Maybe My Lowest Moment

I use my bike to get around. I enjoy riding it, theoretically. In the vacuum of space, I can imagine the wonderful time I could have on a 10-speed in the handful of seconds before my lungs explode, likely causing my death. If I was ever caught in "Time Enough at Last," that Twilight Zone episode where all humanity disappears save one book loving nearsighted gentleman, you can't even fathom how much joy biking would bring me. 

However, I'm biking in the real world, with cars and pedestrians and other bikers. They are not all assholes. Well, all the other bikers are assholes, but I can understand why they develop their unpleasant personality traits with each bike journey I take. 

It does not help that I am not a skilled cyclist. I may never become one. To the best of my knowledge, I am the clumsiest human in the state of Oregon. Couple that with the self diagnosed developmental topographical disorientation I'm pretty sure I suffer from, and you have a recipe for quadriplegia at some later date. 

Still, I try to make the best of it. Whenever I need to take a left hand turn, I go to the sidewalk, get off my bike, and wait for the pedestrian lights to tell me what's what. I don't ride my bike across the crosswalk, because I'm a stickler for the law. In fact, much of my bike riding is more bike walking, as though I treat my bike as a sentient and exotic pet. 

What I'm getting to is, I am absolutely horrified during most bike related commutes. It does not matter how often I do it. I may be getting more skilled and less likely to cause a terrible accident, but I don't feel it. 

I discovered something about myself while biking earlier today that I wish to share with you. This is what happened: 

I rode my bike up Lombard, in the suburbs of Beaverton. I just passed Stars Cabaret. I was in my bike lane - the right one this time, the one that goes with traffic, and I felt pretty okay about myself. Then - 

HAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

was yelled directly into my ear. It needs to be seen as an independent paragraph, larger and bolded, to convey just how unexpected and jarring this yelling was to me. My inadequacies are so acute on a bike that I must be hyper attenuated to the sounds of the road if I want to live, so this screech - already bellowed with the volume of a My Bloody Valentine live show - really fucked with me. 

It is at this point we learn the difference between me on a bike and me in everyday life. As a bipedal, I shy from conflict. As a biker, I am like Craig T. Nelson: I run crew deep, and if you fuck with Dauber, I will take you out. 

 

I turned around, got off my bike, and confronted these two girls who I now recognize were high school students on their way home. 

"Excuse me," I said with extraordinary forced politeness, like Henry Rollins or something. "Why did you just yell at me like that? I wasn't doing anything and you really should be a human being and not screw around with people." 

Those may not have been my exact words, but I was not swearing or yelling. Not at that point. 

The two girls, of course, started giggling to each other as I wrapped up my introductory remarks. Now, it was at that point that I went waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond the pale. I attacked their appearances. I attacked their parent's proficiency at sexual intercourse (for some reason). Did "cunt" slip out my lips? Why yes, it did. Did I call these kids "whores" & "sluts" in the same sentence I hypothesized they would "die virgins?" You bet! 

It felt good for about 3 seconds to let all that frustration out. Then it felt horrible. I didn't let that stop me. I didn't stop. I looked preposterous, flinging my bike helmut to the ground, yelling the worst things I could think of at teenage girls. Now I was too far in it to extricate myself with any kind of grace from the encounter. I wasn't going to leave these two high school girls until I'd hurt them bad with my cutting, Oscar Wilde like wit. 

Also, these fucking kids wouldn't apologize for yelling at me! I'm well aware that I had long ago ceased as the aggrieved party, but what was in it for these two chuckleheads? What did they gain by holding their "sorry" inside their dumb fat little teenage heads? In retrospect, I'm pretty sure they were too scared to say anything at the raving lunatic in front of them.

It took me far longer than it should have to notice the countenance of these two kids betrayed real fear. Yes. I scared the hell out of two teenage girls as I'd never scared anyone before in my life. And then I just turned around and left on my bike. And here I am now, typing it up. 

