overwriting


19
Nov 24

On the occasion of a record breaking ride

Most rides are for the ride themselves. Or for riding with others. A lot of them are for exercise or to enjoy the great outdoors or both. Take a break, unwind, race a friend you can’t beat, go somewhere. Indulgent as they can be, they always seem to carry at least some sort of purpose. But this ride, today, was just for me. I realized, just before I left, that this would be the ride where I broke a personal best for miles pedaled in a year.

It happened right in here.

After that spot, every turn of the crank arm, every loop the chain made, every time I shifted through the cassette would all be new, a record, a best, an achievement.

You don’t think about that over the course of a ride, but it’s there. When the legs protest, you remember it. They’ve stomped and danced and glided through more miles this year than you’ve ever asked of them before. When your lungs don’t ache, maybe it’s for the same reason. When the lactic acid takes a little longer to burn, maybe that’s why. Or all of it could be that you’ve learned a new kind of patience this late into the year.

All of this is racing the sun, trying to stay on the right side of daylight. I set off through town and out the other side, doubling back into the town again, where 10 miles had gone by in the blink of an eye, thinking about the possibilities of what this ride could hold, given the hour and the time of year.

Yesterday I wanted to do this same route, but started too late and wisely changed my plans. This afternoon, which became the early evening as I swooshed and whirred along, felt like a ride that could go on forever.

I thought about that when I stopped, to put on my windbreaker. I was close to home, but determined to take the longer way back, so I mounted the headlight and left the full finger gloves in my pocket, and riding down that three-mile straight stretch of chipseal. It goes on forever because I want it too, particularly today. And through this stretch I feel a melancholy, a paradox that comes up with the truly great rides. It’s going to end soon. And the season will end soon, which is unacceptable. I don’t want this ride to end, either.

Sometimes you want a ride to be over. You have things to do or somehow the fit seems off or you’re just not feeling it, but there are days when you want it to go on forever, and this was one of those days, evenings, now, because the sun has left me and I’m listening to the rubber on my Gatorskins shuzzzz away in the gloaming.

That’s a great road. No traffic, beautiful farm scenery, two little rollers that can make you feel powerful or humble, or a bit of both. I only want that road to end because of what’s waiting at the turn.

At the bottom of that road is the best part of the ride, a brand-new ribbon that you could soft-pedal at 20 miles per hour, but it only lasts four-tenths of a mile, far too short for something so luxurious.

I have to work my way through two parking lots there, and I become aware that my neck has tightened up because my fit is never quite right and, also, I’m a little bummed about how this ride is coming to an end — I have been out for about two hours and heard two voices in that whole time, a crossing guard in town, who told me to “Go ahead honey,” while she held up her stop sign and a woman two towns later who stepped into the crosswalk as I came through the intersection, she laughed and I apologized and she said “Oh, that’s OK,” and we wished each other a great afternoon and you could hear the smile on her face as I pedaled away through a sleepy small town block. It was those two people and me and road noise and the click click click of my bike and this rattle in my headset, a loose screw that I need to tighten — why should any of this end?

I realized I’d put my foot on the ground just three times during this whole ride. Sometimes the timing is right and that was today, and this turn weaving behind the small car dealership and the gas station beside it, I had the timing right, rejoining the highway and a bike lane with no one coming from either direction. The bike lane there sometimes feels huge and sometimes small. Today, it felt small. I felt big. I felt like I could do anything on my bike, even though I can’t. I felt like my machine was asking me to do more, but it certainly, by now, understands my limitations.

