Play ball>Take ball home.

Living about fifteen clicks Northeast from the middle of nowhere has both its advantages as well as its disadvantages.
One of the varied disadvantages being that if you want some really good Ethiopian food at 3:00 in the morning, assuming that you can find a taqueria that’s open, you’re gonna have to eat a burrito and call it good.
I also long for the days when no matter where I went in the greater Bay Area, day or night, rain or shine, I would run into a friendly face.
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Like for example one time when I was on the Embarcadero and a tug boat came by and I was like, Oh hey, there’s Tugboat Gravel Pile Jim! “Hey Tugboat Gravel Pile Jim!” I exclaimed, and he was like, “heeeey Stevil.”


Truth be told, that sort of thing doesn’t happen with much frequency anymore, but earlier in the week as I was headed out the door and ’round the corner for a mountain bike styled athletic pursuit, I came handlebar to handlebar with Hunter Cycles cyclocross styled athletic pursuit hot shot, Abe Rothnothagarstein. “Where are you headed?” I asked. “To where eagles dare” he cooly replied.
I put my head down and we were off.
I would like to mention as an observation that when a 40 year old with a waining lung infection meets up with a young gun powerhouse, the former will tend to crumble at the hands of the latter. At least it did in this case.
However, having learned while in the Boy Scouts that sometimes old people need to be offered a helping hand, Abe was kind to me and we had a nice afternoon bouncing back and fourth between lollygagging and rad getting in the woods;
First we took a short intermission which gave me some time to take my medicine;
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And then we fell headlong into the woods, where we made some rocks and roots and various strains of forest fungus feel our wrath;
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It was just the break I needed from long days in the saddle alone and even longer ones out of the saddle attempting to recover from the sickness.
Some people have extensively thought-out training regiments to make them strong, and unless you’re twenty yourself, I’ve found that simply riding with someone half my age would reap the same benefits.
While we were out, we briefly touched on the topic that is on a lot of individual’s minds currently- That being politics.
Like many people, I am curious as to just what the hell occurred this past Tuesday, and why the sudden commitment to the back pedal heard ’round the world. Not only is there more red across this great land than a blood bath at the Twizzlers factory, but here in my home away from home state, the measure to add an eighteen dollar fee to car registration in order to fund (see: maintain public access to) state parks was also defeated.
In response to my confusion by this fact, woman named ‘Laura Glu’ offered me the following Tweet;
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Am I to understand that by her logic, people who ride bikes are unreasonably benefiting from hard working car owners, which obviously none of us are?
To paraphrase The Bike Snob, to assume that bike riders ride bikes exclusively would be like assuming pilots fly everywhere they go, or that Michael Phelps swims to the store.
As I have said many, many times before.. I do all of the same things that car drivers do, with the exception of getting in my car, yet I seem to not be subject to the same benefits, nor am I extended the same privileges and courtesies that are to my fellow (motorized) road users.
Then again, after Tuesday, looking for logic in these times seems to be a hopelessly fruitless endeavor.
Yet in regard to the election as a whole, and as long as we’re jumping around here, I am not one who has fallen down the rabbit hole of idealistic enthusiasm, though apparently many have, which was addressed brilliantly by Mark Morford in his ‘Letter to a Whiny Young Democrat’.
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“Hey, at least this guy voted. Obama won in ’08 with 66% of the 18-29 vote. Most of that demo stayed home this time and played Cut the Rope and drank vodka/Red Bulls and tweeted about not caring anymore. Ah, silly youth.”
Photo: David Goldman / AP

I don’t consider myself a card carrying, to-the-letter-Democrat, as I generally find them to be flaky, nor do I have even a shade of (contemporary) Republican in me, this article strikes home for many reasons. Primarily because I feel that we as a society live in a quick-fix world. Immediate gratification is the key, and if President Obama can’t fix every issue in two years, then by god, I will do an about face, or just ignore the election entirely. Starting over from the start is surely the answer to all of the problems.
Do I have the solution? No, as usual I do not, but I certainly don’t think that any of us giving up on the directive so soon was such a wise choice.
In all of this doom and gloom of the fluctuating political climate, two things that can make almost anyone feel better are water slides and super bitchin and over the top cyclocross shots. Since I am fresh out of water slides, I will just offer this shot of our own local badass, Buckethead, getting 15 kinds of sick at this past weekend’s Surf City cyclocross styled athletic pursuit, shot by Tim Westmore;
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That’s just about enough to get anyone’s minds off their problems.
Luckily for me if mine grow too great in number, and I ever want to be done with the whole sorted saga, I can pull up stakes and move, oh.. like, fifteen clicks to the Southwest.
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11 Responses to “Play ball>Take ball home.”

  1. Robert November 5, 2010 at 6:55 am #

    Even her Twitter profile picture is infuriating.

  2. Pinto November 5, 2010 at 7:41 am #

    As a younger lad, I used to believe that common sense would always be a prevailing dictum. Now I’m convinced that the majority of the citizens in this country live under rocks, –rocks that have Fox Nooze pumped in, and so they vote accordingly.

  3. Bigworm November 5, 2010 at 8:13 am #

    Unfortunately, this is further proof that the human animal as a group, is not much more than a herd of cattle.

  4. reverend dick November 5, 2010 at 8:25 am #

    A) What the __ck are we doing in Afghanistan? That’s a losing proposition in whatever way you wanna look at it.
    B) I voted against the Park measure on account of when the parks are underfunded the gates are closed to the (sheepish)public (who won’t hop gates),theys not rangers rangering and that means…trails are open!

  5. ben November 5, 2010 at 8:26 am #

    There’s no such thing as common sense. These days we’ve got common dumb.

  6. curtis November 5, 2010 at 11:12 am #

    On the average, I doubt this country is any dumber than when we had a civil war over slavery, than when we put japanese citizens in internment camps, or when we let McCarthy run the government with a fear of boogey-men.
    Anyone who thinks this is some sort of great set-back for our country needs to pull their head out of the ground and realize that midterm elections ALWAYS go the other way, and our country has ALWAYS been retarded. Just because we live in this country doesn’t mean it isn’t getting fat and falling the fuck apart like every other empire in history.
    I’m as sugary as a bowl of lucky charms this morning, ain’t I?

  7. db November 5, 2010 at 12:58 pm #

    Been sending that Morford column out all week. It’s dead-on.

  8. Hunk Williams, Jr. November 5, 2010 at 1:16 pm #

    Meh…if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

  9. innerlighter November 5, 2010 at 9:35 pm #

    “The Americans will always do the right thing…after they have exhausted all the alternatives.”
    -Sir Winston Churchill
    Dude was so onto something there.

  10. jomama November 6, 2010 at 11:25 am #

    That rad getting dude on the ‘cross bike; you sure it ain’t antbikemike?
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/antbikemike/5142820682/in/contacts/

  11. burnt November 8, 2010 at 11:54 am #

    It’s old news but people who ride their bicycles or walk subsidize the heavy automobile users because property taxes are the primary funding mechanism for local roads in the USA and Canada. There are at least two peer-reviewed articles published in bona fide journals that deal with this topic, but if you can’t bother to track them down it doesn’t take too much brainpower to realize that Geno riding the Big Dummy to 117 causes a lot less damage to the road than his next- door-neighbor rollin’ down Minnehaha everyday to the First Avenue ramp.