Friday, April 28, 2006

Better and better and better.

Hello. Are you familar with the film ¨The Passenger¨, starring Jack Nicholson as James Locke, a journalist of the American variety struggling to locate a rebel group in an unnamed Saharan country? It was made around 1973 by Michelangelo Antonioni and not released until recently.

The plot hinges on a moment of discovery in a fellow traveller´s hotel room: a dead Englishman in the adjacent room of an overheated hotel in the middle of nowhere. Locke looks at him, finds his passport, and has a realization: an identity is available for the taking, and he proceeds to switch passport photos, datebooks, and lives as he is entirely sick of his own. That´s all of the plot I am interested in retelling. The relevant bit in my mind is the mood Nicholson conveys, the irritated,
exhausted, spoiled white man moving through a foriegn landscape that neither interests nor inspires him. He roars off into the Sahara in his Landrover and gets stuck in a sand dune immediately, after abandoning his foot-guide (in search of his obscure rebel group) in disgust. One damned thing after another. He smashes helplessly at the ´rover with a shovel.

I have no such adventure before me, only the heat, the cockroaches, the lost passport. Yes, that's right, I managed to lose my passport w.in 48 hours of arrival, which included my visa for a mere 30 days in a country where I am under contract work for 90. Of course I missed my flight here anyway, was forced to wait it out in Mexico City for 24 extra hours and then take a 12 hour bus ride (which turned out to be an air-conditioned breeze, and not the 15 hour milk run I was promised. Now I work six days a week teaching English to sleep-deprived teenagers who drop their books on the floor every five minutes. I have indeed fallen into another life, one where the weather seems to get hotter each day, where the cockroaches have the size of some the larger beetles, where I drag my mattress out on the roof each night, where its cooler and quieter and where I have no Maria Schnieder as of yet.

Its the heaviness of solitude, of having no friend but a heap of problems each day, where procuring a postage stamp is a two hour exercise in sweat-soaked toil. This is the feeling that makes me think of Nicholson in the first twenty minutes of The Passenger (which is a pretty good movie, if only because it holds in high relief the emptiness of the Western material identity, the nihilism of a successful, priviliged man faking his own death out of irritation and boredom with his jetsetting, professional life).

A jackhammer is slicing its noise into my brain as I write this, distracting me from telling you about the exciting sites and sounds to be found here in Chiapas, i.e., the constant sight of old VW Bugs, the ripped apart sidewalks, the posol (a drink made of from the coconut).

I attempted to generate a discussion about overpopulation with my students this morning. They had no idea what the population of Mexico City was, and why should they as don´t live there. I insisted it was 30 million. No one argued. I announced that it was the same size as Canada´s population. No one contested that either. I went into an extended comparison of the relative sizes of the two landmasses in order to show that overpopulation was a kind of myth. No one argued, no one said much of anything. The Mexican teenager doesn´t want to argue it seems, especially not at 7:30 on a Friday morning, but not most other times either. And who can blame them? Isn´t it hot enough already? Why add a lot of thinking into the problem, and in English yet? Its the lassitude of the Tropics coming through again.

Why is Chiapas the poorest state in M.? I asked another group the other day. The corrupt politicians who are totally useless and sell off all our raw materials one girl offered. They´re all going to vote in the elections in July. But what to do about all this corruption? An unanswerable question. This is Mexico, they seemed to say. All people in charge are morons. So why worry?

Regards,

Friday, April 21, 2006

Sweating in the tropics

People,

Why leave the comfortable and familar for the discomfort of airports, bus stations, other people´s houses,
climates, microbes, exchange rates, etc?

Everytime I do it I am reminded of travels past. Large cities in particular remain a source of agony. As I scouted
the TAPO bus station for a place to sleep in Mexico City at 12 30am,I thought of past encounters w. giant cities. Days camping at a truckstop on the edge of Istanbul, sleeping rough in an alley near the Millenium Dome in London, climbing a wall to construction site in Paris in the middle of Saturday night. In this case it was a matter of a missed plane connection and no bus for another twelve hours. A case of waking up too late, wasting rediculous amounts of money rushing to the airport, only to mix up airlines, miss my flight to O´Hare and spend hours in a parking lot at in Washington D.C.reading a novel and taking the sun when I was supposed to be flying calmly into southern Mexico.