This is why you don’t want these rides to end, why you don’t want colder weather to run you indoors, because you eventually tap into something elemental about this. Something basic and cosmic and purposeful and purposeless. I don’t want to lose that. Not for a minute or four months. It takes too long to find again and would require years of continual study to understand or explain it. Besides, we’ve lost too much this year — family and friends and elections and car keys and cyclists and opportunities and remote controls — and how much must we lose? How much is the right amount? But we lose it all, don’t we? And that’s when I heard the Canada geese somewhere to my left, to the west. They’d blended into the dark blue-gray of the sky, making those incessant honks and barks, those beautifully chaotic, continual sounds. They stay over there to the left, in a wildlife sanctuary, between some pastures, harassing the cattle, adding a bit more to the soundtrack as I stand up and suzsh suzsh suzsh my way up the fourth-to-last roller on my ride. You know the one, it tells you how you’re feeling in defiance of everything else you’ve done, and without any consideration for what else is still ahead, three more little hills, in this case.

At the 4-way stop, the one with the haunted house on the corner, a truck hauling a trailer is waiting for me to pass, even though he has the right of way, and I think, not for the first time, it would be great if everyone understood the rules the same way. But he waited, and I did a track stand for a respectful amount of time and finally I went, even though it was his turn, and even here, it felt like I could have held my bike up for forever. But I could not. But it felt like it just then, and now I wonder, maybe my bike doesn’t want this ride to end, either. Is that what it is? We’re both feeling this moment the same way? The air in the tubes and the softness of the grips and the loose-but-tight grip of my cleats in their clipless mates have all made this tiny little magical moment, which is persisting, but also fleeting.

Down and back up again, just two hills to go. I’ve been thinking, for four miles now, about how I didn’t want this ride to end, about that girl I knew in elementary school, some friends from the 10th grade, a professor I once had, the work I must get to. How the mind wanders. How it can wonder in its wanderings! I thought about the incredible feeling I had on my first ride outside this year, the sweet joy and optimism that came with it, and the feeling of this one, right now. I’m starting to think I should write this down and one word falls out of my mouth as I pull the bidon away one last time: Elation.

Sometime, in December, probably, I’ll have to take my bike to the basement and put it on the trainer. I’ll ride away on Zwift for several months. I’ll pedal a bunch, I’ll sweat a lot. I’ll be breathless. I’ll go nowhere. It’s just not the same.

I saw someone on social media yesterday beaming with pride that their oldest kid had learned to ride the day before and she pedaled away yelling, “I feel freeeeeee!” And, kiddo, it never gets better than that. She’s an old pro by now, because you know she was riding yesterday, and again today. So she knows, but it bears repeating. Be home when the lights come on, or for supper, or whenever your parents tell you, but it never gets better than that. It doesn’t have to. How could it? It just stays that perfect. And you can’t get that feeling on a trainer, no matter how many endorphins you tap into.

My average speed fell away, because why would I want this to end? And I circled one of the neighborhoods, the road shaped like a horseshoe. My neighbor built that development. It’s his, and he thinks of it that way. He still plows that road himself if it snows. He probably contributed, then, to those potholes on the backside of it, the ones I dodged in the semi-dark, chin down to the stem, hands over the hoods like a Belgian champion, using the fullness of the subdivision’s road as I turned into the final length of that horseshoe. The flow of a bicycle in the diagonal is a triumph. You feel freeeeeee. And maybe I could do anything my bike wants to do, even if it is a bit slower.

What is speed, anyway? Today, it just seems like a way to end a ride sooner. That’s a fool’s racket. A hustle with no payoff. At the end of that subdivision, I did another reasonable approximation of a track stand to let the traffic clear, so I could turn left, and then quickly right again. Now a car is behind me, and it’s finally fully dark. I charge up the little hill, throwing my bike this way and that up this penultimate roller, looking like a French prima donna, feeling like a million bucks, thinking of those headlights on me, and wondering where they disappeared to. I glanced over as I switched my headlight on, and the car was gone. So now it’s the downhill and it flattens out to the 90-degree turn into the back of our subdivision, the last hill, then a right-hander and around the big circle to the house. Two cyclists we know live back there, but I don’t even think to look in their yards today. I was, I realize now, too taken with imagining the next ride.

