Steam

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Every person only gets so much steam.  It is up to each of us to decide how to use it or let it leak out of its own accord.

No pictures, just words.  Steady rain knocking fat magnolia blossoms onto the sidewalk like fried eggs slipping onto the Waffle House floor.  The smell of them so sweet it is pornographic and I blush just driving over them in the road.

A bike ride last night 20 years overdue with Joey B and an old friend who ate potato soup on a cold day while carving out the first mountain bike trail in Tallahassee that I ever knew of, sweet Grandma Munson.  Maybe it was potato soup, or maybe said he built a chicken coop, his pink bike spinning so fast I heard nothing but wind.

A fresh clean burn on the forest, setting the crest of Woodpeckers off in contrast with the matte black floor of the burned pine needles, green shoots of grass already reaching up over pedals. Long views through the missing underbrush, blueberries hidden off the trail not quite ready.

Just falling into each pedal stroke hoping to never hit the bottom, yarding the next one up around the 12 O’ clock and then hammering towards earth.  I can hear them back there, one wrong move and they will have me.  No wrong moves tonight though.  I’m all on the one and riffing on the breaks.

The way points north to Alabama tomorrow.  I’ll lay my head back and watch the sun shine down on the great south and loll away the miles while my girl pins it to the white line and cocks her foot up on the dash.

Juancho

Tallahassee Blogger Convention

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That title might be a bit hyperbolic, but I ran into Ms. Moon, of www.blessourhearts.blogspot.com Friday night.  Look at us out on the town.  Not bad for a woman who prefers the company of chickens and a misanthropic cyclist.  She was there with a whole mess of family, to watch her friends play some music.  I was there to apply for a dish-washing job.   I’m afraid I tanked the interview, but I aced the swimsuit competition. 

-Juancho

Ole Boy’s Club

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We stood around the car talking tomatoes like farmers.  What do you do about boring caterpillars? Walk away or change the subject? I thought but I guess they meant something different.

Just a scorching fast out and back up the Miccosukee Greenway sliding around the shell-covered turns hoping to not see a family of four, or a dog-walker around the next blind turn.  Just four of us, an uneventful day except it is so unlikely to see the old BRC crew together again.  All we needed was ole Tommy the Torso and it would have been a reunion.

I’ve got to take it easy! says one.
I thought we came out to ride! says another.
What about some fellowship? says Sasquatch.
I can take you all any time I want. thinks Juancho.

It’s getting so hot I could start riding naked, and this ain’t nothing yet, as we say all summer long.

4 old guys leaning on a Volvo talking about tomatoes, carbon fiber, and the weather.  Yes ma’am, yes sir, a thrill a minute and punk rock still lives.  Deep down inside our gluten-free hearts, just around the corner from Mortgage avenue, in a coldwater flat at the end of marriage and family way.

-Juancho

Reality tastes like dust

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The dust that Poncho bit down south ended up in Lefty’s mouth, and I know how Lefty feels.

The forest floor was still smoking from a burn, the trail an ashen pillow, and me- the last in line. I hit that section the last of seven and holding up well enough, the pace so hard I felt I was being reeled in, the prize lunker.  I clawed for my jersey zipper, yanking.  It was already down to my navel. I sucked water and coughed it out as the need for air took priority.  The trail turned uphill and rivets started popping from my hull.  A scrub oak branch snapped back into my face, I spit blood and grit over my front tire, and that is about when I called it quits.  Dropped my friends, like a hit record on the first day of summer.

My last few rides had me believing I was better than that.  Two hour epics of flow and spin with my friend Steve, the ever-steady man of mystery.  Turns out we were caught in a collective delusion.  Two bums straightening each others’ collars, “And a fine good day to you sir, don’t you look smashing this morning!”  “Well thank you good sir, you are the perfect image of vigor and health yourself if I have ever seen a more able gentleman I will eat my hat!”  And away we go toddering down the trail and passing the Wild Irish Rose.

“There is no such thing as patience.”  Bill said, “There is only impatience and the way the universe reveals itself.”  Or something like that.

Juancho

 

Peace Chicken

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1996-

We frequently had to push-start the Peace Chicken.  It turned over with a little nudge, back-fired and roared in first gear while the pusher climbed back in the sliding bay door and said, “Hit it!”

With that, the driver would ease the clutch out and in that last inch of play the old air-cooled pancake motor would thrum us away in a coughing cloud of blue.  The Peace Chicken was an early 1970’s VW bus, brick-red with bags of stale to moldy bagels piled so high  the rear-view mirror was useless.

