Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Like Riding a Something

Do you know what is like riding a bike?  The sort of thing that, once you learn it, you never lose it?  The stuff your body holds onto even after years of letting it go?  What, I ask, is like riding a bike?  BIKE RIDING. 

Sure, it sounds obvious, but the truest truths are - and yet we all too often argue such points, or fail to grasp them.  “Riding a bike” is just a figure of speech, is it not?  Real bike riding, on real roads with a real bike, must somehow be something different.  There’s too much to it that demands practice and reinforcement.  After enough time has passed, riding a bike, however natural it may once have been, will have to be relearned. 

Perhaps in some ways that’s right.  Muscles get soft, fingertips forget exactly how to manipulate shifters.  None of that signifies, though, when you get right down to it.  Riding a bike, as it turns out, sticks to the brain pretty good.  I know, because I tested it. 

It was in 2002 that I took a low-sped, high-impact tumble on the ol’ velocipede and busted myself up badly enough to take myself out of commission for half a year.  But after the cast came off, and the physical therapy concluded, and I’d gone back to doing yoga and built myself up again stronger and more limber than I’d been before, even when everything returned to pre-crash conditions and the bike accident was no more than a distastefully embarrassing memory, for some reason the bike never really came back out of the garage.  It wasn’t that I had developed an aversion to the exercise - I hooked my old beater bike to a stationary mag trainer at home, and I rode bike machines when I went to the gym.  I even got out with my bike for a quick jaunt every six months or so, across the bridge and right back home.  In my heart I hadn’t give up on biking. I just wasn’t actually doing much of it. 

In part, it was the bike itself.  There was a little glitch in the front derailleur; it wouldn’t drop into the small ring when I needed it to.  For the uninitiated, that’s a big inconvenience.  It made me work much harder when I could least afford to.  Also, my old helmet was a bit on the dorky side - bought as a temporary replacement in 1996 after my dear SIL took a bad tumble wearing my old one, it was clunky, unflattering, and crusted with old sweat.  But it had never actually broken, so I’d never bothered to replace it.  I just quietly disliked it.  As for the issue with the shifter, I’d tried to get it tuned-up a few years ago by some condescending louts who’d shamed me into not telling them they hadn’t solved the problem.  Getting my bike back to their shop to complain to those smarmy hippies of an inadequate repair was just too daunting for me.  Instead, I simply didn’t ride.  Running became my interim exercise of choice. 

Running was fun, and fine in its way, but it didn’t really shift my gears if you know what I mean.  I’d spent so many years on my bike, escaping and sublimating and actualizing, it had become much more than mere exercise to me.  Strapping on crosstrainers and galumphing around the park on foot never felt as essentially essential as riding the same route.  It was something I could make myself do while my bike gathered dust, but running was never totally satisfying to me. 

For my birthday a few months ago, I decided that my gift to myself would be a bike repair.  I found a well-established shop and explained the shifter issue; they seemed mellow and competent and quoted me such a low price that I shopped for a new helmet as well.  Two days later I brought bike shoes to work in my messenger bag, and at the end of business I rode the N-Judah light rail car to the shop at Stanyan.  There I picked up the old GT, now refreshed and recalibrated and all pumped up.  While I was at it I picked up a sweet new lid with arcing vents and a slick finish, that fit snugly on my head without any fuss or bother.  I rode home through the park, arriving breathless and exhilarated.  It felt very good and very normal, but ultimately incomplete.  It had been too short and flat a ride.  I hadn’t yet fully fallen back onto my bike again. 

It took four more days before I could clear an hour for a ride worth the name.  Sunday was hot and sunny and I got into bike togs for the first time in years - the stiff-soled shoes and mushroomhead helmet I’d worn just a few days before, but also the tight kneeshorts with asspadding and a spandex shirt cut extra-long to keep me under wraps as I contorted myself over the handlebars in the throes of my exertions.  It felt weird to wear those clothes, as if somehow I wasn’t entitled to dress like that.  But on a deeper level, it felt very right indeed, as if my sense of being misclothed was itself mistaken. 

