Bike Newbie

When you skin the ego bare, love is all that’s left there.

March 27, 2023

7:49am

I was lifting weights before work. Recently the most painful of my memories hadn’t haunted me. But as I was lifting I was struck (figuratively) by the memory of my mother striking me in the mouth (literally). It made me furious and I felt it deep in my chest (not in my mouth, ironically). I used it to fuel my weight lifting, which helped, but I still felt a lot of pain and anger. I wanted to confront my mother, which obviously isn’t possible as she died 3 years ago. Using a technique I’d learned I flashed on a happy memory of mine, and this helped. If the most horrible memory ever is a 10 and the most innocent memory ever is a 0, flashing on happy took my bad memory from a 10 down to about a 6.

Quit moaning about fate and change
Stand up on your feet and rise
With every fall you get the pain you learn the lesson
Start now, open your eyes
Dead bodies falling from the sky
We are the ape with the vision of the killing
A rain of shame that fills the mines
No other blood in me but mine.

Time to open your eyes to this genocide
When you clear your mind you see it all
You’re receiving the gold of a better life
When you change yourself, you change the world.

Your heart is pounding in the brain
As they drag you naked in the mud
A devil’s dancing in the rain
How could you fall so low?
No!
We will never let go!
Let us watch them die!

Time to open your eyes to this genocide
When you clear your mind you see it all
You’re receiving the gold of a better life
When you change yourself, you change the world.

–Gojira, “Silvera”

I had a dream last night I was using scissors to lightly trim my beard, as I often do. As I trimmed I noticed large clumps of whiskers were falling, more than I intended to trim. I looked in the mirror and indeed, I was not trimming but shaving, taking the entire beard off. I wasn’t shocked or upset at all, and kept trimming/shaving. Soon I had no facial hair left at all…not only that, but looking in the mirror I noticed my face had changed to that of a stranger. This didn’t really upset me either, and I went on my way.

I think this is an indicator that I’m ready to embrace the big changes in my life. There may be bigger changes coming, I don’t know. I know that I’ve liked the changes I’ve made so far, and am going to stick with them.

I watched the movie The Whale today with my wife. We both thought it was a brilliant movie, but it wasn’t exactly easy to watch. Some of it reminded me of my own struggles with recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder. One thing about it was pretty cool though.

The movie has a lot of references to Moby Dick. Having read Moby Dick a few years back just for fun, I remembered back to the main characters, especially the highest ranking crewmembers on the Pequod.

• Captain Ahab is a man possessed. To say he is obsessed with hunting down the white whale would be a massive understatement. He believes his life is a failure unless he can exact revenge on Moby Dick. He believes he is the only one who can control his redemption, and that revenge is the only way he can do it.
• Starbuck, the first mate, is a man possessed by religion. He is sober and faithful. He believes that the righteous will prevail, but only if they adhere to a strict set of principles and behaviors. He doesn’t see it as control so much as appeasement of an angry God.
• Stubb, the second mate, is easygoing and full of good humor. He has accepted that the whaling profession is fatally hazardous, that his fate is pre-determined, and that there is essentially nothing he can do to alter it. He has relinquished any illusion of control, and has found happiness in acceptance.
• Flask, the third mate, is focused on the task at hand, the one thing he can truly control or influence. He is a pro at killing whales, and finds fulfillment in dispatching them without mercy or ceremony. He simply does the job for the sake of doing a good, efficient job.

As for me, I strive to be like Stubb, especially now with recovery still very much on my mind. But I also have to recognize that I have strong elements of Flask in me…I love my work and I take a lot of pride in doing a good job. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I have bits of Starbuck and even Ahab in me too.

The Whale is a tearjerker. But it’s not the kind of tearjerker you might expect. No one is absolutely a hero or a villain. You can see many different perspectives on the same set of events, and there isn’t a clear right or wrong one. That’s what makes it so true to life. It has the potential to start lots of good conversations about humanity, and it’s just a good movie that way.

Yesterday I rode almost 56 miles, and it would have been an extremely happy day but for one thing: the weather. This year Mother Nature has not received the version of the calendar that includes the First Day of Spring on it. Temperatures were in the high 30’s Fahrenheit yesterday, and that wasn’t the worst part.

