music: Paul Simon- Concert in Central Park 1995
Despite my philosophical meandering about surviving on air alone, my stomach was quite upset with me this morning. Physiology calls, and I answer. I had breakfast and made plans to go food shopping. While I wheeled a big cart through the ailes of the local grocery store filling it with consumables, brushing by enough food to sustain me for at least two lifetimes, I grew even more upset with the idea of food. The way it’s done for us supermarket style is dangerously convienent. I see this a lot more clearly with my students, who really and truly can not connect their kung pao beef in styrofoam with those enormous bovines that, they are told, graze in these mythical big open spaces called fields. Nutrition, to them, is trying to occasionally eat something that was not synthesized in a chemical plant. It’s a step in the right direction, and it’s honest. For those of us who are a little more mindful of the food we eat, I think we have a lot of misconceptions to get over regarding our own consumption.
I found myself spending the majority of my time and money today in the produce section: onions, mushrooms, bananas, orange juice, pears, an avocado, and the like. After that it was to the dairy aisle for butter, cheese, milk, and eggs. A little here-and-there with bagels, pasta, and pita bread and a few assorted house favorites thrown in like olives, teccino, and heady corn chips. I don’t think I bought any meat products today which is fairly standard for our house; even though none of us are vegetarians we have no burning need to eat meat on a regular basis. I looked at the contents of my cart during checkout and pegged myself as a fairly socially and environmentally responsible consumer.
But how true is that? I’m sure no self-respecting environmentalist would choose a hamburger over a banana, but the more I think about it the more i am unsure of the logic that goes into such analyses. Bananas are good food, fruit from the trees, unprocessed, full of good stuff you need. But there are no bananas growing where I’m from. This means that bananas have to be brought here from very far away, which involves harvesting, sorting, checking for quality, shipping, distrubiting, and stocking. I can’t easily imagine the life of a banana once it is picked off the tree; all I know is that bnanas appear in mind-boggling abundance in grocery stores and bodegas all over the Great White North, even in the winter months. There’s a lot of energy put into getting those bananas fresh on the produce aisle: people energy, a good amount of gasoline energy, perhaps some other energy keeping them fresh. When it is all added up, does the energy needed to bring one bunch of fresh bananas to my kitchen come out to less than the energy needed to bring a steak cut from a cow in, say, vermont onto my plate? Or a lobster from Maine? Even with biomass calculations I’d wager that it’s closer than most people think. The point here is that it could be that real social responsibility lies more in an effort to localize consumption as opposed to taking for granted that things like bananas, orange juice, avocados, and other food from other parts of the world just appear at the local Stop n’ Shop. Even though it’s not really talked about, there are some real problems with drinking orange juice in the dead of winter in Boston. But then again, who among us in New England are going to stick to cranberries, squash, alfalfa, lobster, and venison?
JZ forwarded a link around a week or so ago: it measures your ecological footprint. I scored an 11 acre footprint on the quiz (meaning I require about 11 acres of usable land in order to sustain my lifestyle, which is significantly below the national average of 24 acres per person. I can feel good about my social and environmental consciousness, I guess, but at the bottom of the quiz it said that “if everyone lived like you we would need 2.4 planets.” Uh oh. So much for my socially responsible ways. And, interestingly but not surprisingly, the category that required the most amount of space was the food category. Even with a car factoring in, even with big city living factored in, it really came down to food. The take home here is that one should be more than mindful about one’s own consumption; one should be mindful about the ways in which one’s society has set up and limited our means of consumption. I believe that it begins and ends with food, and today in the supermarket I had the unpleasant realization that the seemingly innocuous activity of stocking up on food for the 1-2 is built on premises that are inherently unsustainable. I say all this, of course, with a glass of fresh orange juice by my side.
music: The Slip- 2/11/05, Matt Murphy’s Pub
I’ve had this past week off from work and it’s passed in a slightly dissociative haze. Sleep has been adequate, but not of good quality and I found myself waking up much, much earlier than I wanted to. I have been doing a lot with music as well: went to two concerts, played an acoustic open mic, had a second jam session with the guys from last week, and wrote a new song. All the playing and listening has been wonderful, but it’s put me into a dream-like state, floating easily in and out of my own thoughts and the more objective reality surrounding me. I’ve also decreased my food intake this past week, partially because I haven’t needed to expend as much energy, but also because I’ve been dealing with a pesky cold and have stuck mostly to juice, soup, and tea. The predominantly liquid diet caused me to be fairly hungry all week as foodstuff passed through me more quickly. I’ve thought a great deal about the nature of food this week as a result and decided that while I really like food, I don’t really like the idea of food, as food is quite possibly the most important limiting factor in a human’s life.
