Tag Archives: journal

Best or Worst?

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I’m still wrapping things up, or, rather, pulling things apart and putting them back together slightly differently. Until that is over I’m still in Annapolis. Should be soon that I leave though. In the meantime the few of you that read this blog can read this passage (not really a passage because it’s not of anything, but I’m considering it a passage of this blog so I can use the term because I like it (and I realize I didn’t have to justify that, but I thought I may, because because)) that I composed some months ago when more and more of the days were rising further and further from their burial chambers, shaking off dark clods of dirt from their brightly shining armor, sword tips piercing upward through the soil alongside new grass and flower blossoms, and voices ringing out singing of warmth and food and sex and life and triumph over the night; and masticate on it, or laugh at me, or do whatever seizes you in the moment of consumption.

Sun dapples all. Splatters the world in colors lobbed through the canopy of leaves above me. I think to myself “to do one’s best is the highest aim of humankind.” But what is one’s best? And when does one know when that effort has been made?

The most wondrous, magical, little fly with a pointed tail and a pale band around its abdomen explores the rim of my coffee mug, and I wonder if it is doing its best. It seems to be getting on just fine regardless. Maybe no one has control over their best or worst. Perhaps I should give up all thought on that and live like this fly. Perhaps I already am—perhaps we all are—if only the thought would be let go, to shatter into dust, permitting me more freely to live more simply and easily like this extraordinary creature.

My Pedals may not be Turning (yet), but my Mind Certainly Is

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I am still ordering things for my bike and my bike trip. I am still sorting out what app(s) I may use for routing and/or recording my trip. I am still designing a route (though that is something that can and will be a semi-daily task). I am still meeting with friends and family before I leave; just this morning I met with a good friend and inspiration over coffee (everything over coffee). Now I am having more coffee, more food, and listing off  things to take care of before I leave (note to self: do actually make a list).

My framebag from Rockgeist arrived a few days ago. It was the last necessary item for my bike that I thought I would need, but alas, that is not the case because the front rack I had ordered to support my handlebar bag that isn’t supposed to need a support doesn’t fit my fork. (In case you’re wondering, there is nothing wrong with my bar bag. There simply isn’t enough space between the top of the front tire and the handlebars for the bag to hang without needing a support. I knew this was a possibility when I purchased, but hoped otherwise.) I’ve just ordered one that will, after messaging Rodeo Adventure Labs for a recommendation. I suspect that will get here Monday. None of this is ideal. But what is ideal, anyway? Are having all of our heart’s wants and desires being fulfilled in a way we want and at our moment’s notice ideal? What if a current moment being disruptive or unwanted yields great joy in the future? Or, what if so insistent on forcing one’s notion of an ideal, i.e., a desire, into RIGHT NOW one unwittingly destroys a more satisfying moment in the future? Again, this begs the question of “what is ideal?” Is it ideal for me to leave on Sunday, or Wednesday? Is there a qualitative difference between the two? I suppose I won’t know until I go, but even then there is no way for me to compare the two scenarios. I wanted to leave a week and a half ago. I’m still here. I say it’s not ideal, but is it not ideal just because it’s not what I wanted (or thought that I wanted)?

“Ideal” is not synonymous with “want” or “desire” but I’d bet most people commonly equate the two. This can make for a lot of unnecessary stress in one’s life that is otherwise avoidable. According to the dictionary app on my Mac “ideal” is defined as “satisfying one’s conception of what is perfect; most suitable.” But even that is subject to much interpretation as is evident in the definition by the words “one’s conception.” What is most suitable for a given situation? Well, different people will likely define that differently. And we can forget about the idea of perfection since it’s simply unattainable (because it doesn’t actually exist, or because it’s so lofty a goal that no human being is capable of reaching to those heights?). Too, what if a person’s goals are unhealthy or crooked? Say I want to be happy, and I have a sweet tooth so that my happiness has a strong correlation with my sugar intake. Well then, eating a dozen donuts a day is an ideal solution to satisfying that sugar craving, and thus my happiness. But, is that really an ideal avenue to happiness? I think not (keep in mind I’m simplifying a complex thing in order to make a point and/or create an argument). Everyone at this point should be familiar with the consequences of too great a sugar intake (potential to develop diabetes, weight gain, rotten teeth, etc.), so, if the goal, to be happy by satisfying my sweet tooth, is itself not ideal, then are the ideal means of reaching that goal really ideal? There’s an old Chinese proverb: “If the wrong man uses the right means, then the right means work in the wrong way.” So, in this case, if the ideal means are used to achieve the wrong goal, then the ideal means work in the wrong way.

