yes, the beginning.

too sleepy to write the true words that lie in me at the moment...the vast untamed mountains. the last weeks have been "a rush and a push..." a giant spinning orb of chaos...and more work still awaits, but my eyes, my dear eyes they beg for slumber. rest. so i give. tomorrow morning, i will rise {likely quite early} and the great sitting will begin its movement. my dear, maine is a long way off.

marking and boxing and oh yes, sleeping.

back hunched, computer sitting gingerly upon boxes. i crouch on a pillow, in an empty room. my mark left, but quietly removed if such a thing is possible. the memories flood. boxes and boxes and dust and things thown out. the objects of my life again carted off to a distant place as the great sitting grows closer by the hour. the body has recovered beautifully. legs limber and calm. water, on a still day.

so i prepare the last minute things. re-route the mail. call the dsl people. close accounts. buy sunscreen. {does the natural stuff work?} organize my brain. sleep. oh yeah, sleep.

yes, we did it.

we finished. all three of us together. {though there were indeed moments of seperation} 12 hours riding time, 3 hours of rest along the way, which of course put us at a total of fifteen hours. we left in the dark, and returned in the dark. 16.7 mph average, and the greatest levels of discomfort i have felt other than injury {broken jaw in spain, broken arm, toe, nose, etc.} or an intense flu. though relative of course, as around mile 90 we saw a man bloody, on his back at the side of the road. the police we there and applying a neck brace, and his companions looked broken. it was quiet. it was at that moment precisely, when i concluded that i should quit thinking about the pains in my body and just ride my bike. which i confess, did not last all that long.

we {being us} got a late start after barely sleeping {2 hours?}, and thusly had to race as they close the rest stations along the way. hour two saw us keeping pace at about 23 mph which is fast, and FAR TOO fast for 7am with 170 miles to go. good god. this pace of course, led to some problems. i had the bright idea around this time, that i would urinate they way the pros do. so i slipped to the back of our pack, removed my penis from my shorts, and proceeded to learn how difficult this is by pissing all over myself. yes indeed, the 'professional cyclist peeing system' is more difficult than it looks. what this meant for me, aside from basically giving up and just pissing in my pants, was that i was left behind the pack to ride the morning winds up to lake berryessa with no draft. i did not like that. ah well.

at about mile fifty, i looked over at mike who seemed to be in fairly {really} bad shape. mike says to me, "this is not going well at all. i'm in a really bad place." i couldn't help but laugh at how miserable he was so early on. 23mph. but we dropped our heads and carried on.

rest stop #3. the sun was finally beginning to warm us, and we had covered 64 miles at 9:30 am. drinking, eating, drinking, eating. we stretched and hit the road, happy that we were finally passing people and we had closed the narrow gap between rest stops shutting down. we were now an hour and a half ahead of closures, while rest stop one was breaking down upon our arrival.

rest stop #4, mile 76. matt's spirits are high. my calf has stopped its strange new pain that began at mile 40. again i quote mike~ "two things: first of all, i will never do this again, and when i get home, i will be crossing the 'ironman' off my to do list." all three of us laughed heartily.

at this point, things become rather blurry. we had come into the hills in earnest, and the fatigue coupled with the fact that we had another 130 miles to go was problematic. i did not feel any joy. as a matter of fact, i can say that i didn't really feel all that much joy the entire day. many other things, but not joy. this ride taught me a great deal about what i love and what i despise regarding cycling. throw forth your guesses.

then "lunch." we took our shoes off and sat in the shade. ate sandwiches. laughed about our state of discomfort. tried to imagine the fact that we had 95 miles to go, and the biggest hills yet. we mounted the bikes, began the climbing, and my darkest hour arrived. bloodsugar dropped, delirium began, and at some point {i don't really remember all that much} i stumbled off the road and lay in the weeds and bushes for ten minutes or so, wondering what the fuck was going on. checking my pulse as i rode back up the hills, wondering what your pulse feels like when you're about to have a heart attack. of course i would giggle to myself about this later. i "bonked" rather hard as they say. but, i climbed the rest of the hills, and we began the descent. there were motorhomes that almost hit us, and a mind nearly vacant of thought.

from that point on, it really becomes blurry. after the hills, we had another 60 miles, which we just sort of rode. we rode and rode and rode and rode and rode. the sun fell and the air grew cold once again. somewhere along the way, my dear friend andrea {matt's wife} was at a friend's farm along the route with frsh cherries, and hugs, and the laughter of people sitting in the shade, watching as the lunatics ride by. i was amazingly grateful for that brief moment back to the world; that quick escape from the dizzying road.

and then the circle completes itself.

though i imagine the thought was purely psychological, as we rode back into town, gliding on the smooth pavement, i felt like i could have kept riding all night. slowly perhaps, but all night nonetheless. then again, i may have completely collapsed at mile 205. who knows? we watched the people passing us in the vans with their bikes on top, having thrown in the towel. the cold, somber looks on their faces.

