Pick-up

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I prefer sandlot rules and pick-up games. Pick teams and go for it. Call your own fouls, play until dark or someone has to go home. No refs, no registration, no uniforms, and no rules other than those universally recognized on the playgrounds of the world. Something about the organization, the ranking, and the clinical approach to determining a first and a last sucks the fun out of sports for me, especially those sports that thrive just fine without those things. I am only speaking for myself here, so no offense to my racer friends, many of whom also soul ride with the outlaws and outliers as well. I want to be faster than all of you, stronger than anyone on a given day- but never line up to prove it. I want to haunt the court like Earl Manigault at Rucker Park, watch surf contests from the shadows like Miki Da Cat. I want the winners to know there is someone out there who can take it all away from them. Victory is fleeting, but legend is eternal.

I have a few friends I consider bike legends. A 43 year-old flying over road gaps in the woods of Oregon, no Go Pro camera necessary- just doing it for the sake of flight, or another one humbly plowing the sands of the Apalachicola National Forest seeing moment after pine needle-dappling moment of north Florida beauty that gets saved in an organic database, or as ink on a page, but never in a series of 1’s and 0’s. One rides a grit-splattered steel frame powering down the rainy bike lanes of Highway 27, alone in the night near Lake Okeechobee, pushing a two-hundred mile day alone in the saddle, 18-wheelers pulling the air-horn in warning and salute.

I really don’t need to compare them, or myself, or racing to anything else. I just need to say they inspire me, and I will forever lift their achievements up around campfires and hunched over handlebars. Every time I clip in or swing a leg over the saddle I know the potential is inside me.

Epic is everywhere.

Juancho

Choices

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You can talk all day about your bigshot deals made over sushi and how you schooled those bureaucrats down at headquarters, but none of those accomplishments mean a thing when you are unloading your bike from your vehicle down at the trailhead and you bump into a friend lean as a piece of rebar. Sure, he has regrets too, or one hopes so, but being slow will never be one of them. That is your regret alone today, or at least in this parking lot. So you rationalize your choices, and you chuck yourself on the arm for keeping that blood pressure down. You take a moment to count your thousands of blessings–your beautiful partner, your apricot poodle, getting that damned deck pressure-washed and sealed, reconciling all of those receipts, nephews and nieces, a rock-solid van, and moving that blog to WordPress. You kick ass buddy!

But- those are all just the saccharin song mewling voices of weakness uniting in a choir of shame while your buddy, and Lord knows he ain’t perfect, but there he sits a few hundred miles of riding into his month while you try to catch a quick 7.5. He maintains eye contact, no telltale glances to the midriff and why won’t he? Just one reason to hate his guts. To literally hate his glossy-entrailed, sinewy guts for his sneering pride would be so helpful, but there is nothing but love there, and you manage to laugh together, all three of you, as your other buddy contemplates his own status, mercifully and safely in the mean on this equation. Ha ha ha! We laugh about riding bikes and not riding bikes, and everyone knows the score here. Bikes. We like them. So off he goes on a road rocket while you galumph into the woods like a bear at hibernation weight, your over psi tires sagging into the sand. During your brief and painful ride you have some epiphanies- about commuting, more big deals over sushi, and how you don’t work for things, you work for the mission man, and that doesn’t ever need to change. So pivot bro, make the necessary adjustments, ride somewhere and write something that will let you show your pixelized face to Reverend Dick and the rest of your circus friends.

Juancho

San Felasco

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CHARGE! I yelled, and rushed out onto the battlefield alone, the only one among my squad to register for the San Felasco 50 off-road eco-tour on January 11. Registrations was closed within 20 minutes and there I was, stranded with no way to retreat. Over the lip of their foxhole the eyes of my peers showed no regret. “Poor dumb bastard.” Those eyes said.

It had to be done. Goals are important. Without San Felasco to fear and hate I am just another guy with a bike and a bunch of excuses. Besides, I can pull myself together one more one more time. I should change the name of this site to the endless comeback.