Anyway, I’m currently unemployed, so I’m not trying to spend much money since I’m not actually on the road yet. But, my unemployment just means more time to get more important things done. More important than making money? But what could be more important than that? Perhaps that’s a blog post for another day…

New Bicycle, New Preparations, New Journey, New Life

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Nearly two years have passed, twenty-three months to be exact, since I returned from my last bicycle adventure which turned into a motor vehicle adventure, and I am at last preparing for something new.

I like the idea of the new, of newness. I like new things, new people(s), new places, new experiences, new sensations—sights, sounds, smells, flavors, textures. Newness means also freshness. It is the opposite of old or stale. It also implies difference, but this isn’t always the case as newness is often times simply a matter of perception. Is it easy to perceive the same (or the old) as new, as fresh? No, not always, not often, but neither is it impossible. It takes some work, and it takes a quiet, at-ease mind: something too regularly out of reach I think for most people (or so they might think), especially these days with the constant stimulus of a cellphone or tablet in our hand or pocket. To find newness in the old requires that one step back from all the noise, and the more often the better, and relax,  not by reading a book or watching the telly (these are the very things we’re trying to get away from), but by simply sitting still and breathing. Maybe closing one’s eyes if that helps, and then reopening them and having a look around. Better to do this outside at a park or elsewhere in a mostly natural environment, and better still a place of solitude or near-solitude (the quiet nod of hello to another fellow finding his/her own sense of newness can obviously be included in one’s own discoveries). This doesn’t have to take a long time. Ten or fifteen minutes can be a surprisingly invigorating refresher, but I often find it easy to lose track of time and thirty minutes or more will pass easily, as though in fact it hadn’t and you were only in that moment…. But when you look at your watch….

I don’t provide myself the opportunity often enough for this. THERE IS SO MUCH IN THE WORLD SO EASILY WITHIN REACH NOW. Is there really though? I mean it’s certainly near effortless to get exposure to “so much in the world” nowadays, but how authentic is that relative to the greater sensorial experience of going out and doing, of, say, visiting the pyramids of Egypt rather than looking at a picture or video? Anyway, the whole point of this is sort of to say that I’m struggling to find the new in Annapolis, and maybe Annapolis is not for me (I’ve lived in and around it my whole life after all), or maybe I just need to get away for a while. Who knows? Are either of these ideas wrong? Certainly not. They just are. They’re ideas. The truth will be discovered in time.

Originally I thought I was to leave here a year ago. However, one’s thinking about what the future may be is frequently not how that future, then the present, now the past actually becomes. In my case, a year ago I was not in a great hurry to leave, and was quite content, and seeing things new. I also made a great discovery, that being Bitcoin and the rest of the world of blockchain technology, last August and got sucked down that rabbit hole. I believe this will pay off for me, and countless others whether they may know it or not, in a few years time (or perhaps sooner, or perhaps later). At any rate, the stars seem to be aligning (as the saying goes) for an imminent departure now. A bit later in the season than I would prefer as largely I want to be places warm and sunny, but this life is doing the way this life is doing. I’m quite content.

So, yes. This newest blog post of mine has gone on much longer than I anticipated, and in directions I didn’t quite anticipate. The key in all things is not so much to fight it, but to let it flow in the way it wants.  There is a channel already provided. One only has to direct “it” into the channel, and not try to dam the channel up or redirect the flow or whatever other silly things humans like to do to pretend they’re in control. The ideal then, really, is to be simultaneously the funnel and the thing being funneled. To make the decision and also to allow the decision to be made for you.

More updates soon!

October 23, 2016, Route 1 Somewhere On

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To the left of me are mountains, their naked bodies showing, and looking just like the flatirons in Boulder, like bare-chested men bronzing in the sun (such little sun, though), and to my right the spot-lighted ocean, overhung with dismal clouds, and pricked with a few oil rigs far out near its horizon, and the occasional splash of sunlight sparkling on its wave crested surface.