In the late afternoon sun I arranged myself on the saddle, looked both ways, and pushed off.  Some things felt weird and different; some, familiar.  They broke down something like this:

Weird and Different:
* Clicking the shoes into the pedal cleats
* Adjusting the seat to just the right height
* Navigating auto traffic
* Navigating pedestrian traffic
* Navigating bike traffic
* Finding and taking the most efficient path through the Presidio and onto the bridge
* Sensitivity of front disk brake

Familiar
* Pulling back against the bar-ends to blend strength and gravity into a single motive force
* Clicking through the gears to push into a cresting acceleration
* Steering through the windblast that rages incessantly around the towers of the bridge
* Replacing the chain on the fly when it slipped off the small chainring
* Hopping over cables laid across the bike path
* Attacking a hill when I thought I just wanted to take it easy
* Harmonizing my own heartbeat to the clicking of the freewheel as I glided alone through the forest

Technically, that’s seven to seven - a tie.  But not really.  The things that demanded renewed familiarization all felt superficial - little challenges about little things.  I should have known better than to ride the bridge on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  The cleats are a trick, not a skill.  The seat would find the proper height eventually.  The route, the traffic - these things were conditional, not essential.  The brakes demanded my attention but to be honest with myself, I had never really mastered them in the first place.

The other seven, though - those carry some serious power.  They’re integral, expressive, and inspirational; they uplifted me.  The flat-out joy of flying along the blacktop and 500 feet over the mouth of the bay came right back to me as if I’d never left the saddle.  It was, in short, just like riding a bike.  I should try it again sometime.  I think I’ve still got the hang of it, you know. 

Friday, September 17, 2010

Impossible Question: Too Fast to be Fat

It has been, simultaneously, too long, not long enough, and exactly the right amount of time since I last made free to answer one of our mad world’s innumerable impossible questions. That makes this a good time to do it again, and also to define my terms. By “impossible question,” I do not mean the sort of question that any fixated yutz could answer with unlimited quantities of some given resource, like time or patience or woodchucks or such. Those questions are inconvenient, but they are not impossible, and that means that they are beneath me. Let the well-provisioned yutz pursue those baubles of wisdom for him- or herself. I am here to answer questions they’d never even be able to fit inside their yutzik crania.

I’m also not here to answer the merely personal question. Seriously, people. Talk to each other. Sterilize your turkeybaster. Get your own damn bariatric chamber. I’m the guru of the impossible question, sugarsnap - I’m not your mother.

So, today’s impossible question comes to us from the annals - quiet, you - of quantum physics. This is, as any troglodyte with an abacus can tell you, that branch of fluxions pertaining to the bits of reality that are changing too fast for the proper application of regular fluxions. It tends to take into consideration extreme circumstances and potentially variable outcomes. Things don’t always have one answer in the quantum. Most people are afraid of it. Today I will answer an impossible question about the quantum. In so doing I will make the quantum my bitch. You may wish to get yourself a wetnap in advance. It’ll be that good.

Quantum physics, or “quanties,” as we of the inner echelon know it, began when a certain supergenius asked how the universe might appear were he riding on a beam of light. From this he figured out how to use a rock to provide most of France with electricity. Along the way he realized that, were he to ride that beam of light, time in the realm we typically inhabit would, for him, just stop, and our mass would become infinite.

Even non-supergeniuses will probably recognize that this would be a very unfortunate combination of extremes: frozen in time, infinitely massive. It brings up a question even Einstein himself declined to confront: If I were to ride on a beam of light, would it make my ass look big?

Damn good question, Einstein. With infinite mass and time at a standstill, it might be objectively unflattering to find yourself riding around on a beam of light if you’re also wearing dolfin shorts and a wifebeater. (Hence Einstein’s own patented “rumpled professor” look (patent pending)). Let’s take an analytical approach and find the truth. It may hurt, but you probably deserve it.

Perspective, of course, is paramount. From where, specifically, might your butt look, potentially, big? (The potential (P) for the outcome (B = big-looking butt) is detailed in the quantum koan of Schrodinger’s Cat’s Half-Fat Cat Butt.) Three points of view are relevant to this analysis. Let us attack them, as is my wont, seriatim:

Your point of view: Would you, yourself, think your butt looked big? Probably not. You, the beam of light (let’s call it “Beamie"), the pants or, perhaps, bridesmaid’s gown you are wearing, and, of course, your potentially fat-looking mudflaps, are all moving at the exact same speed.  This is to say, relative to each other, they are motionless. Under such conditions, general relativity and Pythagorean physics prevail. Unless your ass is literally big enough to generate its own gravity field, it shouldn’t look any different to you while you’re riding along on Beamie than it usually does. And if your butt is gravitationally huge, it’s not ol’ Beamie making you look bad. I’m just saying.