Psychologists call food “the universal motivator.” Almost every religion on the planet manipulate the intake of food in some way in order to achieve some spiritual ends. Daniel Quinn points to food as the source of a need for economic and political systems. Biologists, in a slightly more compelling argument, consider food to be absolutely necessary for life. It is clearly a thing of great importance to us, I think because it is the unsolvable problem. We need to eat whether we like to or not; we are ruled on a very basic level by the very thing a lot of us socially conscious types don’t want to hear: “Consume Or Die.” I’ve hit this conclusion before. I’m pulling the topic off the mental shelf again because of something Chelsea dropped on me during our weekly dinner (yes, dinner; the irony is not lost) last week: Breatharianism.
The science teacher in me laughs at it enough to dismiss the idea all but completely. The ever-so-slight sliver of interest left over comes from my hope that there is part of us that is not bound to the human condition. It seems that if one were to solve the problem of hunger, if one were able to survive without needing to eat anything, then there would be something about us that transcends our own humanity. We would also have the key to solving the larger problem of consumption. Breatharians offer exactly that. And from their own reports, such things seem almost possible. There is the case of the Indian mystic who stayed under complete supervision for 10 days without consuming anything, after all. There are claims of similar feats from various sources. It can’t be coincidence that restriction of food is an integral part of the holiest events of the big three western world religions (Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur), or that adherents to Eastern religions commonly practice a form of fasting or purposeful restriction of food intake. Buddhism teaches that the source of our suffering is craving, and it seems that the most basic and common form of craving is hunger. Solving the problem of hunger, then, is a step on the path to enlightenment.
At this point, though, I’ll take a good breakfast over enlightenment. The world I live in is more commonly about making it through the next 24 hours than worrying about transcending the human condition. Time and energy are more precious commodities now. Modern living has got me firmly by the neck and I’m running in my little urban hamster wheel enough to afford myself a fairly comfortable mortal existence. It probably doesn’t help the breatharian cause that the most popular Breatharian guru comes across as a quack and that one of her followers died following her teachings. It also doesn’t help that our (very human) common sense tells us that this is all a pile of crap.
Still, if I were given the choice between living as I am now and somehow surviving without eating or drinking anything I think I would choose the latter. Food is a utilitarian function these days-I’m eating purely to keep fuel in the tank. I know full well that we can’t run on nothing, that our energy can’t just be created, that it needs to come from somewhere, and that there is a finite amount of energy in the universe. But that there is even a whisper of an outside shot that the tank could be kept full by something as simple as the air we breathe and that the problems of consumption could be solved in one fell swoop has enough philosophical appeal to keep me, um, hungry to know more.
music: Recordings from the Biosphere (with Matt and Sebastian)- 2/18/05
Another week of vacation from school is upon me and my goals this time around are modest: resurrect some of that which I lost to Missa Toss over the past six months. I knew going into this nine day stretch that some sort of ritual was appropriate to mark the reclaiming of my own life that was to take place, and in the days before the vacation proper I considered doing a three-day fast to help clear the cobwebs and to create some mental space from which a more healthy, balanced perspective could take place. The topics of hunger and the inescapable need for food have been rattling around in my head for the past couple weeks, and the idea of a fast appealed to me as a way to manage both my accumulating emotional and visceral clutter. As the vacation hit, though, I realized that I did not need to empty out; instead, I needed to fill up. Enough of my time has been spent in personal deprivation that a physical acting out of that deprivation was not the proper means of making the most of this time given to me. No, instead, I thought to see what I could to to fill time with things of substance. My eating habits are poor enough during the work week.
If I had the inclination, I could easily fill my time from now until the end of break with work for school. I’ll have to dip into it at some point-lessons must be planned for the week after this and an entire curriculum in psychology must be outlined for next year-but for the time being I’m content to do things for myself. And even though break has only been dented by this past weekend, it is of significant substance. Time is being filled with goodness, mostly with that infinitely difficult but unspeakably positive thing I’ve been working towards and pushing on since I returned from my trip across the country: music.
