free hugsThis is not bike related. It's not very philosophical. It's not about athletes using drugs or music or traveling or coffee, and it's not even about photographs I took. But it still belongs on this site. The world needs more people like this guy.
A little more of the story here.
summer days on two wheels
Last week, a co-worker brought in some old pictures to scan. Among them was this photo of her cousins who "used to come down every summer from New York."
The photo was taken in the Caldwell township, outside Hillsborough, NC (ca. 1970)
under pressureIf every night I go to bed feeling that I have to catch up to someplace I should already be, then how will I ever get there? Not every day of life is preparation for the next day. Reading this book, watching this movie, listening to this song, riding this bike -- this is my life. Why should I think that tomorrow is my life and today is dress rehersal?
the ghost of Monsanto haunts me at work...
The Research Triangle Park is a strange place. It feels a little creepy with GlaxoSmithKline's North American headquarters, a major IBM campus, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and Eli Lilly all within half a mile of each other. The presence of these companies alone makes RTP feel like the setting of the next Michael Crighton novel, where experimental science goes awry. Add to that, however, the security cameras at every intersection and the guarded checkpoints at the entrances of most campuses.
Rumor has it that somewhere in the Park is where Monsanto developed Agent Orange. Every now and then you can see official looking health inspectors taking soil samples from the woods that lie between campuses. True or not, I wouldn't plant a food garden anywhere in RTP, if you know what I mean.
Occasionally, when I ride the bike path through the woods to work, I half-expect some strange, genetically mutated monster to confront me on the trail. Between the pharmaceuticals research, the genetics research, the nanotechnology research, and the ghost of Monsanto, such a scientific "accident" is as likely to happen here as anywhere else in the world.
pizza and painMy brother's not ready for childbirth.
The other night A and I decided we wanted to make pizza for dinner. We decided this, however, once we were already hungry; we didn't have the forethought to thaw the frozen dough.
I don't have a microwave, but we were committed to pizza. So, we had to figure out ways to thaw the pale, oblong block faster. The best we could come up with was to hold the mass of frozen dough (in a plastic bag) against something warm -- our bellies. We took turns, passing it on as soon as one of us couldn't stand the cold any more. Despite noticeable fluctuations in my heart rate, our technique was working. Then A noticed that I was placing the bag directly against my skin to maximize heat transfer; he cringed. He had been keeping a T-shirt between his stomach and the dough, so I wondered why his turns weren't any longer than mine.
Our experiment in conduction led us to talk about pain and tolerance for pain; this reminded me of my friend's pain-training exercises. She's about to have a baby, and she wants to have as natural a childbirth experience as she can. One thing this means for her is that she doesn't want to use any anesthetic during the procedure. Her doctor prescribed pain-training exercises -- little things she can do around the house to prepare psychologically for childbirth with no epidural.
In one exercise she holds an ice cube between her wrists for 5 minutes at a time. It's supposed to teach you that no matter how intense the pain, it will come to an end. Perspective.
I told A about the ice-cube-on-the-wrists exercise, and he was curious what could be so painful about a little ice cube. He tried it out, and after a few minutes he gladly put the ice cube away and went back to warming the dough.
We had pizza in record time, considering no microwave.
ghost mumsIn the front yard are the ghost mums: chrysanthemums I planted two years ago that haven't died, but they don't fully come back each year either. Mums are annuals, so it's unusual that they come back at all. This spring, they sprouted and grew into 2ft-tall bushes; in the summer the stalks dried out (despite rain) and turned brittle enough to break in a strong wind. They're now dark gray wisps with blooming white flowers. They remind me of zombies, half alive and half dead.
