MoonOverPittsburgh

Yes We Did.

2008-11-04T23:43:00.002-05:00

It was at 11:07, give or take a minute, when I was blindsided by what flirted with becoming a full-blown crying jag. CNN had called the election, as we knew it would at 11PM and the west coast poll closures enabled the networks to say what we already new. I never saw the strength of my emotional response coming.

Sure, fatigue played a factor: working the polls from 6:30 until they sealed the machines on 4 hours sleep will do that.

But there I was: friends en route to the street to celebrate, me on my way home to rest up for a week that just. won't. quit -- but only after drinking another beer, watching Obama's speech, writing this post. Alone with my thoughts, leaking the occasional tear.

Today was Cliff and Renee, Kevin and Chazz, and Bill and Emily, people who will never read this; 10-15, 10-1 and Crafton; 10-17, 11-2, 11-4 -- Hell, even C and his Mom, the erstwhile and bitter McCain operatives who perked up at 5, out of nowhere, to deliver an impetuous and inept last gasp voter suppression effort to spice up the end of the day, after sitting quietly by for most of the day.

Poll-watching was a lot of things, but very little of what I expected. In the predominantly black neighborhoods to which I was assigned, I saw less dramatic affirmations than I expected. What I did see, however, was a dogged determination to overcome the petty obstacles, logistic and human, facing new voters, undereducated voters, forgotten voters, a will to vote, to speak to the world and be heard.

Kevin and Chazz are my neighbors, it turns out, who I had the good fortune to bump into when, on my way between poll assignments, at my own voting location in the Tenth Ward. The location lacked a McCain operative, and lacked an Obama observer, forgotten in a funeral home, having failed to turn up on either camp's priority list, small, inconsequential, a lost cause and a given, respectively.

But as I stood behind the machine contemplating my vote, wondering whether, observer credential hung around my neck, I could get away with sneaking a photo of my checkmark beside the name Obama, Kevin and Chazz, clad in ghetto chic, were being gently urged toward provisional ballots by the Judge of Elections.

I forgot about my photo, made some noise, held up my credential above the machine, and said "Just hold that thought and give me a sec." If training had given me nothing else, it had imbued me with a visceral aversion to the very phrase, "provisional ballot." Here were two would-be voters, I understood, who were being pleasantly invited to render themselves irrelevant by well-intentioned but parochial bureaucrats.

I finalized my vote, and immediately offered the two gentleman a ride to wherever they needed to go, wherever they were registered. They accepted and it wasn't until we hit the street that I learned that they last had lived in Crafton, well past the West End Bridge. Taking them to their polling station would take me nearly an hour off plan, and there remained the chance that they would not be permitted to vote there, as well, voter registration being, as it is, an imperfect process.

From Lawrenceville to Sixteenth Street, making my apologies, I never got off the phone, in short order receiving an update from a fellow volunteer in Butler County, addressing a non-volunteer friend's observed problems at the West Penn Hospital's polling location, and contacting my own people to update them on my status, all while driving erratically amidst brilliant Indian Summer sunshine.

And then the phone was silent, and so was I, these two young men implacable, wary, as, I'm sure, was I to them. Then: faltering discussion of how best to reach our destination, of my role as a poll observer, of their recent move to Lawrenceville. We negotiated the new direct ramp from Route 28 to Ohio River Boulevard and the West End Bridge, me again on the phone.

Across the river on Carson St., the conversation turned to politics, to Obama, to our respective convictions and hopes. Kevin, in the passenger seat, did most of the talking. He didn't talk about race. Or history. Or the democratic party as such. He talked about affirmations versus denigrations, promises over impetuousness, the failures of the last eight years.

Words seem so small; I can't convey what I mean.

While Kevin and Chazz voted, I worked the phone, tidying loose ends. Then, I drove my new friends home, and headed to my new precinct, where I had been reassigned when I called headquarters to indicate that two lawyers was one too many at my original location, given the modesty of the rolls, the proficiency of the poll workers, and the absence, in the 10-15, of a Republican presence.

In the 10-2 I found new friends, whose names, alas, mostly didn't stick. In the ensuing afternoon and evening, I and the other Obama observers helped dozens of voters find their polling locations, driving more than a few here or there. We called in our share of numbers to headquarters, and problems. We learned how unprecendedented turnout was, and negotated drunks, the stubborn, and the fatally cynical, the silent protest of a man whose placard was so incomprehensible as to defy classification as "electioneering." Meanwhile, two McCain monitors mostly kept to themselves, mourning, I imagine, the inevitably of tonight's result, resenting the lack of debilitating strictures placed on poor, uneducated voters with the temerity not to be convinced by McCain's paper thin solutions (and outrageous and criminal robocalls designed to minimize the vote), their efforts vacillating with little warning between lackluster and occasionally concerted.

Meanwhile, I and the other Obama observers worked the tables to identify and direct the electorate's lost souls, got to know the neutral observers lurking helpfully outside the door, brought coffee to the pollsters, won some battles, lost a few. We watched our phone batteries fade, shared stories heard here or there, basked in the sun, and in the mostly understated but palpable reverence surrounding poor, black voters cast their never-more-relevant ballots for this country's first black president. And all was suffused with the mechanics of the job, and the imperative to do everything possible to ensure that every desirous and legitimate vote was cast, for whatever party.

I had anticipated outsized drama, weeping voters, triumphal displays, but what I saw was sanguinity, perhaps crossbred with well-founded skepticism and more than a little genuine doubt.

In one short day, the stories are too numerous to recount, and I hesitate to dwell on the particular conflicts and resolutions, the petty, inevitably human interludes that revealed the exhaustion and the tension; on D, worrying her nails as she recounted to me her lost son and hinted at her deep fear that this wouldn't go as it should, while we waited for the machines to shut down and the final data to emerge, the results of which were as predictable as the larger context was uknown.

In his accpetance speech, which I watrched in bed, this computer yawning before me, Obama paid tribute "[t]o the best campaign ever assembled in politics," and I shivered with a new round of quiet tears. My role in this has been small bordering on trivial: I've given quite a bit of money, as it is my privilege to be able to do this year, and I have done what I can to bring other money to the table, and people. I have tapped my network more shamelessly than I ever have done before, with gratifying results. I have learned election law, and mostly stood around while the time-worn process lumbers through its familiar choreography, emboldened with my new training, humbled by its essential irrelevance.

I have listened to a pollworker at the 10-18 recall the round-the-block lines for Jesse Jackson in the 1984 primary, and heard precinct after precinct report higher turnout numbers than anyone can remember. I have seen the frustrated and the earnest and the disturbed seek to exercise their franchise, and I have seen the frustrated and the earnest and the disturbed seek to disenfranchise those of whose legal votes they do not approve. I have learned why one charms the people one is thrown at, who do not need you, instead of ignoring them; and I have been reminded that the friendly fare far better than the aloof.

And then fourteen hours were gone, feet aching, eyes pink and raw, and it was hugs, and promises to return, and I will. Whether I volunteer or not, I will visit my girls at the 10-2, who welcomed me and all other comers, who ran a fair and open election in a forgotten part of this city and of the world, and who, I hope, are dancing in the streets right now somewhere among friends who never thought this would happen: that the smartest, most charismatic, most dynamic and promising politician to emerger in a generation or more has been chosen over the man who promised only what has already proven ineffectual.

And he is black. The ground shifts under our feat. Gloriously.

I will remember my conversation with my brother, the elementary school teacher with a passel of black second and third graders in his charge, with whom I discussed what a black president would mean to the black children who will grow up, hopefully for eight critical years.

And I will remember this: Chazz cast his first presidential vote for Obama, and he and his big brother Kevin are my new friends on the block, demographically diametrical, but politically of one shared persuasion, bound by an Indian Summer drive, and our common hope for much better days.

And I will not dwell on the fundamental inadequacy of this post to convey all that I am thinking, my eyes raw from that initial, surprising squall of tears, and those that followed intermittently all the way home and through the acceptance speech.

I will simply say: I have never been more proud to be an American, never more proud to serve in my trivial way, never more hopeful.

Darkness

2008-01-26T20:04:00.000-05:00

My building houses a blind man. My building downtown, that is. He rides the same elevator bank I do, to a floor several above mine. He never gets off at the wrong floor, even when his companion dog, a majestic and stoic German Shepherd, occasionally pulls errantly; even though the chimes on the elevator are less than consistent; and even though the elevator passes through six floors of a very large firm that clearly prefers the elevator to internal stairwells for short intra-firm trips up and down.

He seldom speaks. He speaks sometimes -- to a colleague, perhaps, implacable and tall, behind sunglasses, within overcoat, balding. His dog makes me sad sometimes, furtively eyeing the other passengers. I imagine the weight of the injunction that the sighted not attend to companion dogs to be heavy, social animal bracketed and cosseted and denied the congress I imagine he desires. I consider: are there little insurrections? Wouldn't there be?

One night a few weeks ago, leaving the building and heading toward the garage where I lock up my bike, I found myself standing beside this man and his dog at a gridlocked intersection. We had the green, but the cars were interlocked densely through the intersection, and the dog, responding, as I'm sure his training dictates, to the cars over the light, remained sitting in the cold gloaming, even as pedestrians divided and flowed around the two, finding passage in the narrow openings between bumpers, between headlights and tail lights.

As soon as I had crossed I regretted not having assisted the man and his dog. The gridlock was likely not to abate in any sort of way the dog would recognize as permitting passage, and they might be there awhile. A few steps past the opposite curb, I stopped and turned. There they remained, the man and the dog, precisely where I'd left them. Their light was still green. Again, though, my fear of decalibrating the dog or insulting his master gave me pause.

I turned and walked a few more steps and turned back. This time, the light red, the man and his dog were not where I'd left them, nor anywhere on the trajectory I might have expected them to follow. Instead, I belatedly realized, they were angling, man clearly reluctant and in the tow of his dog, through the heart of the clogged intersection, at first at a 45-degree angle, and then increasingly straightening out to head wrong-way down a one-way road, into the teeth of a line of stopped cars. As I watched, horrified, or rather mortified for the man as the still cars presented no immediate danger, the two of them negotiated their error to find their way to a curb-side location catercorner from where they'd originally been aimed.

Having seen, in the literal sense, them to safety, I returned to my path to bike and home, thoughts thickened with the imagination of what it might be like, to be sightless, dependent on a well-trained but ultimately rather stupid animal to guide one through the infinite perils most of us manage without much conscious thought, how gloaming with all its perils is infinitely preferable to perpetual darkness and the quiet challenges and ewmbarrassments it brings. And I imagined how nice it would be, after years of seeing him around, to reach down, just once, and offer the dog my hand.

Dead of Winter

2008-01-26T19:55:00.000-05:00

In dusty apartments reeking of cigarettes --

In vacant lots on ten-degree evenings
when even thought freezes and falls to the ground
to shatter among the broken bottles and feces --

In a parking lot outside a bar like a souvenir
of a heedless bacchanal left behind
for the staff to collect and deposit appropriately --

In nurse-white hospitals that purge their atmospheres
of the life they aspire to prolong --

In a car unaccountably parked on an abandoned pier
in a blighted waterfront district full of big plans
and bigger failures --

In a body buckling under the impossible weight of a snowflake
of the thought that there is nothing more
than this cold, this grey, this frozen bustling
to and fro in an effort to present a moving target.

Holiday Wishes

2007-12-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas* to the blogiverse, especially to my readers. And to Zulieka, a big virtual hug, with the following response to her inquiry: because it's all we have.

______
* Regards to those who celebrate other holidays as well, but Christmas is the holiday impending, such as it is.

Night Visions

2007-12-06T20:19:00.000-05:00

You find yourself imprisoned where cold grows so frigid that it becomes scalding, long suffering the pendant arrival of a bus on an avenue wide like an ocean, wind plucking your heavy trousers stiffened with chill, flapping about your calves under your thrift-store overcoat; you hid inside your earbuds from the desperate urban congress of a thousand bodies shivering in unison, cold beggaring stillness, yet you are still.

On the bus there's been some mistake -- your magazine scans cyrillic and you close it disconsolately preserving the morning's dogear. Tomorrow, or next Thursday, it will be English, or your facility with the foreign tongue will have returned, unannounced, unheralded, one of a dozen faculties that come and go without warning, unbidden, unlamented, un. Like you, drifting in and out of milieux, wallflower and gadfly, authority and dilettante, gravitas and humor. Un.

Hustling down your block, smooth soles slipping atop the icy veneer without warning, penetrating a wall of private sound, something silly, Scandinavian, incongruous, small children crowding a doorway, at play or in violent confrontation, playacting or enacting (un) assault, "motherfuckers" and "bitches" . . . as you pass, sidelong in every way, you try to gauge the exigency, the emergency, whether to intervene, and despite your suspicions that the fists are angry and the victim pained, the assailants' ages and inertia propel you past, to finish your cigarette on your stoop.

You pass a dark figure traveling the other way a few houses later, enshadowed and hunched, and you turn, guiltily, to see whether he imposes, but he doesn't, his occult moral calculus arriving, by whatever path, where yours has. Vaguely mollified, you proceed to your stoop a quarter-block hence, where you linger on your stoop, remove your aural armor, finish your cigarette safely outside, shuffling in the wintry rime at the stairs' edge.

"R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat," one child repeats incessantly, strafing his friends into hamburger. "Is you a cop or a robber, motherfucker?" one of the impossibly small children quizzes. "R-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat." "Is you a cop or a robber?" "R-r-r-r-r-r-r-tat-tat." And so on.

A child rolls on the street, while another throws a length of PVC foraged from anywhere over a fence nearby to clatter on concrete out of sight. A child screams inarticulately, sounding pained, but what can you make of this, which mimicks child's play's universality beneath a patina of something more local, culturally isolate, inaccessible.

Your cigarette burns down, and you roll it between your fingers to loose its burning end like pinching the third mint from the end free of its foil roll. Your fingers numb, uncertain, unmoored, uninvolved, you turn the cylinder with your key and slip into your house, where familiarity embraces you and forgives you -- un -- all you don't understand.

Tough Day at the Office? . . .

2007-11-20T19:29:00.000-05:00

. . . or, How to Make Yourself Hurt Like Hell in 12 Miles or Fewer:

Blow out of work leaving things undone, grab the attorney across the hall for a couple of beers, then get on the bike and go, no water bottle, no preparation, kind of having to pee . . . just go.

Bates to Forbes to Stanton.

Instant therapy.

Then the wheels came off . . .

2007-11-14T20:24:00.000-05:00

I've always been fascinated by the image of the wheels coming off. For me, at least, few metaphors are more vivid, more evocative, more perfectly descriptive of a certain state of affairs. The wheels break away and the carriage clatters to the road, scraping and groaning, its passengers tumbled together in the wrack or thrown free of the wreckage, bodies akimbo in the gutter or amid traffic, under the disintegrating debris that was, just a moment ago, a viable conveyance. Literally. Figuratively. No matter.

The romance, perhaps, is in the immediacy of the connotation. Mostly, one hears the figure of speech deployed in contexts that suggest suddenness, a lack of forewarning, an exigency unforeseeable and hence particular startling and traumatic. But therein the lie, a romantic notion belied time and again by experience.

Perhaps the warning appears in the guise of a new creak, nearly inaudible amid the road noise. Or maybe a subtle shimmy developed in the chassis, something only the most neurotic, attentive drover would discern amid the ordinary vibration of travel. That minor wash in the road down around the bend by Simpson's farm? You know the one -- you're always complaining about it. Well maybe it got wuder in those awful storms that tore through town in the small hours of the morning last Tuesday chased ahead of that cold front, and it grew just big enough to swallow the front axle whole and shatter it in its inflexible jaws, turning the carriage's momentum into an instrument of its own destruction.

But what to do what to do? For every shudder does not augur catastrophe, and, as though the contingencies outlined above weren't enough, the very act of sensing threat in every irregularity can so scatter one's attention that it effectively pries the wheels off itself, destroying the vehicle as surely as the supposed threats themselves.

And hence the dance. Do you hear that? No, not that, that's been there forever (a different anomaly once feared but slowly integrated into the understanding of the status quo), that other thing -- that ree ree ree? Shh! -- Hear it? -- Hear how its in sync with the wheels? -- It speeds up as we do -- Yeah, that, right, you hear it. Whaddaya think? I look and can't find anything -- But it's something.

It's a fool's errand, chasing down every noise, and it might be better, on balance, to ignore all of it, to welcome the suddenness that follows blithe disregard, to abandon any notion of prevention. But tonight, I really think I hear something. Something I'm pretty sure isn't nothing. It's there, I can just make it out, but I'll be damned if I can pin it down.

Touring for Dummies

2007-11-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

We don't think about these things. Or I don't. The cold. The water issues. The sores. The frost. The reaching out of my sleeping back to find glasses frosted, cigarette lighter encrusted, the wet elbow from the wet sleeping bag from the cold morning. But then if we did, if I did, we'd never end up in these situations, and what's the fun of that.

So instead there I was, awake just prior to done, poking the fire as though to awaken it, lying back in the darkness to envy the moon her diffuse beauty through the pre-dawn mist, wondering whether sleep would return, whether dawn approached, which direction that was, east suggesting a great deal of night left, west suggesting morning's approach, wondering.

It all began innocuously enough: a Myspace bulletin from a friend suggesting a little ride: a jaunt out of the city, through Mckeesport, and twenty miles or so down the Yough Trail, 45 miles each way, Saturday into Sunday, not enough miles to really hurt, especially given the flat terrain, just a way out of town, sleeping in the open, a celebration of fall.

When we met Saturday morning at Tom's Diner, we were a ragtag quartet. B1 (of Urban Velo) and E (of BikePgh) and B2 (whom I finished an alleycat with, once), gathering for a heavy breakfast and a slow prep for the ride. After breakfast, we scattered, variously, to Giant Eagle, Thick Bikes, and REI for random gear and provisions, before finally reuniting at, and leaving from, REI on Southside a little after 1 for our ride.

The ride itself was much as B1 had suggested, short, low key, pleasant. Temps were between 50 and 60, and I changed out of my fleece tights even before leaving breakfast. From REI, we rode out to the end of the Southside trail, then walked a quarter-mile down the railroad right of way to Sandcastle. There, we rode over to the Greenwood Bridge, and climbed the stairs to its southern end, picking up on a strip of dirt alongside the roadbed down toward Homestead, finally entering traffic where it became practical.

From there, it was 837 through Homestead, out past Kennywood, and then toward McKeesport. After passing through McKeesport's blight, we found ourselves at the trailhead, where we passed up a short climb into the woods, B2 and I discovering the surprisingly well-maintained trail for the first time.

Whatever it is that opposes a sense of urgency is what we had, and we took our jolly good time. We were all on road bikes, so we didn't travel slowly, but we were perhaps too confident of the simplicity of the ride, and so we tarried, enjoyed our various and frequent breaks, were slow back to the bikes. B1 rode a track bike equipped with jury-rigged panniers over his front wheel; E rode a touring bike equipped with panniers over the rear wheel; I rode my Ti-bike, the roadie I don't use nearly enough, and my gear and provisions rode in an unfortunate backpack that my shoulders are still talking angrily about; B2 rode a roadbike and carried his gear in a messenger bag.

The mileage was easy, though, and aside from a few close buzzes in McKeesport, everything was very low key.

Finally, after a stop for ice cream at a trail-side convenience store in Newton, we reached our desination, a campground 40-plus miles from my house, fifteen miles or so down the trail. All along, B1 had been defining this trip by the fact that we'd reach a brilliant shelter, a three-sided structure with the fourth occupied by a working fireplace, stone, with a chimney -- the Lexus of lean-tos, in a sense. And the shelter was just where he said we'd find it . . . and occupied.

Ensued from there a faltering discussion of whether we'd ride onward, to the next campground some 12 miles (and the last hour of daylight) away, or set up without cover at one of the firepits in the same space. The campgrounds near the shelter featured firepits and cinder platforms for tent erection, which would have been delightful had we a tent. But of course we hadn't brought tents, confident that we were the only people in the planet who knew about the ubercool shelter B1 had identified.

After some negotiation, we opted to stay, confident in our gear and the rain-free forecast, and, at least for my part, vaguely excited at the prospect of sleeping under the stars on a cold night. We selected an isolated spot, for privacy, and settled in -- picnic tables, firepit, firewood, etc. It wasn't until after dark at 8 or so that we realized that the pumps at the campsite actually were fed by a conventional waterline, and had been shut down for the winter. Reluctantly, we were forced to consider whether four of us could get through the night on the 20 or so ounces of water (not including my bottle of frappucino) we had amongst us. Deciding that we could not, the two B's decided to head back down the trail four miles to the nearest convenience store, which (conveniently) was open. Eight miles on a star-lit trail, with only street-oriented headlights to guide them. Easily, the trip MVP's on that front alone.

All of this is building up to that moment, near midnight, when we bedded down. I can't speak for anyone other than me, but there's something special about lying down in the darkness, next to a fire, and sealing up a mummy bag to leave little more than an eyeslit, and staring up at the stars above. Within moments, the heal I was resting on the ground, the other foot resting across it, began to take on the cold (my pad is 3/4 length), and I pondered for the umpteenth time the prospect of hypothermia.

Of course, a night with a low of 30 isn't the most dangerous condition one might imagine, but I'm no veteran of this sort of camping, and my 20-degree sleeping bag is nearing 20 years old. I've taken care of it, but I had no illusions about it living up to its rating after so many years, and so I spent the first part of the evening suspicious, wondeing whether it was really up to the task, and taking dead seriously the danger implicit in falling asleep in an inferior bag on a night at or below freezing.

But my heel was hardly numbing, the bag seemed adequate in the heat of the first, and then there were the stars overhead. The stars were beautiful, the woods peaceful except for the periodic trains passing on the other side of the river and the snores of my friends.

For a spell, I slept deeply, my sleep growing irregular only near dawn, when I noticed the fire faltering and the fact that most of our woodpile had disappeared, the word of Brad2, who we later learned had slept poorly and thus tended to the fire intermittently all night, making all of us more comfortable.

And then my eyes opened on full-blown morning, B1 tending the fire, my bag and our bikes encrusted with frost, sleeping bag moistened outside with dew. We lingered for a while, hours in fact, toasting cheap bagels, drinking coffee from a nalgene french press, continuing the endless bullshitting session of the night before, warming to the morning.

B2 and I complained of sores; neither of us had done a long ride in a while. But for me at least the bike welcomed me when we finally got moving. Lots of bitching and moaning, for sure, but that's how these things go. We lazily returned, stopping for breakfast in Newton, for no good reason at a cemetery near the start of the trail, and finally saying good bye at the Hot Metal Bridge, where we split for our various destinations.

But what a way to welcome the cold, and to reject its tendency to drive us inward. Instead, we four consider the cripness of its air, its bugless clarity, its way of pruning crowds down to a hard core, and welcome the transition, the invitation, the challenge. I should do this more often.

And the Beat Goes On

2007-08-19T15:20:00.000-05:00

Patrick McHenry (R-NC) on the bicycle:

OMG, $1 millllllllion dollars to cyclists. And lord knows there's nothing so injudicious as that in the ideal GOP budget. Not that McHenry's taking a principled stand against earmarks that benefit only his own congressional district or anything shady like that.

HT.

Passing the Torch

2007-08-07T22:56:00.000-05:00

And just now, Bonds speaks, the stadium still echoing with the mellifluous and generous message Henry Aaron recorded in honor of the occasion, congratulating Bonds. Congratulating Bonds. You'd think I'd be tarred and feather for making the suggestion. But I love the game of baseball, and I won't be deterred from honoring one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, in company with Ruth and Aaron and Mays, men whom I lack the arrogance to compare.

I watched the first at bat tonight, catching it (deliberately) between other pursuits. Barry roped a double 400 feet to right center field, centering a good breaking ball perfectly but failing to get under it. Barry's second at bat coincided with my going to bed, and I ran in from the bathroom, toothbrush in hand and a mouth full of foam, to watch him lash a single to right field.

It was clear that he was hitting the ball well, very well -- hitting it like Barry hits it. Adjusting during lengthy at bats in those minute increments that are familiar to those who have watched Barry over the years and know what they're seeing, taking a breajing ball inches out of the strike zone on a 2-2 count, fighting balls off that weren't quite in the right location.

And then instead of reading for five or ten minutes and lying down, as I usually would, I decided to mute the television, read a little longer, and see how quick the Giants' line-up came back around. It was fast enough for me to linger, reading a good novel with my glasses on, looking up every so often to check on things.

I have tickets to see the Giants when they visit PNC Park on Monday, and as Barry slumped and time passed I allowed myself a sliver of hope that he would come to Pittsburgh still at or below 755. But when he tied the record over the weekend, I knew it wouldn't last until the thirteenth. Tonight as Barry came up for the third time, I found myself impatient, knowing in my heart that he would hit 756 this week in San Francisco, as it should be, and preferring it to happen when I could watch live.

And so as the count went to 2-0, then to 2-1 (looking) 2-2 (swinging) and 3-2, Barry then fouling off one, and another, I watched his battle, his focus, and I didn't doubt for a second that he would swing for it with two strikes, as he always does, missing far too rarely for the force and majesty of his swing. His sweet swing.

And he hit it, sky high into cavernous right center field, and what I imagine was an ugly scrum in the stands -- as much at least hinted in the video replay -- ensued.

Perhaps portions of Barry's career have been improperly enhanced by steroids, Human Growth Hormone, or amphetamines. History increasingly teaches us that athletes will do anything to exceed their peers, to reach what they imagine is their peak potential, sacrificing their own safety and their integrity, for the ephemeral incidents of dominance, or simply to push themselves over the hump, to make themselves competitive in a crowd of athletes with greater natural gifts. Barry's case is hardly unusual to the sport, or the person. That we do not know the breadth of the problem, that we may never know, does not entitle us to burden one man with the sins of an entire sports-media complex -- and yes, I impeach the whole establishment, for reasons that may or may not be self-evident, but which in any event are too lengthy to consider now.

If it was true of him, it was true of the pitchers whom he always dominated throughout his career, and if true of them than true as well of the outfielders who chased his flyballs, the infielders who reached balls that might otherwise have slipped under their gloves.

In the past weekend, Alex Rodriquez hit his 500th homerun and Tom Glavine pitched his way to his 300th victory. Earlier this season, Frank Thomas hit his 500th homerun, and that threshold, once itself rather rarefied, came closer to reach, as it will continue to do as the big hitters of the past twenty years, steroid-fueled perhaps; more effectively physically conditioned and video- and computer-aided no doubt; beneficiaries of modern medicine and nutrition, diluted pitching talent, shrunken modern ballparks, maple bats, certainly -- as this class of hitters and those who follow retire.