Friday night, by all personal measures, was a watershed moment. I connected with two guys from Craigslist, a bassist and a drummer, and got down to it for about two and a half hours in the 1-2 basement music studio. We threw around some original ideas (I’m re-listening to the 30-minute straight improv we opened things with now), a couple Dead covers, a couple Phish covers, and some other assorted works. It was the first time I got to put the room downstairs to good use, and it was also the first time I got to put the newly-tuned and tweaked Gibson through the motions. Both earned their keep and then some-things came out better than I ever could have hoped for. Considering that it was our first time playing together it was downright incredible now that I’m listening to it again. Peet, a man who knows his music and takes it seriously, said that he’s paid good money to hear music much worse. It occurred to me afterwards that this was possibly the first electric jam session I’ve had on guitar…ever? It legitimized a lot for me: all that time spent noodling in my bedroom playing along to CDs, all that work put into recording demo tracks, all that money thrown into the new Gibson. It also made me glad I dropped some bills on mixers and microphones-we got a great sounding recording out of the session. We three are going to make a habit out of it and hope to eventually bring a keyboardist into the mix. Friday night saw a big goal of mine for this year come to fruition. I couldn’t be happier about it and am already itching to have another go at it.
I’m still staying true to my roots on the music front. I’m working on some more structured singer-songwriter type stuff on acoustic with Jono, a guy who contacted me about playing music a couple weeks back. We met up this afternoon, ran a few of his tunes including some covers, some of my originals and some of his. We’re shooting for an open-mic at the Middle East tomorrow night. It isn’t perfect yet, but it sounds good enough to take out there and let hang in the breeze for a little bit. Another goal of mine to be realized: playing out. My musical horizons are expanding by leaps and bounds given this short time in February and the best part is that these recent aural explosions are by no means limited or isolated incidents; they are beginnings.
Music, no matter how good it can be, is not the sum total of anyone’s existence. This week saw, by my standards, a staggering amount of social movement. C. and I had our weekly Thursday night dinner for the first time in a couple weeks and it was good to catch up with her. We came up with a great hairbrained scheme: I supply the music, and she’s going to make us Hammer Pants. (That’s word, because you know…) I also got a chance to see M. twice this week, a monumental feat considering I haven’t seen her since last September. Jono invited me out for the time honored tradition of drinking beer and then throwing really sharp pointy things last night. And tonight we had a dinner gathering at the 1-2 that blossomed from an offhand comment to Peet this morning into a way cool get-together. TiMO and JZ came back to the 1-2 from dogsitting, Jono stuck around after running through songs and convinced Sam to join us, Matt and Gina came up from downstairs, and Jojo made the trek up from Central Square. We had a good hour or two in the kitchen full of frying, boiling, slicing, talking, eating, drinking…even a good grease fire in the oven. We then did a good amount of lounging and laughing in the common room while we waited for our digestive systems to do their thing. It was a simply beautiful (and beautifully simple) Sunday night at the 1-2. It was a study in what is necessary this break: food. I do not need to be emptied, assuming a passive stance towards my surroundings. Instead, I need to be forceful and purposeful in my actions, to indulge in and enjoy food of all kinds, and as the song goes, share it with many friends. There are seven days left in which I have a lot to accomplish here in Boston. This vacation isn’t about leaving, and that’s important. It’s tough work resurrecting one’s social life after over a year of neglect, but I’m already beginning to taste the rewards.
music: STS9- 5/1/04, New Orleans, LA
I went to Spike’s to pick up some lunch today and I was greeted by name as I walked in the door. I got some funny looks from the other people there and I didn’t quite know how to react, but I think this is a good thing. Rocked a Ranger and a Buffalo as per usual and made my way back to school realizing that I’d finally become that guy. At a hot dog joint. Which is a good thing, I think. I don’t even go there that much, probably once every two weeks these days. Maybe it was better when I was that guy at Murph’s, but I’ll take what I can get.
music: “One Last Vesper” Cassette
We were enjoying a typical Sunday night at the 1-2 earlier: sitting around the kitchen table, listening to The Playground, and tearing through a couple artichokes and lemon-butter sauce when this song came on that really twisted my head around. It’s an old folk tune called The Circle Game done by Joni Mitchell and assorted others, a song I know incredibly well but haven’t heard in years. We used to sing it in music class in grade school, and it was the first song I ever learned on guitar (which was actually my mother’s ukelale). But one of the most vivid memories I have of “The Circle Game” is a performance of the song by a fellow leadership trainee and old friend Chris Dallman at Camp Minikani a summer evening long ago. Hearing the song for the first time in so long opened a floodgate of memories and I’ve been spending the rest of the evening picking through them, as well as old pictures, journal entries, and cassettes.