To quote a friend, “Pennies in a pile make a dollar after a while.” The same is true for miles. If I can accumulate enough of them I can be ready. I am using this past weekend, with a baseline of zero miles, as a starting point.

About 90 days from now, I will suit up and ride, and accept my consequences.

Juancho

Blood

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A phalanx of phlebotomists is a sobering sight before breakfast. Five black women await five white men. They will draw our blood to sample the ore for impurity and excess. The chief steps forwards and reads from the list, “Mike, Mark, Randy…Randy?” Mike and Mark jump up and go, pairing off with purple scrubbed technicians to room one, room two, room–“Randy?” Randy just sits there. He appears overwhelmed by this efficiency. He says to the chief, “I’m Randy.” “Then why aren’t you moving?” She replies. Her tone puts the spurs to him and off he goes for a little pre-prandial desanguination.

I mumble to the man next to me, “I’m going to be ready when she calls my–” Juancho?” Yes Ma’am!” “Room Three, no Four, it looks like Randy still can’t get it together. Right here sir”, and she leads Randy by the elbow to a chair where his steward is already posed with a needle.

Mark was red-faced and cursing at the television when I sat down. “Eight years of this shit.” He fumes at the screen, talking of a government shutdown. “Eight years of this bullshit!” Mark’s blood sugar is going to run high with an attitude like that, and his lipid panel is going to be off the charts. I take a few deep breaths and try to will my blood to comply, to bring me back good news, but I’m concerned. Not enough lazy days and hunger to keep my blood clean, so there is bound to be some evidence of lifestyle, of progress, of success to scare the wits out of me.

The chief is going to handle me personally, and I try to soften her up with a good morning, and how was your weekend. “Fine.” She says, too professional to ignore me, and too professional to not process me quickly. She will draw the blood of dozens today, and it does not appear that she dislikes the task. She grabs my right hand and turns my forearm up, then snaps a rubber tie beneath my bicep. Patting my vein to bring it up she asks, “You okay?” and I wonder why she asks.

“Sure.” I say with a dismissive wave of my unbled hand, “take what you need there’s plenty.”

The pinch of the needle, the release of the tourniquet, and the tap flows a rich red, telling all of my secrets.

Juancho

Open Doors

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I accidentally looked past fall and saw the grey wet skies of winter.  In a flash of memory I tasted a  hot sip of coffee I drank a few thousand miles from here, and even further away when measured by sips of coffee tasted since.  I slurped that hot sip in with a rush of cooling air across the roof of my mouth, and burbled it like a sommelier, but I was just a prep cook in a pair of forgotten pants and a blue plaid shirt.  I remember that shirt for the polyester quilting inside that made it warmer than it looked.  That shirt is long gone and lost, although I do remember it making it back across the Mississippi river with me.

Why this memory here?  Why now, as I gun the van into Monday morning traffic on a narrow canopy road in town, the same grey sky as ten thousand sips ago? the air just as thick and claustrophobia inducing, but 30 degrees warmer.  That cold wet air kept outside my blue plaid shirt just as long gone as the shirt itself.

Maybe there is something important to remember about that morning?  Too bad I have so few clues to go on.  I sip this morning’s coffee, the push pot said Chiapas, and the phrase the blood of the peasants, runs through my thoughts.  It is the blood of the peasants that makes it taste so rich.  Were those words that I spoke that morning a river of coffee ago?  Did I overhear it?

This seems to be a significant detail, so I put it in my sleuthing folder with the blue plaid shirt and the faceless pants, and that leads me to a sous chef I worked under, and how he studied poetry at Reed, and how he couldn’t flip a saute pan to save his life.  He put his clumsy fingers in my trinity and flickered the diced pieces about with a scowl. I pictured those fingers tumbling out as free agents into the sizzling pan, my 13″ Chef’s knife marinated in poet’s blood.

Now I remember.  That sip of coffee, bought with a precious squandered dollar as a free man with no income.  A peasant reclaiming his blood.

