclusive club of 29,000,000 Americans. How about that? Pretty swank right? Bigger than Costco. The thing about it is that it is a self-inflicted wound, especially for someone like myself who can get any groceries I want and move my body as frequently as I wish. For other of my esteemed fellow club members they get it because they can’t buy hardly anything in their grocery store without corn syrup in it.

I lost almost 40 lbs, I cleaned up my act. Now the blood tests show nothing out of the ordinary. Its like yesterday there was a terrible crash on I-75 and today you can’t even find the skid marks. But you remember the carnage, and it happens to someone every day. It can happen to me again. All I have to do is take my eyes off the road.

So there it is, the truth in all of its freeing and humiliating glory. I’m going to keep writing this story, for Manny’s sake, and Duane’s, and June’s. I’m going to tell you all about my bike rides, every single one. That part is easy because I am a mutant again, basically two giant thighs with eyes on top. At least one thing here at the Big Ring Circus hasn’t changed in 10 years. Bikes are still magical, and they can save your life.

Juancho

*Thanks to John Prine for the lyrical assist