And there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Politics. I guess it is nice to be an old white dude. None of this impacts me at all, but it impacts so many people I care about and love and it just is fucking wrong and what? What? Vote? Sure lets vote. What has that accomplished? This. Here we are.
No voting rights, no health care.
Was having a typical Face Punch Friday, managed to dissipate the anger and rage and shrug it off, watched a PhD defense about how much scary shit Sars-CoV2 can do to you and the specific pathways it can wreck or change, like that blood clot one? WOW that shit is SCARY. And yeah it is unique in that. And all the extracellular vesicles, those nasty little signally devices. Essentially nanobots floating around with secret messages of mass destruction. Full of tissue factors that trigger cell death. It is insanely cool but also pretty scary.
and yet that one party is hell bent on control, dominance, and driving full speed into a police state where the minority controls everything and... yeah...
gut punch is an understatement.
Here's a good twitter thread by an amazing author (read their books) https://twitter.com/matociquala/status/1540354556315717632
Feels pretty hopeless yeah?
I was going to write about smackdown, and that while we didn't have a speach about MLFN at the start, I did spend a few minutes painting the rough arc of Mark's story, his diagnosis and is passing and why we have this ride.
I deeply appreciate Graham and the rest who've worked to push the ride to happen on a regular basis, creating a place for the A group to smash and having a B group to smash but politely.
My segment times are slow, the hills are hard, I'm also fat(ter than i used to be). I would like not to be this heavy but also, whatever, I'm accepting the fact that biological processes change and I may never get back to the skinny me, and that's okay. I am what I am. Fuck that you gotta love yourself bullshit, I may never but I can accept and deal with it and just do my best.
Consistently doing my best may make me better, but recognizing when I'm not doing my best and why and working to change that will, very likely make things better.
So I ride. I really focus on healing the knee, getting time on the bike, on the saddle, riding more and more. I've always responded more to volume than anything else. But I've rarely managed to combine volume and proper rest so that I'm not always in a state of fatigue. I feel like I'm making progress there too.
At home, kid at home, is still a struggle. The other kid in California with all the pressure of a seat in a world championship boat at stake. Immense pressure even for someone who is okay just doing their best and winding up where they do, how do you not feel the pressure, WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS? Seriously? Representing your country (even as absolutely fucked up as it is)? That's pretty fucking cool.
Reminds me, I was riding home last night. Rumors of what this morning would bring were already circulating, and I got thinking. As I'm riding. I bet there are people like me, in Russia, absolutely frustrated and ashamed of what their government is doing, and absolutely hopelessly unable to do any more, yet they find simple joy and comfort riding their bike.
The bike isn't a solution, but it could be. It is however something to ground many of us. Not really the object of it but the whole thing. Moving one's self in harmony with something we've made, using physics and fueled by chemistry and biochemistry, traveling faster than we can walk, more effortlessly than running, the rhythm, the effort, the process...
and in someways...
the escape.
We can get on a bike and just ride.
We can ride with someone who has absolutely totally different political opinions and you can never know it and you can share that moment or time of joy riding. Sure there are many things that could substitute for cycling, and no, cycling isn't going to be what bridges the gap on women's rights, abortion, crt, evolution, whatever...
I'm kind of at a loss, okay fine, not kind of. I'm pretty much totally there.
time to eat food,
maybe listen to some music,
see what can be done,
Amor Fati Motherfuckers
heddwch
G
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