It was an aversion that grew out of a childhood compulsion to read every interpretive sign she came across on family vacations and school field trips.
She began back in the analog age on a single lens reflex camera, in high school she switched to a digital camera. She rarely dipped her hands into photochemicals again—goodbye, D-76 and HC-110—hello memory cards. Within a decade everything she shot she shot on her phone. All through the years the same obsession persisted she must shoot every interpretive sign with its ancillary scene, if possible, she encountered. And she often went far out of her way to encounter them.
She still hadn’t figured out how to create a vacation or trip where she was assured of encountering these illustrated signs, but a historical or memorial plaque in situ would do in a pinch. Clearly, her ideal was to shoot the scene illustrated on the sign before the self-same scene in nature from the same angle illustrated on the sign.
It was not always possible, but she always strived for perfection—often waiting hours until the flow of tourists at scenic or historic spots dwindled away, or more often arriving at spots before tourists arrived. Although the lighting often added its own set of challenges. She was in the process of transcending—a true existential argonaut.
What I’m Reading:
… we’re a disgusting species with horrible manners and not fit to survive…
This takes place everywhere and nowhere at once. At the center of a spin art piece before the paint reticulates out; in manifold dusty, dark spaces; in destitute backyards choked with crabgrass; and Gusman Hall in Miami, Florida.
A father. A son. Supporting players.
Illicit substances, vitriol, a gun, mind control techniques, married people that shouldn’t have been… married, that is.
And here, someplace, we join…
Son:
Don’t twang that pang of that Journey to Ixtlan at me. I believe the interregnum is better than the internecine, and neither are as good as interstices. What do you sing? What do you sing?
Father:
I sing of the sun going out. White dwarf? White dwarf? Pray tell, dying star, where was your fiery giant? This will all disappear someday after we’ve disappeared in an anthropocentric extinction — the sixth great extinction!
(He points savagely at the heavens.)
There will be nothing you can do… do be do be doo… do about that?
Son:
I think you mean to bring me down at the nascent end of the good new year! It’s 1979! Get with it.
Father:
Nope! Look around, look around, you’re already well into the first act of the end. Act two is a bitch! No one has ever seen anything like it.
(He adjusts his Pope’s mitre — a hat that never became him, always slipping off his shaved head. He flings the hat over the backyard fence. He recoups.)
Act three is acid, bitter, and terminal. The dènouement. So out! Out. Out in your bitter boy britches and fasten your seat belt, son. It gets harrowing from here. A goon’s new year to you, boy!
Son:
I fear my grip on reality is tenuous, at best. I grant you that. After all, you pulled a gun on me when I was eleven. You often pulled the same gun on my mother during those hazy rages in our smoke-filled living room.
(A paisley brocade sofa, a large stereo console, and field and stream oils materialize on the busted walls.)
The ash trays were always overfull — the butts were a dark prophecy of lost days to come. The record player always hiccuping from the stylus on the never ending last groove. Pop! Pop! Pop! Johnny Mathis did not soothe your savagery.
Father:
It’s best not to bog down in theories or paralyzing rationalizations. It was what it was. Just something. Your experience may vary, my mileage was fine. I’m here aren’t I? Buck up!
Son:
I never thought such displeasures were possible. Yours, hers, mine. We drowned.
Father:
Oh, yes we did! The best plan was none. Chaos undergirding all designs — it yielded the most mileage per trauma cluster. That hothouse in your skull is full of dendritic knots.
(He swings his arm out like a madcap magician and produces a silk scarf out of his sleeve.)
There will be cold and snowy days; there will be warm and sunny days. I’m here to make sure many of them will be a hell!
Hell— Hello. Helloooo!
(His voice echoes and bounces back from the corners of the warping room.)
Try me, sonny. Go ahead. Try and find me somewhere in the spring of 1981. I disappeared from your life for a reason. Try to shape my thinking. It hasn’t happened since Silva Mind Control — my method is thee only Method! I use it to pick up all the I women want, from 15 to 53!
Son:
Wait! You claim to use the power of mustard seed grain faith to move a mountain, and instead you use it to pick up women? Really?
You claim to control and harness your mind power to dissipate clouds and divert hurricanes. You claim to shoot lasers out of your third eye, and you’ve the power to lay hands-on to cure cancer, and instead of doing something truly useful you’re using it to pick up women?
Father:
It’s useful to me.
***
Two weeks later my father came to my high school graduation with his new wife — an 18-year old woman barely six months older than I was — and introduced her (left to right, in order of largest mouth-agape) to my mother and my gangster stepfather of three months; to my 60-year old grandmother-inquisitor and her mute husband of 6 months; and to my drug dealer uncle and his pregnant 16-year old mistress.
In that fitful din of graduates and families finding their seats, during the opening strains of Pomp and Circumstance, I took out my pocket comb and made the first gouge. The first of a thousand of gouges to come.
I resolved to never marry.
After the graduation ceremony, bleeding from the chest and thighs beneath my graduation robe, I drove to Tijuana and joined the Camacho Brothers’ Freak Show.
And so I stand here, as you see me now.
What I’m Reading:
If there is something gnawing at you, that means you’re delicious. That gnawing is the universe trying to get at the tasty juice inside of you. Your entire unsatisfying life is just the rind…
what is this place now? a narrowing inward turn— the shock of the real—
falling short of our ideals— original sin baked in
(now flourishes unchecked / unimpeded)
What I’m Reading:
A common stereotype about people on bikes is that they’re anti-car or just don’t drive. This myth is particularly harmful in that it leads to a high level of antagonism and subsequent danger on the roads because the two sides are pitted against each other when cyclists are perceived as an “other.” In reality, 88% of American bike riders also drive a car. When drivers complain about cyclists getting in their way or not following the rules of the road, it would be helpful to note that cyclists are, in fact, also drivers.
