Proof that a ride did take place, March 2009.

Random. April. Maybe a light sneeze.

Random thoughts for a cold April night, no particular order:

I will read a bit more of the Sebald collected work called Campo Santo, a mix of scholarly work and short essay, travelogue and analysis of the post WWII German psyche. I will get my fill of stylish prose on the ranging beauty of Nabakov’s images, and wonder why a lady at the coffee shop, seeing my book and its title, nodded in approval and said, aloud, “Campo Santo.”

I wondered if the wind would come from the west so fiercely, could it uproot the scraggy creeping vine from the front yard and send it tumbling into the arroyo behind the house, leap over the split rail fence and the hard-raked clay-flecked path between the cowbells and the shy ponil, miss the small dog and his larger companions sniffing their way around the trash-strewn pinon tree near the paved walking path, and rest slanted and wind-battered against he barb-wire fence near the city open-space boundary.

The little attenae of my writing self hasn’t perked up in a while. I’m reading more, finding more authors to read, revisiting older favorites, and contemplating classics to tromp through this summer.

Blitzen Trapper’s song “Furr” is beautiful in lyric the way old folk tales are beautiful, and tromps along in time with a leisurely hike in the mowed-down fields at the edge of a dark wood.

I miss the warmth of March in northern New Mexico, but not the onset of allergies.

I am sleepy, and it is National Poetry Month. Despite the welcome daily email of new poems, the rusty poet in me is silent, but thinking on some stool in the more wintery corners of my tired skull.

My favorite European races happen this month. I’m excited, and eager to find out if my predictions come true.

This is the summer in which I ride further in one sitting than I have ever in my life. I hope to extend this personal record a few times this year.

To wear a cotton shirt to a small coffee shop that also sells whole bean is to carry the smell of finely roasted coffee with you for the rest of the day.

Last precipitation of Winter

I know there’s a lot of uncertainty, things appear to be falling away, some new sort of entropy happening all around us now. The rain falls briefly, then it makes space for a flurry of damp snow, then a muggy down-spiraling wind;

Let us, instead, talk about this wonderful new song that sounds like what clean spring morning air should smell like on such days as these.
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Random thought for the morning. Also, I hate daytime television.

Typed on my iPod Touch.

Picture and a Lament.

Twitter is ruining my posting.  It’s fun to limit yourself to 140 characters, but it forces you to think in such small, quick and compact ways that the expanse of  a blog post (for example) seems daunting, a bungie jump over a dark chasm in the middle of New Mexico compared to a grandiose leap from one trail-side rock to the next.

Which is why this post is exceedingly short.  But there is a picture.

Things I said once to a woman to keep her from leaving the bed.

As a boy, I wanted to trace things, anything, out of a deep-seated need to collect. To know. There’s an idea out there that to collect is to own. I like to collect things, but not so as to own them. So that I can know them, more than I already know of them. To love them, at some level. There were the automobiles, the trucks and implements of construction that came first. Then the animals, the cheetah and long-cattails of the stilted creek near my home. The multi-stage rockets, the off-kilter sine wave of space shuttle wing.

The writing came later. A certain kind of trace; not literal, mostly figurative. I learned simile and metaphor, I learned how these things fit together in order to complete some picture of the world, in macro and micro scale. The small shunt of oak leaf capillary. Summer clouds that cotton balls mimic. The idea of the mind and the brain, of two things made whole in one many-organed thing. We, the people, here in this glade, singing songs of praise, to a higher being.

But it was still tracing. It was a methodology to know something better. The details came with mastery, of course. Shading, the way one should hold their hand in order to make the small curves necessary for wings, for the color in a owl’s eye. After a flick of the pencil, a shade of gray added by crayon or marker, and suddenly they were drawings. The depth in the shade of green. Layer upon layer of feathered gray. A pin-stripe running the length of the rearward haunch of a car.

The female form, I never traced or drew. Too complicated. It seemed crass to hone my rough skill upon it, the ideal of it.

So I resort to a trace of a fingertip. I lay here, with you, now, in the old bed, the shade half drawn on a late summer afternoon, and start to trace the idea of you, literal, figurative. I trace you, shade you with rough-hewn skill, rough fingers and a slight tension, in order to know you. To love you, in a small way. I trace the small curve and slight point of your hip. I trace the nape of your neck, trace the line as it falls away from your face and cast of your shoulder, to your elbow, down the length of the outside of your smallest finger. I trace the soft middle of your lower lip, up the length to your cheek, then down the small peak of your nose.