I’m caught up in my immediate reality more than I ever have been. My fond memories of past years usually consist of the past couple years, maybe college. College seems like it happened in another lifetime. I all but forget that I lived a life in Wisconsin for 18 or so years, and it was a life full of events and places and people. Of course I know that I did live in Wisconsin, and that I was a kid once (declarative), but I forgot what it was like (episodic). I had not forgotten the fact that I had been in high school once, but I had forgotten what it was like to be in high school myself. Upon hearing that song on the radio the feeling of it all, the physical and mental sensation of what it was like to be a child, came rushing back. It was incredible. I flipped through old photos, yes, actual photographs on kodak paper; I put in old cassette tapes (remember those?) that I wore down in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I took a whirlwind tour of myself as a child, and even with the primed sense memory it seemed frighteningly distant. ‘That was then, this is now,’ you can say, and yes, but there is something tragic about no longer being young like that. I realized I miss the child’s eye, the struggle with questions and ideas encountered for the first time, the complete amazement at experiencing things for the first time, the struggle to become a competent, educated, experienced human being. Part of why I thought the National Parks I visited this summer were so spectacular was because they made me feel like a child experiencing Nature for the first time again. It was wonderful. I miss that feeling.
Out of all the corners of my childhood that I visited tonight, I found myself gravitating towards camp. To those that have been there, two anize’ers included, Camp Minikani is a phenomenon that doesn’t need to be explained. To everyone else, it can’t be explained. I have camp to thank for a lot. I find myself in a profession that stems directly from my experiences as a counselor there. I point to camp as one of the primary reasons why I have such an affinity for the natural world. I am reminded almost daily of how camp has shaped my core values and philosophies. And as “The Circle Game” reminded me, camp is mostly responsible for my wanting to play guitar. To remember so clearly what it was like to be a child at camp is overwhelming. Much of that feeling has been lost in the six years I have been away from camp. And since there is no way to go home again, I can only hope to take whatever I found there and somehow find a way to make it work, here, now, as an adult, in inner-city Boston.
The end of every day at camp is marked by a vesper, a quiet time where cabins of children lie in bunk beds, blinking in candlelight, and exchange their thoughts on the universe. It generally starts with a song and a simple question: “What was your best part of the day?” Vesper, to me, was always my best part of the day. The song has continued to the present date, but the question is one that I’ve unfortunately ceased to ask myself, but one I should revisit more often. But vesper has ceased to happen. I try to sit at the end of the day with a cup of tea and process stuff, but it isn’t the same. Were I to have time at the end of the day to discuss the universe under candlelight with friends even once a month…it seems, though, that vesper is not something that happens in the adult world. Perhaps because adult life requires that sort of interpersonal exploration less. I would still welcome it. For my part, though, I have colored pieces of cloth hanging on my wall to remind me, a guitar that made its performance debut over the crackles of campfire and chirp of crickets, and presently a candle lit, a candle that probably hasn’t been lit since my last summer spent in Wisconsin, a candle approximately the shape and size of a dixie cup, a candle with flecks of Crayola scattered throughout the wax, a candle with a small rock embedded in its bottom. To those familiar, it doesn’t need explaining. Remembering where this candle came from, and more importantly that I came from the same place, was my best part of the day. Childhood. I miss it terribly.