And what other records coincide with the steroid era? Sosa's and McGwire's three-year epic battle for the homerun title, of course; but so does Ripken's 2157th consecutive game played, several perfect games and myriad no hitters, Clemens' dominant rush past 300 victories, Kerry Wood's twenty strikeouts on a hot day in Chicago -- the Boston Red Sox winning the championship that had eluded them for decades upon decades. What of these will remain, what feats can we recognize justly, if we refuse to honor Barry Bonds' achievement?

None, an entire era ripped from the history books baseball adores like no other sport even begins to emulate, an entire batch of American legends, none more venerated than the sluggers, the men who bat fourth in the order, who can change the complexion of a game, of a season, with one perfect swing.

In order to reach 755 homeruns in a 20-year career, one must average 37.75 home runs per season. Taking into account physical and mental development, injury, external conditions like the ballpark one calls home, the hitters who line up behind you, distracting personal problems, this is an astonishing thought, especially in light of the fact that when I was young and learning to love this game, when Barry was just entering the game to much fanfare in My Adopted Fair City Pittsburgh, gangly and fast and more of a scrapper than a slugger, 40 homeruns was a plateau that no one reached for entire seasons on end, a very different time than the pumped up, power-focused era that has coincided with my majority.

Whatever happened happened; and with or without chemical assistance, Barry would have finished his career honored among the same handful of legendary hitters to whom he is compared now, even mired in suspicion and invective. And isn't it telling that only a few of the loudest and least informed naysayers seriously maintain that he ever was not destined to be one of the great hitters, or deny that this event, this night, was something that fits a pattern of mastery established long before anyone has suggested any impropriety on Bonds' part. Whatever Bonds has chosen to do, he's done.

At home plate, Barry's son, Nikolai, stood alone, waiting for his father, his complicated, standoffish, embattled father, professional teammates at a discrete distance ringing the dirt at home plate. The real celebration, Barry's embrace of his son, his elevated hands and his upturned face, having passed in a few seconds, the for-the-cameras festivities ensued. The sound of fireworks past center field, over McCovey Cove, visible eventually on camera, Willie Mays on the field (whom Bonds gestured toward repeatedly, honoring his Godfather and legendary predecessor, perhaps his better), Aaron on the Jumbotron making the only appearance he was willing to make, but doing so with dignity and grace.

And then one of the announcers put Barry Bond's thoughts, pensive on the bench in the wake of the crowd's loving display, to words: "It's over." Until the next time, when I'll be watching if I'm able.

Thanks, Barry, for the memory.

More Housekeeping

2007-08-06T18:04:00.001-05:00

If you're bored, or if you trust my judgment entirely too much, be sure to visit, in addition to the other sites I link under MoonOverFriends to the left, Big Baby Buckley (baby, sporadic), SteveAndHeather (baby, less sporadic), and, under MoonOverWords, WaxPoetic (not sure yet what this is about, but I'm looking forward to more).

Single

2007-08-06T17:15:00.000-05:00

All love is in great part affliction.
--Marilynne Robinson

Bruised, misshapen, piteous, what an extravagant array of flaws describe those last unselected fruit in an emptying bin among the detritus left behind by those selected, desiccated leaves and stems, crushed and oozing victims of the selection process or of their transit to market slouched weeping in a corner.

Passed over, suggesting only by aggregation in isolated undisturbed curves and stretches of incongruous health their betters now exhausted: skin red almost to bleeding, muscular with preserving their vulnerable perfection, the implication of rich aromatic interiors.

And will a hand pause among the remainder, hovering equivocation, to weigh sustenance against displeasure? Will it grasp, gingerly weighing and squeezing, or opt for another ingredient entirely, abandoning premise and conclusion altogether in favor of a fresh argument?

Self-pity's jaundiced murmuring: You dawdled, came too late, will to your bed hungry; or, Softened and pregnable, unpalatable, you are ill with rough handling.

Or another facile metaphor in waiting, perhaps.

Okay, So I'm Here

2007-07-31T21:32:00.000-05:00

For now.

A little housekeeping. Just pruned my blogroll a bit, and also added a notable friend of Moon: please note, and please visit, J at the Sound and Light Show.

Cresting

2007-07-31T21:12:00.000-05:00

At the hilltop emerging from the trees,
the sun like a radioactive lozenge
dispels the illness of shade that lent the climb
an illusory chill. Stomach recoiling
from exertion and heat, legs withering --
who would choose this unlikely occasion
to meditate on the nature of things?

Good Days

2007-07-31T21:07:00.000-05:00

On good days he flosses. Sometimes he doesn’t. All of the women he dates are obsessed with their teeth; with them, no perversion is more reluctantly revealed than the secret of his high mediocre oral hygiene. Are all women that way? All women in his demographic? (All women, properly understood, plainly a concept that exceeds his grasp; even being glib has its limitations.) Maybe it’s the bad days that he flosses, neglect signifying, rather than torpor, blissful repudiation of the routine.

On bad days, he imagines there are no stories to tell. To imagine that there are stories yearning to be told, entrusting themselves to his care, these are the good days, a sense of purpose, the supple embrace of purpose like a fine leather coat. Stories are like, well, stories – what could be better than that? What metaphor adequate to elevate such an august referent? Sleep on it, and he does. There’s tomorrow, and the stories are in his care. Or, perhaps it's on good days that he imagines that there are no stories to tell. But there are. He thinks.

On On Being Blue

2007-04-04T22:04:00.000-05:00

All week, I have awaited a package, a slim volume purchased without photo or much in the way of description from an unknown Amazon Marketplace seller, something I stumbled across while looking for something else, a thin treatise by William Gass from 1975, On Being Blue. I now see that the volume remains available here and there, but at Amazon there was only the one instance, at one rare book seller, and armed with only a two-sentence description I was moved to action by the threat implicit in there being only one copy in the entire Amazon community, the volume seemingly out of print.

Since last week, I have waited anxiously -- either for the package to arrive or for the dreaded email that sometimes follows Marketplace orders, indicating that the item is not in stock after all, so sorry. I waited as though for a distant great uncle on his deathbed to pass, a great uncle by marriage, a great uncle I haven't seen in twenty-five years, but one I love in the strong unquestioning way of family, as a good man who once guided me around his several dozen acres in rural Maine, an undersized boy of seven in bright yellow shirt and burgundy trucker's hat emblazoned with the name of my father's then employer.

The uncle passed this weekend in the rural Maine redoubt he discovered with his family like an unmapped Pacific atoll, rest his soul, at ninety-two years old. Still, though, no book.

Then today it came. Ever so gingerly, I opened the battered manila envelope, stiffened by boards inside, my heart racing. Hardcovered and dustjacketed, two slight tears at the top of the front jacket and the cover otherwise remarkably simple, the paper thick and creamy and textured, like a woven variation on a grocery bag, the endpapers similarly rough, copyright information but no date, no indication whether this is a first edition (although it simply must be), the cover page adorned by a perfectly lovely indigo impress: "On Being Blue." On the last page, however, I learn that this was a limited edition -- 3,000 copies of the trade edition, and only 225 of the "de luxe" edition. A perusal of copyright information and bookjacket identified, by ISBN, my edition as one of the 3,000 trade editions. A limited edition, thirty years old, in fair condition -- for a song.

Inside, under a Roman I on the first page, I found these words:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit -- dumps, mopes, Mondays -- all that's dismal -- low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that's empty; blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky's turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it's stood for fidelity.

There's more, of course, and I am grateful for it. But I'll stop there, because that, ladies and gentlement, that is what I call a sentence.

An impulse buy in search of inspiration. I don't imagine Gass will start disappointing me now, after all these years.

Creo, Creare, Creavi

2007-03-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

For Z, who was kind enough to ask.

I don't have a child; presently, it's fair to be skeptical that I will. Not because that's how I intended it to work out, but because we're most credible when we view the world as it is. But tonight, I found myself wondering what wisdom I would have to impart. I would not be young for a father now -- not old perhaps, but not young -- older, for example, by seven years than my father was when I was born. When my father was the age I am now, I was seven. The mind reels; I digress.

The occasion of my wondering was my attendance at a lovely performance at the Hard Rock Cafe (of all places) by young pianist Jonathan Biss, alongside PSO Artistic Adviser Sir Andrew Davis -- a cesspool of commodified music misery, with the usual menagerie of outstated rock and roll onesies, guitars, platinum records, and the like, punctured to its core by a Steinway baby grand and musicians worthy of better environs. I learned of the performance only this afternoon near quitting time, and despite my other plans and the event's fund-raiser-esque pricetag, despite my lack of suitable clothing, despite my recent penuriousness and my lack of interest in Biss's weekend program of Schumann with the greater PSO, despite my lack of companion (and whom would I ask these days, really), something about the event called to me. I negotiated the best of my business casual and bike attire, lingered at the office past six, and finally unreined my steed and headed over the Smithfield Street Bridge into the stinking brownfield of Station Square.

I was not surprised to find the event relatively uncrowded, and I was only vaguely unsettled when Sir Andrew and Biss walked in like any other attendees, Biss in shirt tails and corduroy and funky hipster sneakers, Davis in tweed and dungarees, and began to mingle with the distinguished guests. I sat at the bar and minded my beer, my rough and tumble bag stowed out of sight along the bar's footrail. Around me was a smattering of older symphony patrons, who speak as though knowledgeable but I wonder (my own ignorance of the classical canon, admittedly, makes me a poor ombudsman, but my suspicions remain), and younger musicians self-possessed and silent. My $40 bought me a ticket good for some specialty drink involving pomegranate that I refused on principle to accept, preferring to pay cash for a good beer, and granted me access to a buffet of cheese cubes and mustard and fruit. These were the refreshments I was promised in the promotional materials. I spoke to no one, straining to find hidden meaning in the thin literature handed me at the door concerning public radio and TV, and listing the program for the evening, which was as follows:

Sonata in c minor, Op. 13, "Pathetique," first movement, Beethoven;

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, second movement, Schumann; and

The Dolly Suite, first and second movement, Faure.

Finally, a WQED DJ explaining that some delay was in order given a disparity between the number of tickets sold and the number of attendees in the house, I wandered to the front row, where an unoccupied seat beckoned. I tucked my bag beneath it, silenced my phone, and waited.

Biss finally emerged, casually, and with little fanfare turned to his labor. His Pathetique seemed sloppy, but in a most forgivable way. If I'm hearing missed notes, and more than a few, surely you're missing, but Biss's touch was light and vigorous and his pacing was merciless. The performance was riveting, Biss so close to my seat I could contemplate the peculiar irregularities in his breathing and the sound of his left foot thrusting to and fro beneath him in rhythm with the music. If anything, the errors merely served to emphasize the singular intimacy of the performance, the humanness of the performer, the wisdom in my decision to attend. By contrast, I am now listening to the same movement as recorded by Richard Goode, whose entire cycle of Beethoven's thirty-two sonatas I am in the process of moving from CD into iTunes, and it has an almost clinical polish to it that is at once admirable and alienating.

Kreisleriana I found less compelling, perhaps for the same reason I was unmoved by the prospect of the Schumann-heavy program associated with Biss's weekend visit to the PSO. I appreciated the discussion about Schumann's torment that the DJ and Biss engaged in before Biss took up the piece, and so educated I appreciated some of what Biss said about the movement's nascent passion, but overall I found myself nonplused.

For Dolly's Suite, Davis joined Biss at the lower register of the piano, and the two engaged in a playful and delightfully well coordinated bit of play, in engaging this piece for children, the second movement of which, I learned, is aptly entitled on some scores, "Meow."

But this isn't about the music, or at least isn't about the particular performance detailed.

I do this sometimes, wander off to things by myself, and I've written about it here before, though I'm too lazy to hunt down an example. For serious art, really, solitude seems necessary to unfettered appreciation. One can't very well immerse oneself in magnificence while chatting with an idle companion, who more often than not is more or less interested than one is in the work presently at issue. Better to disappear into it, into art, leaving everything behind, trusting in one's return but at the same time indifferent. Should I find myself forever imprisoned in any number of Picasso's blue period pieces, would I grieve? Perhaps -- but I'd look good doing so, hanging on a wall at MoMA or the Louvre, eyed hungrily by a multi-ethnic smorgasbord of jealous onlookers: this is me here, and you there -- have fun getting through customs, coaxing your children to eat strained peas, balancing your checkbooks.

Biss is a third generation world-class musician, son to two violinists, grandson to a noted cellist, inheritor of lifetimes' musical wisdom. With that pedigree, that he is an alumni of the prestigious Curtis Institute (Lang Lang among his handful of classmates) seems almost an afterthought.

I have been reading prodigiously of late, prodigiously for me, prodigiously for law school and post-law school me, as though in preparation for something. Fiction, all fiction all the time, until a recent left turn into non-fiction for purposes of research, but even so still in fiction, immersing myself in others' creations, worlds and psyches alien and familiar, constantly leaning into the buffeting caused by demanding an exit, however temporary, from all of this. The trend goes back further, but since Thanksgiving alone, my reading list includes (but is not exhausted by) the following:

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Mary McCarthy, Birds of America
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Paul Auster, Oracle Night
Paul Theroux, My Secret History
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Banville, The Sea

In addition, I am currently reading, if reading is the word, Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions.

This is not to pat myself on the back. I could have read far more in that span, and probably should have. Rather, it is in service of a larger point that I enumerate. I haven't just been reading these books, but scrutinizing them, immersing myself at once in their narratives and their manifestations of craft. I didn't consciously choose to do this; it just happened. My readings, thus oriented, may sound in discussion like those of a critic, an academic, and that is my training. But I am reading differently now. I am all technician these days, never affected by a passage that I don't ask, Why? It's a thrilling way to read, an engagement that makes everything else pale by comparison, but it's instrumental as well.

This development coincides with, or arises from, my growing sense that I ought to be writing. Not writing, in the elementary sense -- I do that every day -- but composing, creating, writing with a real sense of purpose, writing like graffiti, writing like those handful of words you'll never forget, whether you found them in a film, a book, a seminar, or crossing a lover's lips in the darkest hour of night. It's thrilling, this sort of reading, ennervating, terrifying.

Which brings me back to where I began. I don't feel terribly wise, or even as knowledgeable as I'd like. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time feeling inadequate to whatever task presents itself, confident in my competence but entirely unconvinced of my excellence, and unsatisfied with anything less. Nothing is more tragic than a lazy perfectionist.

But I know one thing I would say to my child as often as I might, no matter his age or inclination or peculiar ability, my one grasp at wordly wisdom, my sole excuse for myself. I would say, "Create." Make something new. Create. Create.

Create.

If there is a God, a Heaven, a meting out of judgment, surely creation will be valued most high and destruction villified. There's nothing new in this thought, which is surely derivative of any number of sources I might name were I not so weak of memory, but in that, at least, they were right. To create is everything.

And by this I think in larger terms. Snob though I may be, I would not intend that my child should take me to mean that he must create something that would assume a place in this or that canon, only that he create rather than obey, for obedience is not creation, it's survival. I would have my child be proud, and defiant, and undaunted by the thought of the billions who have preceded him, each trying to add something to the human mosaic in one way or another, courageous before the inevitable fear that there is nothing new to add, unwilling to accept mediocrity even if it is -- or precisely because it is -- the rule.

(And then my child, being a child, would sigh and turn on his heel to storm from the room as though I'd insisted that he eat brussels sprouts, but the memory would linger.)

I have been an absentee blogger, and for those who drop by with any sort of regularity I apologize -- not so much for the silence as for the lack of explanation. My dedicated readership may be passing small, but I know you're there, and for all your patience with my erratic maundering you deserve more than implacable silence.

But this is not to announce my return. Rather, this is the explanation I have owed. I have liked a few things I have written here, more than a few perhaps, but the medium does not lend itself to the discipline necessary to the sort of thing I would like to create, at least not in my hands. I lack the patience for revision, here, and it frees me from the complication of sustaining my confidence in the face of creative adversity, which in turn impoverishes the work itself.

I can, in short, do better. And it's about goddamned time.

So I'm retreating to meatspace for the time being, turning my undivided energy to a larger project I hesitate to call a novel but (for want of a better word) might as well, something I've been playing with in my head for quite a while, and toward which I've been researching of late. I don't assume I can do this, that I'm technically adequate to the task or tenacious enough to stay with it for as long as it takes to find out, but I'm so very sick of wondering, of fancying myself something I take for granted but refuse to vindicate in deed.

I won't officially wrap this up, because I'm not convinced it won't serve some purpose as a sort of overflow valve when I've been writing long enough on my own to create some momentum. And those of you who really care for my brand of blather might come back every month or so for a while to see if there's anything new. But this is, if nothing else, a substantial hiatus I'm announcing.

Thank you for reading. Perhaps I'll have something more substantial for you in the distant future. But that's the question when it comes to writing anything with literary pretensions, isn't it -- for how long can one delay gratification before tearing oneself apart, like Van Gogh, like Schumann?

Let's find out, shall we?

Filler, Alleycat

2007-01-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

I sooooo need to bring Susan into the City this Spring / Summer for an afternoon of playing in traffic. I won't be satisfied until I've ridden through Times Square at speed.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

2007-01-15T10:32:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, I covered this holiday to my satifaction, and I'm sticking with it.

In other news, Bush has decided that rather than pleading his own case for war to the political body charged by the Constitution with declaring it, it's now apparently Congress's burden of proof to justify questioning Bush's desire to widen said war, providing a delightful illustration of how Congress's abdication of its responsibility to handle declarations of war comes back to haunt us:

"Frankly, that's not their responsibility," Bush said in an interview on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," which aired Sunday.

"It's my responsibility to put forward the plan that I think will succeed. I believe if they start trying to cut off funds, they better explain to the American people and the soldiers why their plan will succeed," the president said.

In lighter news, Zulieka offers a vignette that illustrates the perils of life before Google (and shows her lovely face for the first time in quite a while).

Lolita, the Great American Novel?

2007-01-08T22:08:00.000-05:00

I hate that phrase: Great American Novel. It's no different than any other attempt to apply abosolute superlatives to art of any sort, and as such it's an intrinsically silly exercise. That's not to say it isn't fun, though.

So who are the usual suspects, generally? Gatsby, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn? Maybe we should throw Roth's Great American Novel out of respect for his hubris?

I submit, and I'm sure a Google search would reveal that I'm not the first, that it's eminent emigre Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's brilliant novel, his third composed in the English Language, Lolita.

I haven't read the book in four or five years, have not in any way been prompted to consider it as a candidate, but damn if it didn't just pop into my head, as I contemplate my own incipient project, that the answer is obvious.

What does Lolita have that justifies the brazen compliment / epithet? Let's consider, shall we?:

We'll begin, out of respect for the author, by noting that it is a celebration of the language, a travelogue if you will of what Nabokov characterized, in precisely this connection, as his "love affair with the English language." That's a healthy start, but of course every author cited above would have confessed to a love of the language, so that's not enough.

What else? Well, the book, textually, contextually, and philosophically seriously games this nation's paradoxical obsession with the prurient, its persistent inner conflict between its baser urges and its puritanical origins, its embarrassed celebration (ongoing) of sex and violence and its latent guilt over its pleasure in same. These factors take it somewhere Gatsby never aspired to reach, somewhere Melville wouldn't have dared to go. Both of those books principally concerned themselves with American striving. And of course striving is a critical ingredient in American-ness, to be sure, but it is only one ingredient, and there are many.

Next (and I recognize this point is debatable, but I'm not a scholar and don't have to deal with peer review), Lolita, better than any of the other novels named, explores quietly the nature of the sort of immigration that forged this nation. Not the refugee aspect so much -- although Nabokov was that, in at least some sense -- but the aspirational sense of it -- give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses -- coming to this nation not to escape appalling oppression or genocide, but merely for capital-O Opportunity, an open-endedness that is peculiarly our heritage, if somewhat more in word, in mythos, than in fact.

Then of course there's the veneration of youth to the point of pathology. Everyone loves their children -- there's nothing peculiar about that. But the celebration of youth, the veneration of it, the singular terror at the thought of aging and the ludicrous lengths we go to forestall and deny it, these things are American, and long before this country succumbed utterly to youth's thrall Nabokov wrote about with brilliant clarity. The book, notwithstanding its censors' protests to the contrary, was no defense or rationalization of pedophilia of any sort -- rather, it was a metaphor for a deep unsettledness most of us share with the thought of aging. And the cycle that reflects is self-perpetuating -- we are terrified of aging because we are all too familiar with our own discomfiture at people aging around us. Reification, to leverage a scholarly sort of term.

Finally, at least among encompassing aspects of the work, there is the on-the-road aspect. No country so celebrates its spaciousness as this country does, and of course in the past hundred years this has manifested in a perverse obsession with the automobile. In this regard as well, Nabokov's sense of this place was ahead of its time. Of course, the road novel aspects of Lolita (and couldn't one argue that his was the first true road novel?) reflects more than mere transience, itself a hallowed American tradition. It reflects precisely the aspirational facet so critical to this culture's sense of itself, the idea of escape and reinvention, which I won't dwell on since it's the subject of too much thought already -- it's become a truism of sorts, and I won't pursue it here.

Then there are more fragmentary aspects of the work that further qualify it for the ridiculous title: the celebrity culture emblematized by Quilty; pop culture refracted through the prism of Dolores, a teeny-bopper entirely in the sway of commercial pop impulses, submerged in the tropes of pop culture that now bombard our children with frightening force and persistence; the preternatural obsession with the One Who Got Away, and so on.

So there -- the case is made and I've persuaded myself. If any novel composed in the English language deserves the title Great American Novel, it is Lolita, by V.V. Nabokov, Russian emigre extraordinaire (by way, of course, of France), who saw us ever so much more astutely than we see ourselves.

Friday Shuffle, Baby's First iPod

2007-01-05T20:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, I probably won't make a habit of this, but back when it was new(er), some bloggers had fun posting a random cross-section of their iPods via a short shuffle session. I'm new to the whole iPod thing, but sitting around this evening, book-keeping, I threw my iPod earbuds in mostly to test how my ears like them over a period of time and hit shuffle. So far, I've added perhaps ten or so CD's, chosen more or less at random from a collection it will take me months to entirely rip into digital format. The only guide in selecting CD's at this point is to choose ones that I like, play regularly, and think are pretty good from front to back. Here's my first shuffle, or at least the first dozen songs of it:

1. Death Cab for Cutie -- Stable Song
2. Radiohead -- Tree Fingers
3. Medeski Martin & Wood -- Hey-Hee-Hi-Ho
4. Elvis Costello / Brodsky Quartet -- Dear Sweet Filthy World
5. MMW -- Everyday People
6. Fleetwood Mac -- Oh Daddy
7. EC/BQ -- This Offer is Unrepeatable
8. Beam (local hip-hop fusion act) -- Defiance
9. Nirvana (unplugged) -- Something in the Way
10. EC/BQ -- I Thought I'd Write to Juliet
11. Air -- La Femme d'Argent
12. The Shins -- Caring is Creepy

And it goes on, even presently, but that's enough since, aside from my iPod's apparent aversion to playing the Fiona Apple I loaded, that pretty much covers what I've got in there so far.

Taking Stock, 2006

2006-12-31T16:39:00.000-05:00

Another year ends with the requisite lists and accountings, the arbitrary grouping of events and developments into a 365-day unit, the looks backward and forward, and so on. I would offer links, but the sources are, as we say in legal documents, passim, too numerous to identify specifically.

As a warm-up to posting something this afternoon, the last of 2006, I reviewed where this weblog was, where I was as a quasi-public being, at the outset of the year. In the dawn of the year, I read and commonplaced in this space Anthony Swofford's Jarhead. After explaining my frisson at one of his more notable sentences, I observed, "In a million years I could never write that sentence or any like it. And if I accidentally happened upon a sentence so laced with potential, I could never set it in its due context."

I hope that I was wrong, at least insofar as that sentence was a broad lament about my ability rather than a narrow observation about each writer possessing unique and inimitable gifts; in the next two or three weeks, as something like a resolution, I intend to begin blocking significant chunks of time into my schedule to write, and to write. And to write. And to ignore the voices in my head telling me to stop, voices like that reflected in my Swofford post. And to write still more. Until June 31, at least, when I pause to take dispassionate stock of my progress. This is not idle, not this time -- I've designated an entire room in my house, presently occupied by nothing more than a roll-top desk, a (not terribly comfortable) period-appropriate hardwood desk chair, and five lovely volumes of Edward Gorey, as a distraction-free zone, a studio, my fortress of solitude. There, the computer's wireless will always be turned off, the room always silent but for the sounds of cats padding around, my murmurings, and my fingers abusing these keys -- no music, no adornments of any kind . . . maybe a space heater, but nothing more lavish.

But that's next year; this is an accounting of the year poised to expire. This year was exhausting, as I wrestled with a few very difficult realizations about myself.

I am lonely. I don't mean this in its broadest sense. I am blessed with a loving and supportive family, and too many friendships to count, each of which I treasure. But I lack a deep spiritual connection with the fellow traveler I persist in believing I can find. Not only do I cope with this very poorly, my efforts at changing it are largely misguided and wasteful in ways that should be predictable enough to avoid. But I don't avoid them.

I'm no longer young enough to write off my complaisance. Knowing this doesn't seem to make it any better. I am diabolically inventive with regard to diverting myself, not that my diversions are all that creative in themselves. Rather, the invention comes in convincing myself, albeit subliminally, that manifestly unproductive activities (or inactivities) are more justifiable than they really are. Whole tracts of time disappear, as into an alcohol-induced blackout. Hours, days, Seasons.

I have lost the tremendous momentum I carried into and out of law school; I am treading water. The water is temperate; I am the fortunate residual beneficiary of the mighty effort I put into accomplishing the quantifiable goals that are the privilege of formal education. But I fare far worse in the real world's unboundedness. I seem incapable of choosing among several visible shores to swim toward. Once, I flung myself at new opportunities with reckless abandon in my personal and professional lives. But I have grown tentative. Choice and sacrifice are inexorable aspects of lives well-lived; an inability to choose, to commit, to take risks, characterizes the most unhappy people I know. Sometimes I wake in the early morning terrorized by the prospect that I am becoming one of them. I question whether the person I have become would have taken the chances I have taken -- moving to Pittsburgh, leaving a promising career for law school, falling in love -- that have led to my most gratifying moments. How disorienting to fear that you are no longer the person that brought you here.