kano |
(circa September 1997) The first time my plane touched the ground in Africa was in a city called Kano. Kano is in the heart of Nigeria, and consistent with what I expected, the military met the plane on the runway. | |
| I wasn't prepared for the military to board the plane, however. "A routine inspection," we were told. "We're just looking for anyone trying to enter Nigeria illegally." |  |
I silently wondered why anyone would want to enter Nigeria illegally. Leave, I might understand, given the financial and ecological devastation that General Sani Abacha had wreaked on the country. |
| The expressed concern over immigration was a ruse, which became obvious once the soldiers began walking the aisles of the plane. A business man who had traveled this route many times before was sitting next to me. He told me to place anything of value out of sight before the soldiers reached our row of seats. When the soldiers neared our row, I learned why. I could overhear the soldiers asking unsuspecting people, "is that for me?", referring to headphones, nice watches, and cameras. For the most part, they seemed interested in electronic devices. Once each had a "gift" from a traveler, they left the cabin, and the military told the pilot that we could move on. | ||
 |
As the plane taxied to the end of the runway, we moved past a graveyard... only this was a graveyard for broken and decaying planes. There was one that looked almost whole; it seemed to be missing only a front wheel. The whole plane leaned forward, giving the discomforting look of a rough landing.When you're preparing to take off, that's not exactly what you want to see. | |
| At the end of the taxi lane, when making that sharp turn to enter the runway, I could see from my window a man harvesting something. I thought he might simply be cutting field grass, but the business man sitting next to me told me that the man was actually farming. Since the Kano International Airport is all that many people ever see of Nigeria, the local government thought it would be a good idea to show travelers the products of rich Nigerian soil... never mind the bath of jet fuels leaching into the rows of wheat. I just hope that no one ever ingests whatever crops are grown here. |  |
|
| Before I put my camera away once we were back in the air, I turned to get one last look at Kano. |  |
|
sickStaying at home because I am sick is no fun.
Illness is doubly cruel. For the past three days, I’ve felt weak physically, I’m uncomfortable, my body shakes violently every 30 seconds because I cough, my nose leaks, my throat feels like its closing up with thick gooey, sour, sharp tasting crap, my head sometimes hurts, and my eyes seem extra sensitive to the light. So, I do things like keep the shades closed, refrain from playing music, keep the the volume low on the computer and the TV, walk slowly, and I tend to stockpile everything I need to stay in one room. The physical effects of a cold make me want to stay as still as possible without threat of boredom – which is a challenge in itself. Reading a good book is about the only thing I can do without too much light, noise, or movement. But it can't be a funny book, because that would make me laugh, laughing would make me cough, coughing would shake me, and shaking me reminds me of all those body aches.
Being sick is a double whammy, so the second “wham” is the mental effect of a cold. When I wake up after a full night of uninterrupted sleep, and I still feel like my body has been drained of all locomotive power, that hurts the psyche. When I'm sick, I forget what it feels like not to be sick. All I can think about is how weak I feel, how the fast-moving, loud-noise world that we live in is not very acommodating to people who have a cold. When I'm sick, I feel like I'm never going to get well, even when experience tells me that whatever bug I have should pass in a few days. Intellectually, I know I'll be well again. But, it's hard, if not impossible, to feel the truth of it. With the blinds closed, the lights dimmed, and the house so still, the world closes in on me. Unless I go outside to check the mail or do some other simple chore, I can even forget that there is a world outside of the dungeon I've created for myself. The very atmosphere that my physical body wants/needs, my mind can't stand. Competing physical and mental needs is just torture.
mountain storm
Storm in the mountains. It announces itself from miles away, rolling, incoming. Floats just over the mountain next to my camp, crashing into its bald rock face. I see the rain from here, see its thick screen turn everything behind it gray. It sounds like it's coming this way, dark clouds are overhead, and cool air is blowing, dropping the temperature rapidly. It begins to sprinkle. I quickly finish dinner, clean my bowl, hang the food bags, rinse the dinner pots, sprint for the tent, and am settled inside just as it begins to... sprinkle a little more. Then it stops. I wait a few minutes, open the tent, and return to my post on the crag. I see that the storm is already a mile or so away. It blew around my mountain. I see that the storm leaves behind pieces of itself – smaller wisps of white clouds are left in the valleys. They're too young to climb the slopes, so they're left to fend for themselves in between the mountains. They too gradually blow away, but not over the mountain... into it I guess.
beliefsI think beliefs are strange things. Do you ever believe one thing, and so you try to write it, say it, articulate it in some way, but, in the very process of articulating it you realize that you actually believe something else? Or, am I the only person to whom this happens? I've realized that sometimes I don't really know my own beliefs until I try to verbalize them, either orally or in writing. It's as if I sometimes have to say something false before I can say something true – like I can evaluate my beliefs, see them for what they are, only after they're out there, open for public examination.