My point of view: You. Are. Kidding. Like I don’t have better things to look at than your quantum hindquarters? Not my bag, man. I don’t give a rat’s ass how wide your undercarriage rides, regardless how fast you’re moving. Get over yourself, dude. We’re all perfect just as we are.  Namaste.  But that doesn’t really address the conundrum I vowed to resolve, so let’s move on.

The objectively motionless observer’s point of view: This is the observer who is motionless relative to the place where Beamie originated. ("Beamie" is starting to sound a little condescending, actually. He’s a frickin’ beam of visible electromagnetic radiation traveling 186 thousand miles per second, and he’s tough enough to haul around your apparently potentially fat-looking butt, too. He deserves a little respect.) ANYway, the motionless observer might look up at an opportune moment, just as you ride past on your beam of light. How big, relative to a hypothetical motionless posterior doppelganger, would your butt look?

As it turns out , hypertravel is surprisingly slimming. As an object approaches speeds approaching that of light, our view of that object grows increasingly distorted. Let’s not crap around with Doppler effects. Meterology has irretrievably sullied them for me, but more importantly, our discourse does not touch upon mere sublight speeds. Commodore Beamington Photonray (no that’s no good either) doesn’t lollygag at anything less than C, as in the square root of E/M.* So let’s move directly to the key analysis: At light speed, your butt would barely even be visible as it traversed the visual field of a relatively stationary observer. Edge on, as one sees traffic on the street, your butt will pass too quickly for a photon to reach it and bounce back to an observer to be perceived. You will actually experience buttly motion in the mere amount of time it takes for light to bounce off your mooncakes, producing an incoherent image in which rearmost portions might appear closer - itself an effective caboose obfuscator. During its approach toward the observer, your butt would be invisible because no information about it could reach the observer before your butt itself does. And going away, your butt would be shrinking at an amazing rate, which is never a problem. From the perspective of the stationary observer, your butt, riding on a beam of light, looks fabulous.

However, that stationary observer will probably appear to you frozen in space and infinitely massive. So if you decide to ride the lightbeams, bring a camcorder because you could probably get some really embarrassing shots to post on your facebook (or “myspace” as you may prefer). Now that’s useful advice.

As always, I invite the submission of other truly impossible questions so I can answer them for you. Give me a challenge. Life is either groceries or art, n’est pas?

*: E = MC squared
E/M = C squared
square root of E/M = C
(crowd goes wild!)

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Outlaws

Not so long ago I had a delightful visit with my wife’s extended family.  We don’t see each other too often but not by choice - this is one family that knows how to enjoy a reunion.  However, the whole experience did put the kernel of a story in my mind, and darned if I didn’t wind up up and writing it.  This is not my family, but I thank them for a great week of vacation and a little literary inspiration.  This also got posted at Fictionaut, but it’s not getting a lot of traffic.  You know what that means, Chucklehut visitor - it’s up to you!

The sky was colorless; so was the neighborhood. As Jim’s rented midsize gently navigated the right turn onto Shadyway Lane, Bronte was pretty sure she was making the biggest mistake of her life. If she only knew.

Jim glowed with barely-suppressed excitement as Bronte let him drag her along to the Plainfield Plenary (as his family insisted upon calling their annual confab). As they approached the end of their journey, the gleam in his eye finally made sense to her: not eagerness but naivete; not clarity but callowness. Her curiosity about his innocence died utterly as she spied what was obviously their destination halfway down to the cul de sac.  It had to be the house with two cars parked in the driveway and two more at the curb in front. None of the others had so much as a bicycle on the porch.  The Plainfield front yard also boasted a reflecting globe and a fake birdhouse.  These were not, in Bronte’s eyes, good signs.

Jim was bouncing on his pleather seat as they pulled up to the curb. “Sugar, you’re gonna love my family. Salt of the earth, they are. You’ll see. I can’t wait to show you off to them.” He ran around to open her door for her, an affectation that had already begun to tire her when he had arrived to take her to the airport that morning. He’d acted all gallant as he superfluously guided her into their cab but that was six long hours of travel ago. Now she was booger-eyed and sour-breathed; her back was sore and her legs tingled with lethargy. All she really wanted was a tall G&T and a dim room in which to sip it in peace. She doubted she’d find it here.

