… and I’m pretty sure you don’t care about this at all, but …
… after 34 miles today, I am now feeling pretty confident that I will be able to get in enough miles to set a new annual mileage record.
The only important question is by how much.
By whatever your little legs can handle.
OK, then, the other question is how I should break it up over the next two days.
Two days? Two rides, of course. Or maybe three. But definitely go big tomorrow, just to be sure.
Fine, I’ll get close to my record tomorrow, allowing me to break this personal mark early in my ride on the 31st. So we’re just down to the philosophical questions. Should I count this up at all?
Dude. You have a spreadsheet. “Should” left you long ago.”
Good point. OK, last one. Does it matter? Is it impressive enough to matter?
Having looked at the small numbers on your spreadsheet, not in the slightest.
We woke up early enough this morning to take a little bike room. So there we were in the bike room, pedaling away, thinking about what was upstairs, not getting packed. But I got in 25 miles — which was great!
This was my first ride in a week, and my last ride for a week. Meanwhile, the calendar keeps churning and my yearly mileage record is still out there, waiting to be met.
I should make it, but probably not by much.
Couldn’t do more than 25 miles today, and let me just say, he wrote, that based on how the rest of the morning and early afternoon developed, I did not have time to do 30, or even 27 miles. The day was perfectly, accidentally, plotted out.
We got cleaned up and finished packing. I loaded the car and drove us to the airport. We made it through security and down to our gate with no incident, having left the house six minutes later than we wanted, but with no stress on time.
(Let’s see if we can do that the next two or four times in a row before it’s worth really remarking on, though.)
Anyway, to Delta, and a plane that winged us away to LaGuardia Airport. Here we are flying into Queens now.
They’ve been working on LaGuardia, an $8 billion renovation, since 2016. The terminal we flew into today opened last June. And they’re now nearing the completion of this whole project. Joe Biden, then the vice president, famously said the old airport belonged to a “third-world country” and the mid-project experience was none better. But now, here we are, the airport the New York media is calling the first new major airport built in the United States in the last 25 years.
What is not be available: mass transit.
Can you believe that?
Getting to the rental car companies is no easier. Landing at Terminal C there is sometimes a shuttle to Terminal A. From Terminal A you’d have to take a second bus to the car rental people, who are off the premises. Or you could walk. It is not, repeat, not, conducive to walking. This whole design is as naively 20th century New World as can be.
We took an Uber, instead. Two, actually, because we got in the wrong car the first time.
There’s egg on my face but, hey, it’s in your car, lady, and not mine.
So we got the car and then drove toward our next stop: Pennsylvania.
At a key moment on the two-hour plus drive (about the same amount of time as the flight, I think) The Yankee noted that we have been in seven states in 36 hours. It was then that I decided to tally up our travel mileage this holiday season.
We had dinner with her god-sister’s family. We spent the evening playing card games with their daughters. It’s fun watching them grow up, and it’s a special treat to be able to spend this time with them.
This is their oldest, when she was about a year old, in 2009.
Tonight we were talking about colleges. She’s brilliant, I’m surprised we weren’t talking about graduate programs.
Both of those kids beat me up playing cards, so if that’s any indication …
I visited another dollar store today, found nothing but cheap plastic and small containers of food stuffs. This search for silly Christmas presents is going to require an upgrade tomorrow.
Tonight I started doing the laundry. Thrilling stuff, I know. We also enjoyed a nice, mild tilapia for dinner, and figured out the final details of the rest of our holiday travels. These things did not all happen in that order.
No one in their right minds does the planning before the fish.
Earlier in the day I did the recycling. Anyone need 400 words on that? Loading the car is the trick, you see. I have to break down a bunch of cardboard boxes, because we aren’t always in the best habit of doing that as we go. The boxes fit into the truck. There are four large bins that take the trip, one each for plastics, aluminum, steel and glass. Over time I have developed a stacking system that allows me to get all of this in the car. There’s also the other stuff to work around in the car: my bag for work, my lunch, an umbrella, some sneakers I’m driving around for no discernible reason. I made it all fit because it wasn’t raining in my driveway. But by the time I had it loaded, and covered the short 2.1 mile distance to the recycling center I was in a drizzle. This was what I’d hoped to avoid: recycling in the rain.
If you’re going to save the earth, the least the earth could do is generate some ideal weather patterns. Be appreciative, Mother Nature.
We’re actually in a moderate drought just now, so the rain, such as it was, was welcome.