I wonder where it will take me, and how my legs will feel about it. I remind myself, once again, to start earlier in the day next time. This ride was 40 great miles, without even that much fuel, or water, considering the temperatures. I could just as easily have done another hour or two, amused by the muses and the thoughts they bring, bemused by how much better this little tale was, because I was fully in composition mode, while my legs brought me home. Some days it feels like they could go on forever. You must take advantage of those, I said to myself for the 6,000th time in the last 15 years of doing this.

There are days when it never gets old, days like this one. Not the fastest or a technically superior ride, not the first new road discovered, but just a ride for me, filled, in that last little bit, with hopes and fears and love and dreams. My dreams never grow weary.


4
Sep 24

Here are 1,000 quick words

Today began with so much ambition, and maybe half of the plans were accomplished. (More for tomorrow, then!) I blame the super late night, last night. But, hey, all of the professional tasks were achieved. Emails answered, questions asked, and so on. Dishes were also done. Some laundry was completed. It wasn’t all bad. Take that, super late night.

Oh yeah, I wrote something yesterday for the work Substack. No one has called to complain yet, so there’s that. Here it is.

This is terrible and senseless. And the extended Gaudreau family, who are experiencing a hurt that’s hard to express and impossible to heal, are by no means alone.

The National Safety Council has it that the number of preventable deaths from bike crashes rose 10% in 2022 and have increased 47% in the last 10 years (from 925 in 2013 to 1,360 in 2022). The League of American Bicyclists notes that 2022 was the deadliest year ever for cyclists. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2022 records show more cyclists were killed by motor vehicles than any year since they began charting the data in 1975.

Talk to a cyclist, any sort of cyclist that rides on roads, and you’ll quickly hear themes emerging. The infrastructure is insufficient. Drivers don’t see cyclists. Drivers are distracted, or inconsiderate, or worse. Vehicles have gotten much, much larger.

Every cyclist you talk to has a story about a dangerous moment, a scary encounter, or a truly life-changing experience they’ve had on the open road. A place where they also belong, by the way (go here to see the specific laws for your state). It goes beyond a random heckle or a dated Lance Armstrong reference.

Each cyclist has their own reason for being there. They love it. This is how they commute. This is their exercise. Their childlike freedom. Their community. Their only means of transportation. Whether they are carefully calculating their watts, carefully balancing their groceries, or they are teaching their kids how to ride, no matter why they find themselves on two wheels, their experiences with motorists are common, profoundly troubling and they penetrate deep into the psyche.

We’re seeing that in a survey we’ve conducted in the light of the killing of Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau. The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact is asking cyclists in South Jersey a series of questions, has immediately received more than 500 responses, and the responses continue to roll in.

I was asked about this at 1:09 p.m. yesterday, 37 minutes later I had the first 770 words down.

And then I thought about it during most of the two hours I spent on my bike this evening.

My shadow went hunting for historical markers. Between the two of us, my shadow and me, we found quite a few, starting with the cheapie you’ll see below.

And this is the long straight road, the flat part of it, heading back home. I was halfway to a great ride. The bike felt smooth, in that way we spent all our time hoping to feel.

You get just a few experiences of la volupte, if you’re lucky. It’s so rare, maybe, that you can mistake a tailwind and a stellar ride for the sensation, la volupte.

La Volupte translates roughly to “voluptuousness”, and while the first thing the mind goes to is a sexual definition, my favorite is, “the property of being lush and abundant and a pleasure to the senses.” In a sport where pain is worn like a badge of honor, those times when cycling is lush and abundant and a pleasure to the senses are what makes us want to climb onto our bikes again tomorrow.

Today wasn’t that. But it was something, an experience I have noticed before. Some days everything just feels sure, steady, at your command. My problem is that when I’m always going slow when I have that experience. I was not flying today, but, also I was not going slow. I had three Strava PRs, including a two-plus mile drag at the end of the ride. While my legs were not carrying me especially quickly, they had the decency to keep turning over without needing to stop, which was nice.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, wherein I am tracking down the county’s historical markers via bike rides. By my count, this is the 46th installment, and the 78th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And this one is, in fact, barely a marker.

