But now, capitalism has entered a radical and apocalyptic phase. There is no utopian vision in any of this. Instead, there’s a final battle. And this is where it gets really dark. The people who are advancing this agenda are also building their luxury bunkers and their spaceships to Mars. They don’t believe that there is a future. These people believe history is ending, literally. It’s end times! Get onto your rocket ship, or get into your golden city in the sky. And that is distinct.
— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone
The picture postcard Goddess on my fridge has eight, one for every day and then some random crap will happen, the roof spring a leak, a dictator stink I’ll scream or just lie there in bed, slow draining blinking red.
— Sophia Naz / “To Bear the Right”
More and more, climate change denial is just taking the form of conspiracy culture. It’s: “Who started the fires in Lahaina? did they direct that hurricane to [North Carolina]?” It’s about feeding this narrative of paranoia about global elites wanting to take away your freedom.
— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone
Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.
The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved.
— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
My house had three stories that grew less and less finished as they rose, as if the builders had lost spirit the further they were from the soil.
— China Miéville / This Census Taker
We don’t think hope, the only tyranny we’ll never overthrow, will ever run dry.
— Fady Joudah / “Barzakh”
I don’t think it’s the time to give up. But time is very short. One area where there is — I don’t know if I would use the word “hope” — but where there’s some productive work to be done, is that this [Thiel/Musk] agenda is not the platform that Donald Trump was elected on. There’s quite a lot of vulnerability in the MAGA Frankenstein coalition around the extent to which Trump is not just doing the work of the billionaires, generically, but specifically the of tech billionaires. That is a place to break apart the coalition.
People who are in it just for the white supremacy are going to stay. But I don’t believe that’s everybody who voted for Trump. And the radicalism of the vision — if they have given up on the future — provides a basis on which to organize, and to oppose, that is incredibly broad.
— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone
Fair enough start leaving Bar Harbor. Chilly again, in the low 40’s with a “feels like” temperature of 36 degrees at 7:45 am.
Climbing out of Bar Harbor on Eagle Lake Road, next to Acadia National Park, the first 6 miles were good climbs and the forecasted rain had suddenly evaporated. It would be a cloudy, chilly day but dry.
Paula had just passed me near the entrance to the park, and…
… Snap! Grind! Clang, clang, clang!
Let me explain: as you see in this photograph (below) from Thursday, during the loop shakedown ride—I got stuck carrying one of the group’s cooking pots—we share carrying Adventure Cycling’s cooking gear. Each one of us is tasked with carrying some piece of communal gear. I got one of the hated pots. It’s large, obtrusive, funky looking and just a literal pain in my ass, placed on my rear rack behind my bike seat.
See how it’s held down by two bungee cords I carry for instances that require carrying something outside the panniers?
Well, one of those cords tore in half from the strain of the stretch over the pot. Then ricocheted into my wheel, got caught in my chain and dragged into the jockey wheel mechanism on my derailieur.
This is what a normal derailieur looks like: you see the arm mechanism hanging down at 6 o’clock—it ferries the chain through the cassette and derailieur mechanism. (See above, see below).
This is how mangled my derailieur became in the incident: instead of hanging down, the steel arm was bent up and backwards into the cassette and a chain mash of metal.
I am astonished I didn’t fly over the handlebars, crash, or even fall off the bike. After a grinding halt, I looked at this mess in a daze. How is this even possible? no no no!
You can see the base of the bungee cord hook imbedded in the jockey wheel at 11 o’clock (top left).
image: Dan R.
What the hell? Why? On day three, after 6 measly miles of actually riding south, after so much time waiting for this ride to get going again.
After the daze wore off, I hired a car out of Ellsworth, and took the bike to the region’s most renown bike shop in Bangor, Maine.
Slipping Gears Cycling. After calling they said they had a derailieur replacement—the last one in stock compatible with my bike’s drivetrain.
I will say, these guys know what they’re doing. They saved my derailieur hanger—which is not easy or quick to source, and had my bike riding better than it started this trek 1,100+ miles ago in Key West, FL, back on the last day of February.
Thanks, Matt & Slipping Gears Cycling!
Luckily I had already cycled the section into Ellsworth, ME last week—and a good portion of southern Maine on the East Coast Greenway Trail last summer.
It was too late in the day to bike from Ellsworth to Bucksport, ME, where we were scheduled to camp last night. So in effect I’ll have a 40 mile gap (one day’s ride) that I’ll have to come back and complete later this year—probably in the fall.
But the good news is that I’ll meet up with the rest of the group in Belfast, ME—or thereabouts tomorrow—and continue on towards DC.
