Bits and bobs

1. So Israel is at it again, if one can say that they
ever cease. A policy of absolute aggression, it would
seem. Whenever the Gazans act up, Israel says,
¨Either you control the militants or we will have to
do it¨. Could it be anymore blatant? The only way to
stop us from assaulting you/continuing to assault you
further is if you declare war upon yourselves, hunt
down yourselves and slaughter yourselves so we do not
have to.

Same thing straightaway with the Hizballah in Lebanon.
No chance of a prisoner swap this time, we´re too
busy obliterating you bastards and thank you for the
opportunity.

But if you`d like this carnage to stop, if you´d like
this airforce/artillery/tank/naval blockade and
general shooting-fish-in-a-barrel invasion to stop,
Lebanon, you can do it very simply: Start a civil war
right now to ¨control¨ the Hizballah, never mind that
they are the strongest military force in the country.
Its a foreign policy of hyperaggression. Naturally
the West sits back and does nothing, as usual. Must
wait for Israel to finish its job first, of course.

Will Syria take this opportunity to re-occupy Lebanon
as Hizballah takes a huge shitkicking? Of course that
would be lining up to be the next fish in the barrel,
but if they could re-trench themselves, it would be
quite a political victory for them. Likely they´ll
not have the nerve, as Israel wouldn´t hesitate to
pound them into the stone age at the slightest
opportunity. But if Israel attacks Hiz. near the
Syrian border...

It made me think of all that Colin Powell b.s. about the military doctrine of
`overwhelming force`, ie, the American high-tech, low risk death-from-above approach
to warfare. Basically the doctrine says, never go to war, until you have a 9 to 1 advantage,
or is that 19 to 1? That way you can achieve your miltary objective easily and put the fear of
hellfire into the rest of world. Of course its attributed to the deep military thinking of Powell
and his Pentagon boys, but let`s give credit where credit is due: the Israelis, who`ve been pounding
the shit out of civilian populations since decades. And look at what it has gotten them:
occupation without end.

2.Congratulations Floyd $%&!ing Landis! (Yes, Floyd
reads my blog all the time.) That 17th stage victory
was worthy of the hallowed name of Eddy Merckx. What a
piece of riding, what a spectacular attack the like of
which you never see anymore. Well, I never do anyway.
Truth is, I was rooting for Landis to win the Tour
ever since that poor bastard Jan Ullrich got
blackballed the day before the Tour de France was due
to start. And now Ullrich has been fired from
T-Mobile Team, of which he has been the pillar since
1997. What a disaster.

In a sense I liked Landis for a similar reason to
liking Ullrich: attitude. Landis never shows that
Lance Armstrong, I-am-the-centre-of-the-Universe
attitude, just this laid-back but very determined
understated sort of thing. I like that. And Landis
did it without a powerhouse team like T-Mobile much less Armstrong`s New
York Yankees of cycling.

Still, the Phonak boys really busted their arses the
whole way for him, sacrificing everything for the
leader, as it should be.

Enough.

Tour de Fr., 9me etape

Hello to All Seven of You

One nice thing about my current job is the fact that I am done with work by nine a.m. and can scoot home in time to watch the Tour coverage on tv. I´m always in time to get the last 45 km of live racing from the highways and byways of good old France, with somewhat clueless Hispanic announcers yammering on.

Today was a sprinter´s stage, the last before the Pyranees (I think its the P´s), ending in the city of Dax, wherever that is. It was an awesome bunch sprint yet again with McKewen losing to the great Oscar Freire of Spain by less than half a wheel, with my man Zabel ripping up the inside line and past Tom Boonen no less to take third, his best finish yet this Tour. The way Zabel just keeps going at it, years after his peak, still giving everything against the world´s best never ceases to inspire me. I know he just wants one more stage win in the Tour so much. He´s got more victories than anyone else in the peloton, won the Tour´s Green Jersey six times over but he´s still totally hungry and won´t give up at thirty-five.