Years move by and now the boy is twenty
though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams
maybe better dreams
and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
music: Def Leppard- Hysteria
People to stupid things, but this one deserves special recognition. So utterly backwards, so shockingly against common sense and biological programming, so completely appalling, so rediculous that I can’t do anything but laugh at the poor bloke. I don’t know what more to say about it. Reason #8425 why alcohol is an awful drug, if nothing else. I guess the only redeeming thing about the whole situation is that this guy has effectively eliminated himself from the gene pool. Someone please submit to the Darwin Awards. And we Red Sox fans think we know a thing or two about team loyalty…
music: The Be Good Tanyas- Chinatown
Dead of winter in New England. Boston hunkers down for the onslaught of cold white, spends a week paralyzed, and slowly re-emerges from underneath the piles and piles and piles and piles of now filthy snow. It warms a little, some melts, and piles of opaque liquid fill crevices and potholes citywide. Weather reports indicate a fresh dose of celestial solvents tonight, due to grace our cobblestone and concrete for the next two days…
The past couple of weeks have allowed me a lot of head time and have elucidated some incredible challenges, neither of which have made me too happy. I can fully expect to dip into a dark mood for a week or two every year at some point, and I think that this past stretch of time was it for me. I think I’m coming out from under the covers, or starting to at least, or am just sufficiently distracted by work again to not think too much about the state of things in my own three pounds of gyri and sulci. This time around the normal morose mood was accompanied by a fairly healthy existential crisis recalled from years past: I remember being very young, five or six maybe, and lying in bed staring at the shadows my night light cast on the opposite wall which looked remarkably like E.T. and fully realizing what my mortality means. I remember sobbing uncontrolably back then until i passed into sleep, knowing that I was going to die one day, depart from this universe forever, for-ever, and there was nothing I could do about it. For some reason that incredible dread popped back up these past few weeks in fairly acute spurts. It didn’t quite reduce me to tears this time around, but it did in some ways paralyze me, forced me to call into question exactly what I am doing with the short time given to me in this universe.
We humans don’t function on this level of perspective most of the time. We can’t; it’s too overwhelming, nothing would ever happen if we did. It makes us too insignificant and unimportant and we all would like to believe that we count for something in this universe. So we end up distracting ourselves for the majority of our lives: getting educated, studying something outside ourselves (except for those precious few who wear black and smoke cigarettes and probably speak French and study this exact thread of thought), taking up hobbies, observing the world around us and marveling at how cool that thing over there is, experiencing things, creating things, consuming things. Anything to bring us to that human scale of perspective. Anything to keep our minds on the journey and off the destination, concentration on our feet and off the horizon. Anything to make the traveling as positive as possible. But traveling might not be easy with so many stops along the way. Because when you stop, when you catch your breath, you take in how much you’ve done and how much you have to go, you gain some larger perspective of the landscape and if you’re lucky some clarity, and you re-orient in hopes of improving your journey. You remove yourself form your human scale of perspective and glimpse upon the universe itself, far to vast for you to ever have a hope in understanding it, let alone making a scratch in it.
I’ve struggled with this sort of perspective, on-and-off, for the past couple of weeks. I’ve felt a sense of urgency to make something out of the immediate time given to me and was generally unsatisfied with how I spent it. My creative output was lacked quality. My daily energies were directed towards inconsequential and meaningless things. I would indulge in distractions and just grow frustrated that I was doing so, Despite my efforts to organize the tea cabinet, straighten out the common room, put all my dirty clothes in the laundry bag, eat regular healthy meals, and get on a decent sleep schedule, entropy is gaining the upper hand.
It doesn’t help that work has been especially rough these past two weeks. I gave my midterm exam and pounded out semester grades for my students and things are not looking good. On top of that I’ve had to play more security guard, therapist, and corrections officer than educator this week which siphons the life out of me and into these newer, fresher, more damaged vessels that can’t seem to fill up with anything no matter what they do. Here’s the existential dilemma again, this time once-removed: never mind my own existence, I am now playing a part in shaping sixty-three precious and brief lives with all the potential in the world and not nearly enough resources or personal perspctive to see it through. I can almost comfort myself in the fact that they are, for the most part, distracted by the cotton-candy nuances of modern living, but that may just crush my soul even more. I’m seeing some of these souls slip into conditions that will all but ensure hardship and suffering for the rest of their mortal existences and there’s not much I can do about it. And to make matters worse, I realize that I might be inadvertently contributing to it. Shudder, wretch. This week was a painful reminder of how much I’m up against, and as I stated in the final days of my training for this life of service, I can’t possibly hope to accomplish everything I want to accomplish.
My perspective is off. Reality is quite overwhelming. I’m not making good use of the time that’s given to me. I’ve realized that yes, This Is It, and from there seeds begin to germinate, but also in that realization I’ve grown very disappointed with where I find myself in the more immediate sense. I have a week of vacation from work coming up at the end of the month and I’m determined to use it as an opportunity to recalibrate. It will hopefully involve some degree of social interaction that don’t involve alcohol, some plan to readjust to more global priorities with my students, some degree of musical output, and some time spent with the natural world. I’m also thinking about doing a fast to clear out and reset. Time is the secret weapon, but ultimately, time is also the enemy. What actually transpires remains to be seen. Know that your travels might not go as planned.