It didn’t rain much, but the day looks like this. Every day looks like this. These are the colors we will absorb between now and late March.
I stood on the loading dock, for no good reason as it turns out, for quite a long time. Might as well get a photo out of the deal.
Next time, I’ll do one so that we can’t tell where the limestone ends and the sky begins.
I went on a short bike ride last night. I’ve been trying late night bike rides, but this hasn’t been working well.
Sunday night my legs were sluggish and there was some sort of setting problem with the trainer. I did about a half hour and, discouraged, I called it quits. Last night I was trying to correct the trainer problems, and even made some progress with it. But, nevertheless, it wasn’t right, so, discouraged, I called it quits once again after 30 more minutes.
Last night I figured it out. Really got the trainer and the bike dialed in. Half an hour in, I got into a fast group and I was able to hang on. It was the fastest half hour I’ve ever ridden. And then, at 59 minutes, I got a flat tire.
An actual flat tire on my virtual, video game ride.
My tube burst because my wheel wore out on the trainer drum and, you don’t care about this.
Tomorrow, new tires arrive, and I’ll get back to it. This is the final push toward breaking my personal milage record. (I suspect I’ll meet this underwhelming achievement on December 30th.)
Today in the Re-Listening Project we’re going to learn some things. And, the most important thing you’re going to learn about is Vic Chesnutt. He was from Athens, Georgia. He released 17 records, but his moment was around that fifth or sixth record. See, Chesnutt was in a wheelchair and was partially paralyzed from a car accident he had when he was a young man. He played guitar, but had limited use of his hands. The medical bills piled up, but so did the accolades among his peers. In 1996, a cover album, “Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation” was released.
Chesnutt’s perspective of Americana, which was funny and pointed and gothic and lovely and frightful and pretty much every other emotion, was finally in front of broad audience. R.E.M., Nanci Griffith and Hootie and the Blowfish, Indigo Girls, Joe Henry and Madonna and more showed him off to the world. Here are a few from the and more column.
I’m not saying it’s not the best Garbage song. What I’m saying is it’s the best Garbage song.
And here’s a Soul Asylum performance worth actually listening to.
The undisputed best thing Cracker ever recorded.
And, finally, Vic Chesnutt appears on the last track, alongside the great Victoria Williams.
He died in 2009. He was described by one critic as “a neo-hippie, an ex-drunk, an ex–garage rocker turned earthy Southern songcrafter.” Don’t let the grime get in the way of the myth, though, especially when the myth grew better. The myth also obscures the complicated, and that seems as reasonable an approach as any when considering a songwriter that copped to the conceit of, ya know, writing songs. There’s equal parts misery and faith in most of his work, and whatever precipitate the two yield should be in there in abundance, too. It’s overdone, to be sure, but the writing is something to admire.
Today there’s a songwriting seminar in his name, and a songwriter of the year award is given out in his honor. I suspect he might have differing opinions of the virtue of those two things.
Next we have Primitive Radio Gods, which I picked up as a radio station freebie, and only because of that one song. And, until this very moment, had always thought this was a one-person band. (Sorry, fellas.) This is actually a three-piece. Guess I never read the liner notes. Anyway, they got to the very top of the Billboard Alternative Songs chart with the unthreatening, catchy “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.” You remember it, easy hip hop beats and a lot of samples, including B.B. King and gonging of distant church bells.
The whole of the album is like that. Modern alt rock, one important chord and a lot, a lot of samples used as fills. At the time this was impressive. Not avant garde, but mildly thoughtful. Looking back, it was technically impressive. Without thinking about it, I can reel off three different ways, we could pull down any sound, archived or contemporary that we wanted if we were to make a song like these today. But, mid-1990s? It was on a format you had on the shelf or you made it yourself, and the options of just searching through a database to find something that fit your meter were limited, to say the least.
These guys got caught up in a few years of record label difficulties. Drops, mergers, re-acquisitions, and so on. I haven’t picked up any of their later stuff, but they’ve released seven studio albums, or 11, depending on how you count. The latest was in 2020.
But on this, the debut, the one with the big and only hit there are 10 tracks. The one you might recall if you had a radio in 1996, this one, which has the distinction of sounding distinctly different from most of the record …
The title track, “Rocket,” is the best song on the thing.