I am lazy. Like "lonely," this requires qualification, since my occasional comment to this effect among intimates usually is resisted with an enumeration of those things I have accomplished and the various things I continue to do. That in objective, absolute terms I keep myself occupied, participate in non-work-related projects, socialize reasonably well, read steadily, is no comfort to me when I confront almost daily vast tracts of unredeemed time. For me, "lazy" isn't vitiated by crossing some threshold, after which it is my privilege to loll about in self-satisfaction -- it's about making the most of the array of opportunities I enjoy both as an accident of birth and a product of my strivings and effort. I am so fortunate in this regard that it seems sacrilegious to fritter it away.

Perhaps I am a servant of my own arrogance, deluded in my desire to do more, to make an impress on the surface of things, to validate my time here, the air I breathe, the space I occupy. There is humility, to be sure: I no longer imagine that I will write the Great American Novel, that I will reinvent constitutional theory, that I will star in the movie of my life story and get the girl in the end.

But if living lies in the effort, in the undaunted aspiration, it seems necessary to remind oneself that there is more to do, more fibres to weave into the fabric of things, and that each of us is responsible for being a better person -- more humble, more loving, more involved, more productive by whatever definition suits the context and the person.

2006 wasn't a bad year for me, not really. It was a necessary year. 2006 will only reveal itself as wanting if I fail to heed all that it has taught me. That said, I'm happy to see it go -- better things lie ahead.

Thus, I raise a glass to all of you: may the next year bring you all health, prosperity, and happiness by whatever definition you choose.

Housekeeping in Progress

2006-12-29T20:23:00.000-05:00

So the three of you who have continued to visit after my long hiatus might be interested to learn that I'm not going anywhere. I don't pretend that I'll post as frequently as I used to, or that I'll post as frequently as I have been of late. I am, however, building up to updating the template with some of the handy new tools Blogger is providing. Before I do so, however, I'm working my way through my old posts, applying categories to each.

My new template will include categories, by Gawd, and feature a radically reduced and updated blogroll, among other improvements. I'm approaching my two-year anniversary, after all, and it's not like I have nothing to say. Not for the first time during this blog's tenure, but in a far more systematic and determined way, I'm about to begin writing more seriously outside the blogosphere. So once again I return to the original idea of this blog as a repository of annotations to myself, a collection of observations and ephemera -- in general, as an annex to more dedicated writing. Or so the story goes.

In any event, as it stands, starting from the beginning, I've categorized something like 60 of nearly 700 posts. It's a start, and an unsurprisingly engrossing task for the obsessive-compulsive. It might take a couple of weeks for all of this to come to be, so be patient.

Berube on Kubrick's Silence in 2001

2006-12-29T18:21:00.000-05:00

While he attends the MLA, Michael Berube has posted, in two parts, his 1993 essay offering a novel explication of 2001 as, inter alia, a political rumination steeped in the Cold War that prevailed at the movie's 1968 release. The point is not the accuracy of the account; I've read no scholarship on the movie, and can't gauge whether Berube was fair to the accounts he sought to correct. I do find his account salutary, however, and it does an excellent job of combining excruciatingly close analysis of the film's very limited dialogue with big-picture consideration of the political context (not just the Cold War, but the space race generally as well as the near culmination of the Apollo missions), as well as an intriguing contrast between the movie as filmed and the novel treatment Arthur Clarke offered as a post hoc explication of the bare screenplay. (Indeed, when Berube's done with this part of the analysis, one wonders how Clarke and Kubrick worked together well enough to bring the film into being.)

Regardless, for those who love the movie and the filmmaker as much as I do, it's a worthy, if lengthy, read.

Five Things

2006-12-29T17:18:00.000-05:00

It seems I've been "tagged," and since it comes so rarely I feel obliged to entertain the meme. Too bad it's an especially difficult one. The theme is Five Things You Might Not Know About me, which is made all the more tricky in a pseudo-anonymous semi-confessional framework (one my parents sometimes read - Hi Mom!), but here goes:

1. I don't wash my hair every day. I take a shower every day but I only shampoo every second or third or fourth day if I haven't done anything extraordinarily dirty or sweaty. It's a habit I picked up a few years back when I had long hair. I have always had trouble managing my mop, and my stylist at the time suggested that overwashing wasn't making taming it any easier, and she was right. Now, my hair is shorter, albeit on the long side of professionally acceptable, but it's still thick and shaggy and still wants to go wild, so the reasoning still applies.

2. When I was maybe twelve I was tricked into taking a sip of diluted urine by a six-year-old bully who lived nearby. Bad enough that I fell prey to the bullies in my school and class, but even the young ones got the best of me.

3. When I had long hair, I let my stylist put in blue-ish lowlights alongside my premature grey streak to make it "pop." And it's probably this effect that I miss most from the long-hair days.

4. As literate/-ary as I claim to be, I spent all of my first twenty years reading crap, and I am continually filling in the classics that I failed to read as early as I should have done. For example, I only just read Walden Pond, and I'm almost finished with Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Today at the Barnes and Noble fire sale downtown I bought Hemingway's Garden of Eden as well as Ian McEwen's Atonement, which might be too modern to be a true classic, but still seems like something I should have read quite a while ago. In much the same vein, I have never read any Tolkien.

5. I am absolutely horrid at remembering names, in art and life, and occasionally I blow it with faces as well. If I apply myself (and I have been lately, as I make more of an effort to get involved in my community), I can usually retain a real-world name for a while (character names from books, movies, even series I watch dedicatedly almost never stick and I've stopped trying), and if I'm fortunate enough to meet the person again within a few weeks it takes root. But no matter how long I've known someone, there's no guarantee that I won't struggle to find his or her name when I need it. I just had this happen a couple of evenings ago with a friend of seven years whom I hadn't seen in the flesh in a year or two. I went to refer to her in conversation with her husband (she was sitting right there) and it took the duration of a three or four second pause, during which I mimed a momentary hiccup of sorts (I've developed a bevy of compensatory tricks over the years) to call it up. This happens with colleagues, lovers -- pretty much everyone. It's creepy, and one of the personal tics I find most frustrating. There's a name for it but (natch) I can't remember. So if you happen to know me in the real world, feel free to help me out when you see me struggling.

And perpetuating this silliness, I tag the monkey, the brit, Emily, and the folks over at the Coup (which makes six, but I doubt I'll get all of the Coup to play along).

UPDATE: Jocelyn says that my confession of not-daily-shampooed hair and the regrettable urine-sipping instance has stripped her of her illusions. Says she: 'So, now, instead of sitting across from Moon and thinking "He's so smart, he's so idealistic, he's such a believer, he's so dreamy," I will now ALWAYS sit there and think "Yep, he's the boy who drank pee."' That's all fair enough, but from where I'm sitting, the relatively mild indignity of having once (heh, yeah) imbibed something I later wished I hadn't is nothing next to the other indignities I've suffered. For example, given the cumulative residual effects, psychic damage, and sheer embarrassment factor, I'd probably trade just about any of the rejections I've fielded from uninterested women (who, ostensibly, found me less than "dreamy") for another urine incident. It sucked, no doubt, but it left no scar. Well, that it happened due to the trickery of someone all of six o eight years old might have left a slight scar, but now that I'm a professional and thirty-something, even being outmaneuvered by someone significantly my junior is relatively easy to, er, swallow. Thanks anyway, Joc, for the backhanded compliment. :-)

Merry Christmas, Again

2006-12-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

In a striking bit of hypocrisy, Pope Benedict XVI, after just two days ago excoriating Italian legislators for proposing legislation to recognize civil unions that would be available to homosexuals, offered the following Christmas comments:

"Jesus came for each one of us and made us brothers," he said from his window overlooking St. Peter's Square as pilgrims and tourists began gathering for the Christmas Eve midnight Mass to be celebrated by the pope.

Benedict said people should strive to "overcome preconceived ideas and prejudices, tear down barriers and eliminate contrasts that divide -- or worse -- set individuals and peoples against each other, so as to build together a world of justice and peace."**

I believe that makes 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' the best available interpretation, which isn't saying much.

I'm not back to do political blogging. Just dropping by to note a shameful bit of bullshit for the heck of it. For Christmas, perhaps we should recognize the value of the latter message and just chalk up the former to, oh, well, I don't know . . . be charitable. After all, it's Christmas.
__________
** For those who want context, His Infallibility's latter comments were aimed at the prejudice and hostility toward Christians found in predominately Muslim countries. Doesn't it just suck when someone interferes with your right to exist and exercise your own prerogatives within the private sphere without offical discrimination?

Merry Christmas

2006-12-23T09:57:00.000-05:00

(if, you know, that's your sort of thing)

Destiny or Acculturation?

2006-12-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

You are 100% Pittsburgh.

Great job! There's nooooo doubt about it. You're from Da Burgh. You deserve a reward, so go have an Ahrn City or two. And GO STILLERS!

How Pittsburgh Are You
See All Our Quizzes

Take a Holiday

2006-12-21T18:21:00.000-05:00

The christmas lights pizzicato
in the gas station window
mimic the frantic rhythm
of a Pittsburgh police car's flashers.

The cigarette ads cornered
like fugitives behind the glass
and these words begin to form
around the edges of the fear

that I have no Idea worth this effort
to shape language to reflect it.
A major premise:
All poems must convey something weighty,

something fraught with consequence,
as reflected in the distorting glass
of an Other's conjectured perception;
A minor premise:

The goings on in my mind this evening,
holiday impending, banalities encroaching,
lack gravitas and moment;
Therefore: I have no poem.

[revised, 12/22/2006]

In the Meatpacking District

2006-11-28T20:06:00.000-05:00

The day like a thousand steps
and me too anticipation-petrified
to note the strain of each or all;

Imagining you beside me at MoMA
in the next room contemplative
before Magritte while I succumb

to Klee's underembellished portrait
and discover Boccioni for the first time;
Wishing you there beside me

to mark with a knowing glance
the humor of a tourist confident to his friend
that The Persistence of Memory

is Dali's most famous painting
(and promising the existence
of a larger version elsewhere).

At dinner you hide in the shrugs
of friends sick of hearing your name
cross my lips like a profane sacrament.

Later, across a table your angular visage --
overbite inhabiting a cloudy smile --
captures candleflame and dances,

a vindication of our mutual apprehension
three years later -- and not a blue day gone by
without a rumor of rain in your name.

To have given what cannot be reclaimed,
a cloak sewn from what is worthy in me
that i'd forgotten lending.

My spectral companion embodied
and in the flicker and din,
a drag queen belting out show tunes

at the next bar
over cabernet
no candle.

Veterans Day

2006-11-10T13:13:00.000-05:00

This bleeding heart, for one, is grateful for the many Americans who have fought on behalf of this great nation, in wars just and unjust. No matter the cause, the political climate, the misguidedness of our leaders, our men and women in uniform lay their lives on the line in good faith service to our ideals.

Where there are problems, they never lie with the troops. This is not to say soldiers do not make mistakes, or do not act inappropriately and even barbarically from time to time. But, apart perhaps from a very few isolated instances, even this misconduct is the product of leadership, whether by affirmative direction, negligence, or simple fecklessness. And all too often, as in the current war, the leadership itself does not consist of veterans who know what it's like on the ground.

So thank you to those fighting and dying in service to the United States of America, and those who have done so before.

Last Post on Football, for Now

2006-11-10T11:18:00.000-05:00

Celebration, Piscataway Style.

Too Big for an Update

2006-11-09T23:18:00.000-05:00

Tonight the Empire State Building was limned in scarlet in honor of the Knights. And then, much as one would expect, Rutgers went down 25-7 early in the second. Louisville would level the same smak on the Knights that they did on the Mountaineers. Offense. Defense. Special teams. It was over. And only my love for beer, an absence of other things to do, and a hopeless romantic streak kept me watching.

The rest you can read about elsewhere. The bottom line, when all was said and done, a sea of scarlet stormed the field -- the blimp cam (blimp cam in Piscataway New Jersey!) showed a field full of scarlet, little yellow rings of security ringing each goalpost, because God damn, after beating the number 3 team in the country, Rutgers actually had a reason to bring them down.

What did it take? A 74-yard pass play in the fourth quarter, capped by the receiver recovering his own fumble inside the 5. An offside penalty against Louisville that enabled Jeremy Ito, the Rutgers kicker, to take a second whack after missing a 32-yard kick at the end of the game. And he made it. But this, and everything else that happened in the second half, is the product of a best-in-the-nation defense rattling the hell out of the national title contender with the second-best offense in the country. The same offense that barely moved the ball during the second half, gaining only two or three first downs in the entire half.

This is the real shit, right here. Even if they win out, even if they whip WVU's asses in the first week of December, Rutgers won't get a shot at the national title, and to be fair they probably don't deserve it. But I say that only because I think Louisville didn't deserve it either, because if Louisville deserved it, then so does Rutgers, which just outclassed them across the board.

Here's to Brian Leonard, Ray Rice, the nameless but brilliant Rutgers defense, and Coach Schiano, who's put this team on the map. And here's to the Scarlet Knights, for tonight, for a few moments, providing the other bookend to the history of college football.

The rest is up to the coaches, the players, the computers . . . and the WVU Mountaineers.

It's going to be a fun ride; it already is one.

On the Banks of the Old Raritan

2006-11-09T19:54:00.000-05:00

I've been terribly remiss here, yet again, and this is not the time to get into it or make up for lost time. But it's kick-off for Rutgers-Louisville, and I'm struck by how much pride I feel for my heretofore football deficient alma mater -- that they are, at a minimum, serious spoilers for a team's national title hopes, and at the outside very serious contenders for a BCS bowl if, alas, not title contenders.

The biggest game for Rutgers in 137 years, since they played Princeton in the first college football game ever.

They win the toss and take the ball to open the game before what might well be their first true sell-out ever. They're moving the ball methodically, eating clock. I've gotta go.

Late Night with MoonOverPittsburgh

2006-10-10T23:21:00.000-05:00

It's a school night; I'm tired. Tonight I traveled from work to two grocery stores and home, where I poured a scotch, lit a cigar, and spent three hours reading legal articles in an area of law I'm contemplating writing to. Time flew.

I made a late dinner and watched the end of the baseball game, then watched the first half of the Daily Show. As much as I wnted to watch the rest of the show, David Cross being tonight's guest, I forced myself up from the couch to wash dishes and ready myself for sleep. Almost as an afterthought, I wandered outside to retrieve mail I knew to be languishing in the mailbox outside.

I swear to you the night air kissed me, and promised that winter would never come. But lovers lie; he kiss was for "good-bye.".

So instead of lying in bed, reading yet another article that caught my fancy -- this one on classical rhetoric and advocacy -- I'm out here, sitting on the rarely used bench on the front stoop. I'm fulfilling the blue-collar Italian neighbor's friendly slur of yesterday morning -- "Yuppie," he grumbled sover my shoulder like a paternal cuff on the ear, as he watched me obsessively chip accumulated paint away from a cast iron fixture on the front of my house -- blogging on my fancy laptop in the middle of the night, no wires.

I've known it's warm all evening. Doors and windows are open, fans gently turning on their lowest settings here and there. But knowing it and feeling it are two different things. Would that it always felt like this.

On the street, soft orange light reflects off patchwork brick, cheap aluminum, asphalt beset by esoteric forces, and it curls into the glistening bevels of contoured headlights. A heavyset woman, audibly heaving from a half-block away as she powers toward me as through something viscous, compliments my choice of location as she nears in a greeting more hale than her condition. My neighbor's new beau pulls up in his Volkswagen, and we chat briefly about cold-weather motorcycling and bicycling and other mutual interests -- smalltalk. He's very enthusiastic in conversation, as though perpetually impatient with knowledge of something I erroneously imagine to be a secret, waiting for me to reveal it so he can share his excitement without betraying whoever betrayed the confidence in the first place. I like him, as initial impressions go, and I like that the neighbor seems exceedingly pleased with him, but he makes me nervous just the same.

In the trees in the lot a few doors down an insect clicks nightsong from high in the branches, a half-dozen clicks at a time punctuated by long silences. Here and there crickets chirr despondently, as though aware of how natural death has already thinned their numbers, and conscious of their impending ends. Not long now. A day or two, if the forecasters are trustworthy.

Tonight, though, I'm in sweats and a T-shirt, sitting on my stoop, contemplating another summer's passage and the slow and then abrupt decline into winter. I fancy I can sense its onset in the air, but that pastoral myth won't wash tonight. The air may be softer than the average summer evening, but that's it. If you woke me from a long coma to these conditions I would guess anywhere from March to October, weighting my suspicion toward the beginning and end of the range. But I would detect nothing peculiar -- chamomile and pumpkin spice -- to autumn's august ascendancy.

Rather, I would think, "This is lovely," and imagine that I had missed it during my absence, missed this in particular, and only reluctantly conside the rigors of reacclimation to daily life. I would wish that this might go on forever, this temperate stillness, this peaceful street, safe among new friends and the stability of home, braced for the endless work of living, untroubled by my solitude and the sundry strivings and disappointments that fill up my days and illustrate by opposition the treasures of my successes and discoveries.

I would, for a short time, seek nothing more than now, and resolve in futility never to sleep again.

The Airborne Toxic Event

2006-10-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

DeLillo wept.

Stop Ticking!

2006-09-30T22:18:00.000-05:00

Tonight found me in Braddock, at a library under renovation, an astonishing building with double-hung windows ten feet on a side, stately woodwork in remarkable repair, a fresco newly restored on the ceiling of an auditorium tiered with a variety of seat I have never seen. The seats sat rest vertically, perfectly upright, until folded down, when the seatbacks drop down to a more comfortable angle. The hardware is pewter or bronze or brass improbably ornate.

A partially dismantled organ console stood just off stage right, a tall panel in the wall above it removed to reveal the wing of the stage, which was gently tilted forward, as though to slide the players to the floor at the foot of the audience. The stage was adorned with the suggestion of a two-story house framed in aged beams that suggested driftwood; a bed, a two-sided vanity, and a miniature of the set on a table toward the rear of the stage like an optical illusion between mirrors; a catwalk from the house's upper story to the balcony above.

I don't really do reviews here. Recommendations, I do. Raves, I do. And this is both of the latter.

The play is Quantum Theatre's production of After Mrs. Rochester, and if a review is something you'd like, try the Times Literary Supplement; locally the Trib offers a piece about the play and the library in which it is staged. Rather, it's the experience that interests me, tonight in particular.

On our way to the theatre, I and my friends talked a bit about Braddock and especially its universally well-regarded Mayor John Fetterman, someone who looks somewhat more biker than Mayor, but sounds all Mayor as soon as he opens his mouth. His left forearm bears a prominent tattoo of Braddock's zip code, someone said. Though I sat next to him at a talk not long ago, I hadn't noticed. As we pulled up the library, though, a very large man stood on the dark street by the library, and offered friendly suggestion as to where we might park. As he gestured with his left hand, the tattoo came into view -- the Mayor was directing traffic at an alternative theatre event. When we walked by on our way to the show, he shook each of our hands and introduced himself; it looks like glad-handing on the page, but it was far too affable, too casual, to be only that.

Once we were situated, I skimmed the program. I knew the play was a sort of biographical piece about Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1960's-era book that purported to serve as a prequel of sorts to Jane Eyre, recounting the life of Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, the mad woman locked in Rochester's attic for most of Bronte's novel. I knew Jean Rhys was a character at two different ages (portrayed by two different actresses), and I knew as well that Bertha was a character.

And now I need to rewind. Quantum's first production this season, last month, was The Crucible, which they staged in Mellon Park in Shadyside (review). It remains arguably my favorite Quantum performance, the classic play so passionately and inventively rendered, so ably performed. In particular, the Proctors, performed by Robin Walsh and Hugo Armstrong, were simply astonishing. Never on stage have I seen such incredible chemistry, both emotional and physical, and within the strictures of Miller's play the latter was especially striking. Quantum did not meddle with the play's origins or let anachronism spoil its clarity; but even within a period-faithful performance, Armstrong and Walsh breathed each others' breath. That's the only way I can think to describe it; they were so utterly evocative as a couple, and their combined performance suggested what is so often lost in period drama, especially on the stage: the fact that no matter where, no matter when, husbands and wives may and do achieve a degree of intimacy like nothing else on earth. Their performances, never overwrought or oversold, didn't imply marriage or signify it: they exemplified it.

And Walsh herself was a revelation: even within her period dress, the restraint and decorum the role largely requires, she exuded a sensuality difficult to put into words. "Hot" sort of works, but it's incomplete. I couldn't take my eyes off her whenever she was anywhere in view. I didn't want to.

After Mrs. Rochester reunites the two -- Armstrong as, inter alia, Ford Madox Ford, Rhys' lover and first publisher, and as Mr. Rochester himself (Jane Eyre, too, appears, evocatively cast with the same actress who plays Rhys' unnamed daughter); and Walsh, brilliantly, as Bertha.

Walsh's Bertha, rendered without restraint in filthy corset and tangled hair, spouting repetitive creole apostrophes and lurking under and against the skin of Rhys at all ages, the demoness whose exorcism from Rhys' psyche limns the narrative arc of the play, is simply incandescent. And "hot" isn't even the word.

Bertha, as insinuated into this play, is the closest thing to Caliban I've ever seen outside The Tempest -- primal, avaricious, and bereft. Walsh injects such physicality into the role, infuses it with so much force and grief, and extracts (evokes is to weak a word) all of the sympathy for Bertha that Jane Eyre simply doesn't afford. Once again, she was impossible to ignore, lurking over Rhys' shoulder, acrobatically moving between the set's "attic," Rhys' bed and writing table cum vanity, at one point climbing a black ladder behind the organ console to lurk laughing in the shadows. Her vocabulary, perhaps a few dozen words, perhaps a hundred, stunted by the simple adamance of her desire for freedom -- from the attic, from England, from Rhys' mind -- and animated by her lust for some sense of a self she has forgotten, nevertheless is made decadent by the breadth of her expression.

Walsh is not young, is not lithe and glamorous (Karla Boos, Quantum's director who cast herself as the elder Rhys (and who acquitted herself well in a most challenging role -- that of a relatively composed narrator who bestrides the chaos about her that manifests her personal and artistic torment), has the shapely elegance of a woman aging well), but her raw animal fervence, deployed to brilliant effect in both of the abovementioned roles but in very different ways, is nothing short of mesmerizing.

On the way out, standing in front of the library on a dark deserted street in Braddock, a police car pulled up as I spoke into my phone. I demurred to the man on the other end: "Yes Officer?" I inquired. "Is everything okay?" he asked nicely. "Yes, fine, thanks -- just leaving the play." A friendly neighborhood police officer politely asking after my welfare. First the Mayor, now this -- in dilapidated, forgotten Braddock, a compelling show of civic pride.

Braddock has its best foot forward. As does Quantum, which has led off its season with two gems. And as for Walsh, well, I do believe I'm hopelessly smitten.

Visit Braddock; see the show; and enjoy it from deep in the depths of the first of Andrew Carnegie's thousand-plus libraries.

Go Scarlet Knights!!!

2006-09-24T20:05:00.000-05:00

Hey Emily, another great game to add to Notre Dame lore, but don't look now -- depending on whether you prefer the AP or USA Today, only ten or eight teams separate my Knights from your Irish! I might have to start caring about college football again.

[Untitled]

2006-09-13T20:31:00.000-05:00

Capillary and dust
and a third ill-defined notion
bloodlessly vibrant like
a midnight thunderstorm.

Tongue thrust out like a leaf
slapped down by an invisible palm
and wanting, unreleased static
sizzles in its stem.

For a poet of moist particulars,
silica abstraction
yields insipid sophistry
and the taste of burnt wire.

With no on one to decipher
a telegraph in transit,
its caternary undulations
lead inexorably to ground.

[Author's note: The first stanza is always the hardest to substantially revise or cut when it contains the impetus for a poem that has wandered far afield of its promise, such as it is. There's a connection here between those first lines and the rest, which plainly cohere more closely with the first stanza excluded, but I don't know what it is or how to draw it out. As for the title, I want something that spells out S____ O___ S___, but nothing comes to mind. Gah, I've grown lazy even in this.]

This House Is Home 10

2006-09-12T23:49:00.001-05:00

Something is eating my house. It's gnawing. Right now, while I sitting at my battered, paint-stained writing table, tapping sweet ephemera into a magic box, trying not to layer my apprehension with the fear elicited by the steady rainfall.

Owning a home has not -- as I imagined it might -- restored me to some idealized self-sufficiency. I am ineffectual. I can't even adhere to my own resolve to set aside fifteen minutes, once each week, to tour the house from corner to corner to check for signs of new problems. And now, I fear, it has cost me.

The house doesn't care; she has far more perspective than I will ever have. In her 125 years, the house has weathered hurricanes without me, blizzards the likes of which I have never seen, years of abandonment while rowdies trespassed. She stands something like she always has, her shoulders erect where more than a few of the younger neighbors' are stooped, her brow level and uncreased by worry where neighbors glower or grimace, her face elegantly made up. I am addled by worry, however, the good son, insulting her tenacity with my fear.

A roommate's unrequited departure has forced me to own responsibility for every inch of this space, and so it is fitting that the problem first came to my attention in his room. I have visited it only a couple of times since he left; the spacious room vacant in his absence echoes like a canyon, recalling my house-hunting past. It has that ghostly emptiness about it, implications of former occupancy far more haunting than a stranger's presence. It diminishes me.

But there I was, Saturday, in the room, granting access through the rear window to the porch roof for the Direct TV installer to do his work. While he fiddled with wires outside, I eyed the space suspiciously, cat-like, staking out its perimeter my nose impetuous skimming the floor. There, at the baseboard, the broad historic trim rimed by a crust of paint where missing quarter-round once bridged the gap to the sanded down floorboards, a spill of dust, wood colored, fine and imprinted with vermiform suggestions. Mixed with the dust, a few crumbs of what might be kitty litter, a pebble-sized husk of the same color difficult to identify, and a separate modest spill of dust the color of brick. The whole thing, all of the dust combined, covered perhaps six square inches along the baseboard in one line, but it pointed me toward a hole in the corner, a gap in the floor casually covered by a piece of old paneling, a non-fix solution formerly hidden behind my housemate's furniture, as was the situs of the dust itself until a few weeks ago. I removed the board, horror movie scared, and there, in the darkness between floor and the lathing of the downstairs ceiling, more sawdust, significantly more, as though from recent carpentry -- except there has been so carpentry performed anywhere near there in decades.

I covered the hole, resolving to probe it with a flashlight . . . some other time. I focused on the TV-related machinations occurring around me. Made some phonecalls to people kind enough to humor my irrational worry. Complained. Fretted.

