Like People Do in Normal entries

Went for a bike ride at dawn this morning. That’s three dawns of the last four. I rode up to the rail-road tracks where the road blocks have been cramping my style for a week. I hadn’t been able to get close enough by car to see what the fuck. The fuck is they got the ties off the tracks in piles of I’m not sure how many but I bet they’re even. The piles spread out to the horizon which, here in the flatlands, is a fer piece.

It was cool this morning. I mean the air. Humidity makes the heat hotter, it also makes the cool colder. I amped up my pedaling. The dew point was 59 degrees, that’s Fahrenheit to you son, and it was about 53 when I went out, that’s out a’ridin’ to you daughter. In Portland Oregon 53 is kind of pleasant. In the summer in mid-Michigan 53 is a pleasant relief, but the dampness nestles in your joints if you don’t amp up your game.

I cooled off, took an accidental nap, read an email back from the GF, took a few deep breaths, said fuck it either out loud or like a prayer and went for a ride in my car. I couldn’t tell you why but I stopped by the starbucks in East Lansing and got a big old cup of iced coffee. Oh. That’s not clear my not knowing why. I hadn’t planned my route, I couldn’t exactly, not the way I was going to go, but it was, I had really hoped, back in time. A starbucks was incongruous with where I thought I was going. I flipped in music that was incongruous too.

I can guess why but it fucks up the narrative.

I headed south, sort of, I had to skirt the direct road south because the damn thing was road-blocked at the fucking tracks. I took the route I used to take when I was training for multi century bike rides as a kid. There used to be this old run down school house on the route. Having read Malcom X’s biography and knowing the local geography I’m pretty sure he went there; one room, red brick, a few miles from the metropolitan area. It’s still there, it’s just not run down anymore. It has a plaque. I didn’t stop to read it. I assume it says “Historic Building” and maybe something about Malcom X. Maybe not.

I had left my phone on purpose, I don’t like the sounds it doesn’t make these days. I kept thinking I should stop and take a picture. I rode into Mason, the county seat and typically the terminus of my bike training run (though some days I made that trip twice to three times, 13 miles, 26 round trip). Old brick buildings, courthouse in the middle of town. People meandering the main square, though not in their Sunday best, it’s as though everybody thought starbucks this morning while going to or living in the old world. It would make more sense if you were here.

Leaving Mason I ran into the beginning of some sort of organized bike ride. Most people were dressed in ugly biking gear and helmets. Not traditional but law abiding, an old tradition in new skin. My balls, which had been sulking in my drawers piped up with a “Screw your fashion sense, those ugly bike shorts are made to protect me!” Great, even me and my balls are on the outs.

I continued south. My sort of vague idea was to kind of follow routes my friend and I used to take to try and get lost (impossible) or find old graveyards (rewarding). I didn’t recognize any of the side country roads, most of which were dirt and swallowed by old growth deciduous trees. Huh, that’s a cold way of describing the trees. I love the trees, I love the variety, I love the quaint unkemptness and how they reach out to embrace the road.

So I stayed on the blue highway (a state road running through small towns and going god knows where). As I turned a sharp corner, perhaps built to avoid a tree; there was nothing but corn fields as far as I could see, this song came on and I hit my starbucks;

I smiled. It’s not like it hurt my face or anything.

I came into this town, Danville I think or one close to there. The first building was made of red brick, plain, white washed simple window frames and white washed door, maybe nine hundred square foot and American flags around it like a hoop skirt. Community center. Then the Methodist church; beige field stones and concrete, full parking lot, American flag and flag of Michigan out front, both flying at half mast. I can think of several reasons why, I guess, but I’m probably wrong. A bit up the road the Baptist Church, red brick abutting a graveyard, an old graveyard, I recognized the style of some of the tombstones as Shiloh soldier stones. Parking lot full, American flag at the top of the staff shimmering in the breeze. At that moment I was satisfied that my mission was if not completed at least resolved.

I drove on, saw some other things, found a semi paved road to turn around in pulled into this fancy old country residence with well paved driveway, a barn and a pole barn, both buttressed at the foundation with irregular shaped field stones painted the same color red as the barn. I reached for the phone which wasn’t there and so I didn’t take a picture. I kind of liked the idea of my dumb ass in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts standing in the driveway taking a picture of those folks house and barn.

And that’s the sort of adventure it was, it was beautiful off trail heartland that I very much know and love, always have, in the way that I love My pieces of Oregon; I don’t have to see them, just knowing they are there in the world makes me happy and I know I’ll see them again. I’ve been here damn close to four years on the nose now and today was the day to go out there and I’m happy for it.

I think it would have been disrespectful to interact anymore. I don’t give a fuck what people think of me, but I try hard to give respect to the place. This trip wasn’t for that, it was bi-nary opposition, an amusement most respectful to keep to myself. As I came back through Mason and saw kids on a leash wearing neon T-shirts, the wicking kind not the wal-mart kind, I figured a little disrespect was in order, not out of solidarity, more like honking a horn at a colorblind old man at a stoplight. I rolled down the window hoping more Me First and the Gimme Gimmes would cue up. This was just as good

Um, I am a bit limited by my own tastes. I make the discs. Sometimes discs are like photographs, they look like a captured moment of reality but by their very nature are the opposite. Reality, for us, is fluid, racing toward the grave or new generations depending on how you want to look at it. Once you snap the shutter or burn the disc it might as well be a fly in amber.

Even on a real cold streak the GF has perfect timing to interrupt an entry. She also manages to text when I pull out of a driveway and when I sit down in the bathroom. Most of the time, too, it’s banality. Today is different, sort of, and I typed through it anyhow. I’ve known all along it was a bad idea to hinge my notions of the future onto her door frame, but where we are at now is not the sort of bad idea I was picturing.

I’m actually better going it alone. I mean my mind is less troubled. I’m not saying we broke up, though we are literally not seeing one another neither one of us is saying we are also not seeing one another as the figure of speech goes. I’ve certainly gone longer without seeing her, but this is different, angry different. Occassionally we talk in broad terms about our personal finest hours. I don’t know how to speak without slipping into metaphors. I’ve been trying very hard to write without slipping into metaphors, I mean just being direct. It’s a boring exercise and when I’m sure I’ve got it pinned down I’ll stop doing it.

Metaphors isn’t really the right word, but it’s close. I mean more like phrasing that has multiple meanings, much closer to a metaphor hidden in the narrative than a double entendre, those I treat like puns; a lot of work to make someone groan.

So, when I would tell her about hitch-hiking I was implying my state of Zen; alone, on foot, responsible to no one and like a leaf on the wind going where I went in a pattern so abstract and chaotic it was hardly a pattern at all. She understood, she’s smarter than I am, but she also didn’t, so she related with her own experience. I mean that’s how people do, right? Which was fine. Now it seems like misunderstanding is rolling like a snowball down the avalanche chute. Again, it’s like people do.