hand on the bare box
end of the novel page,
frothy sound of milk heated
moves the soft tack of scatter shot
in our ears -
earphones place calls to the little head-bobber
between the librarian and the small
child in his head,
hand on the cool
window at the start of fall,
evaporation traces dewy fingers
in the clear newly-cold
day.
Does this new Twitter poster work? It would be kinda cool if it did. Even though I don’t have much to say tonight. Forgive me – it’s Monday night. I’m just glad to get through Mondays at work in one piece. (It’s the small things. Really.)
Bosque Trial, July
I’m a little miffed right now. I just created a post in the Quickpress pane on the dashboard and now it’s nowhere to be found. Lame. I didn’t even copy it to be on the safe side.
Sufficed to say, it was another tease of a post about posting more. About setting some new writing goals despite my weird bedtimes these days due to a change in work schedule. (Still not a morning person despite the early work hours, if anyone’s keeping score at home.)
I should stop saying/typing the word post. It does grate after a while.
Fall is upon us here in central New Mexico. And that can mean only one thing – more blog… entries.
(I hope.)
Old August Sunset
Summer comes to a slow, soft landing. Again. I will not apologize (in this post) again for not posting. I think I will post more photos, though.
I am working on a piece to post. It’s been ruminating for a while now, and it will commit to a blog post. I promise. I feel kinda dull, realizing that I haven’t posted in a while. To be fair, I’ve been caught up in reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s all consuming. I’m drawn into that world so thouroughly that I can’t really even focus on my prodigious magazine reading.
It’s that bad.
There is also the matter of what I did over the summer. That’s on the to-do list as well. Photos even. Some photos, at least.
I need to stop apologizing. I need to start writing again. Maybe after I read a bit more of Infinite Jest…
…is still pending. I have some photos, some interesting observations, and a whole lot of riding. I’ll post something soon-ish.
This was the Sunday before last. I was in the Euro-trash outfit, which translates to: ‘98 Team Italia jersey and iBanesto.com shorts. Both items were bright blue. At least you could see me, even in the sun. Visibility is important. Rode the Santa Fe Prison Loop, which was the first time for me. I was speedometer-less for this ride, and it was oddly liberating. I had no idea how fast I was going, how long I’d been out mashing the pedals, or exactly what time of day it was at any given moment. I just counted my pedal strokes and listen to my body. Might do a little more of that in the near future, seemed to get me focused in a new way on how my body responds to speed.
Maybe another picture later.
Not sure where my fortune lies with all these random things happening on road rides, but here’s a quick list of what happened during this (very good) edition:
Six prairie dogs ran along side me while warming up near a field, off the parking lot of the DOT maintenance complex. They darted into a small opening to their labyrinth near the end of the open field, sprinting with their tiny bodies across the dusty tracks between dugouts. (Usually they never react as I pass by – the most I’ve seen before would be a careful sentry pose, on hind legs, and an authoritative bark.)
Two crows, then two ravens floated on updrafts no more than 15 feet above me as I spun my way up my favorite hill climb at the back of a housing development on the extreme southeast-end of Santa Fe county. The warm updraft carried them in such a way as to trace the path of my ride up the chip-seal grade, watching, cheering me on silently as I huffed and puffed. The ravens seemed more supportive, the crows seemed to find me more of a convenient point of reference as they felt their way onto the next warm wave of air.
One of Santa Fe’s finest almost ran me over trying to pull over a guilty driver. Thought he would pass me, then make a right-hand turn in front of me. Little did he know (he would have, if he paid attention to my hand-signal) that I was to make the same right turn. It ended well, and at least he was paying attention to me, rather than his mark.
One of these days, I’ll remember to bring along the point-and-shoot, just so that I might document further these strange spring ride happenings. Of course, once I bring a camera with me, all of these strange occurrences will cease. Worth a shot.
No sun just yet, the late spring day and the long blasts of cold air from the southeast all slow down this rattlesnake, near a giant cellphone tower, set as a relay between the capital and the largest city of New Mexico.
Did the snake strike? No. Coil? As if the playback were in slow-motion, and I and my brain were analyzing the nuances of a big play, it coiled long enough after I moved safely away. Did it bite me? No. I didn’t see it until it would have been too late, but it did not coil, it did not strike. My adrenaline spiked as if it did coil, as if it had made a lunge towards me. I was lucky. The ground around it was a slightly yellow white, like limestone gravel or the dust left over from the act of breaking granite rocks with blunt instruments. The snake was perfectly camouflaged. I never saw its head, and the rattle started very late – I walked a good seven feet away before it rattled. It disappeared underneath this great jagged concrete remnant from the train track construction, and I never met the slightly dazed bugger eye-to-eye.
The thought, recurring over and over again in my head as I made a clumsy retreat in cycling shoes, was it would be terrible and funny in a way if I received a bite on a road ride, rather than the slightly more conventional mountain bike ride.
The season is young. Typically I have great riding seasons when the strangest things happen, so maybe it was a sign of good (strange) riding ahead. Or maybe I’ll be bitten by something else.
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