For reasons I don’t remember, and mysterious knowing the timeline doesn’t easily and obviously overlap, I dubbed a friend Rocket. Maybe she was over at my apartment when this was on one day. Anyway, she knows that single and then she knew this song because I assigned it to her, for some reason. She’s married to one of my best friends and though I don’t talk with her directly on a highly regular basis, that nickname has basically replaced her given name in my brain for a few decades now. Weird how you tie one thing to another, for no reason at all. No telling why that happens.
If this feels brief or rushed today, I’d agree! And there’s not a good ending, either. I’ve almost finished the next album for the Re-Listening Project. I’m sure that’ll wind up here tomorrow.
“In the mail” is a bit redundant, don’t you think?
Not at all, dear interlocutor. You can receive envelopes in many ways. Someone can hand you an envelope. You could fashion one out of your own paper, or even purchase some. I have a small box in my desk at the office.
OK, fine. You received a curious envelope in the mail.
Yes I did. It had a certain texture.
Texture?
Not like a golf ball, which has that dimpled surface for aerodynamic properties, but the opposite of that.
Surely it has some purpose, this round skid plate design. Surely I am meant to stand on it, securely, squarely, confidently, while I’m opening the rest of my correspondence.
Sure, plus, it makes it stand out.
You’re right! I felt it right away.
And we’re talking about it.
Yes, we are.
So job done.
I didn’t tell you who it was from though, did I?
And that’s just how exciting today was. Emails, a few conversations about future to do lists, watching people watch the World Cup. Laughing at people. I also wrote a letter and sent that off. No fancy envelope, though.
I got in a little bike ride this evening, if nothing else to see how my knee would feel doing its part after I aggravated it in last night’s run. Stairs felt the same. Walking didn’t hurt. Getting up and down to clean a few things around the house felt as it always does. But maybe, I figured, the repetition of riding 25 miles would tell me something different. So I tapped out 25 easy miles. No pain. Lots of gain.
By my count, I’ll have the opportunity to ride nine or 10 more times before the end of the year.
If that holds up, and I hold up, I just might set a new personal best for milage in a year.
It’s time to check in on Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. This is an incredible descriptive bit about General Charles Lee. You could look at this in a few ways. How many different ways to you need to describe a person? You could note how this is about personality, and not about his physical description. You’re right about that, the physical part shows up elsewhere. Begging the further question, how tightly can you pack in facts about a man? (And, not pictured, this goes on for a bit, as it is our introduction to his trotting into Charleston in 1776.) But I have a different question.
How much time did Atkinson put in the simple, thorough, act of pulling together this description.
It’s always thick. It’s never burdensome. I love how the man writes.
I am 340 pages into this 564-page first installment of his American Revolution trilogy. (No word on when the second book is due out.) There’s something new to learn everywhere, here. And, even then, you know you’re not getting everything. Something to think about over the next two hundred pages.
Waiting in the wings, the latest installment of just about the only fiction I read.
He was the fastest person I knew as a kid. I guess he had to be. David threw his hands at the ground, ferocious, like the rest of him, but his feet fairly well glided over the grass. We met on the soccer pitch, played together for several years. He was the first person I ever met who learned how to get better at things with relentless practice. I remember more about our friendship than I do his soccer. But I remember this. We were a good team for a while and once we came across a better team that had a superlative striker. Our told him to mark him all night. David gulped, and set out to do it. And for 90 minutes that other dude did nothing against us.
That’s a youth soccer story and so it’s as real as it is meaningless, but that, in some small way, tells the story of David.
He grew up loved, but hard. His mother loved him, but doted on him, but she did that to all of us. His younger brother loved him, too, well, as much as a middle kid could. His two younger sisters worshipped the ground he walked on.
When he was 13, David saved a woman’s life. Got to a car crash and put a tourniquet on a woman before she bled out. Thirteen. I mean, really.
His father was a hard man. He was a Vietnam veteran, a chimney sweep, by trade. A man who knew about scraping out his way, and never afraid of the work. His was a big, strong personality and all that comes with that, for better and worse. David, even as a child, had his own big, strong personality, and some of you know what that might turn into. But his dad had his positive traits. He took his kids to work, took me with him too, and taught us all about spending a day in the sun. We built scaffolding, hauled up bricks, mixed and lifted mortar and tore down scaffolding and it was all probably something you couldn’t do with kids today. David’s dad, though, for a hard man, was generally a fair man. He demanded a lot of that boy, and so the two of them had their struggles, and sometimes I was the tiniest distraction or escape or whatever, and that was good. David was a deep sensitive kid, and it was obvious even among other kids.