I don’t know what to look at. I am dazzled. My visual sense overwhelmed by riches and extraordinary beauty in abundance in all directions, even on this dreary day.

And around a bend I come, peering at an arm jutting into the steely-grey waters like a creature crawling into the ocean, or out of it (Golbez’s arm crawling across a crystal floor searching, searching for something), smeared with starlight in places.

Smeared with starlight in places.

October 23, 2016, Around Santa Maria, CA

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California and her rolling hills. Eternally rolling along the 101. Trees sprouting from these hills like spores on a mold. A prehistoric landscape untouched by the hand of man. I see some fences of course. A cow here and there. But otherwise it’s nature, nature in its unaltered original form. Some of the tops of the hills and those in the distance are veiled, obscured in a mist: mere soft silhouettes. Appropriate, because I’m looking far, far into the past…

And I think back to yesterday along Big Sur. About people trying to capture moments and memories with a camera (like clawing at the air, trying to grab it, grasp it, hold it in one’s arms), and watching while driving along the highway, watching the waves hammering continuously against the rock walls, and after we go to bed at night this living world continuing to hammer against these rock walls which will continue to deny it, absorbing blow after blow. And this goes on eternally. After we sleep. After our deepest of sleeps.

California is a magical place. What must settlers have felt when they first arrived here to this bounty? This impossible world where it is spring and summer year round. It is very much an Eden, like that from which Adam and Eve were tossed out I imagine. And here I am, rediscoverying this lost land buried in antiquity and legend. What right do I have to be here?, for surely I am no better than Adam or Eve (though I might have wisdom enough not to take advice from a serpent or snake, unless he was a very tricky and persuasive one, even if I am in the habit of trusting easily).

These hills remind me of bread dough a little bit: in their smoothness very much uniform. Like agglomerations of soil covered with a smooth, even carpet of grass, like a table cloth thrown over a dining table, then stuck with trees like a pin-cushion.

October 22, 2016, Big Sur

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Driving Route 1, Big Sur. Pinned into the hillside to the right and the left of me, like the bristles of a hairbrush, are thousands of frondsy things, like cattails wafting in the wind; and the sun slowly sinking lower and lower, lower and lower to the pacific, glowing like a pearl, softly, embedded amongst gauzy clouds that drift in the sky like gossamer curtains lifted on a breeze. And around the bend of the road the shoreline rocky and rugged, like a brass knuckled fist limned in white, the water crashing up against it relentlessly, splashing hard and high, seafoam flying like spittle.

Signs for Vista Point. Cars and RVs parked, and people standing on the edge with cameras in their hands pressed to their faces, or their faces peering into a smart-phone taking pictures to commemorate a moment.  THE moment.

It’s difficult to deny oneself the pleasure of creating and holding on to memories like these (and really, why should one?). But the sun is dropping lower and lower. [These frondsy things are wonder incarnate.] The waves are always crashing against the rocks. The rocks are always there, pummeled by the waves. At times their jaggedness cloaked in secrecy, enveloped by a thick fog; other times poignant, acute, sharp enough to draw blood.

What can a photograph say? What feelings and emotions might one dredge up a year or more in the future?  Do these people grasp the magnitude of what they are seeing? Do even I with my words and poetic sentiment have an inkling? Are we not all headed into a night to which we will succumb? And yet this night comes repeatedly over the Earth, but always she experiences a morning, a new sun, a bright day, a warm wind….

