I spent much of the day cleaning up my inbox. If you ignore your inbox for the better part of a week it can take the better part of a day to read through everything.
I’m beginning to unravel the mystery of where my days go. It’s all Quora and Pinterest and spam.
The highlight, then, was a little bike ride in the evening. What a great way to bring in a weekend during a week off!
I’m trying to not think of my work inbox, which has also been neglected for a week.
So I distracted myself on my bike ride by going down a road I normally ride up. Up and down are generally relative, of course, but this one has a certain downhill feel to it in this direction.
It was interesting how a simple change of direction on even a seldom-used road changed the tenor of the ride. Indeed, my wheels were humming differently through there.
That road took me out toward the local dirt track, which was ready to make their Friday night noise.
The only problem there is that for almost a mile in any direction the speedway races drown out the sound of any cars coming up behind me. This was most disconcerting.
But, oh, what a pleasant 20 miles. A light and easy way to bring in the weekend.
We had a short bike ride on Saturday morning, dodging raindrops until I couldn’t. I wanted to get in a quick 20 miles to reach the next round number for the year. (All of the records are falling this year!) And in the early going we went by this familiar corn field, which almost made it to Labor Day before turning.
And then, up the street and up a few hills, The Yankee was creating some big distance. See the little red dot on the side? I had to cover all of this ground to get her wheel again.
Eventually I did, and then we rode together for a while. She turned for the house and I added on a few more miles to get to that goal, and then found myself in the rain. It was foreshadowing.
We got in the car, pointed south and drove through every storm cloud that a third of this great nation can provide. My car hasn’t been this clean, nor my shoulders this tense in the car, in some time. This is just the beginning.
You know how, sometimes, you people stop under an overpass? When my wipers were going full blast and I was slowing down to about 35 on the freeway to let them keep up, it seemed like a good idea.
I always liked overpasses in the rain. That constant rattle on the roof interrupted, however briefly, by a bit of human engineering. It can be a sudden and stunning change, and then just as quickly, the rain returns, because the overpasses are only a few lanes wide. Sometimes you want more overpasses, I guess, if only to park under them.
We did not wait out the weather, but pushed on carefully through. And one of our rewards was this site.
You can almost see it there, but in the heartbeat before I took this photo, and those trees in the foreground crept in the way, you could actually see the place where the rainbow was hitting the ground. It wasn’t off in the distance, or beyond a hill. It was right there. I did not see the pots of gold, however. It is a busy interstate, maybe someone beat me to it.
We made it to my mom’s for a nice little vacation. We had dinner there Saturday night, and a quiet Sunday. Today my grandfather and a great-aunt and great-uncle came over for dinner. This was the first time I’ve seen my aunt and uncle since before the pandemic began. They were, and are, a hoot.
I could tell you stories, but it is a light week here, and you’d need to know them and hear them, anyway. But I will jot this down, just so I can remember it. Someone was telling a bit of a family story and my great-uncle didn’t hear who was the subject of the story. He said, “Who?” He heard the name. There’s a half beat where the name sinks in and you can see the gears readjusting to the new information. And then the man, who is in his 80s, giggled. It was him and them and perfect.
I am running out of ways to vamp for this demolition project. No big updates on the Poplars Building today. It is amusing, a few people on social media have marked the occasion — one gentleman flew his drone over it — but no one is lamenting the building. One of the best, and kindest mentions, is from what’s left of the local paper, which called it “a city landmark with countless, shifting identities.”
Now they’re just shifting rubble.
The saddest part of all of this, truly, is what’s happening to the local paper, which has never been in that building, but it is similarly being pulled apart.
The late nights begin again for me. It was a 6 p.m. production, which wrapped at 8 p.m. today. One production and two shows down, 41 shoots and 72 shows to go.
I’m exhausted already.
But I did get a nice evening view of the sun streaming into the building at one point.
We wrapped everything up and I rode my bike back to the house in the last bit of the daylight. There was less traffic, meaning I got to go faster, and I did the whole trip — including three stop signs, six red-light intersections, a roundabout and a left turn — without putting a foot on the ground.
I’ve done that three times now, so I need a new goal. Please submit your ideas.
Time for a few more songs from the Monday night rock ‘n’ roll show. The headliner was Barenaked Ladies, and because they were the main attraction I’m stretching this content a few more days.
This song, Enid, is 30 years old. And the band genuinely looks like they still enjoy this one. Huge hit in Canada.
It was their second single, and off their debut album. Their first single was a cover of a Bruce Cockburn classic. That same year, and also from their debut album, they released Brian Wilson. Here’s the beginning and end of that Monday night performance, because I enjoy the search for a coherent mesh point.
Brian Wilson covered that song, by the way. How cool is that?
More music, and perhaps some other interesting stuff tomorrow.
My afternoon meetings were canceled. It was a slow-moving Friday, then. And that’s just fine! I disposed of some balloons that had lost their helium. (Helium atoms are small enough to leak through the balloon and escape. Now you’ve learned something today.)