I took to restringing my guitar last night, switching to Ernie Ball .10’s from the D’Addario flatwound .11’s just to see how things sounded under a different winding. the new strings went on fine, but when it came time to tune things were not agreeing with one another. The intonation was off and i couldn’t seem to make the thing play a major chord cleanly no matter where I fretted. I spent a while with screwdriver and bridge trying to bring things into harmony but the Gibson wasn’t having it. The tension is different now with the new gague strings, as is the string scale after all the tinkering. Whatever the reason, the sounds evoked clashed. Frequencies grated against one another, things didn’t click into synch. This wonderful tool of expression I own wasn’t able to resonate cleanly. After about half an hour I got frustrated, gave up, put the guitar away, and thought with mortal resignation, with understanding as clear as a blanket of new snow, “exactly.”
music: Digable Planets- Reachin’
Weblogs make for great soapboxes, sure, but as with any medium of idea or creativity, things are better when ideas are exchanged. Unfortunately our little corner of the World Wide Web was drowning in comment spam. The obscene quantity of these less-than-meaningful advertisements for this and that caused blog commenting to be shut down for a little bit. Thanks to the man behind the curtain, blog comments are back, and with it returns the possibility for conversation. The soapbox effectively becomes a coffee shop. I enjoy my soapbox, yes, but at a certain point it’s the equivalent of talking to myself in a soundproof room with a one-way glass window looking in. Possibly interesting for the casual passer-by, but it doesn’t do as much for me.
Comments are back. You, whomever you may be, please feel free to comment away. Unless you are spam-bot in which case you can go get fitted for a restraining bolt or something. Welcome back to the anize.org coffee house. please make a contribution. I’m counting on the good citizens of the World Wide Web to temper my nonsense with a little of their own.
music: Brad Mehldau- Live in Tokyo
I gave my science midterm today and in return received a collosal stack of notebooks and tests to grade. I haven’t even thought about the tests; the notebooks have to be done by tomorrow night. So tonight I’m pounding science notebooks with red pen like it’s my job.
um.
I gotta go.
music: Mozart- Requiem
I rode my bike to work today. It was the first time I had a chance to do this since the big blizzard. The snowbanks narrowed streets by at least a foot on each side and there were still big patches of ice so I had to behave myself, but it felt good to be pedaling again. My car is convienent, yes, and on some days actually takes close to the same amount of time as biking, but I realized just how sorely lacking my life is of exercise these days and just how isolated I am from the natural environment. Both, I think, are contributing to a slowing of personal functioning, and getting up and out on my bike today was a nice first step in pushing against that friction.
I have been feeling guilty about driving. I just can’t justify the selfishness of driving four or so miles in 20 or so minutes twice a day five days a week. It’s consumption and laziness, plain and simple. My car is great for days with bad weather and when I have to carry lots of supplies or bring home notebooks to grade but most days it’s just me, a backpack, and no rain. Even if I am not biking I should bring a book with me, budget in an extra 30 minutes to my commute and take the T. At least, then, I wouldn’t be as personally reliant on oil, wouldn’t be contributing to greenhouse gas build-up, and wouldn’t be making traffic worse. Sitting in a sealed box of steel, plastic, and glass for almost an hour a day can’t that great for my mental well-being either. My students are shocked that I ride my bike even though I have a car; I am shocked at their value systems. Shocked, but not all that surprised in the end. We grow up here assuming the primacy of the automobile and it takes a lot of unconditioning to think otherwise.
Still, some days something’s got to give in my world. I work hard, I operate on less sleep than I’d like, I probably don’t eat enough. It feels as though I am struggling against the current most waking minutes of the day. Biking in Boston is also quite a struggle. It’s a feat of physical exertion and intense concentration, yes, but to take on the worst traffic in the country as well as the New England winter weather on a fully-exposed two-wheeler is not really a soothing experience. Some days it’s exactly what I need at the end of work, but other days it’s the last thing I want to deal with. I needed to deal with it today. I needed the exercise, I needed to not sit inside the steel cage of my car. My bike (and my pants) collected a respectable amount of ice, grit, and dirt today and I inhaled enough exhaust fumes to give me a clobbering headache on the way home, but after almost a month of not biking it felt alright. Anything to put some energy behind my existence these days. Anything to get me back in the flow of traffic, weaving in and out of obstacles, slipping by danger, somehow finding a way to get to where I’m going. Conditions were not perfect today and I found myself moving much slower than I would like but I eventually got there. We’ll see how I choose to negotiate traffic tomorrow. Something’s got to give.