In the 17th century, this was a place focused on trade and shipbuilding. One of the first ports, 1682, around here was near where this photograph was taken. There were British customs houses here. There’s still a local port authority nearby. It was an important center of trade until the Revolutionary War. The founder, John Fenwick, who we’ve learned about on two different Wednesdays (here and here) laid out this street for commerce and traffic.

Wharf Street was 90-feet wide, lined by houses and shops going all of the way to the docks and water. The people here here saw wheat, corn, beef, pelts and lumber come and go. Fishing was popular in the bay, oystering was a booming pursuit into the 20th century. Growth and overfishing killed the sturgeon and caviar business. Crabbing survived. The railroad, which came in 1876, was here by then, and so was the second industrial revolution, which was about glass around here, owing to the special sand that everyone was walking on, the sand that Wharf Street was built on, the street that was here for all of it.

Two genealogy site suggested Wharf Street was renamed for a prominent settler, Edward Bradway, a Londoner who landed in 1677 and built a fine house down by the water. Later, the town fathers updated the name again to Broadway. There are still Bradways in that town.

The next several weeks of markers are down that road. Some are really great; you’ll want to keep coming back. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.


9
Apr 24

First ride of the year

After 1,323 miles on the trainer during a mild winter, this afternoon was my first outdoor ride since December.

Right from the start, and throughout this 30-miler, it was wonderful. The weather was perfect. The wind was in my face. My legs burned, but kept going, and I got a text that my lovely bride’s swim had been canceled, and that she, too, was going out for a ride. I managed to find her, and we did the last six miles or so together.

Now, at last, spring is here.

Erudite wheelmen would speak of the hum of their wheels, the grip of bar tape, bidons.

Poets would write of the power and purpose of getting back into the drops. Really, it’s heart and joyful freedom.

Freedom to ride hard, to soft pedal, to weave over the road like a kid. Freedom to try on that hill, or to not. And the thrill of coming down the other side, no matter the effort on the way up.

It’s the carefree feeling we rode with as kids.

Already, it feels like a great year of riding.

But maybe you’re here for a different sort of enjoyment and relaxation. Got you covered. Here’s another shot from an entirely unremarkable vista view on the Pacific Coast Highway.

 

They have so many of them that they don’t even name them or, really, even mark them all that well. But they’re each lovely. We assume they’re all lovely. We weren’t able to see each one.

Guess we’ll have to go back one day.


11
Mar 24

Cambria, San Simeon, Hearst Castle

This is Spring Break. Started Saturday bundled up and out the door to watch an 8-year-old’s basketball game. The blue team, which we were cheering for, lost. But the red team, who we also applauded, played well. Also, they had a deep bench of junior students, and the blue team had just the five players. The red team got out to a big lead, and things were looking grim — seven-minute quarters, 10-foot basketball goals and all. The referee was as strict on the fundamental rules as the NBA. And, on the blue team, everyone wanted to bring the ball up the court. That enthusiasm worked out, though. Despite going down 10, they got back to a single bucket when the final buzzer sounded. Some of the blue teamers were despondent. Others were just ready to be shuttled off to whatever else was scheduled for their busy 8-year-old Saturday.

We went to Waffle House. There just happened to be one near the gym, and I haven’t been to a Waffle House since before the pandemic began. That one was not a good one, somewhere in Indianapolis. This one was good. Except the staff were getting along harmoniously, and no fights or any other drama dominated the experience. It was just a quick sandwich and a classic waffle.

When you have the opportunity to have a waffle for lunch, you have a waffle for lunch.

Then, it was time to strategically jam things into a small suitcase. And then it was time to get in the car and drive 90 minutes. On Sunday morning we used the services of one of the many national airports. But instead of driving up early in the morning, we chose a hotel. The hotel we chose was conveniently located near one of the state’s finest institutions. I looked up the reviews. Some people like working there! Not everyone enjoys being a guest there.