Bike Day 30: (Actually day 70 since Key West, FL) Start: Bar Harbor, ME End: Belfast, ME Miles: 6.09 (Actually 1,116 miles since February 28, 2025)
Oy! What an exhausting runaround day after only biking 6 miles. Crisis averted. Let’s move on with better luck from here on out. I got all the bad luck out of the way today.
Here’s hoping!
What I’m Reading:
The long day has ended in which so much And so little had happened. Great hopes were dashed, Then halfheartedly restored once again.
As you see at the base of the Precipice Trail, in Acadia National Park, above the sun made a rare appearance this week. It spent most of the mid-morning g to mid-afternoon putting on some Vitamin D time for us.
The Precipice Trail is still closed for nesting falcons until later in the spring.
And just a couple of miles later, as you see above, in Thunder Hole the fog socked the park in and visibility was less than half a mile…
… all throughout the eastern portion of the loop trail it was as if we were cycling during another season.
Christopher and Dan, a couple of the 13 riders making their way down to Washington DC.
Today’s loop ride was a shakedown ride for the group leaders to gauge rider’s abilities, and for the riders to make any last minute gear adjustments.
Blue sky broke through again for a fleeting view of Cadillac Mountain in the fog-shrouded distance, as seen from Otter Cove.
By midday the sun was shining again and the loop road was wide open for biking as traffic was relatively light.
A view of a glacial erratic in the distance above the sign identifying it on the North Bubble.
Full sunshine at Eagle Lake at the last of today’s 10 climbing summits. From here it was nearly 3 miles all downhill.
Bike Day: Shakendown Ride Around Loop Road Start: Bar Harbor, ME End: Bar Harbor, ME Miles: 22.06
Even though today, Friday, May 9th is tour day number three, it’ll actually be the first day we make positive miles on the East Coast Greenway Trail, i.e., actually biking the trail south towards Washington, DC, and we’ll do so now for the next 30 days.
What I’m Reading:
We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt. People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand.
Later Today all the riders meet at 4pm for the orientation on the East Coast Greenway Trail Tour. 32 Days. May 7th — June 7th, 2025. Bar Harbor, Maine to Washington, DC. 1,256 miles. Bike rain, fog, sunshine, hail—whatever the universe throws at us. We’ll pedal through it.
What I’m Reading:
This is an openly supremacist project. The supremacist ideas surge when they are needed to rationalize monstrous policies. This accelerated during Covid. For people who wanted an argument about why they didn’t need to do anything — whether it was mask, or get vaccinated, or close their yoga studio, or whatever it was. People started playing with: “Well, what would it feel like to just not give a shit if people die?” And once you play with that, you’re playing with fire. And it starts spreading. And it becomes, “Well, who else could we say it’s OK if they die?”
— Naomi Klein & Tim Dickinson / “Naomi Klein: What They Want Is Absolutely Everything” / Rolling Stone
What about overhead footsteps? What about a break in the weather? What about a weathervane windowpane, and standing up to pedal? And don’t gloat that the weather was fine and the riding was fairly easy and breezy.
And I checked out of comfort for a tidal flat on the bay…
… and a pond on a saturated cerulean blue day — so blue it chased the blues away…
… hey what’s that you say, your favorite national park on an azure May day?
… yes, lucky you, to see it on your bike this way—look it’s Bar Harbor at the far side of Frenchman’s Bay…
… and you feel like a fried rice poke bowl because today is Musubi (Hawaiian Spam Ham Fried Rice) day?
… eat it this this way… I shan’t nay… eat it all you burned all those calories away…
… look, it’s Mount Dorr! You can see it in the distance today!
And there is the Anchorage, the place where you’ll stay…
… and there’s your bike—in the room stowed away…
… and a dinner fit for a twelve year-old, because “fried” is the way!
Bike Day 29: Start: Ellsworth, ME End: Bar Harobor, ME Miles: 25.57
And… apropos of extortionate lack of proportion…
… and just because I haven’t forgotten that this is a creative writing blog — not exclusively a bicycle tour journal — an influx of redux… and a 12 year-old’s dinner (not a protein within a dozen miles of this immature meal of poutots and pickle fries, something only possible when you burn 1,609 calories bicycling away)… I am not allowed another fried meal until October… “carb bombs away!”
Happy blue sky day!
a module script failed(redux)
(thanks to John Coyote for reminding me I wrote this…)
i cant move
importing a module script failed butterfly wings detached a planet catches fire on the screen truer more visceral than life itself
we are drunk on simulacra we are a sick clan we are death incarnate
waiting to bloom
What I’m Reading:
Death became history, geography rewrote itself. And yet earth was reborn. It was not a miracle that life was destroyed and then re-emerged. It was the raging stubbornness of living organisms that simply would not give in.
