Month: April 2013

voices

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Alana’s voice is tiny. Cartoonish, dark knight rising, clawing up from deep inside a deep hole. Of cognition and empowerment and oratory. When she has not started a fight or sent herself into meltdown, her code is perfectly clear. Coors rocky mountain water clear. Rising out of that inky cave, grasping its edges, so close to pulling herself up. The stink bomb of willfulness and awful flying around the center of her storm is unable to obscure her voice, even a bit. Its just another filter, yet her voice is so clear.

I watched some vids of G when she was 4.5, and her voice too still sounded like an impressionist’s painting of childhood. So raw in saying, so hard to say it, so vanilla cake, syrupy and yummy. They speak in portmanteaus, and when i hear them they strike me as so normal i forget to remember them. I wish I’d kept a list of all the frankenwords my kids created. Most of us would agree they belong in Webster’s.

Genevieve’s voice is legible, relevant, thoughtful and clear. Metastasizing with each day successfully navigated, self-sustaining fuel of comprehension and competence.The honeyed spotlessness behind G’s voice makes the hard things she says sound gentle. I hope its a timbre and tone she keeps her whole life. She is so very beautiful.

I haven’t been on the bike in 3 weeks. I’ve been drinking on the trainer, getting up for school, driving so far to work cause I am so new at a new job i cant justify working from home.   My flexible well-compensated workaholic world is broken. I broke my finger. Cause i was tired. Cause i am not in shape. Cause i am metastasizing downward. A seminal shift upon all my notions of value, fitness, earning potential, and maternity. It didn’t just happen snap snap; it took 7 years, sluggish cannibalism to feed their voices.   Now, I want to be down here. I want to sit. 4 hour rides sound scary, and icky. 4 hours with kids sounds nominal, workmanlike, like an early weekend road ride used to feel, get it done and get on with my day.

3 Truths and 2 Lies

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A cheesey work kumbaya thing.

I thought about doing the drug-dealer-in-the-bathroom-with-the-drug-dog scene from Reservoir Dogs. A friend said i should just start singing Purple Rain and crying.

All that you project comes back in.   Especially in facebookiness-space, the space between meat-space and cyber-space, cordially awkward social encounters and interactions.   All that you project is a massage of a memory and a wish, and the nature you’re stuck with. How do you project yourself?

  • I have smuggled wild animals across the US-Mexican border
  • I built a backdoor into Ticketmaster’s ticketing system that would enable me to get access into any event.
  • I was saved from exhaustion in the San Juan Mountains by a van full of political extremists, and I asked them to let me out
  • I missed getting killed in the 1993 WTC bombing by 5 minutes
  • I got a tattoo of my daughters’ birthdays from a professional MMA fighter

 

I have smuggled wild animals across the US-Mexican border

TRUTH

I built a backdoor into Ticketmaster’s ticketing system that would enable me to get access into any event.

LIE. I did not build it. I designed it. It doesn’t exist.

I was saved from exhaustion in the San Juan Mountains by a van full of political extremists, and I asked them to let me out

TRUTH

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After 2-3 min of pleasantries and where ya froms, they dive into shooting all those wetbacks and Jan Brewer the Philosopher King. Miles I did not have to slog up in my bike shoes ticked off so slowly.

I missed getting killed in the 1993 WTC bombing by 5 minutes

LIE. Happened to one of my very best friends.

towers

I got a tattoo of my daughters’ birthdays from a professional MMA fighter

TRUTH

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It Makes the Ladies Giggle

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finger

Those hairs are cactus spines.

I lost it on the catwalk on National, during the Squealer. A rockface I’ve cleaned 50 times did not look the same, I hesitated, put my wheel in the wrong space, and tumbled downslope towards a cliff. It was stupid. I was tired and wasn’t seeing the trail well. I was trying to get tired earlier this year, and not save more than i needed for the climb up West National. Slowing down just a bit on the techiest stretch would have cost me a mere 30 seconds.

*facepalm*

My initial catapult into the rockface I handled well. Ish. Bu then started ragdolling down. I threw out limbs, fingers and toes, tumbled again. I stopped, dazing and buzzing, nothing was screaming in pain, but i could not bend my finger. Didn’t hurt much. Ish.

buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Going back up the trail, carrying my bike, seemed a very very far 15 vf coupled with a 30 min walk down nasty singletrack to Telegraph Pass. The road was 25 feet under me, and I could roll all the way off the mountain.   I went down through 15 feet of palo verde, sliding, baby heads.   I peered down the cliff…the road was soooo close. Roadies went up and down Summit Road and didn’t see me, other Squealers appeared on the exposed corner i fell from, the road was so close. This is how fucking dumbasses die you fucking dumbass.

With a refreshed survival instinct, 3 fingers and a thumb didn’t take very long to crawl back up to the trail.

At Telegraph Pass i told other Squealers to send word I was DNFing. The Gnar Van was going up and offered me a ride on their way back down. I waited 40 min, giving all the abused pieces of me time to ache, throb and make me want to get back on just to feel myself getting closer to the end. I was still racing. Ish.   After the van dropped me a 30 min ride away at Boy Scout Camp, after the bumps of a painful 15 min flat spin to the car, DNFing tasted a lot better.

The right elbow was now hurting proper, and de-bibbing a new challenge with neither arm working well. Avoiding monkeybutt definitely outweighed the pain in my finger and shoulder.   Shifting the Acura on the drive to the ER ensured both the left and right sides hurt equally.

Having completed the Aron Ralston punch on my Man Card, i was delighted to find the ER was slow, and flopped into a bed. They have a portable xray machine that showed only a dislocation on the doc’s laptop in minutes. He blasted my finger full of lidocaine, plucked out the cactus spines like a boss, and unfucked my finger in less time than it took the kids to watch one Sponge Bob episode. Beckie brought them to meet me. I was glad they got to see frankenstein, battered and beat-to-shit, bits of blood off cactus scratches and bounces — it will makes them respect their bodies and their bikes and the instructions i give them. Doc left me with a bitchen set of forceps. My insurance paid for them in gold.

My egg survived the calamity unscathed. I pulled it out of my camelback 10 hrs later, and dropped it on the tile floor when it slipped off my splint.

For $2.69 I got 20 percocet i didn’t need. I had 30 oxycodone leftover from 2010, which ironically managed to not be in my pack. I popped 12 old oxy over 5 days, then stopped, and did not miss a tap on the keyboard. Painkillers are not my high of choice. The percocets are worth $100 street if you don’t have a prescription. Can I get a refill?

Narcotics are a constipating agent, but Easter is a laxative. Luck would have it.

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