Zabel wasn´t even supposed to get much of a chance in the Tour with this new Milram team, as they had signed the superfast sprinter Alessandro Petacchi and the team would have been working for Ale-Jet had he not broken his kneecap in the Giro. So after the snub of not being picked for T-Mobile´s Tour squad last year after thirteen years with them, Zabel is back in action, always getting top ten finishes in the opening week´s sprinting stages.

I really needed to get that off my chest, I don´t care how irrelevant it is to any of you. I actually got to see my man Zabel in action at the World´s in Verona, Italy in 2004, if only briefly. It was the final, excruciating lap, and I had spent the previous forty-five minutes of the six-and-a-half hour race climbing the mountainous part of the course. Finally the front end of the race showed up and there was Zabel in first place, just giving it with full force in the heat of the 16th lap. To see a pure sprinter hammering up a mountain like that after 240+ km and in October no less (after eight months of racing), was really amazing. Of course, Freire beat him in the sprint and Zabel had to live with second, tears streaming down his face after a final furious effort over the cobblestones. It was particularly frustrating for Zabel because a) in the World´s your team is ill-practiced and the race is so long and difficult that making your move at the right time without something going wrong is hard enough, and b) Freire had beat him that spring right at the line in San Remo at the longest one-day race of the year.

It had been a spectacular fiasco for such a seasoned sprinting pro, that loss in Milano-San Remo, because Zabel (who´s won that race four times) went into the victory salute five metres from the line, not realizing that Freire was about to explode past him, which of course he did to Zabel´s eternal humiliation. Much later he said, ¨I didn´t see him there, I didn´t hear him, I didn´t feel him there¨.

Freire, who´s won three world championships, is a specialist at the long-range one day race with the possibly the best punchout speed in the final metres of a bunch sprint. It was his second stage win of this Tour, and it was typically amazing. Freire just exploding forwards and even the Aussie pocketrocket himself, Robbie McKuwen couldn´t reel him in despite his typical last-ditch move to leftwards off somebody else´s wheel. Robbie, who´d won three of the first eight stages (which is incredibly dominant), immediately gave Freire the congratulatory slap on the back after almost sideswiping him at 70km/hour. Ahh, biking racing...

A little good news

I feel bad. I have the weight of a certain guilt upon my shoulders. Thing is, I never say a nice thing about Mexico, Tuxtla, my school, or my job, and soon enough its all going to be history and I won´t be able to remember such details.

1. Mexicans are good.
That´s right, you read correctly a blatent gneralization that I may proceed to back up with evidence. If you find yourself standing in a 27 person long line on a Sunday afternoon in an utterly obscure part of an obscure city in a general store, people do not just step right in front of you, because you are just some stupid-looking tourista. Not at all, they treat you as politely as they do all the others. The Chiapanecas are some of the most decent and fair people you´re likely to meet in this world. And that includes most of my students, despite my oft-stated desire to bind, beat, banish, or fling them out of helicopter, the simple truth is that most of them have the grace of Jesus deeply set into them. Some do not and they should be held underwater for periods of time.

2. My bosses.
A case in point. I am continually in trouble, behind or too far ahead in the material, constantly allowing all the wrong things to happen, whole classes failing tests and such, and they just keep dealing with me respectfully, only with a hint of passive agressivity now and then. They would be somewhat justified in really cracking down, but that´s not their style. They do it with the softer touch, the chain of panoptic surveillence ends only in explanations and problem-solving. Many things have driven me and plenty of other mastros extraños batty at this little school (and country), but I have to say that they´ve had aplenty incompetence in return. And they pay on time in full.