Juancho

 

 

Good deal

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I have a young neighbor of modest means.  She is almost 11 and she rides a purple bike.  The tires are fissured with cracks.  We have developed an arrangement for when her bike needs attention.  She leaves it in my carport, understanding that when I find the time I will fix it, and place it against the porch rail by her front door.  There is no risk of the bike being stolen, as her yard is wildly overgrown.  A drooping cedar tree blocks the view from the street and thorny vines as thick as her wrist twine up through shaggy Azaleas and wrap her house in a web of summertime green.

My neighbor is a good kid, and will be a fine person.  Her life is tough in ways she isn’t even aware of, and this will serve her well as an adult.  She speaks in a tiny thin voice and this is my only point of contention I have with her.  I wish for her to be able to grab life by the collar and shove it up against the wall when it crosses her. Instead, she speaks like she is apologizing.  I ask her to answer me in a big booming voice, or sometimes to yell for no reason, like “HEY! HOW ABOUT FIXING MY BIKE!”  When I do this she grins, assuming I am teasing her.  I’m not teasing her.  I am serious.

She put the bike in my carport over a week ago, and it took me that long to find time.  She doesn’t nag, or complain about it.  She goes on about her bikeless days and waits.  She calls herself a Buddhist.

Sunday morning, after my own insufferable steamy ride, I tear down her purple bike. I am careful not to separate the brittle bead from the sidewall, and I put a brand new tube in, after removing the guilty thorn.  I scrub the chain, blast it with the hose and enjoy watching the sheets of greasy black water pool in the corner of my driveway where it will then seep into the carpet in the laundry room.  I pump up the tires, then sit on the front wheel and torque the handlebars straight.  I  lube the brake cables, hubs, shifters, levers, and both derailleurs, before wiping the frame down with my dirty t-shirt.  The last thing I do is take it for a test ride, knees jacking up beside my ears as I run through the gears and kick out the back end in a power-slide.  Rock and roll ready.

The bike is delivered to the stoop– the transaction completed last night with a construction paper thank you card and a vase full of wild dandelions out of her scraggly yard.  Better compensation than one has any right to expect in this world.

 

Juancho

Suck wind

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I woke up Sunday morning with a Saturday night head. Little dog harpies yawped and squeeched me right out the door in a panic. Hunched over the steering wheel like a slug on the window I crept along the miles I felt too discouraged to ride. Will this story ever get older? My body is the financial crisis of 2008. The wealth did not transfer, it just ceased to be. That fitness is no longer in the market.

I hate summer. Not Summer, the Apricot poodle, but the sticky, disgusting season that covers my skin like I’m wrapped in Saran wrap and suffocates me slowly. I blame everything on north Florida panhandle heat. I have learned my lesson. The only way to ride hard through August and September is to be mutant strong at the end of May, and then launch yourself into the spiderweb of dew hoping to scrap your way through to October, which is still a lot like September.

And another thing- getting used to this new site is tough. Even as I type I have in my view a cockpit of gauges and tools. What do they mean? Why do I need them? How will they change our lives?

We will see. Until then I am dancing with the date that brunged-ed me. Complaining about the weather, and talking about bikes.

Slow, hot, Munson, whining. Refer yourself to the archives for context.

Juancho

The Haitian Trunk

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Some years ago I finagled possession of a family heirloom, a trunk my step-father picked up in his travels in Haiti.  It is large enough to crawl inside and pull the barrel vaulted lid down on top of yourself.  I can’t say how long I have managed to hang onto it, or how I have done so without doing it any damage, or losing it in my many moves. Inside it I carry my past.  I have always believed that if I kept the thread of my stories together, I would one day unpack them and discover what my life is about, and lay out the blueprint, or the treasure map, to the story as I would like it told.

There are gaps in the narrative, and I am a shoddy record-keeper; but in the piles of notebooks, photographs, consecrated broken clocks, divine pocket knives,  fliers for bands long broken up, and letters from old girlfriends, there is a common thread-me. I picture myself at a desk, a dedicated funcionario, with an inbox on my left as high as the ceiling.  I process each item, evaluating it for its historical significance and narrative merit, then digesting it into fiction, nonfiction, or poem than placing the empty husks on my right-hand side in the outbox, where each item will be preserved, or discarded.