She scuffed her way up the concrete walk, glancing from the reflecting globe on its pedestal (yes, it made her look fat, shimmering with its total lack of irony) to the rubberized doormat that offered an undiscriminating “welcome” to anyone willing to trod upon it.  With every step of her patent black high heel boots she felt more sure that she should have broken up with Jim two weeks ago rather than to have taken him up on his offer of a Florida vacation. It had sounded fun at first blush but every subsequent revelation about it had diminished the luster - central Florida with nary a beach to be visited; a small town with nothing going on anywhere nearby; every day dedicated primarily to catching up with a family she’d never met before. Hell, she’d spent 27 years getting away from her own damn family. She’d only been seeing Jim for a couple of months now, more out of boredom than anything else, and he’d roped her into this boondoggle of a reunion (oops, “plenary") before she’d realized how pointless it all was going to be. Now she was good and stuck.

The doorbell chimed inside the house and a muted many-throated cry of delight reached her ears.  She automatically rehashed the names he’d been drilling her on ever since she’d agreed to come here with him: there were Mom and Pop - Mildred and Richard, though she’d been strongly cautioned not to refer to either of them by name, which would somehow inject unwarranted formality into the proceedings while depriving them of their proper familial honorifics. The eldest of their offspring was Richard Jr, or “Little Ricky” as he, incredibly, apparently preferred to be called - an actuary living, as it were, in Tulsa. He was married to someone or other - Bronte couldn’t be bothered to keep spouses straight. Jim was the #2 son, and there were also two sisters - Stacy, a homemaker in the greater Texas buttfuck region, and Mary, who was in hospitality grad school, whatever the hell that was, and who had hooked herself up with a college sweetheart with nauseating traditionalism. Richard (oops, “Pop") had earned his nut as an insurance exec of some mid-level sort, and he and his ever-widening wife had dedicated themselves to raising offspring who, judging from Bronte’s knowledge to date of Jim and her impressions of the fleet parked in front of the house, made up in conventionality what they lacked in imagination. She could already smell butter cookies and mayo as she stood on the porch, waiting with fatalistic resignation for the front door to open.

Glancing down, she noticed that one of her black stockings had twisted on her calf during the drive. Automatically she bent to adjust it.  The door opened and a lardy voice called out, “Jimmy!” Bronte stood up again, expecting from the timber of the salutation to see Mom at the door - but instead it was Pop, all beaming smile and florid jowl, reaching out to embrace his sub-prodigal. Pop wore a short-sleeve polo shirt in dusty rose, tucked into well-ironed pleated khaki shorts from which his ropey calves emerged like skittle-pins. Shortly behind him, blocking Bronte’s view into the house, Mom hovered with eager delight, dressed in a sea-foam green smock under a - good god - baby blue, lace-trimmed apron. Her face and her husband’s could have been interchanged without seriously affecting either of their looks. The foyer in which they stood contained an occasional table and a framed reproduction of scriptural art. The walls were three tones of beige.

Mom and Pop embraced Jim with appreciative squeals and then fell back to meet Bronte with restrained enthusiasm, her black frock and stockings and shiny pointy boots apparently putting their corn-fed hospitality to the test. “How nice to meet you, dear,” one of them mumbled. Bronte stood with her arms dangling at her sides, distinctly conscious of the passing of time. Then Mom and Pop sidled back into the living room, and Bronte started paying closer attention.
“Come on, everybody’s here now, make yourself comfortable and catch up with the fam,” Mom (Pop?) chirped to Jim, leaving Bronte to navigate her own way. The living room was mostly beige, with off-white trim, gauzy drapes and overstuffed couches. Mass-produced paintings hung on the walls; precious glass-front cabinets held worthless accessories - ormolu clocks, porcelain kittens. The air was thick with gratuitous contentment. Mom and Pop scurried around their various progeny, gorging themselves on parental satisfaction. Little Ricky, Jim, Stacy and Mary circulated energetically among themselves, a fiesta of khaki and pennyloafers.

All told it looked to Bronte as if one weak personality had been split six ways among the members of the Plainfield clan.  But that was not to suggest that no one of interest was present. Bronte had failed to take the significant others into account.

Standing at three corners of the living room, almost as if to distinguish themselves from it and all it contained and represented, three other guests honed their eyes upon Bronte as if she were a sharpening steel and they were carving knives - eyes fixed, lips pressed thin, postures carefully framed so they wouldn’t resemble each other too much.  Bronte wasn’t fooled. They fit together like a tailored suit. They each wore monochrome outfits and sported glossy hair; their shoes all looked a little threatening.  Even as she realized that she was just going to be ignored by the reunited Plainfields, the three other outsiders assessed her with frank curiosity.