92 – Tsunami, Annapolis

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Late November 2016

Another full glass of beer in front of me, foaming over like my life which runneth over continually. I know this bar well as very nearly there is no other one I visit in Annapolis. Beatles (incidentally, I’m watching a doc on them on Hulu) on the stereo bounding about the dimly lit room, penetrating dark corners. Bulbs dangle from the ceiling, lonely in the dark, shedding meager light. They look like dildos daring drunken debauchery, insinuating ideas into minds swirlingly intoxicated. Once the clock strikes two and the revelers need leave… of course by that point those paired off will hardly need further inspiration. A girl—beautiful and tall, slender long legs—leans against the bar in profile, her gaze vacant, staring. The bar seating is very nearly full at only quarter to seven. I am in a blissful state of calm, my face feeling flush, my belly feeling full. There is comfort in this space I know so well. I am transfixed by the glint of light in the martini and coupe glasses stacked nearby shining in the dark like scores of night lights in a dark hallway, like streetlights in a city block. On the wall behind me hangs a large photograph of a tree. It’s been there for several years, and the more I see it, and the longer it hangs, the same juxtaposition it continues to make with the space. That is to say it doesn’t fit in. I can’t imagine anything more strange displayed as a piece of art in here. Nothing. I think if I were to walk in and there were a hole in the wall where the picture is now, I would be less shocked than I am every time I look at that tree.

Not long after finishing my second beer, I pay and leave. As much as this bar feels comfortable to me, as much as I associate it with home, I can’t stay here for long. I crave fresh air and the chill bite of November cold. I wish to walk the streets of my home town a bit and wonder at the glint and glimmer of streetlights in the dark and the shadows they cast. I want to relive old memories which only I can by walking the brick sidewalks I’ve walked on years past. Later I will have to drive back to my father’s where I’m staying currently, following taillights redly glowing through the winding dark wondering what comes next.

91 – Lamplighter

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Outside is cool. I am sitting in the shadows but for my right foot which is resting in a broad patch of sunlight slowly creeping its way along the concrete to me. Its touch is a caress, that is it is soft and warm, slight, comforting. My back is to the building, and in front of me is an array of picnic tables where people are sitting—whole families, couples with dogs, single dudes drinking their coffees and eating their bagel sandwiches. The two dogs once squirming like antsy children are now sitting still as statues. Rather regal. They look like they could be carvings—sculptures in sandstone or granite at the ends of enormous ledges bounding long flights of stairs leading up to or away from some grand palace. The sky is a satiny blue with the airy fragrance of hazy white clouds. There is still some green in the trees mixed in with the reds, browns, yellows, oranges—not so pretty. But then, look at that damn clutter of electric lines….

90 – Streaking Through Tennessee

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Seen in Tennessee while driving forever the interstate, where bridges take one directly over the River Styx so that one doesn’t have to worry about potentially falling out of the boat which good Charon directs to and fro, back and forth across it’s mirrored surface (this is a very poor analogy because really it’s the interstate that is hell (or Hades) and not any destination that one might find at the end of, so really it’s the threshold crossed when getting into my car that is the figurative Styx, and not any physical feature of the environment itself):

bunches of orange and red, and burnt-orange, a brown, and a whole range of shades in between, some duller, some brighter mounded up as far as the eye can see, like great piles raked together, and the autumn-blue sky (because it is such a distinctive blue) complementing; fields and hills of golden-yellow grass, burnished and bronzey, anywhere there isn’t a forest or highway or gas station or sky. The colors are the colors of a life tempered in fire—they run in the blood. If you make it through winter you’re a survivor, you’ve run the gamut, and you can paint a picture, or many pictures, of all these experiences, and you can write about them and go to sleep with a contented mind knowing what you accomplished, and then maybe you will publish them in a blog, and maybe some people will read about them, or maybe no one will, but it won’t make much of a difference to you one way or the other because you were alive then to experience all that, and you’re a new you, alive now to new experiences, or reliving old experiences and perhaps viewing them in new ways because you’re a new person continually becoming a new person experiencing new things and experiencing old things in new ways (or is that just the supposed old things when recalled to mind are new in that instant?)

89 – Some Cheerio!

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November 2016
Arkansas is a magnificent state, broad with mountains and deciduous forests, whose trees are now loosing their leaves, or beginning to, this time of year, and the whole breadth and depth of the place glowing like a departing sun—orange, red, yellow, brown—a rich nugget of gold pulled from the loamy soil, and the highway cutting through them Ozarks like a river flashing silver and gold, sunlight and fish scales in a meadow.

It all came to an end as the sun came to a set, as the mountains and hills sloped down to the flat of the Mississippi River delta, eventually to the river itself and that gritty Tennessee city, Memphis sparkling with come-hithers, glinting with diamonds strung on a necklace beneath a face full of broken teeth.

Memphis: the home of William Eggleston.