Our place was nice. It was quiet, except for the highway, which was 96 inches from the window next to our bed. I listened to this for hours, waiting for 2 a.m., because if you can schedule a trans-continental dawn flight, on the day that the clocks spring forward and you’re paranoid about alarms, you should definitely consider that undertaking.

The alarms went off right on time. Up and at’em, to the parking lot, to the airport and to the plane. All a pleasant and unremarkable experience. We took off and headed west. We flew Jet Blue, our first time on that airline, because of price considerations and direct-flight convenience. Someone asked for a blanket two rows ahead of me. The flight attendant said, “Of course. That’ll be $10.” I brought a jacket, and left my wallet in my pocket. The flight was fine, the legroom was great. I watched The Burial and rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Holdovers. Both were good airplane movie fare.

We landed in LAX, which was great, because that was what we had anticipated. We were early, which was pleasant. The Jet Blue experience was just fine. We got a rental car, opting for a sensible Toyota that required you to step up into, and duck down, simultaneously. These are fun!

We drove north, which was the direction we wanted to go, cheerily reading off road signs that we recognize from watching police chases. We stopped at In-N-Out and had a perfectly average burger, which was in keeping with our first In-N-Out experience several years ago: decent enough, not at all worth the hype. But we enjoyed the patio in sunny Southern California where it was in the 60s and everyone was wearing jackets and hoodies.

We continued on to our airbnb, in Cambria, the small central coastal town we’re visiting for the first half of the week. A delightful lady met us there, and we’ll be staying in the garage apartment of these nice people’s home right on top of the hill. This was our view. (We were also promised visits from deer and turkeys in the mornings, and I’m 85 percent convinced this was the selling point.) If you look in the distance, you can see it.

Enhance that photo. And, by enhance, I mean allow us to drive down to the coastline so that we may see the Pacific properly.

We’re strictly tourists until Thursday. You know what that means. A lot of photos!

This is standing on the William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. That pier is closed for dangers to life and limb. They really do think of everything in California.

If we were standing on the Hearst Beach, you might think, that must mean we were close to the Hearst Castle. And if you think that, you’re right, and you know where the next bit of this post is going. Here we are on the first stop of our little walking tour of the main rooms. This is the tour they encourage all of the first timers to take. (In fact, they warned us off another tour, because this one is for first timers and, hence, apparently better, but also for people just like you and me.) The guide said no food and drink, and stay on the carpeted areas. And one of the people who was on the tour, a cantankerous old woman who was just, presumably, just like you and me, said “What about marijuana?” The tour guide had half of an answer for that.

Anyway, that’s the guest house, I found out just after I took the photo, and not the Castle, or the Casa Grande, as Hearst called it. I do know a bit about Hearst the media mogul, but really nothing about his home, as you can tell.

This is more like it. This is Casa Grande, and therein are the main rooms, which is the popular first timer tour we were on, along with the older woman looking to spark up her afternoon doob. (She did not.) It’s not my style, but you can see where Hearst got his Mediterranean and Spanish influences. Much of this region could remind you of Tuscany, if you glanced at it a bit. And while the house isn’t too my tastes, the achievement is certainly worth noting. Everything built here is built atop a great big hill, and the logistics of even getting a road up here to start with was impressive. That it took 20 years, that Hearst was constantly tinkering with the plans, that he had a rock star of an architect for the entirety of the construction all figure into it, but you can’t sit up there and not be impressed by the achievement of just getting materials to this place.

As a group, we did not stay together very well, which allowed me to work several different smaller groups there in. I would stand with one cluster and mutter under my breath, “I can see what he’s trying to go for here … ”

And then I would move to another cluster and say, “Sometimes I wish we had a smaller pool like this one … ”

The taste might not be mine, and the pool may come up short, but the man knew how to pick a view.