Precipitation in Oregon takes many forms, and there is lots of each kind. Most people assume all the precipitation besides snow is in the westernmost part of the state…this is not true in March, when even the desert sees a fair amount of rain, hail, and sleet. Yesterday, out on our bikes, we got the trifecta of rain, hail, and sleet, and plenty of each.

While we did have winter riding gear on, in heavy precipitation and temperatures in the 30’s, it’s really only effective for about the first 20-30 miles. After that you’re just wearing thick synthetics fully soaked with ice water…better than cotton, but not by a whole lot. I was reminded yesterday about vigilance for hypothermia. With a group of old, bearded guys bundled up in riding gear, the behavioral symptoms of hypothermia become the most evident (the beards and gloves hide lips and fingernails that turn a telltale blue): slurred speech, confusion, disorientation, uncontrollable shivering.

Our group all made it without going into full hypothermia, however, which was nice. (We stopped for piping hot coffee about 2/3 of our way through the ride, which helped briefly.) I have to admit, too, that the harshest parts of this time of year (the cloudbursts, the brief sunbreaks, the pearly quality of the daylight) can be strikingly beautiful, and no car affords the same panoramic view that one receives atop a bike saddle. The nasty weather also cut down greatly on the car traffic, which was another welcome-yet-easily-overlooked plus of the day.

With any luck, the weather will only get better from here on. Happy riding!

March 23, 2023

This is a good day for me. I know I’m not finished with recovery, not by a damn sight. But I can stop being obsessive about it. I’ve hit the marks I needed to hit and am confident in my will. Radical acceptance has made me into an antenna of The Force (or whatever you want to call a higher power). My will is my own but I allow another to work through me too, whatever form that work may take.

The next thing for me is channeling my energy into a few things outside of work: music for sure, certainly writing as well, but mostly bicycling.

I have a good group, good roads, good friends, and OK equipment. I don’t know for sure what will happen with it all, and I don’t need to know any of it for sure. I’m just going to go biking a lot and see where it goes from there.

To the many people who have encouraged me so far, thank you. For now, my plan is to shift the focus of this blog back to cycling, although there will be many detours and side trips on this road. On to the next thing. On.

I had a Star Wars read-along book with a cassette tape when I was a young kid. When R2-D2 did his signature beep, that’s how you knew it was time to turn the page. I already knew how to read by the time somebody gave me the book (probably a distant relative who only had a vague idea of my age), so I knew when it was time to turn the page, with or without R2-D2. But no matter…I still have very fond memories of that book and of R2-D2.

Of all the Star Wars characters, over the years R2-D2 is among the most popular, at least judging by the amount of merchandise. Maybe it’s because R2-D2’s likeness is one of the simplest and easiest to recreate, and consists of an aesthetically pleasing combination of white, black, blue, and silver with a tiny bit of red. Or maybe it’s because R2-D2’s language of beeps transcends any language differences that non-English-speaking audiences might have difficulty with. But I think it’s most likely due to R2-D2’s pluckiness, loyalty, and sassy attitude in any situation. R2-D2 is the perfect combination of cat, dog, and human. As a droid, he has no gender but is typically referred to as he or him.

As a literary character, R2-D2 is not terribly interesting…he is the same droid through all of the Star Wars episodes, always brave, always loyal, always sassy. If he has a flaw it’s that he can sometimes be overconfident. For the most part, however, he is the perfect astromech and adapts to any situation he finds himself in. He might get himself into trouble now and then, but always finds his way out of it.

I like to think I’m like R2-D2 in some ways, but really I’m not much like him at all. I’m a man, flawed, petty, greedy, needy, sometimes fickle, often scared that my flaws will become known and everyone will know me only as the tiny child that exists inside my man-sized body.

At this point in my life, though, enough people love me that I feel pretty good about myself despite my many flaws. I know enough to know I can work on my flaws, and even though I’ll never be an R2-D2, my character is at least as interesting as Anakin Skywalker. I feel strongly that I’ll find redemption, hopefully more quickly and easily than Anakin found it.

There have been three times in my life when things took an unexpected but fantastic turn, propelling me to places and events I had not before considered as possible for me. They have always been accompanied by some kind of injury to me, at least at the beginning.

Each time it happens I’m reminded of the opening of James and the Giant Peach, where the old man gives James a paper bag.

