in cars, sitting greatly

Guest blogger Christian Kiefer here, who has mysteriously forgotten his password to this site and hence has momentarily stolen Jefferson's (with permission) in an effort to relate my crossing paths with the early stages of the Great Sitting.

...

The Great Sitting, it seems, is something of a seated vortex. As many of you readers may already know, I am a fan of sitting, a huge fan. I like many things that require standing, but quite frankly I enjoy sitting far more. Not only that, but I enjoy sitting with a cup of coffee and a good book. For me, these are the requirements for a fundamentally good (dare I say "great"?) sitting.

My friends Jeff Pitcher and Mike Schwartz, having recently embarked on their own "Great Sitting" are, needless to say, doing a lot of sitting (5000 miles worth) as they ride their bicycles (!) to the fair state of Maine (made famous for me by Thoreau having written a book about it and for it being this nation's fat, erect cock (Florida of course being its flaccid counterpart; but alas I digress).

Nonetheless, Jeff and Mike, while sitting, are doing far more exercise than I care for while recumbent. I suppose one could sip a cup of coffee while riding a bicycle to Maine, and, with the miracle of iPods and audio books, one could even read, but frankly the quality of the experience, for me, lacks some fundamental quality. Ride my bike to Maine? I say nay nay.

I was, however, quite happy to receive a couple of phone calls from them a few days ago indicating that they were in the area and that they would shortly be in Sacramento, having ridden something like 90 miles the previous, foolhardy day (the thought makes me want to take a nap). I have seen Jeff only briefly over the past year, mostly at shows that one of the other of us have played. Seeing friends at shows is like watching a piece of space debris break through the atmosphere and burn planetside: beautiful, indeed, but so fleeting. Mike Schwartz I haven't seen since he put on the Dreamchasers showcase at UC Davis, wherein Pitcher put on a performance that made my jaw drop.

Any reader would probably suspect, then, that we would sit down (!) in the living room, perhaps drink some tea, and talk. What we actually did though, is drove around in my wife's absurdly large SUV. There was talking, of course, and there was much laughter (particularly at Mike Schwartz's spot-on perfect renditions of Bill Cosby), but it is primarily done in a moving car. Sitting, indeed, but not self-propelled.

It occurs to me, however, that I was somehow made a part of the Great Sitting through this fact of driving. Picking them up in midtown Sacramento, driving them to my home, then to my work, then back home, then back to midtown put me in the negative space of the Great Sitting: the final miles that accrue while not under their own power. It is not ironic that I chocked up my mileage at the behest of 2-soldier-per-gallon gasoline while Pitcher and Schwartz do it by muscle and joblessness. Fuck yes, says I. Furthermore, this is essentially the last friendly port before the trip out: up the Sierra and then through one of the most desolate stretches of road in the U.S.: Highway 50 through Central Nevada. (When I told my father, a long-haul truck driver, that they were riding this route on their trip, he said, simply, "Well, I hope they have everything they need." Needless to say, there's nowhere to stop and no one to help.) It's an incredibly long, flat stretch of desert. Beautiful, if frightening.

Of course, I can understand the trip in some ways. It has something fundamentally human in it. Our first piece of narrative English language literature is the Scandanavian tale Beowulf, a story which starts with young Beowulf setting off to find adventure. That is what you did in the year 600 (or whenever it was written: scholars disagree) and that is what you do now if you are of a certain bent. Jon Krakauer has written famously of this in his Into the Wild, but the Great Sitting is significantly more prepared than that ill-fated trip. Beowulf, incidentally, was successful in ridding the world of the terrible monster Grendel and, a bit later, Grendel's equally terrible mother, and lived to be an old man until he was finally met a rather heroic death at the claws of a huge dragon. Frankly, I don't think the heroes of the Great Sitting are any more or less crackpot than Beowulf: the motivation is practically the same: a pressing of human limits, a search for heroism (or the possibility of heroic deeds). Granted, freeing the world of a monster and riding your bicycle to Maine don't quite equate, but the event of the Great Sitting is still one of the bizarre moments of beauty that frankly make our rather dismal lives worth living. They are, after all, wearing gorilla masks for 1/2 hour each day. Why? Because they can. (I'm not kidding about the gorilla masks, either.)

So here I am, having sat and, in fact, sitting at this very moment, considering, at this late hour, diving into my soft bed while our two adventurers are at this very moment sleeping under the stars somewhere above Placerville (Pollock Pines, perhaps--or maybe beyond that). Maybe a falling star overhead. They are riding for themselves, to be sure, but also, in some way, they are riding for you: for your beauty and for your light--gorilla masks and all.

Godspeed you, my friends. And dream on, sweet life.

Posted by jeff pitcher at June 9, 2004 09:53 AM

....................................