Tonight, I opened the attic door to carry the boxes that held my Direct TV receivers upstairs to be penned with their kind. The attic also newly emptied of my roommate's things, it took me no time to spot it, the phenomenon that's plagued me since Saturday. Another spill of dust along the baseboard, more or less directly above its complement downstairs.

It's probably not termites, as there's no suggestion of them in the basement or on the foundation (though when this rain stops I have to look more closely, I have to look more closely). But someone suggested carpenter ants, and that seems plausible. A google search offers this:

There are several ways to recognize a carpenter ant infestation:

[snip]

• Sawdust: If you see sawdust raining from your ceiling or from any indoor cracks, you have a problem.

Whatever it is, the sense of personal failure has married my fears about making it through another winter of exorbitant gas bills and together they are breeding anxiety of a depth and dimensionality I can relate to nothing I have experienced before, a sense that I'm in over my head. It's ebbed and flowed during my one-year tenancy of this house, but it's never entirely left me.

Like any problem, whatever this is will have a solution, one within reach, and soon I will turn a corner leaving behind this melodrama and the fear of what I don't know, as well as my general distaste at the thought of little beasties pulverizing my real estate investment, for the simple elegance of an affirmative solution of finite cost and burden. In the meantime, I will ignore the fact that "[c]arpenter ants like damp locations" and "can be found inside wood structures where there are water leaks: around windows, chimneys, bathtubs, sinks, and drains," since I would have thought that the dust I've observed is nowhere near any proper source of moisture.

But tonight, up too late, water everywhere around me probing the innumerable breaches in the shell that contains me and all of my earthly possessions, an imagined stirring in the walls while I fail to sleep, I am left to remind myself that I chose this, that it comes hand in white satin glove with everything I love about this Grand Dame of the Tenth Ward.

This weekend, in the spirit of testing out my new DVR, I recorded "Magnolia," I movie I remebered liking far more clearly than I remembered in its contours and details. That night, tired with myself after a long day of doing very little, I escaped into the film, which was far more elegant and moving than I had remembered, really quite extraordinary.

At the end of the film, while a freakish event sends virtually every character into the tailspin he or she has flirted with for the entire movie, the most self-possessed character, a child, he alone smiles in the face of the improbable. "This is something that happens," he says. And it is.

Best Times Film Review Ever

2006-09-09T11:09:00.000-05:00

You needn't follow the link; Nathan Lee's review of The Covenant follows in its entirety:

WHAT'S THE 411 ON THOSE WITH GUYS?
By Nathan Lee

“Hey, what’s up? I tried calling you last night.”

“I know. I was at a movie.”

“What’d you see?”

“ ‘The Covenant.’ ”

“What’s that again?”

“It’s that movie about these guys who are witches, and they go to this creepy school, and there’s this new kid — Sebastian Stan — who’s, like, the bad witch, and they fight and stuff. It’s super lame.”

“Are they cute at least?”

“Totally. The main guy, Caleb — Steven Strait — has, like, these big lips and sexy eyes, and he drives a Mustang, and everything. And he’s friends with this crazy, like, blond dude, who looks kind of gay, and this motorcycle guy with long hair and some other guy. Actually, the whole thing is kind of gay. I mean, they’re on the swim team, right? And there’s this scene where they’re all in Speedos and everything.”

“Awesome. I think I saw the commercial. That’s the one with a car that explodes and gets put back together by magic, right?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the coolest part. The effects are super cheesy. Like at the end, when Caleb is fighting the evil transfer student, they fly around a barn and throw magic Jell-O at each other. I’m totally serious.”

“Is it scary, at least?”

“There’s this one part, where these spiders crawl all over this girl and go in her nose and stuff.”

“Ew.”

“Super ew.”

“The Covenant’’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The film is violently banal.

And just for the record . . .

2006-09-07T19:55:00.001-05:00

. . . I'm back.

Shelter Island

2006-09-07T19:41:00.000-05:00

28 August, 2006 (as scrawled on a legal pad by the muted light coming through the windows behind me as I sat on the porch in the rain)

The night is saturated and raw, a rude awakening from summer, but the peach hue reflected against the undersides of the clouds across the bay warms the sky. Runoff drums in the downspouts while baysurf sips at what's left of the beach afoot the seawall, insatiable, its mouth full of salt.

Drifting through the night come the sounds of two boats playing tag in the fog like children of sound cavorting behind parents of light, father first, his searchlight caving the mist in sweeping whorls, fixing the opposite shore for a moment before turning to pin me to the porch moist and still, mother steady in his wake, an emerald perched in her tiara?

As mother and father are eclipsed behind the point, their children still play over the sibilant white caps, which climb over their own backs to surf their bellies, and as their game dissipates higher surf visits the beach like a rumor of their passage.

Beset on all sides by water,
we leap from womb to womb
like sunfish breaking the surfact
to thrill in the gasping
before slicing back into the darkness.

** The photo was taken in 1989 from the top of a dune only slightly down the shore from where I sat when I scribbled the above musing. I remember sliding down it on my belly all the way to the beach as a child. FLICKR has many photos of Shelter Island.

Home Sweet Home

2006-09-07T19:28:00.000-05:00

It's 8:20; a string of advertisements drones in the background.

The Steelers just took the field, and as they gamboled all over the field reveling in their Super Bowl XL victory on the cusp of the new season's commencement, the camera pulled back. The blimp shot revealed every building in the city lit up in celebration, fireworks launching from behind PPG 1's spires, spot lights lining the river and the Fort Duquesne Bridge waving beams of light hither and yon, and the crowd, the Terrible Towel waving crowd.

I am the last person to lionize professional sports, especially on the day we lay to rest Mayor O'Connor, who was taken tragically in the first year of his long-sought tenancy of the Mayor's office, but it's simply impossible to ignore how beautiful my city looks tonight.

Pittsburgh, its best foot forward, is resplendant under the klieg lights; a smug glow suffuses me at the thought of how strangers to Pittsburgh all over this nation have turned to each other in the last twenty minutes to remark on how stunning our city really is. As well they should. This flawed, bankrupt rust belt town is gorgeous, and has so much to be proud of.

A born New Jerseyan, I've had the luxury in the course of my life of watching each of "my" teams win at least one championship in their respective sports -- the Devils, the Mets, the Giants. But never has my pleasure in those occasions matched my pleasure last year when the city turned out to celebrate the Steelers' fifth Super Bowl victory or the unanticipated pleasure I feel right now watching the nation celebrate this city for a few glorious moments.

The rush of civic pride I felt when the camera pulled back, as it does just now, my own office illuminated like virtually every other office in the skyline, is something completely singular in my experience. And just now I couldn't be more thrilled to live here.

UPDATE: Today (the next day), from a conference room, I espied three of the pennants atop the convention center in a slot between two towers. As would be expected on this occasion, they were bedecked by alternating flags of black and gold. But despite the festivities they bespeak, the flags fly at half mast in honor of our fallen Mayor. An apt memorial for the Mayor billed as that of the common folk.

Neighborly, Standing Sentinel

2006-08-04T20:39:00.000-05:00

Early this afternoon, home on a rare week day, I sat at the island in my kitchen finishing up my coffee and last Sunday's Times. I heard the familiar sound of my neighbor's screen door squealing open, and a gruff "No!" in the patriarch's voice. He couldn't see me. There was no one visible from my vantage to whom he might have been addressing his negation.

But as he shambled out onto his patio, brown shoulderblades rounded under the stark white weight of his impeccable wifebeater, I saw obliquely through my window a young man of perhaps thirteen walk across the neighbor's empty carpad and make as though to jump the fence into the next yard, looking warily over his right shoulder, face shaded beneath a trucker's cap. His arms over the fence, he let slip two red globes to the ground on the other side; through the chainlink I watched them fall.

"Sure, g'ahead drop the tuh-may-tuhs like I don't see them," my neighbor chided, resigned.

Understanding: this was about tomatoes. One of the neighborhood toughs had entered my neighbor's property, opening or jumping either of two gates, to steal tomatoes.

As my neighbor neared the boy, he jumped the fence, as though to put a protective barrier between himself and the old man. But he didn't bolt. He stood rooted to the ground on the other side, just opposite, and took his licks like a man. By the end of the encounter, my neighbor was standing just a couple of feet from the boy, hands on his hips, voice no longer raised enough for me to hear, and the boy rested his chin on his arms atop the fence. They could have been grandfather and grandson.

Regardless, evidently I lack the imagination to anticipate what the neighborhood children are capable of. Good thing I don't have Binky's garden.

Chuck Norris and Stepwise

2006-08-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

Recent commenter Matt is a Pittsburgh cyclist who posted the following Chuck Norris facts, with appropriate apologies to the millions of people who have probably seen them (they're popular enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry, evidently):

* Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris.

* There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

* Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

* Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

* Chuck Norris frequently donates blood to the Red Cross. Just not his own.

* Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

* Chuck Norris does not go hunting because "hunting" implies a chance of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.

I supplement this list with reasons I'm posting them notwithstanding their commenness.

* I wanted to add Mr. McHale to my MoonOverPittsburgh blogroll with some sort of splash.

* I suck, and I post nothing.

* The Norris stuff was pretty cool to me, since I'd never seen it, but I'm a thirty-something lawyer with gray hair, so it's not at all surprising that I miss something on the interweb, what with all those tubes and such.

Check out Matt's site. He rode Death Valley and stuff. Meanwhile, it's all I can do just to get around without killing myself in this modest-by-comparison heat.

Neighborly, Ritual

2006-07-25T20:18:00.000-05:00

I cannot let go the insult
of his quiet celebration
the day of my home inspection
to learn that lily white me
would be moving in and not "colored."

Nevertheless most evenings,
wrestling my bike to the top of the stoop
I greet him warmly --
hand upraised as I fumble with my keys --
with the insipid fare of small talk

cast like a grappling hook
across an ocean
seeking purchase in the spongy ground
of "Good evening,"
and "A long day done."

Alleycat

2006-07-25T20:17:00.000-05:00

Pass it on.

Thoughts on the All Star Game

2006-07-10T19:12:00.000-05:00

Tonight, I wandered down to the Point, and eventually over to the Northshore, to sample the All Star Game atmosphere tonight in the hours leading up to the Home Run Derby. It was nice to sample the obvious civic pride, and more than once I overheard people, presumably outsiders, expressing nothing short of astonishment at how pretty this city really is, which brought forth from me a surprising rush of pride in my adopted city. As one might expect, a certain number of security precautions was visible, but nothing overly intrusive. Still, though, it's unsettling -- Coast Guard skiffs in the river, just off the promenade, armed front and back with big 16mm cannons, an occasional fly-by by a circling Cobra that literally bristles with weaponry.

At home, the military fly-by must have passed over my house, just barely subsonically. I lacked the vantage to see the planes, but there was no mistaking the sound of several fighter jets buzzing the rooftops of Stanton Heights on their way to the stadium.

We've always loved our weaponry, which has, at critical times, secured freedom for ourselves and others. And this long preceded 9-11. It would be the worst kind of revisionism to ascribe all of this to the recent climate of fear prevailing in this country.

But it wasn't the same. It wasn't. And it's passing strange to wonder whether I will be hassled for training the lens of my camera on the Coast Guard gunskiff or a phalanx of police mugging in a facsimile of dispassionate professionalism. I remember feeling that sort of apprehension before, but in Mexico, not here, or at least not here before 9-11.

I choose, in any event, to revel in the positive publicity this event is bringing to Our Fair City, and now I choose to close this post as the Home Run Derby begins.

Holy Sh$t!!!

2006-07-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

'Nuff said.

"People Carrier" Racing, and a Little Test

2006-07-04T19:03:00.000-05:00

So I've been awaiting a worthy cause to test this whole YouTube thing here at MOP, and I think I've got it.

I don't imagine the producers were going for deja vu, but that's how it plays for me. The famiy car when I learned to drive and for a few years after I got my license was an extended Ford Aerostar. It all looks too familiar.

To Market

2006-07-02T14:41:00.000-05:00

I am obsessed with my hometown, Montclair, New Jersey, bedroom community for the outrageous wealth newly generated in New York City in the past decade, land of tiny fifties ranches torn down or expanded to more than double their original size, Mercedes and Volvos and Jags (oh my!), no scrap of land undeveloped as the opportunistic (and well-financed) seek to insert interstitial McMansions among the ranches and tudor revivals, no curb uncobbled, no boutique too moderately priced, no sidewalk un-tabled, no BoBo unbeautiful.

When I'm back -- and not infrequently -- whether by bike or by car, I find myself turning spirals around the perimeter of the town, slowly spiraling inward to any of its pretentious shopping centers, eyeing the impeccably dressed scouting the antique stores and design houses on every major corner who in turn eye their quarry -- a magnificent shaker end table, perhaps, or a sleek nickel and glass coffee table like a relic of a Kubrickian future.

The pavement is unfriendly to bikes; notwithstanding nearly universal five-digit property tax burdens, the Powers That Be extend the life of the road surface by sealing it as it ages in tar and gravel, which only smooths over time, and never completely. Moreover it stains shoes and rocker panels, spotting sumptuous floormats in the heat of summer. Nothing one would notice from the supple-suspended air-conditioned splendor of a leased luxury car, windows closed and air conditioning whispering almost inaudibly, radio turned to an investment show on talk radio, blue tooth surgically fused to one's ear beeping from time to time its message of validation.

Does anyone own anything here? Is it all ARMs and leases, a cover story to deflect attention from impending financial ruin staved off by creative borrowing and endless jumps from one overcompensated job to the next, paper wealth or its mere prospect. Financial management and millions of the allegedly wealthy in orbit around the black whole of their own insolvency, falling eternally in perfect equilibrium until finally their orbits deteriorate, one by one, and they disappear into the darkness.

Or maybe they really have this much money, all of them, and I describe my own equally perilous but so much more modest solar system of tiered debt. Perhaps in projecting my own situation onto them, a couple of orders of magnitude greater, I reveal my own desire to believe I am not irresponsible; perhaps I need the wealthy to be overextended and desperate to compensate for my own overextension and occasional desperation.

I am an attorney with impeccable credentials; consequently, my earning potential is effectively limited only by my prerogatives. This is not a pity party. Not even close.

But there is a decadence to all of this, my native surround. And I have trouble determining whether my wonderment at this never-entirely-familiar fact is a product of envy or disgust. I cannot discern -- though I try mightily -- whether I am second-guessing my decision not to return here to make my way in the metroplex of my youth or gloating over my own perspicacity and leaving this place before entering an unsustainable orbit. In Pittsburgh, my finances will right themselves as soon as I make that a priority; in New York, however, I'd be forced to accept, as have my friends and family, a far more precarious existence. At some point it's not about the money, a lot or a little, that passes through one's checking account each month; it's where it goes that matters. So many of the expenses, necessary and merely recommended, that happen here are black holes -- paying rent into one's forties or for a lifetime, leasing what one cannot afford to buy in other areas, the psychic expense of working under the threat of a dozen qualified people looking for your job and just waiting for you, or someone like you, to slip up this much.

And all of this, too, may be a fiction contrived to assuage my ambivalence. Who's to say?

Today I went to my favorite used bookstore south of the Hudson River Valley, a small place in Montclair Center (there really are three centers to this town, as though it were too overlapping ellipses, but only one goes by that name), and negotiated the discounted purchase of a first-edition of Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations. I may not read it for a while -- such painfully elegant writing acts as an obstacle to my own -- but at the discounted price it was a bargain, a fine hardcover first from 1991 in near-fair condition. Then I headed to Watchung Plaza, another town center (and this one more accurately in the middle of things), and ordered a late breakfast from a tin-ceilinged bistro run by Spaniards in an old Montclair store front, their patois behind the display case unnerving as their unlikely trade in hypertrophic bagels. I ate inside, and then took my book, Coupland's Hey Nostradamus, across the street to a small park, where I found a bench in the shade to finish my iced coffee.

On the way home, heading down Bellevue Avenue (just downhill from the third and most northerly of the shopping areas), I spotted two girls, perhaps 14, one tall and one short, both pretty and innocent, walking a beagle like a credulous little brother between them. As I drew even with them, slowing for the red light at Grove Street, they turned to the man driving the car in front of mine and smiled and waved familiarly, with the entirely undirected ebullience of young women in pairs, and I detected in the slow roll of the driver's head no more familiarity with them than I had.

The light turned, the car in front of me passed through the intersection, and I eased forward unhurried to make my left turn, waiting for the girls to negotiate the crosswalk. The other driver gone, they turned as they walked to the car waiting to make the left that mirrored my own and waved and smiled with the same mock familiarity, the same unrequited jubilation, and after a moment they turned their attention my way and continued the ritual as I waited for their passage to open a car-width corridor. I was oddly affected by their unlikely bonhomie -- good neighbors in the land of tall fences.

What Cost Passion?

2006-06-12T17:20:00.000-05:00

"I'm not claustrophobic," I reassured myself as I slid into the surprisingly slender white plastic tube, the whirr of the servos piloting my pallet silky and subdued. On my left shoulder rested a white plastic triangle no less mysterious to me than Bones' magic diagnostic handset in Star Trek, a tube snaking from it into the bowels of the machine.

On the inside of the tube, perhaps six inches from my eyes, two plastic rails, backlit, ran the length of the tube, and my unspectacled eyes reluctantly drew into focus the fine-grained texture common to molded plastic components in the clinical setting. Gently inserted into my ears by the technician, ear plugs muted the commencement of an indecipherable pattern of clicks and snaps signaling the machine going through its paces. Attending the insertion of the ear plugs, the tech explained to me that the machine was loud, something like a jackhammer. But once it began it sounded more like a failed hybrid of Aphex Twin and Nitzer Ebb.

Very quickly, my breathing became labored, the tech's injunction to inhale only shallowly complicating my efforts to stay my left arm's sudden desire to twitch and tremble to ensure a clear image of my damaged shoulder. "I'm not claustrophobic," I again reminded myself, but I couldn't rule out the possibility that I was claustrophobic-phobic. My increasingly ragged breath suggested as much, and I began to lose my faith that I could get through this.

I have had at least one severe, and perhaps two or three moderate anxiety attacks in the past few years; identifying them as such, I have come to accept that my general ability to work through irrational fear is not complete; there are limits.

In my right hand, the rubber panic bulb adhered to the skin of my clammy palm, and I massaged it, surprised to find myself seriously considering squeezing it, my means of escape no more complicated than that. Just a moment outside, the inside of the tube now familiar, my fear suggested, would enable me to brace for a second attempt. Do over, please.

"But I'm not claustrophobic," I remembered, and held on for a few more seconds, focusing on my breathing, closing my eyes, steadying my grip on the odd rubber wedge the technician had placed in my left hand to stabilize that arm.

An hour or so earlier, in the waiting room of Montefiore Hospital's radiology department, the only item in the Pittsburgh news cycle on June 12, 2006, (a date that will live in ignominy in Pittsburgh Steeler's lore), ran constantly on the only television, which was tuned to KDKA's special coverage: Ben Roethlisberger, sans helmet, was in "serious but stable" condition and in surgery after a head-on collision between his motorcycle and an oncoming car propelled him, face-first, into the other car's windshield. In honor of the occasion, ESPN republished excerpts of Big Ben's May 2005 comments concerning his helmetless riding, and he sounds like precisely the 23-year-old (now twenty-four) he was at this time last year:

It's just like anything else, the more risk you put into something, into whatever it is ... Just like gambling. You're gambling. The more money you want to put into something -- you can lose, or you can win big, so you take gambles with things and you can get burned.

* * *
You can get injured and killed in a car, too. You can get killed walking down the street. You have to know what you're doing, and I'm not saying anyone didn't know what they were doing, but it's a risk and being in life is a risk.

Last night, after a two-day charity ride on the fixed gear totaling nearly 150 miles and a few recuperative hours on the couch, I stood to find that nothing worked right. My hamstrings were tuned tighter than a violin's, my wrists and injured shoulder ached, my back felt molded by cement into the fanciful shape of a harp's arc, and my knees murmured in their orbits of a certain future on the operating table, serpentine arthroscopes probing and refining their striated inner surfaces, their masticated cartilage and mottled bone.

In the past few weeks, a congenital heart problem, a simply arrhythmia I've been aware of for a decade or more, has reemerged with a vengeance. Now, instead of a single missed beat every few months, my heart momentarily racing to restore its proper rhythm, I feel a lowgrade discomfort for hours of virtually every day. It's possible that I've simply aged; my father wasn't much older than I am when his cardiologist monitored his heart and enjoined him from freely consuming caffeine. And in any event, that he's had problems like this off and on for thirty years suggests nothing dire is happening. We age. Things work less well today than they did yesterday. We adapt and proceed because there's nothing else to do. But the pressure in my sternum has continued in the wake of the first awful day, and I cannot disregard the possibility of a correlation with my intense training in the past four months or so, my aggregate distances on the bike increasing virtually every week to spike last week at just over 180 miles.

And it's not all present injuries and today's training. My hands sometimes throb without immediate insult, and the obvious etiology is five years of bouldering now two years' remote, hanging my body weight from two or three fingers at a time, cramming my small feet into smaller shoes and channeling the full power of my then-powerful core in a line from, for example, the first two fingers of my right hand through left big toe, all of my weight suspended like a cable drawn taught between the friction between skin and rubber and a few square inches of textured plastic or grainy sandstone in two small unyielding patches six feet apart. Everything along that path, the line like lightning corkscrewing through my body in white heat, trembling and compressed at the ragged edge of failure. Gravity taunting more insistently with every progression up the rock face, every additional foot and yard of open air between my body and the ground.***

Always the nascent risk. Like Big Ben, I agee that the risk isn't really the point. The most difficult thing to explain to people outside the relevant communities, especially with climbing but also to a lesser extent with urban cycling, is that adrenaline isn't the object. Sometimes it comes, and often it is not unwelcome; surely, adrenaline furnishes the purest, most powerful chemical high the body has to offer, and it has its virtues, practical and aesthetic. But if adrenaline becomes the point, as it does for those rare individuals, like any other drug its demands become progressive. Last week's sufficient rush this week is passe, and the addict moves on to the next thrill and the next, each more hazardous than the last, each with the inimitable frisson of novelty.

Very few people believe me when I say I'm risk averse, but I am, and incredulity doesn't make it otherwise. Big Ben says he rides to relax. I believe him.

But the bitch of it is that even those of us without significant others and children have responsibilities, if this world we have is to have any sense of community (and what Hobbesian nightmare awaits us in the absence of community). We have, if we are fortunate, friends and family who care deeply for our well-being and who depend on us as members of their inner circle, whether simply in virtue of our presence, our inclination to pick up the phone when it rings in the darkest hours of the night, our ability to divine the glower hiding behind the smile donned for appearances, our shared memories of experiences positive and negative and every permutation thereof, or as a consequence of those tangible acts we can perform. Our knowledge of those people, our people, makes them more whole, just as their knowledge of us completes us. Our loss works a diminshment on everyone who knows us, as their tangible worlds depopulate by one. We are selfish, comes the suggestion, when we play with mortal risk like a toy with sharp corners.

And what of the ineffable responsibility to the human enterprise writ large, the question whether it is embracing mortality to endeavor risk or insulting to the magic of our inception to rush into the teeth of danger. By what high arrogance, the question runs, would I insult the blessing of my life by smoking, rock climbing, riding my bike in traffic, or a hundred other activities calculably more dangerous than their myriad, more prudent alternatives? And I have no answer. The question, ultimately, is rhetorical, unless one's morality is so pre- and proscriptive as to make a mockery of any notion of human agency. Frankly, I'm more terrified of the prospect that there is an objective answer to that question that I've been missing than I am of the next car that heedlessly crosses my path on a workday morning, or of the possibility that the flake from which I'm hanging might peel off the rockface and send me tumbling toward the rocky ground in a mortal tumble, or of the idea that my hobbies are working into my joints and bones to gnaw.

The equally pat answer to this challenge is that we can only achieve our full flower, with all the blessings full realization of ourselves enables us to bestow on our people, by embracing those things that animate our spirits. We must be who we are, or some such piffle, or we are no one, and our true natures cannot be denied, only suppressed, at incalculable cost to our innermost selves. But this answer is insufficient. Its predicate selfishness defies the sacrifice that underlies the notion of community. But I have no answer to offer in its place.

Finally, counting breaths, something I've never used in the past as a calming exercise, brought me slowly back from the brink of low-grade panic. In the first position, arm placed rigidly at my side and strapped down, I began counting, without consciously choosing to do so, perhaps three minutes into the scan, and I reached 400 breaths, most of them more even than those at the beginning. My mind wandered to the seed of this very post, and I further calmed myself by imagining the complex images formed by blasting my shoulder, injected a half-hour earlier with a cocktail of agents designed to create contrast in the presumptively damaged soft-tissue of the joint, with varied magnetic pulses, a high-powered computer processor somewhere in the bowels of the control room translating data into a diagnostically robust set of outputs.

After I was withdrawn from the machine and repositioned with my hand above my head, the magical triangle resting precariously over my armpit, I counted another seventy breaths, but by then being inside the tube was more an inconvenience than a problem, my breath-counting a background tic newly acquired, a vestigial impulse rather than anything critical to my serenity. Indeed, toward the end I had to fight my body's impulse to doze, recognizing in the incipience of slumber the likelihood that I would move as I went under thus fouling the data. My hand falling asleep made steadying the arm challenging, but the fact of the tube itself was an inconvience with which I had made my peace.

On the way home, I called my general practitioner for a cardiologist referral. Perhaps the simple answer is to do what one must with as much responsibility as can be reconciled with the adventure, compromise being, in one form or another, the best solution to most problems, simply knowledge authoring the most prudent, if not always the most cautious, decisions. I'm not claustrophobic.

____________
*** Just writing this undermines my occasional conviction that I'm done with climbing. Boy on a Bike understands.

Speak

2006-05-28T15:53:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, more often recently, I find the thought of conversation almost painfully unappealing. I sicken of the sound of my own voice. Worse, I don't know how to shut up. So I stay home. Confronted with the necessity of conversation, I will speak, and speak, and speak; I will stand outside myself and imagine how I must sound, I will fear that I grow tedious to others as I do to myself; I will hear the repetition, the doggedness, the inability to let a topic go until I have worried it to sodden, masticated tatters; and then I will leave and spend too much time imagining that I have acquitted myself poorly, again, I will vow to change, to shut up, to listen more and share less, to hold my hand closer to my vest. And then I will decline any number of subsequent opportunities to visit others, exiling myself from the world, manufacturing excuses -- money, fatigue, other commitments that either do not exist or will be demurred in precisely the same way -- to stay home.