She knew her next move would be important so she took her time making it, casually opening her beaded clutch and drawing out from it a tube of gloss.  Bronte’s eyes locked onto those of the tallest outsider as the glistening applicator stroked her lightly pursed lips; then she strode out of the living room and into the den beyond.

The den was underlit, pine-paneled , smelled like television and Febreze.  On the other side of the venetian blinds, a manicured backyard butted up against a sterile deck.  After a discreet pause, someone followed her in - but not the guy she’d invited.  Without diverting herself from the view, such as it was, Bronte knew it was the other woman who had joined her.

“Wrong choice. The tall one’s mine.”

Bronte turned to face her with a small chuckle.  “Yeah?  You divvied up already?”

The other woman remained on her side of the room.  “Not as such.” Her words clinked, bright and cold.  “They’re both mine.  But if you’re gonna be hanging around, I’ll let you use Carlo.”

“Both yours?  Sounds… cozy.” Bronte tried to mask the weariness in her voice.  It had been a long day, she wanted a smoke, and this sudden twist her afternoon had taken was demanding more focus than she’d expected to need.

“Cozy?  Not exactly.  But definitely entertaining.  Around here I take my entertainment where I can find it.” The two women faced off from opposite corners of the Plainfield family den, raking each other with their eyes.  The other woman was trim and flinty, with high cheekbones and a pert nose that suggested a cuteness the rest of her face belied.  She was hot, but she was not cute.  Her chest was small and high; her legs were slim but solid.  She wore a short black skirt over black stockings.  Ladder-patterned.  Nice stockings.  Bronte noticed herself staring impolitely.  Instead of stopping, she licked her glossy lips.

The other woman laughed, deep in her throat.  “Iris.  You’re Bronte.  I heard the introductions.”

“They seem… conventional.”

“That’s even giving them too much credit.  The kids are okay if you get them on their own, but together they’re an egg white omelet.  No color, no flavor.”

“I’m not always satisfied with such wholesomeness.  Sometimes I like a little yolk down my chin, you know?” Bronte turned fully toward Iris - in invitation or challenge, neither was sure which.  They both took a few steps forward and met in the middle of the floor.  “Yuri’s mine,” Iris purred.  “You can have Carlo, I guess.  But most everything’s negotiable.”

As if she’d rung a bell to summon them, Yuri and Carlo entered.  Yuri wore a double-breasted dark grey suit and a white shirt open at the throat, black hair upswept above an aquiline nose and a professional grade tan.  Carlo was a little shorter, thicker, more substantial.  His smirk dripped confidence right down the front of his grey silk shirt and black silk blazer.  They looked at the women, then at each other, before introducing themselves to Bronte by respectively stating their first names.  Then both turned to Iris, expectant, obedient.  The room was getting warmer.

Bronte broke the brief silence.  “So, what do you do for fun around here?  I mean, other than each other?” Carlo’s smirk broke into full-fledged laughter; Yuri feigned shock.  Iris leaned forward and breathed into Bronte’s ear: “We misbehave.”

“For real, or just kid stuff?” Bronte’s pulse was racing.  She fought to keep it out of her voice.

“Damn real.” Carlo spoke with the smoothness of fine bourbon.  “We met here first four years ago and got something going right off.  Regular life, we’ve all got normal gigs; nothing like this for any of us. Come the Plenary, we go out and do stuff.  Turns out, now we’re pretty good at it.”

“Good at what?” Bronte felt herself rising to the occasion.

Yuri stepped to the far corner of the room and pulled out a notepad.  “Your choices tonight:” - a quick glance to the others - “Pharmacy, bank branch, car dealership.”

“What kind of cars?” Iris and Bronte were standing nearly collarbone to collarbone.  They spoke as one, turned to each other, communed subcutaneously.  “Jinx,” said Bronte.  Her voice, for once, masked nothing.

Iris inhaled deeply, then gestured to the living room, still busting with Plainfields.  “In there, we’re the in-laws.  Outside, in about six hours, we’re the Outlaws.  Welcome to the family.” Yuri and Carlo kept one eye each out the door as Iris laid a leisurely kiss on Bronte’s unresisting lips.