The bagels were cast-offs we intended to give to the poor and hungry, although I do not know what we had against those people.  We would pile in the Chicken and attend meetings around town with other noble idealists, sweat running down our backs, into the cracks of our asses, puddling on the vinyl seats before dripping out the rusty holes in the floorboards.  Boxes of STOP GENOCIDE flyers mouldered in our laps waiting to bring people down as they ate pizza, or shopped for a Bob Marley poster in the student union at FSU.  For those who needed further explanation, we carried folders of color-copied photographs depicting children murdered in the streets, old women cooking grass soup, and city parks lined with tombstones and freshly dug graves.  This was our calling card.

That winter, the Peace Chicken carried two of our emissaries to a meeting in Washington D.C.
Prior to their departure we collectively worried over the Chicken.  Those with abilities changed oil, tightened throttle cables, and checked brake pads.  Those of us without lined the floor with blankets, made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches by the dozen and passed bottles of Dewar’s around and watched the others work.  I have pictures from that trip north of the Peace Chicken coated in clear ice so thick they couldn’t open the doors, the driver and passenger swaddled in sleeping bags as they rumbled up I-95 to join the voices for Bosnia, prosthetic stump socks on their heads to keep them warm.

Sometimes I think I see it around town.

-Juancho

 

Happy Birthday

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Today is my wife’s birthday so I wrapped up my eye teeth in my last bottom dollar to give to her.
She said, “Thanks, but that’s really not necessary.”  I said, “Oh, but it is.” and ran across a bed of hot coals to get her a glass of ice water.  “Now you’re just being silly,” she told me as I rubbed my belly and patted my head while jumping up and down on one foot.  “No I’m not. I’m a serious person.” I told her and I seriously love you and that is nothing to joke about.”  She said, “What has two cheeks and is brown in the middle?” and I guessed a hamburger, which was the wrong answer.
Last week she said, “Don’t do anything special for my birthday.” So I let the ice carving of Pegasus slowly melt out behind the shed.  I paid the chorus of 5 and 20 angels their travel per diem and apologized for putting them out unnecessarily.  “What can you do when your true love speaks, but what she requests?” the conductor angel shrugged.  “Indeed.” and the 26 of us polished off the Scuppernong  pies I made for her, cooling on the window sill.  “Good pies!” the angels said and they penciled me in again for next year just in case.
-Juancho

Listen

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My right ear has been closed up tight for almost two weeks.  I think it is trying to protect me by prohibiting negativity from coming into it.  The doctor says it’s an infection.  To each our own. I still have one good ear so that means I’m listening, but just barely.

A friend took a scary fall at the Santos trails down in Marion County, FL last week.  We got a pensive call from his girlfriend late at night with scant details.  I spent the next 24 hours pondering the possibility of his death, or permanent incapacitation either mentally or physically.
That’s the kind of information my ear is trying to shield me from I think.

He tumped over from a small height onto his head and lay there unable to move or feel anything below the neck. “I think I broke my neck” is what he was reported to have said.  I know a bit about broken necks and a life without movement.  The thing nobody acknowledges is that it goes on.  My step-father is quadriplegic, as is a childhood friend from back in the day.  They live, they get things done.  They travel the third world and get drunk.  You say you would rather be dead, but you wouldn’t.  We all persist. We accommodate.  We adapt.

For some minutes my friend must have lay there amid the crumbled limestone and pine needles and contemplated such a transition.  How will I earn a living?  How will I eat? How will I everything?  I imagine those minutes will become very important to him, much like my Crash of Great Clarity.  I can’t recommend enough a terrifying accident or crisis when one needs to prioritize their values.

As feeling tingled back into his fingers and toes, and the paramedics loaded him up, was he making amends?  Counting his blessings?  Who knows?

All of that is personal between he and his moment.

Juancho

Hippie Killearn

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Bikes? That’s hilarious. This is a grown-up blog where we talk about grown-up things- like hippies and houses.

I looked at a few yurts over in Indianhead Acres, a neighborhood I like to call “Hippie Killearn.” This neighborhood is highly prized by leftists, progressives, socialists, and other popular covers for Al Qaeda cells. This neighborhood is characterized by the street layout, which resembles the profile of an indian, or to be more sensitve- injun, as long as they all wore feathers on their heads.

The streets are called “Nenes” instead of “streets” and I can only deduce that this is a misspelling of “ninnies” which would make a lot more sense.

Killearn is on the other side of town, and for me it has always represented affluency, ascendancy, and mainstream economic values. I am trading in gross generalizations, but let’s admit it: Killearn had a lot of McCain Palin signs in the yards, and Indianhead was split equally between Draft Gore/ Kucinich/ Obama with the debate scheduled to be resolved by a moonlit session of Zen Non-Power Volleyball at- where else? Optimist Park.

I am not going to get my hopes up, because that is not my way, but I am asking the Ouija board if there is a place for me in Hippie Killearn with the rest of the BRC All-Stars: S’quatch, HiTops, and Soup.