At home, the ennui thickens like epoxy until it fastens rock hard skin to skin and I find myself immobile, losing interest, disappearing into my own head, which I find comforting even in a vague sort of familiar contempt, as in the company of an especialy unpleasant relation of long acquaintance, the devil one knows, perhaps.

I used to be far more comfortable in the company of strangers, use to work a room with some aplomb, and while to outward appearances I'm no less able to carry it off now when circumstances conspire to force me, it lacks the appeal it once had. I don't know why.

Is it just that I've been there so many times before, that the divergent minutiae are overwhelmed by the general sameness of things, that nothing seems as new as I'd prefer?

Settling down, settling in, is if not inevitable at least very common among even the most admirable of individuals, a honing of focus, a recognition of one's limitations, aiming to do as well as one can within one's sphere, and forming that sphere with dimensions no greater than one's reach. But what of settling before certain preset expectations have been satisfied -- companionship; professional ambitions well-defined, attainable, toward which one is moving; financial stability -- settling in the absence of such things is an excruciatingly solitary process of self-abnegation and compromise, and even as I resist the alternative, I thrash about in my own head.

Just ask me. I'll tell you all about it.

UPDATE: The party, as it turns out, was fun. I knew one more person there than I expected to (for a grand total of two), and everything was fine. Funny.

Lightening

2006-05-26T18:41:00.000-05:00

If rock climbing restored to me the pleasure I take from being in the woods, cycling has restored to me the even more primitive pleasure to be found in rain. Left to our own devices, most children will rush out into each rain storm, plunge their hands, palms down, into the nearest puddle, and cavort heedless of any risk of illness or hazard.

I have logged something like 50 or 60 miles in the past 10 days alone in rain -- first at the Ride of Silence, then in the morning of Pedal Pittsburgh, and then this morning and this evening riding to and from work.

Children are a burden on their parents, no matter how they spin it presently or later. And children do -- it's true -- pick up colds as readily as pebbles and sticks and the inappropriate tics of their parents. Sick children are more burdensome. So we forgive parents, and preemptively ourselves, for being prudent to a fault.

But what do we miss, raised to believe that rain is an adversary from which we reflexively hide beneath umbrellas and oilskin, roofs and awnings?

Were rain lethal, or even a terribly bad thing, we never would have made it to the point of fashioning even crude shelters. We would have perished like all the other maladapted species who speak to us in crumbling, blanched whispers from the deepest strata of history.

Tonight, climbing out of Panther Hollow into Oakland, and arriving at the bottom of Schenley Park, the sky loomed ominously, as it had intermittently all day. I had divined from the satellite map a tentative expectation that I might fit 20 or 30 miles in between the visible rain bands, which seemed in jerky flipbook doppler animation to be moving more slowly than is usually the case. But I am no weatherman, as the world sees fit to remind me, time and again.

The prospect of rain required no mental preparation; the skies had tipped me off for the six or so miles I'd ridden from downtown, had whispered to me even before I turned the office light out on my workweek and embarked on my long weekend, Memorial Day . . . .

As I'd intended, I began my ascent, loose and ready from a moderate-paced ride out of the city. I passed the Conservatory, bent right onto the bridge over Panther Hollow below which I'd passed not ten minutes earlier, and negotiated the complex of overlapping ramps and merges to enter the park proper. I lifted out of the saddle to get up the momentarily steep first switchback, then resumed the saddle for the mild climb to the next.

I heard live music, the Ramones, from inside the park, the tinny sound of a snare played out doors, the flurry of nonsense syllables, and over all of it the piercing squeals of tween or teen girls, mocking a ritual invented by the oldest among their parents as though it were a birthright. Rounding the bend, I saw the source of the noise, the volume of which was increasing. A few dozen kids were crowded into a shelter in David Lawrence Park, tucked perfectly into the rectangular rainshadow provided by a peaked roof standing on four pillars.

There was something surreal about the prospect of a middle school or high school band, playing the same covers I had played in the one living-room-bound middle school band for which I had briefly played keyboards nearly twenty years ago. Aside from this unlikely tumult, the park was almost empty, nothing like it was on Tuesday when Frightened Monkey and I invented, in slightly longer form, the particular route I rode tonight.

As I reached the top of the park, approaching the tennis courts, I considered the prospect of lightning. Even exposed, more or less alone at the top of a park, I couldn't find the energy to worry much. I wondered briefly whether having bicycle tires between me and the ground would save me. I imagined not, but figured the odds of being struck by lightning were, well, like the odds of being struck by lightning. My corduroy shorts became saturated and stuck to my legs; my sunglasses became impossible to see through, leaving me with a familiar choice between uncorrected vision, rainfall constantly interrupting my vision, and obscured but corrected vision through sunglasses that I'm sure look sillier than they really are when the skies darken and empty themselves on the world below.

Descending through the trees, slow to accommodate the danger presented by poor vision, the canopy's untimely shadow, and the prospect of a line of parked cars, I witnessed the absurd spectacle of a man trying to mount a mountain bike to a trunk rack while hiding under his umbrella. I resisted the urge to call out something mocking, recognizing that I looked as absurd to him as he did to me.

But why hide? Why treat the rain as something to be endured only reluctantly rather than embraced and celebrated? The rain continued all the way home, out Forbes through Squirrel Hill, across Braddock through Point Breeze, down Dallas into East Liberty (or whatever neighborhood lurks between Point Breeze and Highland Park), through Highland Park and up Stanton into the Heights, skirting the edge of Morningside, and then finally, shamelessly riding the brake down into Lawrenceville and home.

As the rain diminished, my glasses dried into something less than clear, my gloves squelched in time with my cadence as I methodically climbed Stanton out of the saddle, water moving around within my shoes, dress socks, all that remained of my workday uniform, sodden and bunching around my ankles, and I wished the deluge back, to complete the circuit, rain by morning, rain by evening, and the welcome prospect of a warmer shower awaiting me at home.

Leaders of the New School

2006-05-23T08:50:00.000-05:00

There has been much said about Jean Rohe's commencement speech at the New School, which preceded John McCain's by-all-accounts canned stump speech, the same he delivered at Falwell's Liberty University and Columbia University this graduation season.

Ms. Rohe was born in 1984, when I was dressing in layered rugby shirts and jean jackets with the collars high, which makes her 22 now. Rather than relying on the brief media accounts, I strongly urge anyone who is interested to read Rohe's post-mortem comments and the full text of her talk at The Huffington Post. And when you're done, scroll down a bit to read the petty, inarticulate comments of Mark Salter, McCain's pit bull (they begin: "I am employed by Senator McCain . . .").

Ask yourself whether Salter would be an improvement over Karl Rove. Armand thinks not.

(Without getting into the partisan politics of it all, I think it's an insult when any politician delivers a transparent campaign speech at a commencement. If you can't drop your own ambitions for a little while and speak from the heart (and not from the focus group) to a new group of graduates, go find the nearest American Legion hall and leave commencement duties to someone with something interesting to say and the nerve to say it.)

UPDATE: Majikthise has more.

Ticking Away the Moments That Make Up a Dull Day

2006-05-20T14:48:00.000-05:00

Time doesn't fly away from us, it slides out from beneath our feet.

At the gas station, where I paused to buy one more carton of self-loathing at a dear, sin-tax-inflated price, a young woman in DIY-compliant uniform filled up a Mitsubishi's fuel tank. She wore black jeans, various gleaming metallic accoutrements, a black hoodie, and her hair, too, was colored an improbable shade of black. Her nose might have been pierced; I'm going to say it was, so picture it with me.

I did a subtle double-take; there was nothing terribly important about her refueling, nothing terribly striking about her or her car, and yet something pulled me up short. Her car, the Mitsubishi, wasn't terribly small and seemed an awfully nice, less than fuel-efficient vehicle for a woman who looked like she favored Cars Are Coffins stickers. More importantly, the car looked entirely too expensive for a girl in torn black jeans -- a loaner from mom and dad, perhaps. I smirked inwardly, not because it was justified but just because that's what I do: I smirk, alot.

Here's the thing: as I walked into the convenience store, sorting through possible reasons the hipster and her car caught my eye, it dawned on me: the car isn't worth much; it's close to ten ears old. It is the sort of car a poor hipster drives -- maybe not a signature member of that class, but a member just the same.

And in this way, the mind's nefarious tendency towards fixing one time in mind as the present and denying the existance of aggregating evidence to the contrary revealed itself. My time, Moon Time, had stopped moving nearly ten years ago, at least as far as Mitsubishi goes. That particular iteration of the car in question remained in my head a $20,000-plus mid-sized sedan, and so it had remained, even though the model has not issued in anything even remotely resembling that form in at least five years.

Returning to the tarmac after completing my transaction, I noticed that the car was missing a hubcap, shod in cheap tires, and looked its age.

It's impossible not to wonder in what years my other sensibilities are fixed, and what it is, if anything, I view in light of the age it actually is. I'm certain about one thing: I don't see myself for my true age, and I thank my stars for that salutary delusion.

A City Besieged

2006-05-19T12:46:00.000-05:00

Grousing about the weather is a Pittsburgh pastime of unquestionable pedigree and endurance. Among outdoor athletes, the grousing reaches crescendi in spring and fall, when the sky grows dark and ominous with the prospect of rain, and the sun finds summer at or below the equator leaving us all pining for its grace with the faith of the devout; and on the tenth or eleventh consecutive day without sun, like a lapsed Catholic, our faith falters, and we shake our fists at the sky, bereft, betrayed.

Notwithstanding our uncommonly dry Spring, the delayed arrival of weather more typical of this time of year has provoked the usual hue and cry, our yearly ritual. Brian's in on it. So is David, just days after noting how odd it was that the rains belayed their arrival. And I'm hardly innocent.

This morning, nether regions impossibly sore from 50-ish unpadded miles in the past two days on Susan's miserable saddle, I skipped riding in, especially in light of what should be a long-distance sort of weekend. I figured that if it was vaguely painful just to walk to the shower, naked under my robe, getting back on the bike once again would be intolerable.

Instead I drove, having an after-work commitment making bus commuting impractical. Still half-asleep from the somnolent creep down Butler, I had my breath stolen from me when I turned onto Ligonier and paused at the red light where it met Liberty. Before me lay the narrow strip of Liberty arrowing into the heart of downtown, and at its end stood the monolithic USX and Mellon towers, dwarfing at their feet the cornice of the granite facade of the Pennsylvanian, its lower stories eclipsed by a train trestle in the foreground.

All paled beneath the sky, which was bruised and inflamed with the insistent vibrancy of spring, and lurching toward the city from below, the vividly green flora of Polish Hill, within which hides the narrow, begrudging easement of Bigelow Boulevard. The sky and the hillside formed discordant jaws threatening to devous all the iron and concrete of this city, the water of the rivers perhaps rising up to facilitate in- and digestion. The city, in a word, looked small.

The wind hurtled about my car, the clouds about to reach down and pluck me from the roadway, and all I could think was: I wish I were on my bike.

I can take or leave the rain, in itself, but I love this weather, its profundity, its urgency, its life-giving ablutions, and I love living in a city so green, with hillsides to look upon, waterways to stand beside, backroads down which to disappear.

Missing the sun when it goes is a biological thing, and like anyone when it goes for long spaces of time my spirits plunge and I find myself aching for something I cannot name. But I wouldn't trade those struggles at the expense of this, the heavy gray sky I see out my window, offset with the blues and greens and reds of the city and the suburb, the bright yellow of the right field foul pole at PNC park, the gleaming dome of a distant church, a sliver of brilliant green marking the trees between the Gateway towers, and the gray, always the gray, the gray that is white and blue and purple and even a little green, the gray ever-changing, bringing with it all the joy and petulance of resurrection.

Truly, I do not mind the weather in this city.

MoonOverHarrisburg

2006-05-09T21:52:00.000-05:00

Actually, there was no moon to speak of, unless by moon you mean Moon, as in me, inhabiting the streets of this capital city after almost everyone has gone home, or somewhere else at any rate, unless by Moon you mean a small, pale, concentration of reflected energy at Third and Forster, in the shadow of the capitol building, rotunda exterior all illumined in green and cream, the plaza about the building qua astonishment open to the public as though terrorism was just a story you tell your children to keep them in line, flush (as I was) with the intangible learning of an evening spent plying someone with a wealth of knowledge to share (even if the Mets were losing to Philthadelphia in the background) . . .

Yes, let's think of it that way, the Moon over Harrisburg my aquiline face, reflecting dully the shared light of a dozen streetlamps, and Harrisburg itself, among the more storied cities of one of this nation's more storied states, the river a few blocks hence, eclipsed in its unaffected beauty only by the opulent enterprise of men, this capitol, this building atop a hill, and the simple, unpoliced knolls of its setting, a green apron beneath bluish light, reminding me, as every setting does, that home is here, right here, wherever I bed down for the night comfortable in my own skin.

Understanding the System

2006-05-05T09:33:00.000-05:00

By all accounts, sentencing in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial was, in its way, riveting. I have not followed the goings on in that trial closely for a variety of reasons I am not inclined to go into here. Probably, it boils down to a combination of his plea and my displeasure with the death penalty; although I wouldn't have been surprised had he been sentenced to die, I'm hardly upset that he won't be executed and granted the martyrdom he so fervently seeks. As Judge Brinkema observed, in effect, there really is no more ignominious end than to rot in a Supermax prison.

One thing jumped out at me, however -- a victim statement following sentencing:

Judge Brinkema asked whether there were any family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the audience who wanted to be heard.

No one responded initially. As the judge prepared to move on, Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon, rose from the audience.

Walking to a lectern a few feet from Mr. Moussaoui, Mrs. Dillard looked at him and said: "I want you, Mr. Moussaoui, to know how you wrecked my life. You wrecked my career. You took the most important person in my life from me."

As Mr. Moussaoui stared back impassively, she continued, "I hope that you sit in that jail without seeing the sky, without seeing the sun, without any contact with the world and that your name never comes up in any newspaper again during the rest of my life."

She then thanked the judge for "what you did," thanked the prosecutors "for what you tried to do," and the court-appointed defense lawyers for "what you had to do."

That last little bit, reflecting an abiding appreciation of the role of defense attorneys in our system, floors me in its simplicity. I don't know what Mrs. Dillard does that led her to include that gratuity at an intensely personal moment, but as someone who believes strongly in the critical importance of the criminal defense bar, and thinks it incumbent on any attorney to take the occasional case he or she finds distasteful as a matter of service, charity, and humility, I'm grateful for her choice to include that last expression of appreciation -- even if it was no more than a matter of basic politeness.

Time Out

2006-04-27T19:05:00.000-05:00

The furnace kicks on, belatedly heeding my injunction electronically transmitted. I do not know it's language. I do know, however, how to goad the translator. Sixty-two degrees is all I ask. Sixty-two degrees -- in the dining room, at least, with whatever that connotes for this most drafty corner of the house, my writing table nestled in the corner of my bedroom bracketed by windows that admit nearly as much daylight through the crenellated rot in their sashes as through their murky glass.

An epigraph, apt perhaps only to me:

I'd forgotten. Maybe I'd never known. He sang in that empty packinghouse as I hadn't heard him sing since childhood. Every nub in his sound had been burned away, all impurity purged. He'd found a way at last to transmute baseness back into first essence. Some part of him had already left this earth. My brother, the prizewinner, the lieder recorder, the soloist with symphonies, had found his resounding no. He sang Perotin, someting we'd had in school only as history, the still-misshapen homunculus of things to come. But in Jonah, all stood inverted: more good in the bud than in the full flowering. He'd found he freshness of always, of almost. He made that vast backward step sound like a leap ahead. The whole invention of the diatonic, everything after music's gush of adolesence had been a terrible mistake. He hewed as closely to a tube of wood or brass as the human voice allowed. His Perotin turned the abandoned warehouse into a Romanesque crypt, the sound of a continent still turned in upon itself for another sleeping century before its expansion and ouward contact. His long, modal, slowly turning lines clashed and resolved against no harmony but themselves, pointing the way down a reachable infinity.

The quote is from Richard Powers, deep into the twilight of The Time of Our Singing, page 529 in the Picador trade paperback, far deeper than its poetry should last, but there it is, waiting patiently for each discovery, none so precious as the first, Powers sitting back one afternoon at his computer, rubbing his fingers absently and considering -- Yes, that's it.

At the office this evening, alone after quitting time, I stood from my ineffectual writing, today a labor more Herculean than quotidian, and contemplated the city fallen before me, hundreds of feet down, cars like beads of mercury reasoning in faltering rhythms their ways through constricted grooves attended by insects to absorb into their plump insides, flat roofs graveled over, two rivers made one to run away like the time in every clock I see, whether blinking, ticking, or carving fluid circles in a shallow circular terrarium, metaphors for the ineffable, all of it, of them.

My palms pressed against the glass, I allowed it to resist my falling, a fantasy of weightlessness humming in my core. Unsatisfied, I leaned forward until the full of my chest rested against the glass, which held me with the indifference of one turning to a lesser task. I cannot pen my own story, can neither spin it in gossamer radial rhombuses of words nor fence it in like livestock.

Walking across town, injured shoulder throbbing with a day at the keyboard like a day hammering nails, I gagged on a poem of melancholy. A rejection of blues and grays in the poetry of sadness; a celebration, in its place, of the vividness of solitude, colors knocked off their banal foundations in a shockwave of alienation. Neon neon enough to define neon. The blue border of a posted notice commanding concentration. The atmosphere of sound resolved to order, one conversation to the next, ears like radio telescopes corraling distant messages or tricking static into nonsense facsimile.

Depression is poetry's bad penny. I will not be complicit in its gathering in the bottom of clothes dryers, between cushions, in gutters too valueless to stoop for. I will not stoop. Poetry doesn't need me; it never has.

A backyard, Glenlivet and a cigar, San Luis Rey, sweetish with a mild finish, a hint of something I lack the vocabulary to describe, another language unlearned. But I need no words to enjoy the murky traffic cone luster of its smoldering end, the swirl of smoke eddying around my tongue tingling with tobacco and peat, alive like no other part of me. My Sybaritic essence, distilled.

On my lap I persist in reading a Richard Russo short story I already recognize as an episode from his novel Straight Man, and I try not to feel cheated by the editorial padding, recycling having its place in art . . . and in marketing. And of course a first collection of short stories that emerges long after a novelist has emerged has more to do with marketing than with art.

Upon finishing the story, unfinished when the bus slowed to my stop, I returned to the Powers, and a book I have plodded through for months now, savoring, resisting its inevitable end by reading in sips, as I enjoy the scotch, mulling without haste.

On the street and alley my property connects like the crossbar of a stylized H, someone is always throwing someone else out in a public ritual of shunning alien to my suburban instinct for decorum. Dirty children play unidentifiable contact sports in the untended property two lots over.

An errant ball thudded on the roof of my patio which shed it like water to bounce on the concrete of my neighbor's patio. I eyed its downward trajectory until it came to rest against the low chainlink fence that divides my neighbor's property from mine. I looked up to the children and found one towheaded boy to meet my gaze, daring me to betray my age with an angry injunction. I refused his invitation, determined to remember my own childhood, content that my home, rickety though it often seems, would bear the incursion stoically.

Down the alley, a woman yelled "Get the fuck out then!" with the practiced ease of a leading lady in the third act of a production's final performance, already mindful of her next part, which on paper looks like more of the same.

The grass I have seeded bursts from beneath the overturned clogs of weed and exhausted soil in slim walls of artificial green, the turnedup undersides of the prior yard bare and accusatory. In one patch, the blades number only in the dozens, despite hundreds of seeds. I have probably done something wrong, another task incomplete. I am surrounded with evidence of my impatience. I trail it like a wake behind me.

I live amid mysteries of my own invention for another's gleaning. But whose?

The Caffeinator Makes the Trib

2006-04-19T20:37:00.000-05:00

At least, it made the online edition.

Renegade Cyclists [--Ladies, Avert Your Eyes--] Stay Edgy. Guess they didn't get the memo that the three people who put the race on were professionals, two of them married with kids. Ditto, more or less, the additional volunteers.

Renegade. Funny. Still, in some respects, the article hit true notes.

Fib #1 (Over the Bars)***

2006-04-18T17:05:00.000-05:00

mule-
kick;
pavement;
i lie prone.
fear looms, pain pending
official video review.

____
*** "Fibs" evidently are the New Thing.

Right Hook

2006-04-18T15:18:00.000-05:00

I'm laying on the street at the corner of Penn and 33d, Susan beside me, looking up at the bumper and grille of a big old Lexus. Lexus, the car I'd been focusing on when it all went to shit. My head having lifted without incident, I begin to pick myself up, bringing my knees up beneath me. And then the Lexus honks. It fucking honks. Fucking car.

I find my feet, stand up and swivel to face the car. "FUCK YOU!," I yell, in my best Jersey snarl.

My point having been made, I bend down to retrieve Susan, raking her upright by her steering tube, and dragging her and myself to the curb where I set her down gently. The Lexus hasn't moved, and the driver has gotten out, already on his cellphone to 911 or the police. He's gesturing at the phone and looking at me: "Do you need a medic?" he asks. He actually uses the word "medic."

It's a really good question; I don't know. I go back over the fall in my head. I was taking it easy this morning, first time on the bike after an 85-mile weekend, and I eased through Lawrenceville quietly and without incident, my legs spry and quickening to the brisk morning air. I shot a couple of narrow openings at moderate speed, nothing special, and as I reached 34th Street, where Penn and Butler merge, I picked up the pace, using the gentle downslope to set the cadence for my run into the Strip District.

Traffic was backed up from 32d Street, but the line of cars was moving only slightly slower than I was. I know 33d Street is a dangerous intersection, because cars tend to make last-minute rights to slide over to Smallman for the ride downtown. I'm the sort of driver who makes decisions like that on the fly, based on what's going on directly in front of me, and I've seen others do the same -- jumping out of the line of traffic when they draw even with the turn, unsignaled right turns, lethal.

Let me repeat: I know Penn and 33d is a dangerous intersection.

As I near 33d, however, I'm focusing on the wrong car, a Lexus. I'm at his quarterpanel, in his blindspot, as I near the intersection and I deliberately add some speed to bring myself up to his fender, where I'll be in his field of view. Most people hit only what they don't see; being seen is everything.

Thing is, while bringing myself clearly into his field of view, I've put myself on the quarterpanel of the vehicle in front of him, a silver metallic Chevy Trailblazer, and now the intersection is upon us.

And just like that, more or less at once, Trailblazer signals right and cuts hard for 33d. As soon as the wheels turn in, I know this is it, that first, inevitable, nasty fall on a city street. I've been waiting for it, sanguine. But with it upon me I fight, I don't want it.

My instincts are good by now, and I've been in situations nearly this nasty before and gotten out of them in one piece and still on two wheels. I lift out of the saddle in automatic mode and lock the rear wheel; this sort of skidding is one of my peculiar strengths on the fixie, not just the skidding but the angling of the skid, stopping on a dime, literally sliding into a motionless stance, balanced. But skidding is not a terribly efficient way to stop, and I'm sliding way too fast and Trailblazer's not moving out of my path nearly fast enough. I've violated the principal rule of riding in the city: I have no obvious out.

At this point, a few things happen at once. One, I remember that I have a brake, now, something I use so seldom I tend to forget it's there. My right hand slides up the bar to it and clamps down. Two, I sense perhaps enough daylight to take the sharp right with Trailblazer, between it and the curb. I might strike a pedal, but that will either not upset me or put me on the ground most likely behind Trailblazer. I can also lean into Trailblazer, a maneuver I've never tried but I've heard tell of; it's not the sort of thing one practices idly, invention born of necessity, rather.

I'm still weighing these options, skidding, clamped down on the brake and drawing ever so near the car when the rear wheel hops up behind me and hits me in the ass. This is so remote from anything good, especially as I'm now nearly on top of the Trailblazer; it signals loss of control. The wheel touches down briefly, but it's right up behind me again because now I'm pretty much in Trailblazer's backseat and my right hand is doing what millions of firing neurons and ganglia, one for each year of the evolutionary history coded into my DNA, tell it to do -- Squeeeeeeeze.

I'm airborne and tumbling, until finally, heels over rear, I crunch to the pavement on some combination of left hand, left shoulder, and cranium.

Of course, Moon rides with a helmet, which a) protects against severe brain injury, something we all know Moon cannot afford, and b) makes a really creepy sound when striking pavement at high speed under a substantial amount of weight, a striated crunch that suggests medical halos and spinal injury.

This catches us up, no? Right.

So now I'm on the sidewalk, Lexus man asking whether I need an ambulance, and two or three others who saw the fall milling around me in kind concern for my health. They're all ashen. I glean from this fact, and the fact that Lexus evidently called 911 before my body came to full rest on the pavement, that whatever just happened to me must have looked really scary. Clipped into the pedals, of course, when I go flying the bike flies with me; we probably both, Susan and I, flew through the air for a half-second and fell hard in a tangle of steel and flesh. Poor Susan. I pity the bystanders; I, too, would be appalled to witness something like that. I'm reminded of an unbiked motorcyclist I once watched slide across perhaps 60 feet of sidewalk and a few yards of grass before coming to an abrupt stop against a chainlink fence. He stood and brushed himself off that long-ago afternoon, just as I'm doing now.

The adrenaline hits, with the pain sure to follow. I'm up, I can feel my extremities, I don't have any obvious symptoms suggesting head injury except for the creeping sense of abstraction that attends surprise trauma. A youngish woman, pretty and petite in too much makeup and a suit so purple it prompts me to second-guess my initial diagnosis of my lack of head injury, is especially concerned. "Are you sure you're okay?" she presses, in a tone of voice suggesting that she won't believe any answer I give her.

"Yeah. Maybe." I shake my head, hands on hips, and turn my back on her, looking back up Penn as though I might run back the tape, analyze what went wrong, figure out why everyone looks so freaked out. There's no conscious decision on my part to shout, but there it is, a throaty yawp rumbling up from somewhere deep inside me and climbing skyward. Frustration, pain, fear, adrenaline -- I am, as they say, jacked up. It almost feels good. Almost.

It's probably just as well that Trailblazer's driver didn't stop. I don't think the driver saw what happened behind him or her anyway, because anyone with that much car has a corresponding amount of insurance and a sense of duty to match. I'm not saying Trailblazer shouldn't have seen or shouldn't have stopped. But Trailblazer didn't. And I'm over it.