3. Football.
I too have the World Cup fever, and this time of year its a good thing to have. Did you see that Thierry Henry goal when France played Brazil? That was... ¡STUPENDO! That guy is my new superhero - the speed, power, and ball-dribbling grace that man pravails with rocks my world. And against the greatest team in the world. All Brazil needed to do was neautralize Henry and they couldn´t, not with all the king´s men and horses. The %&/!!ing Tour of France is on and I´m mildly infuriated with missing it while they show pingpong matches from Ohio on %$"!ing ESPN. But only mildly.

4. The heat, mosquitos, cars, pollution etc.
Despite my rampant disgust, kvetching, and general hatred of everything, its not really so bad, except for the skeeters, which have turned me into a hotblooded killer. Nothing like a little hunting with yourself as bait. Rationality suffers in the tropical heat, as you can imagine. But its not always so hot.

5. The Mexican Elections. I haven´t seen La Jaffafa (the señora whose house i live in) since the final days, and now they´re deep into the recounts, supposedly with an announcement today of this closest-ever presential race. Lefty PRDista Obrador vs. centrist/righty PANista Caldaron (maybe? what do I know of it all?) Still, pretty fascinating to a political junkie like me. Everyone´s being so... Mexican about it. As in so calm you wouldn´t know its even happening. They´ve only had democracy for 15 years and already they´re bored with it. Surprize, surprize. 60% voter turnout, just like in Canada. (Yes, yes, I know, it was 62.5% last time so good for us.)

And off I go, full of joy and gratitude.

Hydrology Cycles.

Well, I feel its that time again. I know I´ll never make it in the Blogosphere with this complete lack of regular posting, never mind the lack of photos. Its scandalous. I can´t even get the address straight for people or its just not online half the time. Sounds like digital technology and me getting along nicely as usual.

One nice thing about being at this tropical latitude is the rain. When it rains it really bloody well pours to clean the world right down to its $%&ing rear molars. Just streaming down for hours in the evening or from 4am like this morning. If it is in the evening I´ve been known to get out the shampoo and go for it Irish Spring style up on my rooftop, and I assure your miserable office-bound self that nothing could be better. In fact, it makes me wish I had a bucket up there to save some of those ten inches of water when half the time the electric pump under the lawn hasn´t put anything into the tank on the roof in hours and I wake up to stinking dry taps.

A touch of good old water conserving rationality would really do the trick around here. Mexico is a ´developing country´, and you know what that means: miles of strip development on the edge of town full of car dealerships, outsized supermarkets, massive parking lots rammed full of cars every Saturday morning. You know, all the $%ing good things of life, that everyone in the world must have in order to be happy. Obviously you´ve got to wash your car, keep that pride and joy of a debt-and-pollution-inducing status machine looking fine. The secret is to get the kids out there on Saturday a.m., doing some work for the family, hosing dozens of litres of soapy water down the street the day after a good rain; it does my heart good to see the dream of a consumer society alive and well and growing like a cancer amongst 100 million Mexicans who work their tits off every day to make it happen.

I got a proper passive-agressive talking-to by my principal for mentioning that there was no way I´d be accepting a contract extension that meant signing myself up to working six days a week for a whole year. She rightly pointed out in subtle terms what a spoilt-rotten rich-world slacking piece of swine I am. Felt properly chastised and then rode off on her crappy two-wheeler that she´s too afraid to ride on these carstrewn streets of Latin insanity. The utter disgust and contempt for the bicycle in these parts was perfectly conveyed by my 7 o´clock class one day (half of whom should be tied up in sacks and thrown out of helicopters, but only once or twice because they´re good laddies after all, just slightly unmotivated), with this parcipial phrase:

Having too little money to buy a car, Lisa instead purchased a bicycle to ride to work.

On two occasions I was made to hear audible snorts of utter disgust from those forced to read out/listen to such a pathetic state of affairs. Why doesn´t Lisa just shoot herself instead of bearing this pathetic humiliation publicly? Hmm, Lisa, let`s just give you a bit of help with that mess you´re in, shall we now? Ah well, you can´t blame these ambitious youngsters. They´re steeped in the wonderful lore of the automobile at every possible moment, and what could possibly change their minds? Not me of course.

