Information Blues.

I’m banged up, inside and out. I fainted at 4am while getting a drink of water, woke up on the floor in a twist of pain. I must have landed hard on the edge of the bath tub; my ribs hurt.

With their loss tonight the A’s are about officially eliminated from the playoffs. Now some people think that baseball is flip or cromagnon. I know plenty of these. But what I think is that it’s majestic and arcane and more dramatic than a Greek tragedy. It’s designed to break your heart.

So getting your heart broken sucks but still it’s a reminder that you have one. My heart I can’t understand, it’s strong and fragile. It breaks for a week, then rages back like a phoenix. It breaks for a day and I spend it trying to reload, with tea or spirits, bicycles, books and music. I really like this raging back part, the coronary re-load.

So the A’s have next year, and the next, next, and next. And I bet that this year’s team is the weakest they’ll field for a long time. But tonight it wounded me to see that outside slider of K-Rod’s drift in to Swisher for a called third strike in the bottom of the 9th. That pitch was a piece of junk, a goggled piece of ballet. That’s no way to retire a cowboy.

I dragged my heels when the Northstar trip was first presented. The place is about as mano as you can get: it takes two chair lifts to get to the top, there are double black diamond bone breakers and crazy North Shore style jungle gyms built into the trails. And furthermore, ski resorts make me feel uneasy, they reek of posturing and upper class caucasian novelty.

But those are just excuses right? Common sense and overanalysis getting in the way of fun?

When we got there it was crawling with stormtroopers. Ie extreme downhill mountain bikers in regalia: full face helmets, goggles, and more armor than football players. But there were also forty something moms on hybrids and dorky old dads on creeky department store bikes. So I felt simultaneously more nervous and a little better.

The first draft for my personal strategy involved taking it easy, fracturing off from the daredevil group and riding mellower trails if necessary. But among numerous incantations to sack up I ended up following the group all day, on what were exclusively the toughest trails in the park. These were the double danger, whiteknuckle, rock waterfall routes.

I’ve discovered my current mountain biking limitation/fear, and that is the waterfall; those parts of the trail where it’s so rocky, steep and stair steppy that you can’t really stop. You have to commit to the waterfall and ride it down, to flow with the bumps and drops, to act like water in the dust. But holy crap, it freaks me out to be skidding and falling, leaning and gawking at boulders, sticks and stones…

I think it’s like any big problem; you have to break it down: one step/rock at a time. Though to complicate things, the wrapping around this problem is that you need to be confident enough to parse it correctly, steely enough to give yourself the time to solve it.

So I tried a few (minor) waterfalls, saw some success and some failure. I was feeling good, stoked to be riding the chair lift which felt like the carnival, happy to be managing the relative armageddon of the trails. The weather was lovely and the views were amazing. But then I crashed a few times going down what seemed like the toughest double black diamond trail in the park (Karpiel), and a switch was thrown inside. From then on I was riding in safe mode. I became pumped with emergency adrenalin, twitchily devoted to caution… cautiously taking my walk of shame, baby stepping down the route which ran unfortunately right underneath the upper chair lift.

This is not to say I didn’t have fun. I had a lot of fun (cut with a few doses of danger.) The best moments of mtb’ing are when you forget the worries though, when your mind and body are fully engaged in the real-time tetris simulation that is navigating the trail in front of you. When it becomes a series of revelations, like: Wow! (look at that crazy obstacle…) Oh! (I’m riding over it) Yeah!! (I made it?!) And repeat.

The next day we moseyed on, riding gold mining country in Downieville, descending from the top of Packer Saddle, dropping 6000 feet alongside Pauley Creek. Riding down the undulating trail, passing through so many different ecosystems and environments, I kept marvelling that mountain biking is such a unique way to interact with nature. You get to feel the contours of everything you ride over, the crackle and buzz of the earth, all in a vivid, first person movie. The colors and textures fly by, condensed into psychedelic intensity. Nature seems to be frolicking with you, inserting a log drop or baby head rock under your wheel when you least expect it. And you frolick back, you wheelie down the slickrock, carve through the mulch.

And you smile!

I’m Bobbing out like crazy; I just watched Don’t Look Back. This afternoon I was finishing up Chronicles in a cafe, afternoon sun on my back, smiling big when Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 came on the radio.

He’s a thorny character in Don’t Look Back. He’s panicked and cornered, doesn’t know how to control what’s happening around him, only knows how to introspect and digest. The guy’s so self-imbedded that when anyone tries to tease him out it makes him angry. It’s frustrating to be Bob Dylan. It seems like the only person he can really talk to is himself, and that he doesn’t have the patience or maybe even the ability to translate for you. Because the songs are the (encrypted) message, right? They’re everything, and if you ask him for more you’re just pissing him off. Yes he’s a magnet but you can’t make him explain why. He’s already said so many times that he doesn’t know.

Sometimes I think about his songs, peer closely at lyrics, and they’re unstable. If you try to take them out of context, quote them, remove them from their strands, they disintegrate. If you look too closely at his words you look right through them.

So don’t look back!

While I’m sort of large (thus gravitationally-challenged) to be a good bicycling hill climber, what helps is my inner dog. See, somewhere inside I have a dog on a chain. This dog hates hills. Whenever I pull up to a patch of 9% he goes crazy, starts barking at the incline, pulling at his chain. He’s a bulldog or (sometimes, if I’m feeling good) a rottweiler, the kind of naughty guy who barks at moving cars and bites their bumpers.

My eyes may grow large, I may be staring straight up the gullet of South Park Drive, but this dog is going crazy, he wants to destroy that hill.

This is fine sometimes, but other times I don’t want to shred myself on the escalator, I’d like to enjoy it a little, actually see where I’m going. So I whisper to him, “Bien fácil, amigo!” EZ duz it, señor. This hill is okay, and there is such a thing as climbing slow. Good dog.

This was what I was telling myself today, as I went bien fácil up old Snake Road. I feel sort of burned out on the bike; this spring to summer has yielded new strength, but also new exhaustion. I didn’t have the burning urge to do anything epic today, I just wanted to have some fun. You know, enjoy yourself–it’s later than you think.

But this morning I drank a medium Peet’s coffee, and for my inner dog this is something like PCP. I tried to calm down but I raced, as I reached Grizzly Peak my inner dog began barking at a bike up the road and the coyote gave chase. I pulled around the rabbit quick, and he was good eating, a carbon racing rabbit, but as soon as I passed him I became his rabbit, and he was the fox on my wheel.

The jack rabbit, the fanciful jackalope, bounds past Claremont, up the forehead of Grizzly Peak. Jackalope has a carbon fiber coyote chasing him.

I looked back after the first hairpin and he was still on my wheel. So enough with the bien fácil, I went up GP the hardest I’ve ever gone and it felt terrible. My lungs were burning, my heart was pumping vinegar, my legs stiffened up like concrete coated rebar. The frantic rabbit wouldn’t let me shift down, he told me that speed was of the essence. But I rolled over the top with no canine in sight.

Fácilmente, amigo! I took the long, slow way to Inspiration Point, then rolled the ridge. Four miles out I stopped at the abandoned cold war missile launch pads and sat down to stretch. My thighs were tightening up, tendons taught and rusty. I lied on my back on the launch pad and stared at the polarized sky and for the first time today the words got through; I understood that this was taking it easy. So I stood up and peed in the bushes as a dear little bunny looked on, deep in a cave of poison oak, and two ladies observed me in the distance. I think my liver is sort of pissed, my pee was neon yellow.

I spent the last twenty minutes sitting in the sun on repeat, singing/playing Brown Eyed Girl on my guitar.

(File your complaints early, file them often.)