And now I'm going to play guitar or something to soothe this stuff out.

AGE 27 SEASON MUSINGS

When you are young you are invariably stupid, because you are so sure that the dumb and underdeveloped intuitions percolating in your silly little head are the correct and the only possible way to interpret the world, of which you are the center. Every social and/or legal milestone - 16, 18, 21, even the rarely considered 65 - seem like they will never arrive, and that seems so unfair, because you know everything you'll ever need to know, now that you've engaged in some awkward heavy petting in between heats at the track meet, now that you've read five pages of Nitchze, now that you are aware movies exist outside of comic book and toy properties.   

Eventually - and "eventually" arrives before you know it, of course, nothing in life happens as if properly calibrated - you're legally responsible for all your actions, up to and especially including your overdraft fees. Still, now you can finally buy your own goddamn liquor and cigarettes. You are free to share living space with a couple of fellows (or ladies, or a combo thereof). You can have a bunch of great ideas for websites, none of which will ever generate a profit. If a companion shares your bed for an evening, if you are attractive or pleasant or funny or persistent enough in the eyes of another, who the fuck is going to bother you about it? The Pope? How could he know, unless he was some kind of Spy Pope? Who would suspect the Pope is a spy?

The insipid overconfidence of youth begins its metamorphosis into something richer. You mature if you are doing things right. If you are doing things wrong, you are libel to curdle, to become a caricature of arrested development, lacking in self-awareness and generosity of spirit. Most people do things kind of right and kind of wrong, because most people are basically wonderful and beautiful things, capable of bringing overwhelming joy to those that love them, catastrophically flawed in some minor way that isn't of much concern to their friends and loves.

Before long, the passing milestones cease to have legal ramifications, but my stars, the physic ramifications can brutalize.

The first thing this writer noticed as he entered his mid 20's was the NBA Draft was populated solely by people younger than he. A few years later, it dawned on him that the Beatles had already filmed Hard Day's Night and Help! when they were a little younger, in aggregate, than he was that day. He remembered reading a biography of Orson Wells as a 14 year-old youngster and thinking to himself how weird it was that the man was considered a "boy genius" when he didn't make Citizen Kane as a boy; why, he was already 26 years old! Wells should've been balls deep into his grotesquely strange career by then! 

At 26, this writer was well aware he wasn't ever going to make a Citizen Kane - he wasn't even in the running to be "the Lester Bangs of videogames," which was the closest he was to being a thing, much to his chagrin - and to his satisfaction, if he's honest with himself. 

Then came 27. As the writer knows well, this is a big one. The Age 27 Season. As legendary baseball analysis and inventor of sabermetrics Bill James discovered in one of his yearly Baseball Abstracts, the age 27 season is almost always the best year of a player's career. The player has seen pretty much all there is to see, and he has learned from his 3000+ at-bats or pitches. Best of all, his body has yet to break down, and can still withstand the many strange, violent and unnatural motions that make baseball the thing it is. 

Will my Age 27 Season be the best of my life career? Maybe. Maybe not. I've found a lot of comfort thinking that it will be totally okay either way. If this is the year I become a Great Dane, wearing eight chains, I think I could handle the success. If nothing much changes, and I'm still searching my couch cushions for quarters, even knowing I'd already mined that vein dry, I won't be too bummed out. I have so many people who genuinely enjoy spending time with me, and I already have the guitars and keyboards and organs that make me so happy when I use them I can't even fathom it. I feel a bit like Adam Scott's character on Party Down, okay with settling for what works, but not entirely comfortable staying still.

All I need now is a Lizzy Caplin. Or a Kristen Bell, but she's kind of a bitch on Party Down. Now, a Veronica Mars... is out of my league. So are Lizzy Caplin & Kristen Bell. 

Also, seriously. Why do I still have celebrity crushes, like a 14 year old girl? You know what else bothers me? People who get bummed out at a celebrity marriage or pregnancy.  Christ, like you were going to get Natalie Portman pregnant.