As a wise man once said, "Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Oh, I´m so terrible. Whatever am I going to do with me?

A quickie

I just wanted to say that I am going to get a couple of pics up on this blog, I just need to finish the roll. Yes, that´s right, I´m still pissing about in the film age of still photography. A took a series of pictures of stencils in San Cristobal de las Casas, where there are one or two very busy stencil artists.
The camera´s a piece of crap so no guarentees about how they´ll be. Maybe they won´t be.

Ever since writing that last bit about the grackles I´ve been meaning to correct what I said: grackles really are everywhere in Mexico, including meadows and forests as well as city streets. I was just trying to emphasize something about my grackles here in town.

Now that I´ve got that birder´s moral crisis off my mind I can move on to say that everything you´ve ever heard or thought about the mediocrity of teaching English far from home is true.

The hours, the endless marking of error-filled papers and tests (¨she want to be marry with the Arthur¨), the greasy indifferent teenagers acting like idiots at every possible moment, the crappy tape decks and vcr´s that should have been left in the 1980´s: its all a giant pain in the ass. You know you´ve become a teacher the first time you find yourself counting the number of desks in an empty classroom. It´s only mildly horrifying I admit, like sneezing chalk dust.

It could be worse though. The endless cries of ¨Teacher! Can I go to the bathroom? Can go to the bathroom Teacher? Can I Teacher? Can I? Can I?¨ always end when everyone leaves. The greasey, hyperactive sixteen year old boys with their backpacks carefully placed in their laps and smartass grins on their faces aren´t going to kill you. Of course its just a phase you´re going through Javier, you living piece of slime. You´re not bad guy, just a drooling piece of egomaniacal adolescent trash who needs to learn to shut his attention-crazed mouth.

We´re good pals, Javier and I. You should have seen Javier and his clown buddy Francisco in our multimedia session yesterday. It was the paralympics of hyperstupid sixteen year old dipshits, pretending the keyboard wouldn´t work, jacking up the computer speakers ¨by accident¨, highfiving the glazed window with fellow dipshits on the other side. It was a beautiful thing, gold medals of drool for them in the pairing category. I love these assholes. I makes you want to invest in a nine pound hammer and make society just a little bit better. Of course I allowed them to sit together, so I´m just an accessory. But they´re good kids, aren´t they now?

You can see that its bringing out the best in me, this teaching business. The wholesome hours I spend every single day with these fine upstanding youth of the Mexican United States of Mexico just keep bringing me closer to that fountain of youth I´ve always wanted to dip my toes into whenever the opportunity has arisen.

Grackle for you, grackle for me.

The grackle is a resourceful bird, a hustler, a busybody. Here in Mexico they are everywhere, the way crows are everywhere in points north.

The grackle is the most prehistoric bird my untrained eye has ever watched. That mechanical back-and-forth movement of the head when they walk comes straight from the dinosauric raptor of old. Its ´saurusness is acccentuated by a beak that is, in some individuals, continually open, even during flight. The grackle is a ground bird, constantly seeking its food, nest materials, etc. on the street or sidewalk or peering from a fence, ready for another sortie to the ground. Its song is a mix of short tsks and longer cries, all loud and distinct and loudest when in negotiation with others of its kind, just like all birds, but greedier.

What strikes me about the grackles of Tuxtla is the spastic intensity of their social behaviour, the sheer nervousness of them. Alone they are more composed, preoccupied with their next hustle, a groundscore or something in a fig tree that will be had for the searching. Their wings are lengthy enough to generate that beating sound one associates with pheasants in the bush or ducks taking off from water. But these grackles seem uninterested in such ´natural´ habitats. They´re for the streetcorner, the shade tree, a telephone wire. Its intense eye seems to be saying,´I´ve got business here, people to see, deals to finish, I don´t have time for pissing around in forests and meadows´.

Business indeed.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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

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.