Progression

This has become fascinating for me. Gross, occasionally painful, somewhat inconvenient, but also fascinating.

Hematoma, second morning after crash:



Hematoma, fourth morning after crash:


It's growing and changing like something out of a sci-fi movie, and I can't help but wonder if it's planning to take over my entire leg.

Eating gravel on the C&O Canal

Well, I had a fun ride today.

Drove out to Sharpsburg and got on the C&O Canal towpath across the river from Shepherdstown, headed downstream towards Harper's Ferry. It was gorgeous out, so I had no specific plan or mileage in mind, just figured I'd ride as far as I felt like then turn around to head back, and enjoy the beauty of the sky, river, and trees along the way.

So I'm cruising along, when I glance down and see a wasp on my thigh. I brush it off without looking, then glance down again and see it's still there. I brush again, looking to see if I got it and... I don't know if I hit a rock or leaned my weight the wrong way or what, but the next thing I know I'm sprawled face down in the gravel and dirt, with my bike under me. Hopped up, grabbed the bike to check it out, and noticed blood running down my arm. Twisted my elbow as close to my face as I could only to find a nice little hole gouged in my arm. There's also almost 6 inches of bright red road (towpath?) rash down my shin and the leather on the palms of my gloves is shredded. And I can feel a goose egg growing on the inside of my thigh from where it must've smacked into the nose of my saddle.

Fortunately, I was just upstream from the Huckleberry Hill campsite, so I start walking the bike towards it and see 4 people standing near the porta-john. They were standing around a snake that was in the middle of the towpath (and which was probably wishing they'd all go away). I had to walk around and through the group to get to the porta-john for some toilet paper (since none of them would move), holding my hand up in front of me to prevent the blood from running down my arm, and not one of them seemed to notice. I come out of the porta-john wiping gore off my wrist, and still not one of them says anything to me.

So I grabbed my bike and headed down to the picnic table, where I had to lie down for a bit for the adrenaline to wear off and my ears to stop ringing (I had hit my chin on the ground). After a while I sat up, pulled out my first aid stuff (thank goodness I come prepared), and began trying to clean myself up. Then I had to get my chain untangled from the bottom bracket and fix the shifter that'd been knocked cockeyed. During the time that I was sitting there, 3 more pairs of people passed by and two of the people who had been looking at the snake passed again heading back. Again, not one of those 10 people said "How are you?", "Are you ok?", or even "Gee, you look goofy."

The 9 mile ride back to the car was easier than expected, and it was so very beautiful out this morning that I was actually still able to enjoy it. If it weren't for the fact that my elbow continues to ooze blood as I type this, the crash would kind of be no big deal.

And there's a big drop of blood right in the middle of the top tube of my bike. I think that I'm not going to clean it off. It will serve as a reminder to me that, in this world of oblivious idiots, I can take care of myself.

Cafe Nola- New menu, new (capsule) review

Cafe Nola's chef has outdone him/herself with the newly revised kitchen menu, which includes breakfast every day of the week (yay!). Close your eyes and allow your taste buds to imagine: a portabella mushroom cap topped with spinach and mozzarella, crowned with poached eggs and hollandaise a la eggs Benedict-- The creaminess of the egg yolks and lemony-ness of the sauce are a startlingly tasty compliment to the meaty flavor of the mushroom. An absolutely brilliant combination.

Now if only their spiced chai latte actually had some spice...

And the secret is...

...Mag Glycinate and Endurabolic. I've been on the magnesium supplement since last year, after telling my chiropractor about the heart arrhythmia I'd experienced on a few strenuous rides. He recently recommended the Endurabolic supplement after I mentioned the sluggish, weak feeling I'd also had on many occasions last summer.

My last two rides have been challenging. Last weekend, some friends convinced me to take on the Peach Tree Loop, site of my first scary experience two years ago with whatever heart issue I may or may not have. Sure, I caved in and walked the bike part-way up three of the steepest hills this time around and made my riding partners take a couple breaks more than they otherwise would have, but I survived, dammit, and felt good afterward.

Today I had planned on a 45 mile ride along the Western Md Rail-Trail in preparation for an organized ride I'm doing on in eastern Md in just over a week. Nice and flat, just like the upcoming Wild Goose Chase ride at which I hope to do the 43 mile route. Last year's Wild Goose wasn't as fun as it could've been, but if this year's weather allows I hope to take greater advantage of the flat roads and gorgeous scenery that comprise it. So, today was a practice run. Except that today began with wind gusts up to 20mph. Heading northwest towards Hancock took me straight into those gusts. I tucked down in the drops and plowed into it at a somewhat comfortable cadence, but it wore me out quicker than I would've liked so I turned back at mile 12.5 and made the most of the tailwind on the return ride. Of course, by the time I got back to the car the wind had become merely a breeze and I could've gone on for a few more miles...