“Take a look, my dear,” he said, opening the bag and tilting it toward James. Inside it, James could see a mass of tiny green things that looked like little stones or crystals, each one about the size of a grain of rice. They were extraordinarily beautiful, and there was a strange brightness about them, a sort of luminous quality that made them glow and sparkle in the most wonderful way.

Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (1961)

In the story, it turns out that these tiny green things are not only boiled crocodile tongues, they are alive, moving, and full of magic. James, of course, trips and spills all of the tiny dried crocodile tongues onto the ground (at the base of the peach tree), thinking he has ruined his one chance at happiness. But as we all know, that spill only marks the beginning of his crazy, unreal, wonderful journey.

The most recent time (the 3rd time) this kind of thing happened to me was in 2007. The injury I was suffering was not physical but emotional. I was leaving my wife of nine years and going through a nasty divorce, moving out of the house I was still 100% paying for and into a little apartment in West Salem. I was going through the motions of life but my mind was always elsewhere, in the past, trying to figure out where exactly things went wrong with my marriage. I had completely forgotten about applying for, and indeed interviewing for, a job with my employer that was unlike any other job I’d ever heard of. And many weeks later, out of the blue, I found that suddenly I was being offered the job. That was the beginning of a 14-year journey that included some of the dizziest heights and piratical perils I had ever been aware of in my professional career. It was a wild ride I could write volumes about.

My whole point in writing about this is that I believe I’m standing at the threshold of Bag-of-Crocodile-Tongues Incident #4. My injury has been mental, and a little emotional (although the emotional parts happened decades ago; I’m only reliving them now). Recovery has given me the opportunities to tap into parts of me I’d been wishing were there, not realizing they were there unseen. Specifically, my writing, my riding, my faith, and my music are each having a renaissance that I previously didn’t have the energy for (hard drinking is hard work). Once again, I’m not a hitchhiker in life but a race car driver.

Mentally, emotionally, and physically (and even, I suspect, spiritually) I’m healing. Years of adventure still await me, and I’m finally getting ready for it.

March 20, 2023

5:06am
I’ve been getting right around 7 hours of sleep for the past several nights. It’s making all the difference in the world for me; I’m starting to feel like myself again.

I had a dream that was a long line of people waiting for government sponsored therapy. Each person, upon reaching the front of the line, would hear, “You are special. You deserve happiness” and be sent on their way. I thought it was ironic and funny to have that visual.

12:56pm
I’m finding that I’m thinking about food less and less. Pre-recovery, I would always know at the start of each day what I’d be having for dinner that evening. Now, I still eat plenty but I just don’t think about it so much. If I’m hungry I get something to eat; if I’m not I don’t. Usually caffeine is a more pressing matter for me these days. My caffeine use is way up from pre-recovery, but most of it is tea rather than coffee. I know caffeine isn’t great for me, but it’s far better than alcohol. I will do water and caffeine (tea and coffee) the rest of my life, no problem. It’s not even a debate.

2:46pm
I should mention, too, that my muscle recovery time is so much faster than it used to be. I don’t know if that’s a function of more frequent workouts, eliminating alcohol, or some combination. All I know is I completely fried my leg muscles Saturday and am good as new today. I’m hoping the weather tomorrow is nice so that I can mountain ride…if I do it’ll be my first ride of Spring.

4:25pm
Thinking about how it helps me to talk/write with people who also have AUD, whether online or in person. I don’t really know the exact reason why it helps me, and I guess I don’t really need to know. I just know that I get a great benefit from it. It gives me confidence, validates my decision to stop, and I often get some great pointers and tips from folks. I plan to keep talking/writing with folks even if I find I don’t “need” to…hopefully I’ll help someone a fraction as much as other folks have helped me.

March 19, 2023

9:25am
“Sure you work!” said Alfy. “Everybody works at something. Getting out of bed’s work! Getting food off your plate and into your mouth’s work! But there’s two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life. Sure, everybody worked in George Washington’s time, but George Washington worked hard. Everybody worked in Shakespeare’s time, but Shakespeare worked hard. I’m who I am because I work hard.”
⁃ Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Player Piano

6:25pm
Four words for you: Jelly Belly Sparkling Water. That shit is the bomb. They sell it at Safeway. I’ve had Cherry, Watermelon, and Pear so far. They are all exquisite (no sugar or sweetener). When I need to just sip on something carbonated, it’s one of the better options.