The Big Ring Circus, has become another Haitian trunk, full of evidence and artifacts. It is a narrative that jumps in time and space, leaving fingerprints of nearly a decade.  I found myself writing about bikes,  probably because I trust bikes to always get me where I want to go.

This is where we have arrived next, www.bigringcircus.com.

 

Juancho

Blessed are the Pilgrims

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Listening to a 35 year-old song in a 26 year-old van I feel like a historian trying on the artifacts. 

He is riding in the rain, a downpour so powerful that it drowns out the music and the rattle of the old motor jangling on broken mounts in the chassis.  A rain so complete, that I imagine there is no space left for the air he is sucking as he climbs the long grade into Taylor county.  Loaded down with full racks, he is not the visionary or the vagabond, but a rider prepared for the journey.  Is he a one-day epic artist or a cross-nation explorer?  Despite the sheets of water and the speed, I can see this is a young man.

I want to pull over and offer him something, and why is that? To see the pilgrim on hajj is to see free will flexed, and what inspires more than free will, enjoyed and asserted?  In my instant assessment I determine he needs nothing I have, and truthfully, it makes more sense to stop and ask him, “What can you spare for me?”  Can you part with a little courage? Afford me a small handful of freedom from fear? Peel off a bit of ache in the knees, and the conviction to ease up just a tad, but keep going through the rain to a soaking campsite and a camp-stove under the fly to warm the spirits.  Perhaps a little extravagance of rum stuffed in a sock and stashed in a cook pan? Brother?  Can you help me?

Sitting at the San Felasco trailhead, with the bike in the back, I watch it rain and rain, and I can’t be bothered to unload for a sloppy, slow grind that won’t be enough to break me from the tethers that keep me from tumbling off the earth. 

The truth is I am a working man, who owns a bike.  I like to ride it when I can, but it’s raining today and my dress shirt hangs ironed behind my head, and people are expecting me to help them tomorrow, with things I can’t ignore.

So is this still the adventure?  Is he killing time, or am I?

Juancho

Too late

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My arm is sore from patting myself on the back so much for being a strident supporter of equal rights for gay, lesbian, and transgender people.  I wrote this and got some things off my chest, and many of you were complimentary and supportive, and that was lovely.  

Elvis Presley recorded some 800 songs in his career, and to my knowledge In the Ghetto was the only one that addressed a social issue.  We all have our causes.  As a writer, I avoid using my digital soapbox to advocate, because in the end we all sing to our own choirs and go home with sore arms.  What’s the point?  If it matters to you, sacrifice for it.  Go sleep in the Capitol rotunda for 31 days.    Stand on the right side of the street at a protest and get called a faggot.  Go out and get your skull cracked for the right to vote. 

And yet:

I need to tell you a story about how everything being done to support the gay rights movement, or the Big Gay Agenda, is just too late.  Too late for some anyway.  I saw an old friend this week in Texas.  An early mentor of mine, she has spent most of her life working on behalf of kids who are homeless, runaways, or otherwise lost and forgotten.  No better or worse a person than the rest of us, but a damn good egg.  In all the time I have known her she has been with her partner, Nadia,  another good egg.  They raised a family together, and their kids now have kids, and there is even a great-grand child at this point. 

Her partner, her love, and her soulmate  fell ill with a catastrophic brain injury, requiring many surgeries that she somehow survived.  She lost much of her ability to speak, and requires constant in home care, that my friend was willing and able to handle.  Instead, Nadia’s aging mother was given power of attorney over her daughter, and promptly moved her 800 miles away from her home.  You see, Nadia’s mother doesn’t believe in gay.   Now, on the rarest occasion, they are permitted to see each other.  Nadia is making great progress, but is still unable to assert her wishes legally so this family remains broken, because by the laws of this land they are not a family at all. 

I hope on the day this nation arrives into the light, we celebrate even as we hang our heads in shame for the damage that can never be undone.

Have a nice weekend, enjoy your family time.

Juancho