What was different on both of these rides was that, as hard as my legs and cardiovascular system were working, I felt good. I may have been tired and even a little sore, but there was none of the weakness that's been such a plague for so many months. Right now, instead of feeling that I can't do anything but collapse in a chair and vegetate, I feel fatigued yet strong.

Dr. Joe, I love ya.

Intarwebs intarvention

Hi, my name is Kali and I'm an addict. Yesterday, I blew off an incredibly lovely, albeit windy, spring afternoon by succumbing to the lure of the intarwebs. I said I would just sit down and quickly check my e-mail. Two message boards, Facebook, a bunch of blogs, and several RSS feeds later, it was less than an hour before sunset and I also had housework to do. I may be (hopefully) keeping my brain sharp with all of this stuff, but the body's getting soft and that just won't do.

It's time to impose some limits. I won't be going away entirely, as there are too many people around the web that I've connected with and I want to maintain those connections. But I also need to find a better balance between time on-line and time doing all the other stuff that rounds out one's life. So, to anyone to whom I currently owe a reply-- please be patient, it's going to take me even longer than usual to get back to you.

As for you, intarwebs... It's not goodbye, it's just au revoir.

The hardest thing is rendering a moment moving too fast to endure...

Today's weather was the most schizophrenic I've seen in a long time. From dense, milky fog in the morning, to thicker stratus clouds and drizzle, to blue sky and fluffy mixed cumulus and cumulonimbus, to being pelted with rain under a sky mixing all of the above. At one point, though, I managed to hurriedly park the car along route 340, then dash across heavy traffic and run out onto the bridge just in time to catch this before the clouds shifted and it faded away:

Click image for larger view


Look Alive

The hardest thing is rendering a
moment moving too fast to endure
But you abide and smile wide 'cause
I want to remember this for sure
Give me guns and politics and
I'll just make a mess of it, y'know
Give me art as sustenance and the
wiser, wider part of me will show

A picture says with sight
what we can't say with words
But you've been walking eyes-to-feet in dark sunglasses
A picture will survive
So smile and look alive
The camera lens is opening, a wider angle is yours

Every empty one of us have methods
to quell the madness of this place
But yours have bled and are running south
like dollar-store mascara down your face
You can take that wait and all that fuss and
I'll just get the best of us, y'know
Give me love not suicide
and the wiser, wider part of me will show

A picture says with sight
what we can't say with words
But you've been walking eyes to feet in dark sunglasses
A picture will survive
So smile and look alive
The camera lens is opening, a wider angle is yours

Look alive
Smile, smile and look alive

Out from the woods: Yet more random babblings

Got out on the bike yesterday for the first time in five months. I left the computer at home, and my intention was to just ride easy with no care for mileage, cadence, or speed. It started out well enough, easy as I'd intended, turning the pedals at a smooth, loping pace. But then it became... not quite hard, but... effortful. I can blame part of it on a slight wind that kicked up periodically (always a cross-wind, never a tail-wind, of course), but the rest? So many of last year's rides were like this, easy one moment, the next a concerted effort to keep the cranks turning smoothly at the same rhythm. I've begun a series of doctor's appointments to check out everything from my asthma to the heart flutters I experienced last summer and fall. There's got to be something at the root of this fatigue, whether it's my heart, my lungs, diet, poor sleep, the beginnings of inherited fybromyalgia, I want to find the deficiency and correct it.

So this morning I woke up feeling sluggish and out of it, not to mention sore in the saddle area. Not getting on the bike today, how about a nice, easy hike instead? Almost thought I was too tired even for that, but I finally forced the car in the direction of one of the many local trails and headed out. By that point I felt absolutely no desire to exert myself, but wanted badly to be out in the woods under the vibrant blue sky. After wandering probably less than a mile, I found a good spot and plopped my fatigued ass down by the creek, where my mind turned to a series of thoughts that've been fermenting in the vat of my brain over the last few weeks.

Between my own gradually increasing physical limitations (fuck it, let's call a spade a spade-- middle-age is slowing me down) and recent synchronistic reminders of Ego (it's a big subject, so it gets a capital 'E'), a bit of Baudelaire struck me that I may as well share...


Carrion

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off,
the hideous carrion --

legs in the air, like a whore -- displayed,
indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat
and swollen with foul gas.

The sun lit up that rottenness
as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold
what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse
like a flower open wide --
you nearly fainted dead away
at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts
from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank,
then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there --
like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower
loosens in his fan.

Shapeless -- nothing was left but a dream
the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on
finished from memory.

Behind the rocks the anxious bitch
eyed us reproachfully,
waiting for the chance to resume
her interrupted feast.

-- Yet you will come to this offence,
this horrible decay,
you, the light of my life, the sun
and moon and stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up,
my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
the form of my rotted loves!