That’s David, in the Yankees cap. This was at one of my birthday parties. He found a knife, cleaned it up, made me a sheath by hand. It was the cheapest, best, most thoughtful gift.
When David spent the weekend with me we’d go to the mall or the movies or do some other suburban sort of thing. When I spent the weekend with David, we’d spend the day wondering around downtown.
We moved in different directions, as people do. Different high schools, but stayed in touch. I went off to college and his family moved out of town. Not far, but just far enough. The last time we spent together we went camping, which was David’s natural environment. If there wasn’t a target to shoot at, or a fire to build or a tent raise, he’d find one. It was Christmas time. We had two or three tents and David, his younger brother and I went out in the too-cold and, being older, we tasked his brother with keeping the fire burning all night. Not too long after I woke up the next morning we heard him from over the next hill, “Hey guys! The pond’s froze over!”
No kidding, kid. Where’s my fire? But that was OK. We probably called him some names, but then we laughed about it. David and his brother figured it out, as brothers, the lucky ones, do.
Some time after that, David joined the Army. Became a paratrooper and made sergeant. He went to Iraq and worked on dismantling IEDs, or some such.
When he took off the fatigues he signed on as a security contractor. That’s when we found one another again, online. He was working in Afghanistan at the time. We had some pleasant chats. He was a soulful kid and a thoughtful man. And that sort of work just seemed perfect for him.
He’d met someone, got married, and was splitting time between assignments in troubled nations and at home in the States and at his other home in the Philippines. He loved it there. There was a lot of untouched countryside where he was, and he spent several chats telling me all about it. It felt a little like he had finally been able to tap into this calmness that was always in him that he didn’t know how to call upon.
A few years ago, not too long after his first kid was born, his father died. Then his mother-in-law died, pretty soon after. Last night I found a picture of David and his father, and his father his holding one of David’s kids and he’s looking down with this sense of peace and relief that I never saw in the man. He and his dad figured it out, too, and that was a blessing.
I saw that picture last night because I thought to look him up to see the latest, only to find out that my old friend, David, died at the very end of last year. His wife had died a few months before. They are survived by two little kids and some grieving siblings and probably a lot of friends. David was the sort that made them last, even if they got frayed or distanced around the globe.
He saved a woman’s life when he was 13 years old. He knew how to take in the moment, work hard at it, and make it happen, and I think he used that sort of force in some way or another most all of his life.
The Christmas before last I learned of a very distant great-great-aunt who had died, when I saw her marker at the cemetery. Had I learned of it at the time it would have been of the “Oh, that’s too bad. Her poor husband, her kids and grandkids … ” sort of reaction. Distant, as I say. I was sad because there was no one left on that side of the family that thought to tell me.
Last year, I learned that the woman who taught me how to be a mascot died of cancer in 2019.
This spring, I learned my college roommate died in early 2020. He was a success at everything, except maybe for picking a roommate. I think I frustrated him endlessly, but for two years he was a big brother to me, and I admired most everything about him. We hadn’t been close in ages, but I loved that guy.
This summer, I read that a former student of mine died last fall. It seemed she never seemed to perfectly fit in at a school where perfectly fitting in was criminally important. She had a spark and a vitality, though, that never let that be a problem. She moved to New York and lived one of her dreams, but it was all too short. She was 34.
Finding out things well after the fact brings up its own peculiar sort of helplessness.
Two bike rides this weekend. Twenty-five under-caloried miles on Saturday. I just looked at the scenery on Zwift. There’s neon signs on the stores in the middle of the desert. And the “neon” moves. And when the “neon” is off on most of the signs you can see the other neon “tubes.” They could do a lot more with this setup, but they do an awful lot with this setup. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to notice things like that, but I want to now.
Saturday’s favorite sign was this pig. He waves at you as you go by.
I did a humble little 20-mile ride yesterday. Just wasn’t feeling any of it, but I’ll get back to it this week. I did notice, though, the stars dotting the nightscape, the snow-covered mountains and how the mountains held the clouds around them, as mountains often do.
I closed my eyes for the last five miles. I wanted to see how close I could get to the goal, just from counting the pedal strokes, without watching the graphics.
I made it to within one-tenth of a mile. Which, over five miles, means I should be fairly proud of my counting skills, or fairly disturbed by the amount of time I’ve spent on that particular gear in Zwift, to know the math as I do.
Tomorrow, there will be no neon, no mountains, no pedal strokes. Tomorrow I have to try a run.