It’s been raining, virtually nonstop, since I started pedaling south on the East Coast Greenway three days ago. I experienced nearly 90 minutes of sunshine on Saturday when I arrived at the Sun Shed farm. I was awarded with a bald eagle drifting overhead as an augury of sorts for more rain—because it rained all day yesterday on my ride down to Ellsworth, ME.
But before I left Rebecca and Varien were kind enough to give me a tour of the farm. Here’s some of the menagerie:
Baby rabbits in their “zoomy stage”
A few of the the two different types of porkers on the farm (bred for different purposes)
An alpaca, sheep, and goats galore
Tiny piglets, no larger than the length of my feet
They’re predominantly a breeding farm for pets and service farm animals. Great tour, great stay. Thanks to Rebecca and Varien!
But I had to get on with the pedal pushing, despite desperately wishing to stay warm and dry.
The Narraguagus River inlet on a prototypically rainy and foggy late-Spring May day.
My first stop was the Milbridge House Restaurant for the first real (non-energy bar) meal since lunch the prior day. And this sheet of a cheese omelet, sated my hunger…
… and I had a leftover breakfast sandwich for later, to boot.
The hour I spent inside the Restaurant was the driest I’d spend all day.
Even though I’d stop at Traceys Seafood Diner later in Sullivan, ME, I was so deeply chilled and wet that I had to keep repeating the adage on the wall to myself.
After all, I chose this adventure so I have to take the crappy weather with the good weather to come—though it won’t be for another six days as this weather system of rainy 40 to 50 degree days is stalled over the region.
But there’s plenty to see through the fog and rain. Like long cove at low tide before the diggers go out to harvest clams.
Or the peaks of Acadia National Park in the distance across Frenchman’s Bay…
… just kidding, the peaks—Mt. Cadillac, Champlain and Dorr Mountains are completely socked in by those distant clouds. But it’s, nonetheless, a beautiful scene in this light, too.
No funky farmhouse in Ellsworth tonight just a cheaper hotel. But it will provide what I sorely need: warmth, dryness, laundry and a hot shower.
My surgically repaired right knee is cranky again. But that’s become par for the course on big elevation or big mile days. Today was elevation, as the miles were modest.
Bike Day 29: Start: Cherryfield, ME End: Ellsworth, ME Miles: 38.40
The knee will be back to (somewhat) regular size tomorrow morning. And tomorrow morning I’ll head to Bar Harbor, ME, to await the tour group. We’ll all meet each other for the first time on Wednesday. The “down” weather days at least will be tempered by good company. There’s how “Life Is Good.”
Here’s the cure… plenty o’ ice!
What I’m Reading:
Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.
— Jia Tolentino / “My Brain Finally Broke” / The New Yorker
Their present situation reflects a broader dilemma in America: A large group of people feels one way, while a small group with a disproportionate amount of structural power tells them they are wrong to feel it.
— Lydia Kiesling / “Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University” / Lit Hub
Please, someone— tell me a poem can coax
oil from a sea bird’s throat. Tell me what to do with my hands—my hands—
what can my hands do now?
— Rachel Dillon / “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem”
My family huddled hidden under one another in the house our Dad had built alone. The house where we’d spent these years together. The old roof groaned under the pouring. The leaking basement filled with goo.
LOST: my gun collection.
LOST: every board game you can think of.
LOST: mother’s bowling trophies (30+).
LOST: our hope for some new day.
— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas
They could be an orchestra. A single one looks in the mirror & sees a note. A quarter note.
— Sandra McPherson / “Las Hormigas”
What you feared, to put it bluntly, was the possibility that the powers Al had would grow to far surpass yours, such that Al would take over human society as a result.
— Hiromi Kawakami / “Destination” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird
a generation dies, and the next generation doesn’t really mourn a country dies, most of the time just leaving apocrypha a country that doesn’t leave apocrypha wasn’t a real country if it wasn’t a real country, when it dies no one mourns
— Xi Chuan / “Mourning Problems”
There are pundits who are dining out on a theory that the Democrats handed the election to Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and Nayib Bukele, because the Democrats insisted on caring about trans people (they didn’t), and that “gender ideology” is upsetting to most Americans, and that these Americans were thus forced to vote for some of the worst people of all time. This is morally bankrupt. There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots.
— Lydia Kiesling / “Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University” / Lit Hub
What I’m Listening To:
Flawed, the extradition request Blown, the freedom of conscience Is there some form of justice possible or So long, public’s right to know the truth Gagged, muzzled by the powerful Cultivate ignorance and hate
thee istsfor manity reader 