Three strangers pacing with nervous looks on their faces wait behind me, at once relying on me for their cues and suspicious of any cues I offer, and then a vision emerges on the horizon, an old attorney on his bike, a man who works in my building and rides to work often, whom I've come to know only just by name, call him Steve, in his sixties I imagine or older, an old-school athlete with the soul if not the resume or the frame of a boxer. He rolls up on his old but lovingly maintained roadbike and dismounts, his tall slender body an aging geometrical testimony, points and lines and angles more fluid than his proportions suggest they would be, at home in his age.

A site for sore eyes.

In the ensuing few minutes, Steve's aura of responsibility and his personal familiarity with me combined with my continuing protestations that I don't need an ambulance, don't need a cop, really don't need anything but the time to figure out what's broken and how to fix it, have convined the others, all with places to go, to move on. I make an effort to pat each on the arm, look each of them in the eye, thank them for their kind concern. I don't take names. There's some discussion of Trailblazer, but I assure them that I was at least as in the wrong as Trailblazer was, that my fall may not have been evident to the driver, that I've got good coverage should anything come up and am not much inclined to sue in any event.

Steve says something to one of them about being my lawyer. Than adds that I'm a lawyer too. Soon after, they all meander off. Infer from that what you will.

The rest warrants recounting only in summary. We righted Susan to see if she was still in order, and discovered that the front wheel was out of joint. With no obvious bends, however, I immediately suspect that the axle has just shifted in the drop-out, which would explain why the tire is rubbing one side of the fork. I make as though to continue my ride, and I'm not just gesturing -- it seems like the right thing to do. Steve, balks. "I think you should go to the hospital, let them check you out," he says. I'm ambivalent.

All I can think, at first, is "I have things to do." But I'm not just banged up, I realize belatedly, or at least I can't assume, based on available data, that I'm just banged up. As the adrenaline slowly diffuses into my system, I discover that I'm in a lot of pain, most of it in and radiating from my left shoulder, which hit hardest in the fall.

I test my left arm, raise it above my head, and my body buckles beneath it. For the first time, the depth of the pain registers. This isn't a mere contusion, whatever else it is, and my arm really isn't all right in any conventional sense of that word.

"The ER, maybe," I concede, still hesitant.

"You should go," Steve reaffirms. "Can we get you a cab?" Steve asks. "Do you have a phone?" I say I've got money, then return to my bag to check that my phone hasn't been crushed. It's in fine working order. I look into my wallet skeptically. Steve much catch my look. Instantly, his wallet's out: "Just let me lend you $40," he says, withdrawing the bills.

"No. Thank you. Really. Just help me lock up the bike and I'll take it from here. No concussion, I swear," I say, and offer a smile designed to dissuade any alternative diagnosis, a smile that surely doesn't reach my eyes. I'm not much for smiling just now.

It then dawns on me that my roommate probably is only just now leaving the house. He has a wagon and a flexible schedule. I call. Tell him the minimum. Ask for a ride to the hospital. He agrees, of course.

Steve, however, keeps company until Roomie arrives, and helps me deal with a police officer. Evidently, the Lexus guy was on the phone long enough with 911 that they decided it would be best to send a badge to the site to sniff around. She, too, was wonderful; she encouraged me to file a just-in-case report, and took as much information as I had about the car. Candidly, I explained my complicity in the accident, and she sucked her teeth disapprovingly but not judgmentally.

I fish into my bag for my cigarettes. I need one.

Two hours later, leaving Presby, the verdict: nothing broken, nothing torn, a knee badly bruised and a shoulder pretty well relieved of its skin and swollen to within an inch of its life. My left arm feels like someone's pulling down on it pretty much any time I stand and let it hang, but I've been worse.

I'll be at work tomorrow, and back on Susan no later than Friday. And perhaps I'll be more cautious, or perhaps not. While today's misstep wouldn't have happened had I been more cautious, there's a fine line between dumb bad luck and recklessness, and today's fall bestrides it. That said, if I am nervous I'll allow it, hold back, for a while at least.

End of story.

Backyard Blogging

2006-04-11T18:53:00.000-05:00

New rites of spring: training on Susan, seeing what I can do to improve the quality of my backyard. Tonight, from work I rode out the jail trail, up into Oakland, across Squirrel Hill to Beechwood and then out Beechwood almost to the High Level Bridge, whereupon I started home, climbing up through Squirrel Hill (Moon's single; when choosing between any number of routes, only three factors come into play -- distance, climbing, and the concentration of pretty girls dressed for spring), then cutting across Forbes into Point Breeze, and taking the direct route home through East Liberty and over Stanton. A tidy 18 miles or so, which I rode at an average of 12.23 miles per hour.

And how I know that brings me to a bit of housekeeping. I've been largely silent lately, because I haven't been posting my rides. I didn't want this to become a site where I monitor my training, principally because it would give me yet another excuse to avoid writing novel material that speaks to the real stuff, whatever that may be. Fortunately, Moon's friend from college has started WeEndure, a site dedicated to tracking endurance athletes' training miles in a variety of sports. Now, I'm not endurance athlete, but I've been making a passable showing of late, and the site provides ample opportunity for me to document my travels. From now on, those of you interested in keeping an eye on what I'm up to on two wheels can monitor Moon's WeEndure page. I'll be setting up a WeEndure badge and a direct link to my page there shortly.

The nicest thing about today's ride is each climb seemed more manageable than the one that preceded it, hence I was positively sanguine about climbing Murray from Forward to the top, and when I crested Stanton on the way home my breathing wasn't ragged and I never even slowed, as has been my tendency, as I crested and began down the other side. Indeed, the whole thing was somewhat routine. That's not to say today's ride home didn't come with its share of pain; climbing Forbes from Oakland was no picnic, and climbing the hill on Shady between Monitor and Forward was a bastard. But right after that I was on Murray, and everything was okay.

I had so much energy that at home I filled a glass of water, changed into flip-flops, and watered the lawn (not that you asked, but if the pathetic limp nodding of the dandelions is any indication, the weedkiller's doing its thing). No muss, no fuss, no wheezing collapse.

I'm a bit backlogged on things I want to post here, but for now the battery weakens and the sky dims. I should head in and do something -- shower, eat, sit on the couch with the cool breeze from outside drifting through the house through windows that just days ago were shielded with plastic that crackled and pulled in drafts.

It's been a beautiful day, and the night that now falls like a gently lofted top sheet is brisk and bracing.

In Keeping With the Theme

2006-04-04T12:29:00.000-05:00

Others in my circle have been writing about cycling lately, and I thought I'd throw them some linkage.

First, Michael has a run-in with a pizza delivery guy, and Stephie mocks him mercilessly for linking his ubertrendy Chrome bag.

Matt's going off-road, big time, that crazy bastard. He's just jealous that he can't join the lot of us riding the MS 150 fixed in June. Of course, he says he's going to run Arizona's counterpoint in November, but we'll see. Show off.

Brian writes evocatively of a long ride home, and also gives a way a bit about the upcoming Caffeinator alleycat, which is turning out to be a bit shorter, if run efficiently, than we at first anticipated.

Emily's got a problem with cyclist graffiti at the law school, and turns her post into a longer rumination culminating in this apt observation:

look, part of the problem is that cyclists and motorists are engaged in this weird competitive, combative struggle for who gets the road. it's the whole entitlement thing. people, people, PEOPLE!!! where in the FUCK did we as a culture go so astray that we're convinced that we get to act like assholes because we think we're entitled to certain things? it's really quite retarded. and it's totally unproductive and inefficient. you know the street signs that say "share the road"? um, duh! it's about SHARING the road. the street isn't for cars only. it's not for bikes only. this is my issue with the critical mass rides -- they end up pissing drivers off because the cyclists act like morons and basically cut off access to the streets to motorists. what does this accomplish? how are we working towards awareness of reasonable alternatives if all we're doing is alienating groups that really have no reason not to co-exist peacefully?

Elsewhere, however, she excoriates cyclists who "act like jackasses, cut off motorists, ride really irresponsibly, and behave as if they're entitled to this sort of activity." I'm sure she doesn't have me in my mind, but as my writing here attests, I have my moments. The way I see it, cycling's reward isn't just the salutary effect it has on the world and my body, but also the opportunity to take short cuts. I drive hard and sometimes I cycle hard. It's not entirely responsible, but then I've never claimed to be an entirely responsible person.

Finally, David explains why he's done with fixed gears, in an engaging counterpoint to the current trend toward single-speeds of various stripe, especially given his credibility as a former courier and serious competitive cyclist.

* * *

Yesterday, I was fiddling with my bike outside the doctor's office in Oakland before heading in, and a salty old black man came up to me and asked after the bike. Without asking my permission, he tested its weight while I watched to make sure he didn't scrape it against the meter post to which I'd u-locked it. He was relatively gentle, and he commented on how light Susan was. I smiled, and said, "No gears," gesturing at the rear hub.

"Why you got no gears?"

"Fewer moving parts. Lighter. Simpler."

"How you get up hills?"

"Work. Hard. But I get up them faster."

"Man I'm not seein' that."

"It's a thing. Not for everyone."

"Why don't you have two brakes?"

"Don't need them. Front brake's mostly a back-up anyway. Didn't have any hand brake for most of the winter." I tried to explain how direct drive works on a bike.

"Not me. I like old bikes. Got me a bunch of him. Schwinns. Good bikes. I like old Schwinns. I've got one with 28" tires. Stands about this tall." He held out his hand at the height of his sternum, comparable to mine.

"There's no way you can ride that."

"Sure do."

"How do you get on it?" My turn to be surprised.

"Carefully."

"Oh well," I said. "I'd better head in."

He smiled and returned my farewell, then turned to walk down Forbes, looking over his shoulder once to look upon Susan once more, shaking his head slightly.

Variations: Oakland Morning

2006-04-03T23:24:00.000-05:00

This morning, sunny and mild. This evening, blustery and cold. Today's commute was only a couple of miles longer than my usual ride, but normally I don't climb a hill like Main less than a mile from home. I'm not sure what was creaking louder, my bottom bracket or my legs.

And Dave Wanted to Ask for Directions at Mile 6 With the River In View

2006-04-02T09:34:00.000-05:00

Of course, he got shouted down, and in any event, the woman he hoped to stop seemed fearful of five cyclists in lycra and shorts and messenger bags. This was on the cobbles at the foot of Logan, one of the Dirty Dozen and so steep that several of us decided that rather than burning through our brakes in one ragged descent it would be more prudent to walk our bikes down. The thought of climbing the hill was almost comical. If it isn't the worst or second worst (after Rialto) of the Dozen, especially given its length (first half miserable; second half so steep I was worried I'd somersault over the handlebars before I dismounted the bike, at which point I started worrying that my feet would slide out from under me), I'd really love to know what rates higher.

Yesterday's ride was a bit of a mess. More than once we stopped to regroup and dither about whether we were heading the wrong way, more than once one or two of us found himself out of sight of the others and had to wait, twice phone calls were required to reunite, and several times we doubled back on our path to get back on track. The roads north of the city were entirely unfamiliar to me on a bike, and only marginal more familiar from driving expeditions, though our jaunt through Millvale did recall my very first weekend visiting Pittsburgh, between eight and nine years ago, which got me wondering about moving here.

With only one of the more notable doubling's back recorded, the tally is just about 30 miles, the last mile or so ridden by Dave and me alone after two beers and some minor carb loading (potato skins; no bacon) at Lot 17. But it was a hard 30 at an aggressive pace, notwithstanding a certain amount of hurry up and wait.

Messy or no, it was a lot of fun, Andrew, Aaron, Dave, and new riding partner Nathan, powering through the slight chill of a moist and cloudy April Fools Day, the wind playing us like big brass instruments.

UPDATE: Just thought I'd add, as much for me as for anyone else, that with standard 4-mile each way commutes factored in to last week's perfect five days of riding, my week's mileage came to 79 miles.

Variations: Oranmore Plus

2006-03-30T19:56:00.000-05:00

Last night, I played cards with a few friends, two of whom are former competitive cyclists. I had intended -- but forgot -- to ask whether it ever got easier. What I would have meant by the question was not whether I ever improved. There's no doubt that I have; my aerobic resilience, right now, is probably as good as it's been since the last time I took up regular running, six or so years ago. But no different than when I started, it often seems, by the time I'm a few blocks from home, or, later in a ride, a hundred feet up a steep hill, my legs and lungs are burning, I struggle to maintain some semblance of control over my breathing, and I just labor to get through it.

In rock climbing, I found with time came strength, and strength was most palpable by reference to how much climbing I could do without working. Climbs that had once left my arms trembling and my mid-section aching became warm-ups, limbering exercises, nothing to think about; I could climb them all night if I chose, with only very slow incremental reductions in strength. The analogy to what I find with cycling would be if easy climbs made everything burn and my muscles screamed at me to stop, but I persevered, but that's not how it worked in that sport. In running as well, the first mile or so hurt less and less with time.

But with cycling I don't know that my subjective sensory experience of my body is all that different now than it was a year ago, when I began riding in earnest -- this notwithstanding the fact that my commute now is all but daily (eight out of the last nine days, with tomorrow clinching my first five-day week in memory), a guaranteed eight-mile round-trip that at least gets my heart rate up for twenty minutes each way.

But I was wrong.

With this question lurking in the back of my mind, I embarked on the first Variation this week's schedule afforded, this being the first day this week I left the office anywhere near five o'clock. And with the question in mind, I realized that while I still felt like I was working too hard on the first long flat leg of the jail trail, my initial challenges did not waste me as they used to. I climbed up through the hollow without leaving the saddle, at speed. Up on Boundary, I turned left onto Fillmore instead of continuing straight up to Fifth or turning left onto Winthrop. Fillmore is steep and nasty, but short, and though it was hard to work up it I did so at a standard pace, out of the saddle, and by the time I locked up outside Khiva Han, a block from the hill, I had all of my wind.

A few stops later -- Moon was out flyering for an upcoming alleycat (definition here, but n.b., I'm perilously close to qualifying as an airhead, the next term defined), which, if you ride a bike, and you don't suck, you should come out and play with us -- Moon stopped in at Crazy Mocha Bloomfield and ended up in a long conversation with the proprietor of Dreaming Ant, the ubercool videostore in the back.

On the heels of that chat, my flyering done, I finally set out for home by the crescent moon. I decided that Stanton was too far, and heading down the hill to Butler directly too easy, and that this left me with only one option: Oranmore, again.

Which returns me to my subject. Mossfield, the rollercoaster run along the perimeter of the cemetery, as always presented a challenge. On each short downhill, I'd run up to something close to maximum spin, and then try to carry as much of that momentum as possible up the following hill. That spin takes a while to deteriorate to a point where my rpm approach a comfortable standing level, and fighting the spin prolongs the amount of time until I can get out of the saddle productively. It's a lose-lose -- either I stay in the saddle and fight my diminishing speed, or I succumb to it and let it take me down to a level at which I can comfortably stand, which on a moderate hill is infinitely more comfortable, albeit slower, than the ensaddled alternative. But I'm stubborn, and this is training, so I fought with everything I had until the last uphill preceding my turn into Stanton Heights. On the last climb, I bled speed and stood, conserving my energy for Oranmore. And more.

Oranmore was brutal, as always, but I maintained a steadier pace, a more even line, and found myself at the top of the hill long before my legs began to mumble about giving it up. More palpable progress. Moreover, at the top of Oranmore, experimenting with something I picked up looking at the map of a prior Variation, I turned left into Stanton Heights's side streets atop the hill rather than drop down to Stanton for the familiar descent into Lawrenceville.

Turning left onto Coleridge, I saw another climb a half-block distant, just a blip on the map. I shuddered a bit, my breath still ragged and my throat burning, but it was short and over before it began. Plus, as I climbed I had the tantalizing view of an aqua post-sunset sky framed by the trees on either side of the street, that view that undeniably says you're approaching the top of something. And so I was; as best I can tell, that is the functional highpoint of Stanton Heights, and I climbed it from the Oranmore basin.

From there, as the map reveals, I wandred sort of aimlessly through the neighborhood, figuring that sooner or later, if I kept Stanton to my right, the streets would spit me back out onto it, and they did, but only after treating me to a couple of brutal descents.

About two thirds of the way down the last one, Stanton in sight and legs tensing into oak to resist gravity's siren song, a group of children awaited me near the bottom of the slope. They called out a jumbled, polyphonic greeting from their post under a streetlight, and then a young, impossibly skinny girl moved assertively toward my path down the hill, hand outstretched. "Hi-i," she sang out again as I approached, importuning something I couldn't quite interpret. Uncertain, and still wrestling with the handlebars and gravity, I started to wonder whether she wanted me to slap her five as I rolled by, but I realized that if I did so I might not be able to control the bike's speed, and with the T-intersection at busy Stanton looming, I couldn't risk it. Instead, I just slid by, with little room to spare, grunting and fitting a feeble belabored smile. As I passed, she shouted something that sounded like, "Hi -- you dick."

Kids these days.

Spring has sprung in earnest, folks, and the night was absolutely beautiful. I climbed Oranmore and could have ridden more and more, another sign that I am growing stronger.

Thermocline

2006-03-27T18:52:00.000-05:00

This week brings Spring in earnest to this quarter. I might defensibly hope that this morning, at 26 degrees upon waking and 31 degrees at departure, may represent the coldest morning I will have to endure on two wheels until sometime next fall. But I cannot hope, regardless of the temperate forecast, that the temperature will not bob around to an extent defying even layering. In the spring, on a bike, one carries almost as much as one wears, never sure.

Today, leaving the office a bit late at 6:30-ish, using the lights in the twilight from an abundance of caution, I wore less home than I wore to work. This morning: skullcap, full-fingered gloves, fleece vest under windbreaker. This evening: no skullcap, half gloves, vest balled up and stashed in my bag.

I was surprised at the chill leaving the office, but I knew it would fade with effort. Nearing home, I turned down Butler at the cemetery entrance, gathering speed, and as I turned I was repelled from my sanguine meditation by a sudden chill, the air cutting through my shell as though it were sheer and drawing taut the skin on my arms into gooseflesh. I was reminded at once of the pockets of cold that lurk beneath the surface of the bay where I have vacationed with my family lo these past thirty years in August or September, the testicle-shrinking, shiver-inducing frigidity that suggests its matriarch North Atlantic, a few miles east, and incipient winter hibernating all summer long -- like the coding for cancer in a body -- amid the dark waters.

But Spring surely has sprung; the sun no longer shines impotently, the days lengthen and grow more amiable. I am eager for thunderstorms, rain spraying sidewards and back from the few square inches where the rubber of my front tire meets the pavement to soak my feet and ankles mercilessly, a spine of water improbably preceding me in a distorted parabola from the front tire's pinnacle, a forgotten physics calculation's vindication. Even the odd typically ephemeral peppering of hail, in its way, is a welcome advent, its prickly smarting against cheeks and fingers an affirmation, a stinging ablution.

Variations: Flat Pittsburgh

2006-03-26T16:26:00.000-05:00

Hungover like a frat boy, I conditioned joining Brian and Eli for a short ride on a promise of no real climbing. They were kind enough to oblige.

This week: 53 miles (of course, I never post my normal, 8-mile commute days, of which there were three this week). Not enough, but oh well.

Man, I could really go for a pizza. But I think instead I'll fix the egg sandwich I couldn't bring myself to cook this morning.

Eyes Wide Shut

2006-03-25T13:27:00.000-05:00

Like an elite athlete struggling to recover from invasive surgery, I have yet to reacclimate myself to my dreams. A psychic injury, of sorts, entirely ended what had been, until then, a vibrant, lucid dreamlife, one that made an adventure of virtually every night and every (rare) catnap. Science tells me I must have dreamt. And so the injury did not deprive me of my dreams, but rather deprived me only of my lucidity within them and my recollection of them in the cocooned in the muslin of morning.

Recovery has been slow, faltering, incremental. Now I remember at least some of my dreams upon waking, and I not infrequently awaken to them from within. The control I once enjoyed -- making of each dreamscape an amusement park, or at least a new city to be explored -- has been long in returning, however, and I regret my continuing inability to mold each subconscious island into a playground of my own design.

Lucid dreaming is something that should come with practice and effort, conventional wisdom has it, and there are any number of suggested techniques for achieving greater lucidity to and control in one's dreams. In my case, I benefited from chatty, whimsical parents, who fixated on the idea for a spell when I was relatively young. Simply listening to them illuminated its possibilities, and at some time in adolescence, with no real effort applied, I began to awaken to my dreams with some regularity with a host of results. Slowly, I developed the ability to manipulate my nocturnal sojourns to suit my mood and my fancy.

Now, I would estimate, I awaken to about a third of the dreams I recall upon waking, and so I am returned to a state more endemic to my youth, when dreams could be fearful occasions. I've only had a handful of nightmares sufficiently vivid to have stayed with me, and very few since adulthood. I almost never exert the god-like control I once took for granted, however, an elementary reminder of my subjugation to my own implacable hardwiring, how fragile things are that a finite episode has changed things so inexorably, even many months after its passage.

Now, I often awake aware that I have dreamed an epic, which I recall only in fragments. A couple of early mornings ago, I found myself shackled to a long story of a devising wholly removed from any conscious effort or contribution, a ride I had not asked to take and could not readily end. At one point I woke entirely, somewhat breathless and tired with the odyssey, only to fall quickly asleep and continue where I left off.

In a last segment of the dream before waking for good, perhaps twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off, I found myself face to face, through prison bars, with the dark almond-shaped eyes of a beautiful young woman. She looked Japanese to me, but I struggle to distinguish one far eastern ethnicity one from another so she might have been imagined with the features of a different heritage (an interesting question lurks here regarding whether my subconscious could have given her the features of a discrete ethnicity when my conscious mind would struggle to explain what suggests one background over another, but that's nothing I need to get into here).

I remember only that our eyes' silent meeting was fraught with meaning for both of us, a caesura in the drang of all that had transpired around us, but beyond that context eludes me as it has since I woke that morning. The oddity of the moment, however, was that as I stood there, still, returning her stare, I had the entirely dissonant experience of meeting her wide steady eyes with my own while another part of me, a thin rope of connection, reached back into this world to feel the tight press of my shut eyelids asleep in my bed. I wasn't necessarily lucid to the dream as such; perhaps if I had been the sensation would have been less discomfiting. Rather, I had the irreconcilable experience of my eyes being both as open and shut as they ever are at the same time.

Paralleling this disconcerting duality, I woke from that scene at once happy to be of one mind and sorry I couldn't have followed the dream further to resolve it in the dream world where resolution once came so readily.

Each night I go to sleep hoping things have returned to what used to be normal. That hope, the prospect of control, used to be self-fulfilling. Now it appears not to be enough.

Variations: Nightlife

2006-03-24T21:26:00.000-05:00

Time was, on Friday night I'd be home at 8, drinking something, anticipting a shower, considering outfits, playing phone tag with cohorts. It's not entirely unlike that now, but the occasions are fewer and farther between. Tonight weas a celebration dinner on southside, a full stomach, mist, and a phantom journey through the haunts of my recent history en-roundabout-route to home and basketball and a quiet night of, well, this and little else.

Today's commute included some unfamiliar features, and encompassed a number of nasty hills, notably Bates, which I have only climbed once on Susan, and not recently. Truth is, it was nothing I looked forward to, especially at rush hour, the most likely time for me to try it, when in addition to gravity I'd be negotiating cars backed up at the light atop the hill. It's not the sort of hill one wants to stop and then have to start up again on.

Tonight, outside the restaurant, I stripped of my sweater, rolled up my khakis, decided to skip the skullcap,and affixed lights to the frame. Cruising nightspots one after another, I observed their differing schedules: Southside Works (the map has it as a big patch of dirt, which reveals how new the complex is) was fairly busy with its movie heatre and its covertly corporate restaurants; Oakland was heating up, the young needing no excuse to start drinking on classless Friday, the sooner the better; Walnut Street in Shadyside was strangely quiet, and Ellsworth was predictably even quieter.

By then Stanton loomed, but notwithstaning persistent cramps from dinner and dessert, the incessant pistoning of my khaki-clad legs, and the beginnings of saddle sores from the coarse fabric of my cheap pants, something in the winter air, some hint of spring evenings awaiting mere days away, something even of summer urged me to pedal on, away from the direct path home. And so I pushed onward along Highland, observing a few stalwarts sitting in the warm glow inside Tazo D'Oro's picture window including one winsome woman sitting alone with only her wild hair and a book for company, climbing the last modest hill toward the park.

Then -- and only then -- did the nipping at my ears and the chafing inside my thighs urge me homeward. I turned down the hill along the edge of the park, a phantom playing out my slow descent down the steep hill, consciously forcing myself to concentrate as in my fatigue and cramping and general complaisance I didn't trust myself to hedge against the many hazards concealed by darkness -- teens exiting the park between cars by the curb, people lurking inside those same cars who cast no silhouette in the darkness, potholes barely detectable below my front wheel, dogs, errant unseasonable squirrels, firewood laying improbably in the road, the usual.

On Negley, heading back toward East Liberty, the gentle descent pulled imperceptibly at my bars, and I found myself quickening until I was nearly spun out, easily exceeding 20 miles per hour on a stretch of pavement that felt flat, speeding sufficiently to require a significant reduction in speed before I turned a wide sweeping right from the double yellow line on Negley to the double yellw on Stanton.

I slowed then, preparing for the climb, regretting that my spin through Highland Park had done nothing for my cramps. On Stanton, as I stood out of the saddle and began to negotiate my effort level with my lazier nature, I made a deal with myself: I would allow myself to use my brake descending the sharp side of Stanton if -- and only if -- I climbed all of Stanton without resuming the saddle or taking a slow-down break.

And that's where it all came together: two thirds of the way up Stanton, where I typically flag, I found an unlikely sanguinity, a resignation to my own determination, the triumph, however brief and inconsequential, of my better nature. For the first time yet, I climbed the easier side of Stanton without faltering, at a steady pace, left-right-left-right, the bike rocking beneath me like a tool, like a stubborn animal enslaved by its own ineluctable momentum or a workout partner exasperated by my persistent bitching but unwilling to let me off the hook -- I wasn't sure who was pushing whom, and before I could figure it out I was atop the ridge contemplating the other side.

Descending Stanton with the aid of a brake I'm still relearning how to use was an unmitigated rush; arriving at an empty house to a tall glass of water and a humming furnace an unmitigated privilege deferred. My ears tingled. My legs felt strong. And my wind returned soon enough.

May and Melancholy

2006-03-21T19:20:00.000-05:00

More dedicated readers, all seven of you, might have followed recent comment threads enough to have noticed the frequent offerings of one May, who even was kind enough a few comments back to furnish a link to her weblog, A Private Eye. Although it's not usually my practice to blogroll anything so new (beginning at the end of February, so far May has posted only a handful of ruminations and photos), in part because quality is in question given a brief sample, and in part because so many blogs fail to take root in their proprietors' worlds and soon enough wither away, I'm making an exception in this case (under MoonOverWords). For as long as it lasts, this one is worth watching.