All the subsequent flights on the last leg were booked solid, and had horrible connections anyway. I dreaded the 15 hour bus ride more than anything, even more than the horrendously loud bus terminal with its floor polishers waxing away relentlessly in the middle of the night. Even more than sharing a little hut in the parking lot with a compañero in the dark, pesos and euros and pounds and quarters falling out of my pockets as always. But all was well in the end, none of the thieving nightmares every Western tourista dreams about befell me in that city of thirty million. My sweater came in handy for the first and last time this trip. I admit that I actually LIKE the guerilla camping, even w. a bad night´s sleep. Makes me feel a little bit George Orwell down and out wherever, wandering around in a daze the next day looking for un baño publico.

A million wasted pesos later I arrived after an easy, airconditioned bus ride that was only 12 hours (three bad Hollywood movies) long. Ah, the Latino tropics, where the only thing on the menu at 1am is mystery meat in a tortilla, and you´re happy to have it. Where it cools off to 25 degrees celcius. Where you can lose a foot in a crack in the sidewalk.
A place to be contento como los locales. A place to sweat and reflect.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Eating it from Paris to Ancaster

Thoreau said "We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us", and by the time we were back in the car heading home from the 13th annual Paris-Ancaster mtn bike race, I had had a sharp reminder of what that meant.

My last chance to do a bike race and I leapt at it before I even had one to race with. P-A is a mix of road and gravel and as it turned out, pure muck. And it was the pure muck that did me in around kilometre 54 of 60.

It was a bright Sunday, warming nicely for an Ontario day in early April, with little wind. I had borrowed my good buddy Dr No's new bike, a rigid flat black hybridy thing that I'd transformed into an off-roadish bike by throwing some knobby tires at it. It seemed to be just the thing for the job, once I'd warmed to the task (having elected to go without the tights when it was 7 celcius at 10am, plus some shinguards from my freestyle bike days. Maybe it was those Jinx pads combined with the 13th edition of the race... or maybe it was the shit-stupid organizers who let 1600+ bikes churn through kilos of six inch deep mud wrecking many a citizen racer's day (and the trail)in the process.

These massive for-profit races definitely have drawbacks. Paris-Ancaster drew more racers than ever before and the organizers didn't keep infrastructure up to capacity, so dozens of us started late in a 'third wave' of racers. (The race is big enough that you drive to finish, park, then wait for school buses that herd everyone to the start point, and inevitably there weren't enough of them.)

My raceday cohort J.L. and I finally got off the start gate in a small escape group, a cyclocrosser leading. It was way too high a pace for my cold muscles and I cracked inside the first km, then tried to find a pace of my own against the heartburn in my chest. As a mtn biker bridged up to me and we got into a rhythm I suddenly saw the long-gone J.L. headed in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION, sucking on his Camelbak stoically. Had he packed it in already? Dropped something crucial? Bad leg acting up? It was a mystery that bothered me as we sped away. Hours later I spotted J.L. in the parking lot changed back into street clothes. Turned out he'd grabbed his Camelbak for a drink and ripped the nozzlehead right off, the contents of its bladder emptying all over him as he rode. Eventually he gave up trying to find it on the trail and committed to a 59km excursion with nothing to drink. By the end both legs were cramping hideously. Such is bike racing.

I had a different yet worse fortune, after passing the hundreds of slow people who started god knows when before me, getting a decent rhythm going on my oh-so-effecient rigid frame with its much narrower 700c knobbies that even cut through the mud better than the fat tire gang could, mechanical disaster struck just five or six km from the finish: coming out of a few hundred metres of walking-only mud I jumped back on all ready to drop some more slowpokes, not even looking at the state of my drivetrain. If I had, I might have seen the deraillieur upside down and backwards, the chain mangled up along with it. I actually got on and pushed it skateboard style after walking it awhile, but ran out of pavement and opted for a ride to the parking lot from a local race marshall with a huge 4X4 truck. End of race, DNF.