This is how I know you, how I grow to love you a little more.

Not a list.

Random things in the middle of February, no particular order:

From time to time, I catch some of the Lannan Foundation broadcasts on a ride to or from work courtesy of our local public radio station.  Today, they rebroadcast an earlier round table discussion with some estimable persons on the topic of Walt Whitman and his work.  Instantly, as I enjoyed the back and forth of the host and his guests, my head became light and bobbed ever-so slightly, similar to the feeling one gets after cutting off all their long, thick hair and your neck adjusts and overcompensates for the lack of weight.

One of my secret pleasures is to find and read articles or reviews of artists that the reviewer confesses an undying love/admiration of, but attempts to maintain a modicum of objectivity.  I especially enjoy said articles/reviews when said objectivity falls away less than one hundred words into the review.  Currently I’m reading a piece by David Foster Wallace wherein he writes about David Lynch’s body of work and the rare instance of a “columnist” (he was permitted the set of Lynch’s Lost Highway with the help of Premiere Magazine) allowed onto one of his sets to observe the director in his element.  It’s great.  You can see Wallace relax here a bit, warm to the subject with little effort, and let his considerable talent for contrast and compare (the little academic in me squeals in delight) contextualize the greater movements of American cinema as a foil to Lynch’s idiosyncrasies and influence.  Plus, he tells a fantastic story.  While he contextualizes.

Unseasonably warm, clear days in February create the most eggshell-blue skies in northern New Mexico.

In (exercised-induced) Dreams…

I listened to Radiohead for the first time in a very long time last weekend.  I was struggling through a new test; to see how long I could hold up rotating from aerobic exercise machine to machine, every twenty minutes, in an attempt to build a good base for the coming cycling season.

It could have been the exercise, it could have been the onset of long-distance aerobic endorphine buzz, but the somewhat familiar taste of alkali rose in my mouth.

Was it exercise-induced?  Was it the lack of adequate breakfast in order to hasten the lost of extra “winter weight?”  Was it the restless night of sleep in anticipation to breaking a self-percieved exercise time barrier?  Maybe it was simply using a mental yardstick of couting off fifteen steps during a few laps of the track, one of a number of mind games in which to occupy a tiring body.  The sun was out, and it was unseasonably warm – maybe it was the heating of structural steel and aluminum in February, the slight flakes wafting in the rising heat.

Maybe I was dehydrated.

But a metallic, alkali taste rose in my mouth, and the body warmed to the idea of long afternoons spent sweating and reaching past new limits, and Radiohead played in my shiny earbuds…

And, now, Radiohead reminds me of sweat, alkali, and the warm flow of exercise.

It begins… (again)

After wrestling with an over-tight cassette and digging for my front wheel block in the garage, the stationary bike trainer is ready to go.  I found the fan.  I found the old ratty sweat towel to keep some/most of the sweat off my bike and out of my eyes.  (Freshly laundered as well.)  I dug out all the old DVDs for various lengths of watching/torture.

My goals for this month are to sit on the bike for one four-hour, one five-hour, and one six-hour session.  There will be shorter sessions to clean up my pedal stroke and get the body used to the efforts on the bike.  I have no idea how this will go, only because I’ve never spent that much time on a stationary bike in one sitting.  I want as much base mileage as I can take right now to get ready for a big riding season.

The Enchanted Loop is mine.  Google it if you have a chance.  I think it will be epic, no matter what semblance of shape I’m in.  Sadistcally enough, there’s a part of my brain stem that is relishing mountain pass repeats up to the Santa Fe Ski Basin this spring.  Of course, this is all big talk considering I haven’t turned a pedal in anger in over four months.  The gym is my friend right now, but as of late, the relationship is starting to sour.  Could be the warmer weather, could be my mental fatigue, could be I just need some fresh air.  The excitement is building…

Here’s to a mild spring pollen monsoon, a short spring snow season, and lots of sunshine going forward from mid-March.

Posted from a new gadget…

This could be interesting…

Snow day

It snowed last night, after reaching almost 50 degrees in town during the day. As much as I’m not a morning person, getting up for work today was worth it, if only to witness the rare occasion of fog rolling along the high desert, backlit by a waning moon.

If I only I could have returned to bed after a short while…