In her most recent post, "Melancholy," May writes beautifully and provocatively on the subject:

Today, when I drove back home, it was darker than usual. It had just stopped raining and there was mist all around. I passed by the grey lake and by an old hotel attached to the corner of the road. In the water, in front of the hotel, there was a sailboat without its sail and it was slowly swaying. I was listening to the sad “Autumn leaves”, sung by Eva Cassidy. A deep sensation of warm melancholy came over me like a tender hug. I did not reject it. Although I am often too busy and too projected toward the [pursuit] of enjoyment, it felt good to acknowledge that I am still able to miss what I cannot have.

This little fragment, if nothing else (and examples abound), illustrates why I was so floored when May semi-apologized for her English in an earlier comment on this site. Her evocation of such an ephemeral, protean state of mind, makes a lie of any such apology, whether read for its veneer or for its substrate. An old hotel attached to the road, a boat slowly swaying, compact images fraught with elusive emotional antecedents demurely withheld.

Surface flattery aside, hours after I first read this I continue to turn it over in my mind, the casual equivalence May implies between melancholy and the regret that attends our desire for objects beyond our reach. I have never made that association, at least not directly, tending to use melancholy in the sense of its tertiary definition of pensiveness, perhaps tinged with something closer to depression.

Perhaps timing has something to do with it: of late, I have found myself in a state that I might call melancholy, if only out of an abundance of charity (insofar as the recent strain I've caught is closer to depression tinged with pensiveness than the reverse). At this age, I find myself conscious of cement hardening around my ankles. One might think that my enduring solitude and childlessness would forestall this cliche of American manhood, but while the specific gravity of the weight anchoring me may differ for this me from what it would have been for the married-with-children version of me I imagined five or so years ago -- each possible me layering in fugue one over another, until the doubling and trebling of posited mes defies focus or resolution -- it's turning out to be like the punchline of a certain species of joke in which the subject thinks he has negotiated a series of hazards only to find himself imperiled by the one he didn't anticipate.

I am: a lawyer, a loner, a homeowner; I am not those things I keep imagining I could be: a writer, a thinker, an academic, a man beloved of many friends and reviled by a few carefully selected foes, a starting pitcher for the New York Mets. I am: a smoker, a cipher, a contrarian with a contentious streak; I am not: an athlete in enviable health, a person who forms strong lasting relationships, amiable.

And, perhaps like May, I pride myself on being here now, n appreciating each of the inconceivable incidents of each miraculous day. The most exasperating thing about my occasional (but recently more frequent) dark moods is that they take me out of the now -- kicking and screaming sometimes and other times without much of a fight --and fill me with thoughts of the past, all of which fundamentally is inaccessible, and of the most remote corners of the present, which are no more available to me, states of mind I cannot attain like a desert mirage, accomplishments that continue to elude me if only for lack of trying.

How difficult it is to look at oneself and accept, how difficult to live according to one's moral and philosophical commitments, even given the challenges of their formation, endeavors begging for vindication in manifestation. How difficult to say what one means, to clarify rather than obfuscate, to speak in a voice worth listening to, even when the speaker purports to be his own audience.

And in that sense, perhaps, life is suffering, just as the Buddhists would have it, and it is only in the exaltation of this peculiar suffering with which we are all blessed that one may achieve satisfaction and peace.

Good God, at this rate I'll be rereading the existentialists by week's end. Another trial.

To return to May, the promotion of whom was to be the thrust of this post (modest thought it may be, coming from little old me), I can't help but feel a little envy: if she expresses herself so well in an acquired (second or third or fourth) language, how much more ably must she speak in her native tongue. Alas, in my monolingualism (another regret), I'll never know.

Housekeeping

2006-03-21T19:17:00.000-05:00

This is long overdue. Under MoonOverFriends, please find ma vie en vert, new friend (to me) Stephie's weblog. I won't speak for her; her early posts (the blog is fairly new) say plenty about her interests (generally, film, consistently with her graduate work) and offer plenty of reason to keep an eye on her site.

Snakes on a Plane, Man . . .

2006-03-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

Snakes on a Mutha F*&kin Plane.

I don't want to love Samuel L. Jackson, but I just can't help myself.

Intersection -- Eleventh and Penn

2006-03-20T18:11:00.000-05:00

I eased up to the intersection, two cars waiting in front of me, and watched the courier on the other side of the intersection, lithe and hoary in black on black on black, steady himself with the occasional backward rotation, wheel cocked to the side, slowly inching into the intersection playing traffic like chess.

My posture was similar but more patient, wheel turned toward the double yellow line, standing on my leveled pedals still and balanced, a quick rearward quarter cadence to regain my deteriorating equilibrium followed by a lazy half-rotation forward, eyes on the courier's progress toward me as I waited in line for the light to change and the cars before me to move.

Behind and to my right approached the tell-tale clicking of a freewheel. Turning slightly to the right, I waited until a diminutive woman in red sweatpants coasted into my peripheral vision, safely on the sidewalk, where she stopped at the handicapped ramp and waited for the light with her own peculiar breed of sanguinity, slouched down on her low saddle like a lanky teenaged boy on a BMX bike.

My mind was flooded with work, and errands, and thoughts of the coming Caffeinator. At rest, slowly eating up the bit of pavement I'd allowed for that purpose, I relieved myself of the burden of concentration, and my ruminations, diffuse as the breeze in my face, carried me away without a second invitation.

The light changed, and the cars in front of me eased slowly forward. I stood into the pedals, tracking the bumper of the car in front of me, watching its right taillight for signs of a change. The courier passed on the other side of the line and waved, lifting his hand slightly from his bars in answer to my reflexive nod, quiet bonhomie.

The intersection was clear and safe, and I allowed myself a brief glance at the young woman as I passed; she still lingered there with her foot down. Her face, alabaster doyenne hosting a frenzy of pink on her cheeks, was radiant and impassive. I resisted the temptation to stop in the middle of the road and stare (conversation was out of the question for a host of reasons), instead turning my head and then my shoulders into the turn, which I fed with my gathering momentum, angling my front wheel toward a familiar seam amongst several metal caps in the road.

Homeward, angel.

A Comedy of Errors

2006-03-18T18:56:00.000-05:00

Today, Andrew, Aaron, Dave, and I met at Kraynick's to work on our bikes. More specifically, Dave finally had the parts to finish assembling his first fixed gear, and Aaron was set to help him across the finish line. I needed to replace my bottom bracket and put a brake back on the bike. Brakeless had always only been a temporary thing; it just became a six-month temporary thing.

It's worth noting that I'm not patient with mechanical tasks, not even a little bit. Add to that that I hadn't ridden since Monday and had spent the last couple of nights drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching basketball like the vegetable I sometimes feel compelled to be, and add to that that I woke tp a nasty sinus headache even a shower couldn't clear, and circumstances were all set to conspire against anything going smoothly or well.

First, getting up into Bloomfield: I packed a bag and, running late, headed up to a Bloomfield cafe for breakfast. This, unfortunately, required a quick ascent up Main Street from Lawrenceville into Bloomfield. Or rather it quickly required a slow, agonizing ascent. I was fighting gravity, my own pre-coffee torpor, and a bottom bracket that, once removed, would be the marvel of a number of knowledgeable bike people at Kraynick's: You were riding on this?

When I arrived, late, Dave had already encountered problems with one of his fancy new crank arms, which arrived cracked. I went to work on removing my bottom bracket, which proved nasty. Pursuant to the advice of Jerry, the sage proprietor, we tried to remove the BB on the assumption that the drive side was threaded left, instead of the standard right. Turns out, however, that both sides were right threaded. Girded by a generation of knowledge, however, Jerry disregarded our comments to that effect and provided me with the better of the two BB's he carries, which was right threaded.

The details don't matter, but over the course of the ensuing hour, while Dave was finishing up his attractive new fixie, Jerry realized and accepted that both sides of my BB were indeed right threaded, and we drew the conclusion that someone, at some time, had actually tapped my frame and rethreaded at least one side of it, making it a bit of a BB bastard. We managed to use the cheaper of the two BB's he carries combined with the receiving cup from my old BB to make the bike work, but the diagnosis remains that I should have the frame bored out to a greater diameter and rethreaded the right way for an italian bottom bracket; until I do, I'll have no choice but to use a cheaper, less durable and smooth component.

Having sorted this out, we turned to reattaching my front brake and running a line to it. I removed my fancy yellow bar tape and bought what Jerry had in cork: black, black, or black. Boring. Attaching the brake and running a new line, matters attended do by the more technically inclined Andrew while I reattached the crank arms to the new BB, proved uneventful, but once we replaced the front wheel it proved tricky to keep the brake from rubbing. Although a single pull front brake should be self-centering, it seemed to want to stay out of alignment and rub on one side. In a rather coarse gesture, we just opened it up wide enough that the rubbing wasn't a factor even with the brake significantly off-center. After all, the brake is there for assistance on downhills on long rides more than anything -- after riding brakeless all winter, I will not give up the workout that comes with braking through my legs.

Finally, we were ready to ride, and ready to watch Dave figure out what it is not to be able to coast. I should note here that Dave is a pretty serious cyclist when it comes to geared road bikes; the man has killed me on such rides in the past. But he's the last in our group to pick up or build a fixie, so in this one regard he's still learning.

From Kraynick's, we headed to the Quiet Storm for much needed bathroom brakes, coffee, and lunch.

After we were relieved, refilled, and refreshed, we hit the road. We recognized it was a bit late for a long ride, but still wanted to collect a few miles. My sinus headache had not relented, but I wasn't prepared to go home. We headed down Graham to cross Friendship and head into Shadyside and Oakland.

Turning onto Morewood from Centre, leading the group, I heard a pop and then a clang as something kicked up from the road to ricochet off my frame. I looked down to find that one nut had come off my front wheel axle. I pulled to the side, instructed Andrew to watch my bike, and jogged back to where I'd heard the sound. In the gravel by the side of the road, only eight inches from the oblivion of a storm drain, I found my nut, thankfully brilliantly chromed. I returned to the bike and threaded it back onto the axle, cranking it down harder than a front wheel requires, and cranking down its opposing nut equally hard. Then I cranked down the rear nuts just for good measure.

Almost immediately, though, the brake was rubbing again, and hard this time. Looking down, a skein of rubber fragments coated the brake and the fork. I pulled over again, no more than two blocks from where I'd last stopped. Examining the brake, I discovered that it had actually been rubbing the front tire and had created a frayed groove in the tire for its entire circumference. Removing my multi-tool from my bag, I used an alanwrench to loosen the offending brake pad and slide it down to the rim. But it dawned on me that the whole thing didn't make a lot of sense. The front wheel wasn't centered in the fork. Removing the front wheel, which proved rather difficult as it had wedged itself into the fork weirdly, I reset it and found it centered again. Now, the brake wasn't impinging, but the shoe on the rubbing side was too low. Once again, I loosened the alanbolt to slide the shoe back to where it belonged.

We proceded through Oakland without event, unless you count the car that bore up on me at the tail of our group and rode my wheel, simultaneously refusing to use the other lane it had to its left and to back off as anyone who didn't want a small slip up to end up in a large lawsuit would do. Refusing to be muscled out of our lane, let alone permitting him to pass only to harrass my friends ahead of me, I slid further out into the lane and offered, with my left hand, a Jersey salue. He rode his horn and remained behind me for far longer than circumstances required (the left lane still entirely available to him), and I just taunted him with my finger and my bike and my greedy determination to enjoy a fair share of the road. Eventually, he raced past me and I watched his brake lights blink once, twice, and a third time. I imagined him looking for an appropriate place to pull off the road and I checked the left lane to make sure I had an evasive option in that direction. He didn't stop, though.

Fighting a stern headwind down Fifth Avenue toward the Birmingham Bridge, a wind strong enough to obviate most of the benefits of the downhill, I pushed through the valley and up the other side. Behind me, I heard a metallic pop, and looked over my shoulder. Dave, behind me, called out, "That was my seat."

We pulled over again, and circled. His seat had fallen backwards, its nose sticking erectly upward. A few minutes of fiddling later, it was back in position, and again we were off. At Fifth and Grant, however, we found ourselves stopping again, to examine Dave's chain, which seemed to be popping on the odd rotation. That problem we identified (it related to a chain guard that was too snug with his track chain), but couldn't remedy at the time.

Deciding enough was enough, we turned toward the strip and shifted over to Smallman for the ride home. We stopped at 20th-ish, under the bridge, to say good-bye to Dave, whose return trip required the climb up Penn Avenue to where his car was awaiting him at Kraynick's. Before parting, however, we considered his crank arm, which still was noticeably loose. Deciding it was nothing, we parted, and Andrew, Aaron, and I continued down Smallman into Lawrenceville.

Andrew came to my house for a beer, Aaron continuing directly home to Blawnox. Upstairs, basketball on the television, my phone rang. I picked it up and it was Dave. "Do you know what talent is?" he instructed. But I thought he had asked what time it was.

"Six-ish," I said.

"No, what talent is."

"Oh," I said. "What's talent."

"Climbing Penn Avenue with one crank," he replied.

"You lost your crank?"

"Yeah, it popped off."

And as though that weren't bad enough, he's convinced that someone siphoned half a tank of gas from his truck while it was parked on Penn Avenue in Garfield. In broad daylight. On a Saturday afternoon.

Everyone is in one's piece. Everyone's bike is in one pieces -- or in Dave's case, two pieces. And hopefully everyone made it home intact. But all in all a rough day. And I still have that sinus headache.

The good news: the better of my two brackes is in seventh place out of 78 after three days of March Madness, and is positioned to finish very strong. I might be looking at a very healthy chunk of money here. Which I evidently will need to remachine and reequip my bike.

questions (an open thread of sorts)

2006-03-16T19:56:00.000-05:00

folly's plaint: when will it stop?
wisdom's lament: so soon?

what's next?

Variations: Oranmore

2006-03-13T19:06:00.000-05:00

Today, factoring in a couple of necessary stops, the passage of the storm before I left the office, and the fact that I will not be able to ride to work tomorrow, I had to take dramatic action.

I've written about Oranmore before:

Oranmore, the last street priot to Stanton, between milemarkers 9 and 10 on the map, is particularly entertaining. While the map doesn't show it very well, the lion's share of it is a slope so steep that, at least on a fixed gear, it feels more like working some new fangled Nautilus machine than it does riding a bike. It's not, that is to say, just like riding a bike. It's like kneading a mountain of pizza dough with your feet in a room full of ammonia while someone hits your thighs with a rubber mallet. It's short, at least -- its only virtue.

Nothing's changed, except that this time my bag was full of unused rain clothing, a pound of coffee, and a carton of cigarettes (I know, the irony -- bite me).

In sum, Oranmore [see milemarker 8 to Stanton]: 'nuff said.

Eagle Rock

2006-03-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

Saturday, I was home in New Jersey. In the morning, I headed out to explore the town in which I was raised. It was a bit cool for my shorts and jersey, at least for a while, but as I leaned into the ride it grew more comfortable.

Once away from home, I pushed slowly southwest into the corner of my town, which backs up against Eagle Rock Reservation, a sizable patch of woods embedded in the suburbs atop a cliff at the edge of my town. I schemed to evenly distribute a substantial climb, aiming to avoid any of a host of near-vertical hills, drawing on my imperfect and fading knowledge of the roads I once drove incessantly as a teenager.

At the foot of the Reservation, which sits atop the cliff at the western edge of town that shields us from thunderstorms and denies us a view of sunsets, I climbed the switchback road I once spun my 1980 Mustang on as a seventeen-year-old, and made my way out to its breathtaking overlook. The view isn't stunning because of extraordinary height; perhaps 150 feet below the vantage point one can see the road at the edge of town through the winter-barren trees below. There are houses. And cars passing. Rather, the view is extraordinary for the unimpeded panorama of all the meadowlands and Manhattan beyond, laid bare, impossibly close.

The old stucco and spike wall that deterred the young from plunging down the cliff on a Saturday bender has in substantial part been removed and replaced with a marble memorial, complete with modified traffic pattern and statues in bronze, to those who died on September 11, with a large bronze book containing the names of those many residents of Essex County who died that day, several of them from Montclair. And were the memorial -- seventeen tablets lined up below the view, five columns of names, towns, and ages per tablet -- insufficient to evoke the tragedy the City's emasculated skyline just beyond the wall would stumble to the task.

I spent perhaps ten minutes up there, sweating, catching my breath, drinking all but the last few sips of my water, planning to head home fairly directly from the rock . . . it was a lovely day, and the unmanned skyline was sprouting new growth, construction cranes visible at lofty heights in several locations, the Freedom Tower soon to begin to rise from the ashes and restore to the financial district its virility.

Riding home, I did not dwell. A couple of the downhills were so steep I found myself skidding just in trying to minimize my speed; and so I slid down one hill, and skipped down another, praying on both occasions that my chain wouldn't choose that moment to let go. I have grown accustomed to New York's loss in some fundamental way, but views of the City still affect me, still, as perhaps they always will.

In the Dumbo section of Brooklyn (so identified do to its location Directly Under the Manhattan Bridge), Saturday night, my friends' gallery proved to be an inviting space, and their stable of artists impressive given how new said friends are to the business.

Post-Mortem

2006-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00

The hint, the barest hint, like an emerald tassel of aurora borealis over Orient Point, Long Island, really the mere suggestion (and the concomitant suspicion that it's all in one's head) -- wishful thinking, even -- of something, someone, extraordinary, peripheral vermillion amid the stars, just . . . maybe.

There is magic in sitting across a table from someone about whom one's predominant thought is: She's out of my league. And there is simplicity in it, too.

Variations

2006-03-09T18:23:00.000-05:00

So today, out of an abundance of ambition, and basking in the glow of an unusual eight-hour night of sleep (I woke at 4 and found myself strangely uncomfortable with the thought that I still had three hours of sleep ahead of me; I woke to my alarm groggy and disoriented by my circadian satiety), I decided to cap the week with another long ride home in the unseasonable temperatures.

The only real differences from yesterday's return trip are pace and a few different choices made on the fly. Neville is no longer barricaded, so I was able to roll right through Fifth without jogging over to Craig. Because I didn't get forced over to Craig, I was free to use Ellsworth instead of Bayard, so I took Ellsworth to Bayard. After that, my route was identical to yesterday's, through Friendship and East Liberty to Stanton -- except that I made a left a block before Stanton rather than stand in a line of traffic, and came across Chislett.

9.74 miles in 44 minutes, for an average speed of 13.28 mph.

And since tomorrow I'll drive to work, heading directly to NJ at the end of the day, that wraps up my week unless I bring the bike to Jersey for a ride in the burbs on Saturday morning. I may. But for no, the tally for the week, factoring in the three rides discussed here and a standard-issue eight-mile round trip on Monday, is 66 miles in five days. 150 miles in two days it ain't, but it's still my best week in memory, and I felt fine tonight -- like I could have gone on or a while.

Training Begins . . .

2006-03-08T18:30:00.000-05:00

. . . when the urge to quit does.

Tonight, within a mile of embarking on my circuitous augmented ride home I found myself thinking about whether I should just turn around. I felt dreadful, weak in a deep way, left knee twinging with my cadence. Granted, I went out last night, had a few drinks, stayed up until 3 and then rose at 7:30, so it's not like I wanted for an excuse.

I decided to persevere, though, and tabled the decision whether to climb Stanton or just push through Bloomfield and down the hill by the hospital. After climbing into Oakland, I settled in -- still weak, but no longer uncomfortable or afraid that I had no climb in me. At Millvale and Liberty, I decided to push through to the Park, and at the Park, I turned right onto Friendship, Stanton beckoning.

There are no short cuts, and I have a long way to go. By next month, in the warmer weather, I must take this path home -- or variations on it -- almost every day. And by then I'd like to be making a similar trip on the way in, too, or at the very least adding a climb to the ride by turning up Main or Fisk in the morning.

If I can ride a hard 20 miles four out of five business days, and add a long-ish 30-mile-plus ride on the weekend, I should be able to muster what I need to survive the 150.

Why the MS 150 Is Going to Kill Me

2006-03-05T18:08:00.000-05:00

Because these 30 miles, a mere 20% of what I'm going to have to ride in two days in June, almost killed me. A brief pithy narration follows.

As for the start, I've already bemoaned the 5-7% grade of Stanton Avenue from Lawrenceville into Stanton Heights so I won't waste my time doing it again. Today, I noticed, while I had more trouble holding a steady pace out of the saddle, once I got past the back and forth changes of the hill's brutal beginning, I found myself in the saddle up into the Heights, holding down a respectable pace without standing. Nevertheless, I feared I was in trouble, underfed, underhydrated, over-cigaretted, something.

I pressed on, of course, to meet Moon's riding partner (MRP) at Enrico's in Highland Park, which explains the quick left turn off Stanton. At the cafe, MRP was drinking the last of his coffee and reading up on the methodology of a little diversion I found and passed on to him and a few others last week, an asteroid / comet impact simulator that is entirely too fun to play with. He had scrawled equations in the margin, checking the scientist's math. Engineers.

After a few wardrobe adjustments -- it was at once mild and chilly, with a significant breeze, making it very hard to figure out what to wear -- we were off. We rode uneventfully into East Liberty until at Penn Circle and Penn, yours truly in the lead, a woman crossed against the signal with her stroller in front of her without so much as glancing our way. I could tell by her body language that she was going to do just that, and I had already confirmed that there was no traffic behind me, so I swung left into the lane, clearing her by a bit more than an arm's length. MRP reported that as he passed he heard her say "Whoa." Responsible parenthood.

From there, we rode into Shadyside and then Oakland, cutting through the University on Fifth Avenue and proceeding downtown, where I led us on a meandering path through the triangle, the belgian stone of Grant Street clacking beneath our tires as we passed. Through the park we then rode, picking up the trail along the Ohio and heading out toward SCI-Pittsburgh, our second time riding out that far. We discussed as we rode the prospect of getting across one of the bridges in sight ahead of us and returning via Carson.

As we neared the big blue superstructure of the McKees Rocks Bridge, however, we realized that there was no direct ramp and that it crossed the river from high on the palisade to our right. We contemplated what we could do to get up there, and my testicles shrank as MRP, who is much fitter than I, manifested an increasing commitment to finding our way up the ridge one way or another.

Jumping off the trail at the decommissioned prison, we first tried to continue downriver on Preble Avenue. Very quickly, however, we reached the barricades and guard stands at the entrance to the Alcosan water treatment facility, the fence rimming which was adorned with a Terorism Threat Warning jammie (we're currently at yellow, in case you're wondering). We turned back, rebuffed but not deterred.

The alternative had been visible the whole time; a cut in the ridge that led back across the highway, 65, that fed the bridge. We'd climb up from behind, somehow, and get there that way.

And it was directly under that overpass that I found myself suddenly in the grips of a profound deja vu that it took very little time to replace. Directly under the 65 overpass stood a looming, narrow building that looked all too familiar. It was Eagle, a rather daunting gay bar that I've visited a couple of times over the years with friends, the last time probably a good five years ago. Three or four levels of exquisite, thematic gayness. Truly, a very entertaining place. I knew only that it was north of the rivers, all these years, having never driven there on my own. I never would have been able to find it, but here it was, a stone's throw from a sewage treatment plant at the acute convergence of a couple of dilapidated streets.

I noted this to MRP, and we slowed a moment while I explained the barely marked building's odd significance as, among other things, one of the very first gay bars I ever visited -- certainly, the first of its over-the-top fetishy ilk -- back when I was still coming to Pittsburgh as a tourist.

MRP indulged me for a moment, and then cut left against a Do Not Enter sign to climb an intimidating hill with crumbling asphalt. There was no choice but to follow. Had my goal been to reach the bridge, it would have been my choice too; my goal, at that point, was to lead MRP to believe that my goal was to reach the bridge, a fine but important distinction.

The hill was pretty rough, and at the top it curved left into an unfamiliar neighborhood that was really rather depressed. Young men stood on porches eyeing suspiciously our slow progress over the peak and down into a small valley; a vicious-looking dog near the bottom of the valley rushed a fence as we passed. At the bottom, another road branched off to the left, and rose quickly at a grade surpassing even Stanton. My stomach sank as MRP withour hesitating turned into it, lifted out of his saddle, and began to climb.

The gmap elevation -- this passage is the sudden crag visible between miles 14 and 15 (you have to scroll right to see it) -- really doesn't do the hill justice. In eighteen months of on-again-off-again riding, almost exclusively on a fixed gear for the past year, it remains a source of pride that I have yet to get off the bike because a hill has gotten the best of me. But on the worst hills, I usually spend the second half of the climb negotiating with myself over whether it would be okay, just this once, to give in, to unseat myself and walk the last little bit. Today, it wasn't so much a negotiation as it was a screaming match, the conflict palpable and adequate to raise veins in my forehead if the exertion hadn't already done so. MRP's inexorable progress a half-block above me, however, furnished enough motivation to hold me in doubt, which was enough to keep me moving, barely.

At the top, winded and entirely drained, having reached the peak of the palisade, we turned right into a gentle grade that took us slowly away from the bridge. Between two houses to the left I spotted the bridge -- below us.

"Dude, we're above the bridge," I panted.

MRP said, "I wondered if you saw that."

A few blocks down, at my suggestion, MRP turned down a dead end to see if we could get a view and figure out how to get to the bridge. The road terminated directly above the intersection at the end of the bridge, and we figured out how to reach it.

The bridge itself was actually quite spacious, and while in our uncertainty we opted for the sidewalk we agreed that in the future that won't be necessary. The sidewalk itself was reasonably clean, except for a few sprays of broken glass, and we stopped at one stanchion to enjoy the view down the Ohio, the circular pools of Alcosan directly below us.

The rest of the ride, once we crossed the bridge, was relatively uneventful. Meandering back upstream, we soon found ourselves on West Carson, which, despite the vaguely uncomfortable rate of travel of the cars at our elbows, actually was relatively smooth and safe. We passed Station Square, and sped through South Side to Southside Works and the Hot Metal bridge, where we crossed over and headed up through Panther Hollow into Oakland.

The rest is familiar. In service of training, I forced myself back up over Stanton, despite my fatigue, and enjoyed a familiar conversation with myself all the way up, which took a while in that I punctuated my slow ascent with several slow-downs to near dead stops for a rotation or two just to get some blood into my thighs and some air into my lungs.