I'll let you know later if I still believe in this observation.
except the lord iputipusIn college, I had a friend who, whenever he found a key on the ground, would pick it up and say, "I'm going to hold on to this. You never know when you might be stopped by a locked door; this might open it." It always made me laugh because the odds of meeting a locked door, the key to which I picked up several years ago and carried with me ever since, are simply absurd. But, perhaps because of my own penchant for the absurd, I adopted his habit.
The other day, I woke up from a dream repeating the word "iputipus". If Muriel Rukeyser is right, and the universe really is composed of stories rather than atoms, then maybe words are the keys to the locked doors we may be stopped by in the future. Just in case, I'm holding on to "iputipus". I picked it up in a dream, and brought it with me into the waking world. It sounds like it may unlock an interesting door.
war in iraqI wasn't going to write anything about the war, even though it is something I think about everyday. Mainly, I wasn't going to write about it because I know where I stand on it, and my views are usually just dismissed as extreme. As a pacifist, I'm not going to support any war, so it doesn't matter whether it is a war that some philosophy professor can rationalize as "just". It doesn't matter whether the war is waged by a democratically elected leader representing the wishes of the people or a not-even-elected-merely-appointed occupant of the executive office. It doesn't matter to me whether we're sending over the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful or those of the poor and disenfranchised to fight the war for us. What matters is that going to war means that we believe that we can know, definitely and justifiably, that taking many, many lives is the right thing to do. I don't believe that we are even in a position to know that, and I'd rather be wrong and take no lives, than be right and take many.
There are many ways to measure the cost of the current war in Iraq. Obviously, it's not good for our economy, nor is it economically helping the average person in Iraq. Of course, Dick Cheney and Halliburton may be profiting something from it. But, yesterday I learned of a new cost to me personally. A school friend of mine, Kimberly Hampton, was killed January 2nd while she was piloting a helicopter. Kimberly was a good person. How many more of our friends need to die before we're going to realize that we don't even know what we're doing over there in the first place?
The Nature of ViolenceWritten when I was a wee lad of 19, I had all but forgotten about this piece until I recently stumbled upon a college friend's website where he is hosting archives of an online journal project he and I were involved with. While I'm certainly not impressed by my writing (almost embarassed by it, really), this piece is still important to me because it reflects some of my younger thoughts on non-violence.
--
conflictFor more privacy and serenity, she buys a condo in a small building of four units. Her building is in the woods. When she goes to bed, she leaves the shades in her bedroom window open so that she can wake to the morning light through the trees. The light from her nightlight reflects off the leaves, and she can see the outlines of the nearest trees even at night. The light also shines into her neighbor’s bedroom window. He keeps his shades open as well, because he too enjoys waking up to the sight of the trees. He's bothered by the light, however -- kept awake by it. He bangs on the thin wall between their bedrooms. She feels she needs the light on for security, but he is disturbed by it. Neither is able to sleep.
amput(r)eeI went out for a walk one day last week and found what's left of this tree only a street away from my house. The tree is on a street with other oaks, hundreds of years old. When you walk into this tree's space, you feel a break in the shade -- a break that doesn't seem right. Then you look up and see why... it's a little startling. A week later, what's left of the tree is still standing there. It's like someone started cutting it down, then stopped. The half-finished job is a little eerie.
backups and backhoesMy computer is my notepad where I scribble out ideas, my filiing cabinet where I store my important papers, my journal where I write to myself, my music box where I keep just about every song I would want to listen to, and, oh yeah, an important tool for work. Given the fact that harddrive failure is not a matter of if, but just a matter of when, and also given some of the scary things I've seen at work, I figured I really need to start backing up my data. Probably on a regular basis too.