Depending on which story you heard — and our guide told us one, but the reenactment video narrated by Donald Sutherland told us another — Casa Grande is built either on the land where he and his family camped when he was young, or on a hill near there. It’s a delightfully romantic story, and so I hope the guide had it right. But that video at the end of the tour was well-produced. I’m sure they were working from good material. This is probably the best view near the place where he remembered spending so many wonderful days as a child. And that’s plenty good.

The main rooms tour takes you into the big welcoming reception room. All of Hearst’s many guests would gather there before dinner for a drink (but not two, Hearst delighted in being a great host, but did not suffer a sloppy one). We saw the dining room, that was straight out of European central casting for a dining hall. Except, maybe, for the table, which is set for dinner, as if the Chief were going to come through those doors at any moment.

We also saw the morning room, which I am sure has a better name than that. That would have been where the guests gather to read the paper, take the sun, and someone would fetch their to-order breakfast. We also saw the billiards room. I bet you can guess what happened there.

What happened there was that our guide talked about how Hearst was always working, surrounded by his phones and the newspapers he owned. (Hearst got his money the old fashioned way, his daddy dug it out of the ground.) William was an editor and publisher by 23, courtesy of Pa, and then became a proper media mogul. Newspapers, radio, movies. Our guide then said Hearst was the social media of his day.

My lovely bride was at one end of the billiards room, with the front of the group, and I was at the other end, working another cluster of visitors, “We run into this problem all of the time. If you have two tables, some of your guests just can’t play, so last summer we expanded and now we have four in our entertainment wing … ”

So the guide said Hearst was the social media of his day. I looked at The Yankee and she looked at me and so there we were, two media pros and scholars trying not to giggle and daring each other, with facial expressions, to derail the tour and explain where she was obviously wrong.

We let it slide.

Then we watched a short film in Hearst’s in home screening room.

“Oh this is nice,” I said. “I can see what they were trying to do here. Of course ours could just be better because of the modern technology. And how we budgeted for it … ”

Hearst was one of the richest men in the world by then, of course. But in the story, I was only wearing the cheap sunglasses to not stand out, of course.

The footage we saw there was a bunch of home movie clips, filled with stars of a bygone day. Some you recognized, still. Some, when the old images came up and the tour guide said the name, you would have a moment of recognition. Others were just lost to most of us — most of us except the old woman who was looking to scurry up a little. She might have known who all of the people were. It was charming, seeing the old footage taken from the grounds, right there in the place. Just delightful.

Then we saw the other pool. It’s built beneath the tennis courts. The room leaks. In fact, the entire ceiling has been removed because it’s a mess. They blamed this on Hearst, and his changing plans, not the architect. And also common sense. If the roof is your tennis courts, then your roof is flat. So there’s nowhere for rain to run off and you’re going to have leaks.

“We learned from that mistake, too,” I said to no one in particular.

That pool, though, really is something.

(Click to embiggen.)

It’s a nice little tour. It’s worth seeing. We never thought about adding the zoo, which is no longer functioning, but you can see some of the remnants on the way up to the house itself. Only now are three or four little jokes coming to mind about how we should incorporate that in our third quarter expansion. I guess we’ll have to go back so I can try out that material on another set of visitors.

Our own tourist activities continued, with the rest of the afternoon spent enjoying the beautiful central coastline around us.

“… there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

— Sarah Kay

“We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide.”

— James Kavanaugh

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

— Isaac Newton (or Joseph Spence)

“I marvel at the nine shades of green and three shades of blue, only separated by the irrepressible skein of white foam, the color itself which keeps some of the blues from looking gree — oh, hello.”

— Me, probably

(Click to embiggen.)

“To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.
To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.
Ay, you are like an ocean,
And though heavy-grounded ships await the tide upon your shores, yet, even like an ocean, you cannot hasten your tides.
And like the seasons you are also,
And though in your winter you deny your spring,
Yet spring, reposing within you, smiles in her drowsiness and is not offended. Think not I say these things in order that you may say the one to the other, “He praised us well. He saw but the good in us.”
I only speak to you in words of that which you yourselves know in thought.”