At home, absolutely exhausted, I hit the kitchen before even removing my helmet, where I devoured a quarter-bottle of dry roated peanuts, a glass of water, and a banana, bringing with me upstairs to set up a map and do this write-up a Clif bar and a glass of milk.

I'm still hungry.

The upshot is that I will not be cleaning the house today, as I'd originally planned to do. Indeed, I'll be fortunate to drag myself from this seat and into the shower.

I'm committed to ride to work tomorrow, however, chafed perineum notwithstanding. But I'm none too happy about it.

The Sunday Papers

2006-03-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

Last night, Moon was at a fantastic show with, among others, his friend, a reporter for the Post-Gazette. At some point, our discussion turned to our preferences for weekend newspaper, and I confessed, with no small measure of guilt, that I have the Times delivered on the weekends and that's usually it.

Little did I know what I was missing.

Today, the P-G's website, and presumably its print edition, prominently features an article on the trials of contemporary consumer packaging. Hard-hitting news from one of America's last privately owned regional newspapers. After noting that in 2001 more than twice as many people suffered packaging-related injuries than from skateboards and swimming pools combined, the article considers why:

"The loss prevention managers at these big retailers are really the driving forces behind it," [Ken Sullivan, director of marketing for SCA Consumer Packaging,] said. "They're really concerned about gangs of people who come in and scoop up all this kind of stuff."

Of course, "high-visibility packaging" allows thinly staffed big box stores "to showcase products with a minimum of staff involvement," he said. "You just hang it on a peg and let it sell itself, while the employees in blue vests stay busy hiding themselves from the customers."

But in the world of Barbie, words like "theft" and "economics" are no-no's when it comes to the raison d'etre behind her impenetrable packaging. Instead, it's all about -- what else? -- looking good. A spokeswoman for Mattel, which makes Barbie dolls, noted that all those wires and manacles holding Barbie down -- which she delicately referred to as "points of restriction" -- are designed to keep America's favorite doll in great shape during her multi-thousand-mile journey from the overseas factory.

It's not like the Times awaiting me downstairs is going to want for fluff, but packaging? Really?

This House Is Home 9

2006-03-03T20:13:00.000-05:00

Since I moved in, the transom over my bedroom door -- clean of paint unlike most of the others -- has made my every passage Damoclean.

The transom is divided, and the left pane (looking out) has a rhombus of glass cleanly broken free of the rest of the pane, two sides the faces of the upper left corner, the two other vertices punctuating the two opposite sides. Even before I moved in, the inch or so offset of the glass in the four-sided figure has begged for tape or removal, remedy. But it has never moved or changed in any way; like everything else in this house, I have assumed a sort of stasis and grown been complacent.

Tonight, clunking upstairs in my cleated bike shoes, braced in lycra and long underwear and neoprene, helmeted, I greeted my roommate unseen in the TV room and headed to my room. I opened the door and as I passed beneath the transom I heard the inimitable sound of glass on glass, a thief's diamond etching a circle in a museum window under cover of night. I completed my stride before turning to see that the transom had turned on its hinge to parallel the floor, and the rhomboid had separated entirely, point down, to rest on the bottom of the frame.

A guillotine stayed. A reprieve. A warning.

School Day

2006-03-03T19:36:00.000-05:00

On the corner, beside the mailbox, stood Lowell, his hair a bowl inverted over his head and cocked rakishly to the rear. His cheeks, orotund and kissed rouge by November, resembled those of the squirrels frantically scratching at the base of a tree in the yard behind him, gathering a winter's rations. Like them, he lifted his nose slightly to the wind before noticing my approach, his hair blown momentarily back from his fair brow.

Between bangs and cheeks his eyes safely demurred -- indians, not chiefs. His parka was fisherman green and lined with tawny fur matted and spiked like a stray dog's. Clouds scudded by on their way to sea, and Lowell's eyes danced with the mailbox's bureacratic blue.

My workboots, buckskin with faux leather furls of padding at the achilles, crunched a passel of leaves underfoot, and Lowell of the Squirrels met my wary gaze, a line of evenly clipped hair bracketing his brow like a fitted paintbrush.

I don't remember how we greeted each other then. Certainly, we didn't embrace as is my custom now. At that tender age we did not lower ourselves to share an adult handshake, a complex taste we'd yet to acquire. Maybe we slapped hands; just as likely we stood awkwardly around for a moment, proximity our language, toeing tufts of yellowing grass at the edges of the treacherous flagstone sidewalk, tilted by implied tree roots into angles that might impart flight to a bicycle well aimed.

Too long a shared glance would have pitched us in each others' grappling arms to the foot of the hedges beside, every intimacy an invitation to idle contest, and I would have ended beneath Lowell's much larger frame, braced in babyfat, looming above me with a leering smile, seeking my surrender too long in coming.

I picked a red berry from the yew and pinched it between my bare fingers, rubbing to reveal the tiny pit within, the red pulp one shade too pale to suggest edibility. In the corner of my eye, Lowell's backpack was thinner than my own, I knew, and fit him, while mine, packed and cantilevered out from my lumbar made me feel small, unbalanced, vulnerable.

The wind sent a squall of leaves tumbling dryly across the road, where "Lennon Lives" was scrawled across the wall of the bowling alley, then an incomprehensible legend, a graffito like any other graffito, and I shivered inside my own coat. A hat hid in my hip pocket where it would stay even were a gale to come down from the arctic to embarrass my smarting ears.

Finally, Brent appeared in front of his house up the road and shambled with his charismatic dullard's enthusiasm toward us, a slim Trapper Keeper under his unjacketed arm, a beaming Cheshire smile haunting his fine blonde hair. The tacit ritual repeated itself, expanded by one exponent, and after a time we turned into the wind toward school.

The Evolving Tenor of the Smoking Debate

2006-03-02T13:42:00.000-05:00

Care of 3QuarksDaily, an article by a physician posits that lung cancer sufferers are the lepers of the twentieth century.

It is a sign of the times that there has been no storm of protest over the increasingly manipulative and moralistic character of anti-smoking propaganda. In the crusade to reduce mortality from smoking it is considered legitimate to exploit the deepest fears of parents and children. While the law seeks to prohibit smoking in public, the new anti-smoking advert seeks to proscribe it in the private sphere, fomenting domestic strife to achieve this objective. At a time when a wide range of civil liberties are under threat it is alarming that the strategy of using children to police their parents' behaviour - reminiscent of totalitarian regimes - provokes so little public disquiet.

The whole article, which isn't terribly long, warrants reading by any smokers and by anyone who's concerned about the degree to which anti-smoking fervor has displaced all semblance of tact in most contexts; people are very nearly comfortable spitting on smokers (and I speak from experience; the vitriol is sometimes astounding) and in general denigrating those addicted to tobacco in a way they'd blanche to see anyone denigrate, say, an alcoholic, an also-deadly, also-safety-jeopardizing addiction that garners considerably more sympathy than opprobrium.

If to No One Else, At Least I'm Predictable to Myself

2006-03-02T11:49:00.000-05:00

Thanks go to non-blogger Rachel, who directed me to this gem of a quiz.

take the WHAT BAD BOOK ARE YOU test.

and go to mewing.net. not as good as reading a good book, but way better than a bad one.

When I started this test, I thought, "Watch me draw Lot 49." This book was huge for me as an undergrad, and remains one of my avowed faves, notwithstanding that it violates one of my principal rules for identifying worthy books in that it doesn't read aloud, whether in whole or in part, terribly well, and notwithstanding its intrinsic pretentiousness.

I still recommend it to people, too, precisely as it was recommended to me: find a quiet place, start it at 11 pm or so, and read it through in one sitting. I read it in the empty, silent living room of a vacation rental on the East End of Long Island, the night and the bay blackly invisible behind the reflective picture window but for a few lights faintly glowing on the opposite shore. It was like having a nightmare without the inconvenience of having to fall asleep first.

I haven't tagged people with memes in a while, but because I'm very curious about what other books are there, I'm going to today. Majikthise, Emily, Michael, and the folks at Bloodless Coup -- you're up.

Mind the Gap

2006-03-01T00:24:00.000-05:00

Just posting this as filler to let you know that a graphic posted below has, at least for some of you, created a big air bubble above it. Scroll down for more nonsense.

UPDATE: This post now is somewhere between superfluous and a total non sequitur. Know what? I don't care. You're reading it anyway.

MoonOver[Your State Here]

2006-03-01T00:14:00.000-05:00

[UPDATE: Graphic removed, because I refuse to let a stupid quiz ruin the formatting on my weblog. For the record though, among the continental United Staes I'm almost perfect east of the Mississippi (omitting only Illinois and Indiana), and west of the Mississippi I have visited only Michigan (well, that's not really west of the Mississippi, but whatever -- I'm American, ergo I suck at geography), Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and California. Or something like that. Like I said, graphic removed, but feel free to play with yourself. Really. Do.]

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Why "Crash" Shouldn't Win the Oscar

2006-03-01T00:04:00.000-05:00

Armand and I over at Bloodless have been having fun upbraiding Crash as pretty much the most overrated Best Picture odds-on favorite ever, but Matt Zoller Seitz just nails it beautifully. A tip of the hat to Armand.

I'm also going to pat myself on the back for posting the Afterschool Special observation here over a week before Zoller Steitz did, when I wrote:

My whole problem with the movie is that it doesn't show racism as being all that complex, unless complex equals nothing more than pervasiveness and brazenness. I'll grant that it doesn't play heavy favorites, but it also uses a bunch of extreme archetypes to supposedly hem at the more subtle, insidious stuff that really plagues us. The racists you can see aren't nearly as problematic as the ones you can't. Everyone's racism in Crash was on such display that they might have been drug using jocks in an afterschool special, and though the movie had its moments overall it felt like nothing so much as an afterschool special for adults: hectoring, pedantic, and predictable.

Zoller Steitz says it way better, in any event.

Barratry: Shilling the Volokh Conspiracy to a Killer Soundtrack

2006-02-28T23:12:00.000-05:00

I don't do RSS, or any of the other feeds. Indeed, I don't know what it would look like if I did. Call me Old-Fashioned -- as with newspapers and magazines, I prefer to browse the blogosphere, and as with the former I go through phases with the latter.

That said, when I discovered the Volokh Conspiracy, I quickly subscribed to an email service VS offered, each post delivered piping hot (well, actually a couple of hours after posting, sometimes anyway) to one of the two relatively unused inboxes (heh, I said boxes) I use like a plumbing trap to capture various arms-length emails pertaining to commercial transactions and relationships and the occasional mailing list I subscribe to and then often unsubscribe from. I've found that I delete a lot of it; I don't have a lot of time lately, and it seems almost a chore.

There are many blogs I adore, and only a few I can count on myself to stay current one. One is populated by a few meatspace friends who are ultra-sharp, and the other two are creative sites, Zulieka like a journal but of an especially expressive and aesthetically worthy sort, and Flagrant who I consider one of the better post-modern novelists working, or rather is working on one of the better post-modern novels on a near-daily basis, the only problem being that she betrays no overt interest in the book deals swirling around the blogosphere.

For a while, the subject lines didn't reveal anything about the post (author, subject), and I'm pretty sure then, when I was busy, I just deleted the posts en masse. Now, however, the posts are properly labeled and I can see at a glance based on author and topic whether I care to read the post. I cull, selecting all, twenty-five messages at a clip, and then selectively remove the check marks of a few, repeating as necessary until I've deleted everything that doesn't immediately interest me. My reward for the long process of culling my inbox (that just keeps sounding dirty) is a handful of posts to which I have been looking forward, the supper for which I sing, or click.

This week of VC posts reminded me why I haven't cancelled my subscription; there was just too much good stuff, and I'm going to share everything that caught my eye. Requisite tips of the hat to tips of the hat are omitted, but I have included links to those articles VC merely shills itself, as they are, of course,* the thrust. In no particular order:

Volokh himself got all hot and bothered about words this week. On a related note, he shills Dahlia, who writes brilliantly of Anna Nicole Smith's unlikely visit to the Supreme Court:

Today's dispute is about the boundaries between state and federal courts—whether there is a zone outside ordinary federal court jurisdiction known as the "probate exception." (Try dancing naked to that.) Even though federal bankruptcy courts have rather broad jurisdiction, they have, for centuries, butted out in the areas of domestic relations and probate—under the theory that state courts are better-positioned to decide them. The 9th Circuit said the bankruptcy court should butt out here, meaning Anna gets nothing. She appealed, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari, thus making for the happiest crop of law clerks in modern memory.

Jim Lindgren, co-Conspirator, also posts on our favorite TrimSpa spokeswoman.

Turning to the other Conspirators, for those among my friends who are members of Law Reviews, who seek to be members of Law Reviews, who seek to publish in Law Reviews (and any of you feel free to ask Moon once in a while, Are you going to write something or what?), or those whose closest thing to "glory days" are their afternoons spent in law libraries "citing and sourcing," "pulling books," or bluebooking, a series of posts discusses the "sweet spot" for submissions, and the unraveling market for law review submissions (Hoffman at Concurring Opinions as linked by Conspirator, Orin Kerr).

Or you could just go read the site yourself (although the above, believe it or not, is a modest fraction of the post volume over there). For the record, I'm not logging a single trackback for all of the above. I'm no link whore.

And by the bye, as longing as we're acknowledging my technology backwardness (RSS, remember?), months after I bought my new laptop (if 18 months same as cash really qualifies as "buying"), concurrently with which I bought a bunch of blank CD's and jewel boxes, I finally just tonight burned my first CD. This is especially notable since for reasons I won't get into my roommate has anywhere between 500 and 1500 CD's laying around in the next room, many of which I'd like to add to my collection. My first two choices, the second of which I'm about to put in as the first expires, are both Yes albums: Fragile, and Close to the Edge. Lately, I've had the creeping suspicion that while I'd like to stay current, and do have certain growing branches of music I at least casually follow, I'm always going to have a taste for the classic rock I've largely eschewed for the past five or ten years, concept rock, the stuff that really tried. There's plenty of good music out there, no doubt, and I sometimes berate myself for how little I really know, but I just so rarely encounter things that think as big as these old seventies groups did.

This lament has long since been exhausted, but not by me: I think the movement from LP's, with their two sides and severe time limitations, to CD's with their expanding capacities and seamlessness (not to mention the first incarnation of shuffle), moved the focus from full-length albums to individual songs, with effects positive and negative. But I grew up on albums in a hippie household, and in some ways I've never left.

Coming Soon (March 2008): Moon buys an iPod (about which, tying this all together, VC offers a link).

______________________________
* I use "of course" so gratuitously that in formal documents I very require a dedicated of-course pass just to remove every unnecessary usage (to wit, basically all of them (of course)).

Contemplating Critical Mass

2006-02-26T14:10:00.000-05:00

So evidently they've largely stopped arresting cyclists participating in New York City's monthly critical mass group bike ride. I suppose this is a good thing, except perhaps for those who consider their participation in same to be civil disobedience in the proper sense of that by now worn out term. After all, disobedience becomes all too civil when arrests don't follow.

I'm not a big critical mass supporter or opponent, and I believe I've written about my ambivalence on the topic on this blog before. The gist of my ambivalence is this: when I've participated, all I've seen is a bunch of pissed off drivers. I'm not sure they're going to be any more charitable to cyclists they encounter on the road in the future for having been held up behind a phalanx of cyclists taking their time. On the other hand, the intrusion, on balance, is minimal, and I do like the consciousness-raising as well as the community-building aspects of the enterprise. In short, while I will probably continue to ride only rarely, I certainly respect those who do so every month and would defend their right to do so.

Here's the reason I'm writing about this, though. Evidently, the police in New York were arresting dozens of cyclists each month for parading without a permit. A judge, however, rebuked them for doing so, either ruling or strongly suggesting that the charge cannot apply to this activity. In lieu of mass arrests, this month, police handed out summons for, inter alia, crossing against a signal and riding the wrong way up Broadway.

And this is where my question comes in. Wouldn't it be far more demonstrative if in riding en masse the group obeyed traffic signals, yielded to pedestrians, and so on? In Pittsburgh, scouts essentially shut down intersections with their bodies and riders disregard the relevant traffic signals, which of course is that aspect of the ride most infuriating to drivers.

But it's not parading without a permit, or parading or demonstrating at all, if a bunch of people driving their legal vehicles on public roads and observing all relevant laws, happen to end up together and take up a lot of space. And that's where the ride would be far more interesting in not violating signals.

Sure, the group would have more trouble staying together, but in becoming more strung out the "statement," if that's what it is, would merely be bigger, the number of people conscious of what they're seeing greater, and the impact more diffuse but no less significant.

I don't observe all laws when I'm on my bike, because I ride in part to not sit in traffic, to not wait mindlessly at red lights where no traffic is in sight, and so on. I try to keep moving, for practical and aesthetic purposes. But the more treacherous the situation, the more legal my riding becomes; often, in evening traffic, I simply slide out into the lane and wait my turn with the other cars; similarly, at busy intersections, I also bide my time. Not because I must, but because it's safer and thus less stressful.

I by no means intend to defend the New York police. In arresting people on a trumped up permit charge is patently ridiculous under the law, and just meanspirited. But as I've said here before, the real critical mass is individual people riding often, taking up their rightful places on the road, behaving well, integrating themselves into traffic where necessary and being at once firm about their own entitlement to the road and polite to automobiles who share that road. "Share the road," that is to say, should cut both ways. I wish fewer people drove, but the reality is that many people have no option, especially in a mass transit-starved city like Pittsburgh.

I'm curious whether any of my readers have thoughts on the role of Critical Mass rides, their effect, and whether it mightn't be more effective to restructure the rides to respect the laws we so adamantly demand that cars observe when it suits us then flout when it doesn't.

Nowhere to Go But Up

2006-02-26T09:19:00.000-05:00

My all-too-level commute is killing me.

Yesterday, in an afternoon of swiftly plummeting temperatures and 20 - 30 mph winds, I got it into my head to ride. I realize I'm in shape wholly inadequate to the MS 150, which I intend to ride with friends in June and I can't afford to wait until March's warming to start piling on miles.

And of course, yesterday's ride hardly qualifies as piling on miles, but time, fitness, and did I mention wind, conspired to limit my options.

Seriously, though? -- hardest twelve miles I can remember, at least since I first started riding.

Start with the stepped 7% / 5% / 7% grade of Stanton Avenue for a warm up, the shorter but equally steep brakeless controlled descent down the other side, and then enjoy a relatively lazy ride up through Highland Park and Shadyside. Add to that a not insignificant but considerably milder climb up Beechwood Boulevard, a pell-mell barely controlled sprint down Forbes Avenue, and a stop at a friend's house in Wilkinsburg / Point Breeze / Regent Square, where he and his SLF were painting and making bread in an old bread machine, bemused by the fatigue evident in my expression.

After water and a half-hour visit, return to the porch to find the wind stirred up even more, an impatient frigid playmate who doesn't know his own strength, and the temperature significantly reduced from what it was. Enjoy a scenic return through some of the most depressed streets in East Liberty and a relentless wind carrying a chill wholly unfamiliar from the outbound leg of the trip, every inch of the return like trying to tunnel through the elastic membrane of a rubber bladder.

And then a final uphill slog up the back of Stanton Avenue, which you've been praying for the past mile or so will not require you to fight both wind and gravity at once, but only a small part of which is under the windshadow of Stanton Heights. Near the top, try not to weep with a sort of fury at the wind's blithe, repeated insult and your own imminent inadequacy to the task, and then (finally) inflect over the crest of the hill into the final descent, a 7% / 5% / 7% step down the hillside into Lawrenceville.

The only kindness afforded me the whole ride was that the wind on the downhill side of Stanton did a lot of the work for me, fierce enough that it essentially regulated my speed with its callused palm against my upright chest. When it relented momentarily, hidden behind looming rowhouses to the right, the bike slipped its tether and tried to run away from me toward the cemetery; not for the first time, I heard myself barking a creative, and wholly unpremeditated series of obscenities, as I summoned what little strength I had left in my thighs to restrain Susan's flight.

This morning, my thighs are stiff and cramped with the fatigue I never stopped feeling last night at a smoky Morgantown bar. and I'm appalled at how far I have yet to go to prepare myself for the big ride in June.

This morning there is an inch or two of pristine snow on the ground, snow which had only begun to fall in the city when I returned around 2:30, but which I had seen in its accumulating form on Interstate 79 through Washington County, the lanes difficult to divine in the orange glowing chaos of a thousand snowflake collissions per second against the windshield.

This House Is Home 8

2006-02-20T13:42:00.000-05:00

The house finally fallen silent with the departure of my roommate, Sunday, noonish, I don my robe to head downstairs and determine whether the New York Times has survived the morning unaccosted. Opening a door to enter the frigid foyer, I find the paper lying just inside the exterior door, laying sausage plump within its signature blue plastic skin. I retrieve it from the inside welcome mat, and move to set it on the hallway table when above the whooshing din of the furnace I hear something louder, more insistent, a hiss. Moving back toward the source of the sound, I imagine a piece of paper or a magazine somehow tangled up in a floor register, but as I enter the kitchen I recognize that the sound is coming from behind the door to the washroom on the far side of the kitchen. Before I open the door, that is to say, I already know the broader story, though I'm unsure of the narrative details.

With the door ajar, the noise intensifies, and I notice droplets of moisture on every surface revealed by the yawning opening. Neither the toilet nor the sink, along the wall, appear to be implicated. I look down to my left, where I discover a fierce jet of water rockting out of a hole it has carved in the sheetrock just above the floor and splattering against the side of the washer, which doesn't seem to care.

Even in the midst of this miniature disaster -- unsurprising given the struggles I have had with keeping the pipes in the ill-insulated and shoddily plumbed back room -- I can't help but appreciate the comedy in my own nonplused response. Water is shooting improbably out of a finger diameter hole in the wall at an astonishing rate (wasn't this pipe just frozen; how did it suddenly develop this capacity for flow?), drumming against the metal flank of my fancy new washer, and here's me, in robe and slippers, staring dumbfounded at the event as I might watch the breach of a beaver damn on a nature show, with passive fascination. Only with a moment's regard does it occur to me that this problem is entirely mine. No one will do anything about this but me. And time is passing all too quickly, the gallons adding up with the prospect of damages going and coming, the expense of unused water of course paling by comparison to the potential expense of extensive water damage. (The plumbing repair, though sure to be more expensive than either, has yet to enter my mind.)

Finally, I break the spell, leaving the room, closing the door behind me. I head for the basement stairs, and once on its concrete floor move into its back section toward the crawlspace where the offended plumbing originates, creeping dread competing with urgency to slow my step detectably. At the back wall, the awful sound of water falling; I turn on the light. The damage, in fact, is minimal as yet, though the loose dirt inside the crawlspace is now pasty mud, and is sliding into the basement a smooth carpet of brown. Most of the water, however, appears to be ending up in the washroom. Over the water heater, just a few feet from the crawlspace, a tangle of pipes and shut-off valves momentarily overloads my slept-in fuzziness, and I realize I have no idea what I'm looking at, not yet, not like this, the sound of water continuing with the implication of far more water overhead, my slippers tacky in mud.

Realizing that I have no capacity for subtlety I move quickly to the front of the house, where the main water line enters from the street. There, above the floor ad before the meter, a knob promises silence. I have a sudden premonition that it won't work, and I try to recall quickly whether my home inspector actually ever checked to ensure that it was operating properly. No matter. I turn it. A cold surprise of droplets burst out around the knob as it turns, and then silence in the line, and after a moment a welcome surcease of the dripping in back. Upstairs, I confirm what I already know: that the bleeding is stanched. I have tracked mud onto the floors.

Content with the gross gesture of shutting down the entire system, I fetch a mop and open the back room to sop up the worst of the standing water. Cleaning is pointless; I already recognize that this room will be dirtier once the plumber has come and gone. And there will be a plumber, of course.

Once the water is mostly dealt with, I call the roommate, who must have missed the event by no more than five minutes, to warn him that the house is currently without water and may be for some time. He's left some vacuum sealed meat on the stove to thaw, and the sink is full of last night's dishes; it seems only fair to let him know as soon as possible.

Upstairs I don more appropriate clothing -- jeans, a sweatshirt, and workboots worn without socks -- and return to the basement for a closer examination. After studying the plumbing that enters the crawlspace more calmly, careful to avoid standing in the mud nearby, I realize that shut-off valves are available for the back room, valves I failed to understand in the press of an incipient flood. I shut the cold water valve, belatedly realizing that the water emerging from the wall had not steamed at all, and return to the front of the house, where I cautiously open the main valve. Nothing sounds askance. Upstairs there is silence, the wall no longer bleeds icy water, some of the tension in my shoulders releases.

This morning, I called the plumber, whom I already expected this morning to prepare an estimate to run the lines and prepare an opening for the dishwasher I plan to purchase soon. He came. He saw. He spoke with me of cabinetry and soft copper and various ways to combine the work (the pipe breach and the proposed dishwasher opening are on opposite sides of the same wall) And now he's estimating, so help me.

My checkbook groans audibly on the desk to my right, striated with stretchmarks from its serial expansions and contractions, the joy of property stewardship.

* * *

Just above my head here in the corner of my bedroom, the insistent growling of a pigeon who has defied the bundled chickenwire contraption devised by my neighbor long before I moved here to prevent just this sort of roosting, sounds anything but dovelike. It sounds like something dying, or at least carping about potentially lethal conditions that it alone is equipped -- if barely -- to endure.

Occasionally a thumping flutter of flapping, the birds' grooming and shifting and vying for position drowning out the more sedate sound of my cat cleaning her forehead and nose, over on the bed. I cannot decide whether my reticence about opening the window and doing what I can to roust the fowl arises from my combined concern for sticking my head out in the arctic chill and making this corner more uncomfortably cold than it already is (not to mention inviting a flapping confrontation, which can only end badly for both of us), or whether it derives more from my instinct to forgive the bird its intrusion, given the circumstances.

This House Is Home 7

2006-02-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

9/4/05

To own this house, I take it, is to own the small, desicated rat corpse in a forgotten corner of the cellar? Bummer.

Filler -- Johari, Nohari

2006-02-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

So there's a meme running around over at Bloodless that's slightly more interesting than the standard Quizilla fare. I'll let the site speak for itself, but if you're so inclined, contribute to Moon's Johari and Nohari windows and get one yourself.

Today's Random Thought

2006-02-15T15:21:00.000-05:00

Insurance law actually makes my brain ache. Not in the concussed or hungover sense, but in the way that I imagine having a metal probe inserted deep into the tissue of my brain might.