— Hilary Angus / “The 10 most common myths about cyclists” / Momentum
my heart distills my blood heliotrope looking for a sun
a plantation of hateful verdigris factors out to flow
out big star not too far severance runs rampant over
my tripartite welcome parse the light hiding from guards
foiling the crowds out in the rain
i care less each passing year
What I’m Reading:
Just as he was placing his camera in position, the sand at his feet began to move with a rustle. He drew his foot back, shuddering, but the flow of the sand did not stop for some time.
But you. Rain on the hot sidewalk. Turned mist. Handsome aura. Gone.
— Nicole Callihan / “Summer Elegy”
The sky is low and charged with snow that has not yet begun to fall. A flock of starlings keeps lifting off and landing, lifting off and landing. The sound of their wings all at once is soft and explosive. A hundred feathered concussions.
— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
The universe demotes me, yet again, to coin-operated laundry, and each night, when everyone is sleeping, our tongues all migrate one mouth to the left.
— Josh Bell / “The War Against Birthdays”
The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.
— Robert D. Kaplan / Earning the Rockies
Much like plate tectonics, poetry is a measure of time, decades and seconds felt equally, refreshed until we pass out or think of better ways to explain what this means.
— Jean Prokott / “Trust the Hours: Poetry to Reclaim & Rename the Sorrow”
I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes.
— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas
. . . mechanical autonomy on a bike opens other doors, such as going on long trips with the confidence of knowing you can face any technical problem.
— Laurent Belando & Louise Roussel / Practical Cycling
What I’m Listening To:
I’m lost at sea Don’t bother me I’ve lost my way I’ve lost my way
Only biking 11 miles feels as if something is lacking.
Not getting on the road and pedaling through the day seems as if I’m bereft of something.
But I’ll be back at it soon—making my way to Georgetown, SC—I’ve already reserved the car back and lodging.
But there is important life at home to be lived in the interim.
I’m certain I’ll be back love/hating every moment on US 17 soon enough.
Here: random shots of the bike on a drumlin atop Peter’s Hill with Boston in the distance — the Arnold Arboretum will be a tranquil stand-in for the immediate future…
What I’m Reading:
Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.
— Susan Sontag / “The Art of Fiction No. 143” / The Paris Review
I never set out to do an 83-mile day on Tuesday—in fact I’d planned a 42.5-mile day to Honey Hill Campground in the Marion National Forest. But I arrived at the campground at 12:45pm. It was much too glorious a day to stop so early. Also, the swarms of no-see-ums (tiny biting midges) were so thick and pervasive there was no way I was going to sit or lay inside a tent for 18-hours until the next morning.
Picture hundreds, thousands, of these tiny teeth swarming all about. If one stood still they’d be covered in dozens of moving black dots on one’s face, hands, arms, legs, clothes—and no-see-um bites rival that of mosquitoes or any biting bug, some say worse.
So I moved on.
Even though I’d scheduled out the next five days through Wilmington, NC, I decided on the spot to move on and skip camping and bike well into the afternoon.
Why ensconce myself inside a tent when there were 7-more hours of beautiful daylight? So I decided to move on without any particular plan where I’d end up. Schedules be damned.
So if you look at the last post’s pictures you see a variety of roads, national forest pics, burnt churches, cemeteries, the strangest Luna Moth sighting (on the wall of a Circle K) outside Georgetown, SC—and that I, indeed, made it to Georgetown, SC.
I found lodging and after 83.1 miles—my longest day biking this trip, and my longest ever—I found lodging by the water, inside four walls, and mercifully no-see-um free (although I was festooned with the earlier itchy bites).
My plan all along (and the cryptic birthday allusion) was that no matter where I was on the Atlantic Coast Route / East Coast Greenway I would take a break and head back home to Boston for my life-partner / wife’s—Pattie—birthday on April 1st.
On my day off in Mt. Pleasant, when the bike was being serviced, I worked out Wilmington, NC, as the point where I could rent a car and be in Boston by April 1st. But it was cutting it close, and I was running into some difficulty arranging for a car hire in Wilmington—a convention or Spring Break?
So when I realized how much of a chunk I bit off biking 83-miles, leaving a mere 16-mile ride the next day as per plan, I thought I’d check to see if I could move the visit up a few days.
As nice as the Lowcountry waterside setting in Georgetown, SC is…
… spending a few extra days with Pattie seems like a better alternative. No contest! So I quickly came up with an alternate.
I was able to secure a one way rental car to Boston, MA. Note here the first pannier is already in the car…
… and now the entire kit and bike. (Who’s behind that shadow?)
Yes, that’ll do nicely.
Now for a longer day driving 880-miles, through torturous beltway traffic around Washington, DC: because 15-hours of driving is nothing next to the joy of spending Pattie’s birthday with her, instead of dodging cars, screws, nails, and every type of road detritus imaginable (and now no-see-ums).
This will be bliss!
And so, with this short break—I do have 2,000 more miles to go to get to Canada—on a bike, yesterday, I also hit the halfway mark of my goal to bike 3,000 miles this year. So Canada seems imminently doable — after this brief pause.
Yeah, that’s me… and all this time you thought I was a mere shadow… stay tuned for the conclusion.
What I’m Reading:
Americans are most themselves and most likeable when on the road. We are a restless nation. Adventurism, for better or for worse, is the bedfellow of optimism.
thee istsfor manity reader 