i do know, that i will never do that again {on purpose} and that i am proud of myself and mike and matt. somehow, it still seems impossible though it is done. one more thing checked off this list of mine. now it is time to put things in boxes, load the car, and drive to the folks house. why do i have so many 'things'? life continues its own ride, up and down the hills. sometimes slow and sometimes fast.

and tomorrow we ride.

and we arrive at may 14th. it seems so long ago that i was running through my head, the night before the davis double century, and now we have arrived. life is like that i guess. the distance between two places may seem so great and vast, and then we are just there. like sleep in a way. so many thoughts move through us just before drifting off, and then we are gone. off. asleep. and then we wake, in some ways, feeling as if nothing ever happened. no eight hour expanse of space, no small piece of life.

pehaps that's how tomorrow will go. at least the first eight hours anyway, as i figure there is a decent chance i may be on the bike for sixteen hours. good god. my goal is to finish a good two or three hours faster than that, but who knows? 200 miles is a long bike ride. yes indeed. so i look forward to my evening. dinner and a ride downtown with friends. a heaping scoop of ice cream looms on the horizon. then we will sleep, wake, eat, and riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide. how many eyes are there in a 200 mile ride? how many waking dreams are found in the aching muscles? what will i be thinking of at mile 190? will there be music in my head, or just the constant din of fatigue?

life is brimming with questions no?

wish me luck.

j

still not recording.

"the bicycle hides nothing and threatens nothing."

~stewart parker

how is it that i am still not recording yet this morning? perhaps it has something to do with the above statement jefferson. hmmmmm.

some things i did learn.

the things i did learn this weekend. {some of them anyway}

sometimes, when driving to sacramento on a friday night at six pm {eighteen hundred hours for those of you in the military or those who have changed their clocks} when you expect a great deal of traffic, there is none.

sometimes, when you are terribly excited about performing {everything about the evening really} you play worse than you have in years. amazingly bad.

you will miss christian more than you realized.

you missed steve tiller more than you realized. steve may also buy your guitar which makes you happy as you wish it to be in hands that will love it.

you don't really remember at the moment what you did on saturday. did you just sit around?

taking a sandwich on a long ride is an exceptional idea, but putting lettuce on said sandwich is NOT a good idea.

you LOVE sparkling mineral water, especially when it is lime or lemon or orange {something 'citrusy'} flavored.

you are terribly overwhelmed by all of the things you must do before riding your bike to maine.

you are overwhelmed about riding your bike to maine.

your landlord is, as he put it, "walking with jesus."

your hair seems to be growing more slowly on top which concerns you.

you do not like cell phones, and as you prepare to buy your first one for the bike trip this summer, you come to some realizations. see exerpts below from letter i wrote {on saturday} to verizon.

1. why does it seem that i get varying answers to the same questions every time i contact A.verizon or B.a shop that deals in cellular service? my questions are not difficult and i am utterly perplexed as to why no one seems to be able to give me any definitive answers...when they do of course, i ask someone else {yes, i have called several times} and get a completely different answer. completely different. for example the question "do you carry a bluetooth phone?" i have received three answers for this question. "yes," "no," and "i'm not sure." this my friends, is amazingly frustrating. were i a conspiracy theorist, i would assume that it is some sort of hoax in which you folks steal my money. while i have noticed that the people working in these shops are typically not very intelligent, they could at least be more knowledgeable about the services provided.

2. there is no need for these people working in these shops to dress up. the fact that the man is wearing some cheap-ass tie with some cheap-ass dress shirt does not make me trust him more, or believe he is more intelligent than he really is. i am not fooled.

3. why the hell are cell phones set up like this? all of the other things i pay for monthly are simply done by a means of my being charged for the amount i use them. ie: internet, electric, gas, water, regular phone, etc. the cell phone plans are confusing beyond belief and my theory is that this confusion causes people to pay you more money because they have no idea what the fuck is going on, and they give up searching for the exit in the dark. in a sense, you have created the perfect means of making money. confuse the people so much, give them little control, and they will accept all that you say. it is not fair to change the rules, after the game has begun.

4. there are too many choices, and yet somehow, amazingly none of them suit me all that well, which strangely, in a sense means that there are not enough choices. why can't we set up our own plan, specifically tailored to our needs?

5. the phones themselves are too complicated and many of them are too small. i do not like feeling as though i am talking into a peanut. why for example, does my home phone simply have some numbers and a few extra buttons, when these goddamn cell phones are littered with unnecessary things. you might want to take into consideration, that not everyone wants whistles, and bells, and video games, and all manner of crap. perhaps some people just want to use their phone to talk to their friends and loved ones. hmmmmm, what a novel idea.

i also learned, that i have a bit more recording left than i thought on the new record which demands that i focus my time better, which also means that i ride my bike less, which means that i grow a bit more nervous about those 200 miles i will ride on may 15th. ok, go record jeff, go.