Someone buys balloons for a few of the opening week festivities and, is it just me or do they deflate faster these days? Anyway, the balloons get moved around from space to space for this reception and that welcome and so on, until they’re just rolling around on the floor. Someone has to deal with them, and I went to graduate school, so it may as well be me.
I use scissors to put a small slit in the base of each balloon so the air can escape and to avoid a lot of popping sounds. No need to cause a panic, I’m already causing a mess. Those ribbons go everywhere when you’re cutting them free of the weighted base, in this case another balloon filled with sand.
But that was only the fourth or fifth most exciting thing that happened today. There was also watching the work at the nearby Poplars Building. The cleanup continues, today starring a few excavators moving rubble from here to there. You can just see them in between the trees.
Perhaps next week they’ll get back to scraping down the building. The point of this exercise is to see the progress of the destructive process, after all.
Then again, there’s rain in the forecast for the first part of the week.
I rode my bike to work, as I have been doing these last several weeks. But that’s taken the place of normal bike rides, for the most part. And also I’m carrying my bag, and riding through the city and it’s just not the same. So I decided to ride this evening. But, I figured, instead of starting at the house I could use campus as my jumping off point, and ride to the other side of town, which is rare.
So here’s my shadow selfie tapping out the miles on one of the only flat roads around for miles.
I’d laid out this route on a map and then mostly followed it from memory. It was a lumpy route.
Also on that flat section, I found a nice optical illusion. This road parallels the interstate, and there’s little more than a jersey barrier with glare shields separating the two roads. At about 25 miles per hour the shadows started going the wrong direction.
About 20 miles in, and starting the evening turn back to campus I ran across this sign. Normally, taking pictures of signs is a waste of time, and they’re never a good photograph, but knowing I had a few climbs ahead of me, it gave me a little chuckle.
It isn’t a barn by bike, but a bin by bike fits the bill. I’m assuming this corn will be going in there before long. (I set out on this long ride with no fuel and only one water bottle and, yes, at one point some of those cornfields seemed like a good idea. (That would have been a bad idea.))
There is a fire station out on this route that has a water fountain in the parking lot. They’ve even labeled it “water for bikers.” Pretty thoughtful of them. And I took advantage of that handy resource coming and going. There’s a big hill by that station, and since I went by it twice that means I went down the hill and up the hill. I don’t know if I’ve ever been down it before, but I did so with some hesitancy because who knows how it will go. It fit with the theme of most of the ride and I seemed a bit cautious and unsure of everything. When I came back that way I was just four seconds off my fastest ever ascent of that hill. Fast for me, then, slow by every other possible metric.
In between the hills, though, you do get some flat stuff. This is in some little valley that would probably be otherwise unremarkable, but for the angle of the sun as I was passing through.
I got back to town, and to campus, after a two-hour ride. Then I had to put my backpack back on my shoulders, now heavier than normal.
It was after 7 p.m. by then, of course, and the flow of traffic was all different, so the most amusing thing happened. I did the whole commute — across campus, through two neighborhoods and a huge commercial district, and then back into my neighborhood without having to take my foot out of the pedals. That was a goal I devised and said out loud just two weeks ago. Speak it into existence, as they say. That really works!
This was Wednesday, which felt like Thursday, because I thought Tuesday was Wednesday. When I finally came to grips with that and adjusted for chagrin, it made the entire day feel like … Tuesday. Which, just great.
But at least Thursday, tomorrow, will seem a surprise. Even if today, and yesterday, just seemed a repeat. A repeat of every other repeated day that repeats itself. I had one meeting that was more deja vu than meeting, another that was much the same. The same things were resolved as the time(s) before.
I’m even watching the same shows. It’s a weird loop out of time, a long running loop with no end possible. And it’s only a Wednesday. Of August.
There’s one brief moment where my bike points west in the morning, and the sun has cleared the trees and there’s nothing in the road and the pavement is clean and I can take a shadow selfie.
In the evening as I ride back to the house I see different shadows. I’ve been meaning to take a different sort of picture here for some time now, but this one seemed to work in a different kind of way. I like the lines. They, too, repeat.
In between, at the office, the view of the destruction of the Poplars Building shows two good days of scraping. Not sure where the now familiar big orange has been moved to. Maybe there was a more pressing job, or they just moved it out of sight.
But there are some smaller, and no less impressive, heavy machinery tools out there rearranging the debris. I’m hoping they get to that elevator shaft or service core, or whatever it is, soon. In my imagination it’ll crumble like potato chips, or take an intricate and futuristic solution. These are the only possibilities I can picture. It’s empty and air, or a re-discovery of something impossibly strong from the mid-20th century table of elements. The rest is more of the same.
Back to Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. In the third section he’s finally got to Ireland. And after a very light summary of ancient Celtic texts (which read as hilarious, in parts) Cahill quotes Lord Kenneth Clark’s documentary, Civilisation.
So that’s a 1996 pop history book quoting a 1969 BBC2 series. Still resonates. Maybe they were onto something. Or, perhaps, we haven’t found a better understanding. How could we? We’re in the same paradigm.