Should the unlikely event transpire, there will be nowhere for them to hide.

Juancho

Wobbly

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Am I out of my groove because my inner ear is infected, or is my inner ear infected because I am out of my groove?  Either way, this record has been skipping in all the wrong spots.

Time to make it right.  I got the antibiotics, but the rest of the prescription reads something like:

  • Acquire perfect summer theme song
  • Swim against the current
  • Consult the Angry Monk
  • 2 tblsp Turpentine
  • 1 bushel of barbed wire
  • 100 miles per week

I now welcome any and all non-binding, should-free advice from you- my crowd-sourced board of directors.

Thanks!

Juancho

Finding Charlie

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Charlie the black Labrador disappeared in the storm on Sunday, a pouring down of buckets and crashing thunder that laid most of us down flat with the weight of the  falling pressure.
It has been a run of the putrid touch lately, when my every effort to get it right turns up shit. It is a syndrome exacerbated by effort, churning more and more best intentions into disappointments, let-downs and failure.

“My aged black lab escaped my yard Sunday during the storms. He is black, about 100 pounds, and he has a difficult time getting around, so I’m not sure how he got further than the drive, but he is missing.  If anyone has seen him, please let me know.  He answers to Charlie, though usually only if he thinks food is involved.”

I read that message at my desk and thought about old Charlie.  Was he off on a rounder? Scarfing cat food off or porches and licking wrappers behind Vertigo burgers? Had someone taken him in, unable to find his people? Was Charlie alive?

I thought about that dog all day as I willed myself to not leave the building, my job, and my financial security behind.  Such a feat of strength by the hunger artist that goes unnoticed by his distracted audience. I exited the building to no applause, although I took my bow.

The social network was alight with erroneous sightings of Charlie, and one concrete piece of information, however ominous-

“There is a black lab laying in the water in the Greenway by optimist park if anyone is missing a black lab it is alive but seems disoriented.”
 I called Charlie’s people, and she said that she had been up and down the greenway twice and saw nothing.  I felt the draw, the inexorable draw of adventure, redemption, yet another go at getting it right. I wanted to find Charlie, and I felt that I knew where he was.  Down into the greenway we went- my wife, my neighbor JJ, and our two intrepid search dogs, Summer Chanel (pictured) and Max the Australian Shepherd.  Find Charlie! we beseeched them and they did nothing of the sort.
The greenway is a lowland drainage, which in lesser neighborhoods would be separated from the community by a chainlink fence and no trespassing signs, but in idyllic Indianhead Acres, it hosts wild foxes, a beaver, a walking path and even in early spring, every mosquito on earth.
Our crew trundled down the long stairway into the covered, close air of the swamp.  I hung back, allowing myself to wander off the path and into the knee-deep marshy thicket.  I could see the basketball court, the nearby road, and hear the kids playing in the playground just a hundred yards away, but this was a wild place and I walked it the way a wild place must be walked.  I walked cautiously along a muddy rivulet invisible from the main path, obscured by thickets of grass.
A black lab laying in the water, a black lab laying in the water, a black lab laying in the water, I whispered to myself as I walked and then I stopped-frozen with excitement, relief, and fear for the possible outcome.  There, neck-deep in the mud, were the sad and frightened eyes of a dog, alive.  I cried out something, and as I splashed towards him Melissa appeared above on the bank, her hand outstretched with a packet of food.  Charlie licked an inquiring tongue out to taste the food and then hungrily lapped it up from his prone position.  I called the owner and she was there, she could see us down below and she hurried down into the mud with me, a strong woman with white hair in a long braid and worry all over her face.  I reached into the water and felt all over Charlie, probing for injuries or signs of trauma.  He seemed unhurt, just exhausted.
A gentleman with a long white beard and a rugged bearing, Charlie’s other human companion, went back up the trail to find a tarp to help us move him, and Charlie made a move to follow. He was a willing old dog, but he just wasn’t able. His tired old hips would not hold him upright as he repeated his effort to get unstuck from this place.  That was it for me.  I knew how Charlie felt, stuck and tired, staring hope in the eyes yet unable to get there.  “Charlie, it is time to go buddy.  We are getting out of here.”
I knelt down in that  muddy water, my knees pressing into the walls of this rutted stream and I scooped my arms around this 13 year-old dog, 90 lbs made heavier by muck and mud, and I lifted him up, cradled in my shaking arms and laid him on the grassy bank above us.  His owner and I worked ourselves out of the crick and Charlie stood wobbly and tried to head up the trail, unable to hold himself upright for long.  I thought once of my back, then put that thought aside and thought, I will carry this dog out of here or stay here with him forever.  Up he came, and he felt so good against my chest, this thing that I had gotten right.
Juancho