Bike racing is a stark enterprise, where much pain and privation often meets with little or no reward and often punishment, and it left me wondering what exactly I was doing shelling out $48 for the privilege of such muck-strewn crap.

I took some consolation in the fate of George Hincapie on the same day at the inspiration for my race, the 104th Paris-Roubaix in north east France. The American pro star recovered from a scary fall on the cobbles mid-race and found himself in the lead group with 40-plus km to go in the 260km, seven hour marathon 'L'enfer du Nord" race with its fifty or so cobbled sections. Then his steerer tube cracked as he roared along at 50km/h, suddenly with neither steering nor brakes he crashed again brutally, at the side of the road. This time he broke his collarbone and had no support car to throw him another bike anyway. End of race. There's a picture of him sitting on the roadside next to his bike crying.

Fuck this.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Self De-fence.



I like removing fences. There are far too many around inhibiting the free movement of people in the world.

In Toronto I occasionally remove a chainlink fence by request of someone who owns it. Actually its the Downtown De-fence Project that does it, through its parent, the Public Space Committee. Seeing as I'm tearing off to Chiapas I asked if we could open the de-fencing season a bit early, and so we did at the weekend.

Burning through some metal pipe with a handheld grinder is a fine way to spend an afternoon when that pipe is holding up a chainlink fence. Its a wonderful thing to do with friends, and it makes people quite happy.


Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Bottombracket

So,

I have this bike race coming up on Sunday, Paris-Ancaster. I've been in a phase of excitement about bike racing for the last couple years, in fact I've allowed myself to become addicted to it as a spectator sport - European road racing that is.

Now this race on Sunday is special for a number of reasons, the biggest one being perhaps that its the last one I'll be doing for a good while, as I am off to Mexico for some some months very soon... so this one's gonna be it for now. Its a 60km point to point race, with over a 1000 bikes involved, even a special category for tandem bikes (!); its both road AND off-road with the ideal weapon being a cyclocross bike. Which I don't have. In fact, I don't have any bike for this race that I'm fifty non-refundable dollars registered for, at all. Tomorrow's Wednesday, so that gives me four days to play with.

But I've got a plan in the works: I looked at a bike a dude is selling out of his parents basement today, a full-suspension mtn bike that's pretty fancy for my taste, maybe too fancy, so I'm getting my mechanic buddy John to look it over tomorrow. It's certainly not preferable for the P-A race, that much I know. At least its only a couple blocks from my place, so we can take another look at it tomorrow, put peddles on it, and I can actually ride it which is crucialin a matter like this, I'm sure you would agree. Guy wants $800 for it, which is way more than I should be spending (should be spending $0). I'm getting nervous as hell just thinking about it all, but I could sell my road bike and get half the $$ back later...

And some people have sick children to worry about in the night.
Enough

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Welcome.

Hello,

I've been meaning to get back to you about.... a number of things. I'm bored of sending emails and you're bored of reading them, perhaps. So let's jump past the sending of memos and let me establish my own little corner of the virtual universe, where all information appears recoverable.

Well, you have to start somewhere and why not here? Soon I will be going to Mexico and news from a foreign world will I have, though I'm really uninterested in relaying what its like to walk down the street in a foreign country, or any of the typical travel story bullshit. Travelling is mostly stupid and boring. I'm interested in other things, like bicycles and the English language and other languages and migratory birds. Got it?

So welcome to my little record of bottom bracket life. (A bottom bracket, for those who don't know, is the mechanism by which your bicycle crank makes your drivetrain work. As those who know me understand, I dislike numerous things, but I like cycling very much. I also tend to live at the bottom income bracket due to my lack of interest in trading my time for money, or in doing things that would make me a lot of money. An apparent lack of interest anyway.

In addition, this is a record of my last days in Hogtown, ie, Toronto, for a good while, so I'm trying to do a bunch of things I've never done before here before I disappear.