(as translated by Richard Howard)

Somehow, that's both alarming and comforting to me. Alarming when I think in the short, egoistic term, as it reminds me of the decay within that will only continue to make physical exertion more and more difficult. Comforting, though, when I let go of ego and realize that we all come to this. No matter our beauty, intelligence, physical prowess, or lack of any thereof, the one thing that unites us all, the greatest reminder of our sameness, is the way we end. The thought is humbling and reassuring, albeit a bit morbid in its inspiration.

Happy new year!

There've been words bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks trying to become a couple of blog posts, but so far they're not coalescing into anything coherent. So, in the meantime, you get some spring fever babblings...

I was reminded today that the first day of spring signals the new year in the Persian world. I haven't researched why the middle of winter was chosen to begin the calendar year pretty much everywhere else, but the Zoroastrian idea makes so much more sense symbolically. Spring is when everything comes back to life and begins, for crying out loud. Winter has its moments of snowy prettiness but, really, the Greeks nailed it when they designated it the season of death. Why would anyone choose to begin a new year when everything around is in stasis?

The sticky little leaves are forming here in the mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere, and will soon open to their new beginnings. If you've got 'em where you are, go, get out there and appreciate them.

Another interesting commute

So, there was another lunatic on the subway this evening. On the way home from work, I boarded a half-empty train and found a spot standing in the aisle facing out towards the windows. As the train flew through the dark tunnel, the reflection in the window revealed a grizzled, disheveled gentleman sprawled across the row of seats behind me, with his belongings sprawled across the row of seats ahead of him. Before the train had gotten very far, he began sputtering and grumbling. I continued watching in the reflection as a fellow commuter noticed, shifted, and moved to the other end of the car. Despite his apparent weirdness, the lunatic had the presence of mind at the next stop to gather himself and his belongings into one row of seats and offer the row he emptied to some new passengers.

As the train continued, the volume of his mutterings increased until it became clear to us all that he had a serious issue with air travel. "Don't fly the goddamned airplanes up in the sky! I don't unnerstand you people, why you wanna fly? God said keep your feet on da ground! I'm tryin' to save you, like Jesus Christ, I try to save you!" All of this tumbling out of his almost toothless mouth in the most gravelly voice I've ever heard. He'd occasionally become more excited, at one point standing and leaning over between the two people in the row in front of him. One of the two, commendably, remained calm and quietly urged the lunatic to take a break, telling him that we understood, it was ok, he should sit down. It worked. He gradually calmed a bit, telling us again in a lower voice that he loved us and just wanted to save us.

As always in these situations, my attention shifted between the lunatic and the reactions of the people around him. On a few of the faces nearby, I sensed alarm, annoyance, stifled giggles. Most, though, stoically gave no indication that they noticed anything at all out of the ordinary.

On and on the guy went, standing and waving his arms, sitting back down and grumbling, then standing again to exhort us all to stay outta the goddamned airplanes up in the sky. I wanted so badly to turn around and ask him what he thought of cars. What held me back? Sure, a part of me was apprehensive of further setting him off, uncertain of how close he might be to whatever line kept him from physically accosting any of us. But I think a bigger part of me feared something else. What if he didn't understand the question? What if he flat out ignored me? I honestly think I was afraid of being rebuffed by a lunatic.

After a while, he again quieted down and sprawled back in his seat, letting out periodic low cackles. I glanced up from scribbling at one point and happened to catch his eye. A moment later I heard him mutter "What's she writin' over there? She writin' a book?" A young couple a few rows up captured his attention then and he began babbling about how nice it is to have a girlfriend. Next minute, though, we heard over and over about how the girlfriend had been kidnapped, and that "They gonna kill da white girl on tv." But he was an equal opportunity lunatic, because very soon "They gonna kill da white man, too..."

Thirty-five minutes after I boarded, when the train reached the end of the line and we all got off, he stayed sprawled and rambling in his seat. I can picture him now, riding into the night, warning his fellow subway passengers of the dangers of "the goddamned airplanes." Hopefully, at some point, his mind will let his body rest.

Ain't there one damned song that can make me break down and cry?

David Bowie sings that line in Young Americans, which is a pretty intense tune in its own right. I was recently reminded of the one song that always has that effect on me, and it just so happens to be another of his. I go through long periods during which I forget about this song, then I'll hear it somewhere, on the radio, over a store intercom and... it'll hit me. An emotional reaction that I feel all the way down in my toes. I have no idea what it is that does it-- the lyrics are profoundly meaningful, the vocals are beautiful and evocative, and both are perfectly complimented by the softenings and swellings of the music. But dozens of other songs contain those same elements. Bowie somehow combines them all in a way that never fails to put a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. The statement at the end of the video is apt, Bowie does indeed rox.



Changes

I still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence and
So the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware what they're going through

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't tell them to grow up and out of it
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Where's your shame
You've left us up to our necks in it
Time may change me
But you can't trace time

Strange fascination, fascinating me
Changes are taking the pace I'm going through

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
I said that time may change me
But I can't trace time