— Kahlil Gibran

(Click to embiggen.)

“People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering.”

— Augustine of Hippo

“He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town …”

“The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: “Hello – Goodbye!” and no address.”

— Tennessee Williams

Yes, Tennessee, the rest of the play explained itself.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

More tomorrow.


6
Jan 21

We failed, we can succeed

If you haven’t noticed it before, it was made a bit easier for you to see today: we’ve failed.

The failures are, at all levels, institutional. A lame duck president and his lemmings, too vain and disbelieving to face the inevitable, behaved in ways most seditious and terroristic. We have failed in the teaching of our civics. That so many continue down this path, listening to outlets that serve no purpose but to stir fear and anger, show we have failed in teaching media literacy. That so many have shown themselves so susceptible to this nonsense shows we have failed in teaching critical thinking.

A seditious mob descended on the United States Capitol while the elected representatives were doing the nation’s business. A woman died. The vice president and next several members of the presidential line of succession were in immediate danger. Someone erected a slapdash gallows in front of the building. Perhaps others will die in the hours and days to come. Dozens more were injured.

The failures are, at all levels, institutional. And, thus, the failures are, at every stage, also individual. Impressionable, angry people made these decisions, and they have been meet with condemnation and revulsion, with further consequences to no doubt follow.

In the days to come it will be natural to seek a single failure point. People will study video frame-by-frame and pour over photographs. Jobs will be lost. And there will be investigations, too. You simply can’t inconvenience Congress, foment a coup and commit terrorism on cable television and not trigger dozens of investigations. Some will yield startling results across a wide array of agencies and jurisdictions. Some will provide disappointing outcomes.

In these ways, and perhaps more, we’ll come to realize in the coming days, we have failed. It is a frightening thing to confront your failures. A challenging thing. A necessary thing.

How we succeed is no less challenging.

As I write this, the Congress has gone back to conducting the business of the people. In some ways glorious, in others no doubt quite frustrating indeed. That’s the way of the legislative branch. Sometime in the overnight, or tomorrow, they’ll plod their way through the ceremony and a new presidential administration will ultimately begin.

Today you heard from President Trump and President-elect Biden and you saw them in stark contrast. Tomorrow, and later this month, and, hopefully for the next many years over the course of many administrations of different parties and congressional configurations of different makeups, we will start to undo the damage we have inflicted on ourselves today, and in our recent past and, indeed, throughout our history.

History is an important word loaded with hints and allusions and inferences and truths. I like the pursuit of history. Telling the truth of a story is a noble thing. I like the humanness of it. It is not to be ignored. Ignoring things brings us here, seeing our problems manifest today.

If we simply stuck to the problems above — a narcissist-in-chief, failings of civics and literacy and critical thinking are ultimately as cultural as they are individual — the challenges to correct them are immense. But we like to think we are at our best when we are faced with immense challenges. It’s comforting, it fits us. And, friends, the immensity is before us.

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. I know we won’t always be good at reaching for all of the remedies, even the obvious ones.

But, without trying to sound platitudinous in a too-tough week, I want to celebrate the words that become the ideas that move us. I hold onto the idea that we are an experiment. No less an architect than Thomas Jefferson and no less a keen observer than Alexis de Tocqueville used the word to describe us. An experiment is still alive in the moment, where the possibilities lay, where we can still impact the outcome.

The American Experiment. It really began with those few simple words that can stir you each time you really think of them, the ones found right near the beginning, in the preamble that you, perhaps, learned in school. The words that said simply, we are here “to form a more perfect Union.”

We are flawed, but we are forming. As I am sad and shocked and share in the hurt of the nation tonight, I think of those words, “to form a more perfect Union.” There’s so much power there. It was given to us. The power is still alive, in our hands, in our national will, where the possibilities remain, and where we must still determine the outcome. This is how we will succeed.