Eatsop’s Foibles

•November 29, 2007 • 5 Comments

alice in blunderland

There once was a woman who had a habit of picking up everything she saw lying around in streets, on the trees, and in the yards. Because she was on a bike and because she had ‘velcro eyes’, nothing–well nearly nothing–escaped her gaze.

The bicycle she rode was a spinster special–a rugged green Raleigh with double wire baskets in the back and a wicker one up front.
This fifty pound machine was built in post-war Nottingham England.
She loaded “Old Vic” down with clothes. She gathered rags. Food. Bags. Tools. Coins. More towels than she knew what to do with. Bills. Paper. Plastic flowers.Once, an envelope full of paper money. “Cold lettuce” was the expression she used at the time.

But most of all she collected orphan fruits and vegetables. The untouchables, the forgotten left d’oeuvres were taken in (literally!) by the sympathic old bat, a mad soul who just couldn’t believe anyone would pitch that Perfectly Fine Pineapple, not even a bruise on it.

She’d brush it off, shove it in her pannier, and remount the bike and steer for home. “Taj Mahovel” (the home of the woman) was a squalid little shack with piles of provender obscuring the kitchen table, counter tops, yea verily unto the In-Between Room with its puny Swedish Asko “tvattmaskine” (Swedish for washing machine).n

Upon return, even she could detect a distinctly fetid air, combining rot and growth and maybe even the lingering reminder that Rodents Once Roamed Here… this impressioin only vanished when a cake was in the oven, in which case the place smelled delicious.

Well one day this forager stumbled upon a mushroom that was NOT an orphan, in fact, it was happily fruiting above the vast mycelium that is the real bigger subterranean part of a mushroom…and the woman exclaimed with glee, “Oh, goody, a Boletus, a nice huge red one …never seen one of those before…all the boletes are edible, seems to me…” and with a rude yank the largish, barely protesting mushroom that Wasn’t An Orphan but was about to become Dinner was borne away…

And verily, though the dying shroom showed  first screaming yellow, then went brilliant blue mere  seconds after being sliced, and indeed this was well documented by the woman, the common sense that abides in this old bat’s cerebellum about 75% of the time
seems to have taken an extended break.
And oh! The gnashing of gastric muscles and the copious drooling accompanying initially familiar-looking lost dinner, then becoming nearly colorless emesis, yea, verily, it was pretty damn awful: almost like the stomach had turned itself inside out.
Bad enough to require schleppage, rather than pedalage to the nearest ER, a mere 4 miles away. My kind neighbor drove me since CC was fast asleep (it was 9:25 pm, nearly half an hour after bedtime!).

The evening passed wired up to funny drips and the blood pressure it did gyre and gimble on the screen, and beeps and blips did punctuate the still of the humming hospital.  Finally the 23 b.p.m. heart rate was coaxed up, and the electrolyte balance restored from a precarious low, and the old bat was allowed to go home.

The crew in attendance were all most gracious. They somehow already knew of the forager’s Other Life.  Indeed, the presiding doctor himself murmured  that he was a big mountain bicycler ( a trim gut gave it away– and the outline of fit-like legs within those baggy old scrubs).

At long last, everything returned to “normal”.  There hadn’t even been N.E. decent hallucinations for all that trouble and strife. At two a.m. the forager was helped into a taxi home, after signing an agreement not to undertake any more suicidal culinary gestures.

But the big lesson the scavenger woman took home was: Steal not the organisms from their abode, but stick to the tame shroom-orphans in the Back Door Catering CO. who really need the rescue.

Funny how they turn blue instantly…tasty, though!

Posted in food, Jacquie Phelan, Night
Tags: , , , , ,

Dear Reader/Riders

•November 28, 2007 • 2 Comments

Thank you so much for the kind attention of the last two months.
Somehow you keep returning to the blog (I am touched).
This fact has me twirling around the kitchen thinking, “I’m understood”.
Can I trust this feeling? Is it good to feel so baselessly elated?
Sure, if you grew up in a healthy system. Where I grew up, elation was often followed by a humbling jab, dealt by the wolves I was raised by.
Musta been a bit jealous of unwarranted juvenile joy.

With fifty or so Perfect Strangers, it’s so much easier.
You’re saying, “Right. . You’ve been free associating since September!”
Ahhh, risk IS my middle name. Plus I’m a sucker for correspondence.
You’d think my spool-a-day rate means writing a capital b Book would be easy.
Well it isn’t; I’ve muffed it for at least a decade!!
Those divots in the concrete driveway are me tripping on my tongue, chinning the ground, and having to get back up, and dust myself off, and say: “It’s not the endo the world if I don’t produce a flipping book”.
Welll, thanks to a host of mentors ranging from Kay Ryan to Carol Cunningham, but mostly the dashing Chdot, I AM making a book. I think.
Oh, yeah, an’ Richard Ballantine is another mentor. An’ Chip Mefford. And you, and you, and U.
The project is underway.
In true Alice B. tradition, I’ ve needed some distractions to take pressure off the production of Said Book (no, it’s not a novel, it’s a lightweight book on Women Who Love Bicycles or something Like that. Maybe ‘the year of the wombat”. Maybe I should have a title competition…)
ANyhow, the first distraction was the little velveteen chapbook I called my ‘Amuse Buch”. That took well under 24 hours to produce (see side photos, and earlier blog).
Now, with pressure continuing to build around the “real” book, another nice distraction presented itself.
An art calendar. In less than 24 hours.
And an ode to ‘brinksmanship’, one of my strong suits.
Strong, and in my birthday suit.
Today, prizewinning photographer Anne Cutler and I decided to produce a calendar using the mudshots we made last week.
Nostra donna del fango (Mudwoman in Italian) will be a reality thanks to Lulu publishing, whose existence was made evident twice by serial organizer Chris Hill of Edinburgh. I grasped it upon the second hint.
Owing to the mud in my ear, I have to hear stuff more than once.

Come next week the calendar will be published, just in time for my 52nd lap around the sun.
Hence, “Birthday Suit”.
You can have this for yourself. Like me, it will NOT BE CHEAP.

Other important dates Anne’s birthday, our husband’s bd. No excuses for anyone to forget. And: full moons, plus the all important red letter date –August 23rd of the SSWC08 in Napa) Not to mention certain celestial events (solstice, etc). Ah, the photos…there will be at least a dozen shots oozing with good taste. Yes, they’re All Of Me.
Why not take?

Isn’t this a little uh, late in life to be chasing after that sort of fame, JP?
Charlie put it more simply: “Only pictures of you? Has anyone ever done that before?”
“Well, Marilyn Monroe did it…I think that’s about it” I replied sweetly.
Hmm, maybe I AM an egomaniac.

Riders, even though I called you “dear” and stuff, you are under no pressure to purchase my muddy monument to my massive ego. Lulu.com has a clever way to make them available without having to, ahem, lay out the scary 4,000 clams you need to do a work-of-art calendar.
For a mere (double the cost of production) you get to have (far fewer calendars, but also fewer headaches) restful nights.

I like the idea of spreading the burden around, which makes you, esteemed multitude, the beast that has to haul..what? My ego? My message? No, MY CALENDAR.
You get to haul it home (along with the dozen others you got, the star wars one, the Edvard Munch one , the Golden Age Of British Rail one, etc) to wrap up for the several people you know who would DIE to have such a cool 2008 calendar.
Cheers and a batty holiday season to you all. I am scrivileged to be sharing cyberspace with you.
Jacquie

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Charlie Cunningham, Cycling, Night, Ride, Single Speed, The Book, Uncategorized

Moon ride courtesy of Earl Ytobed & Albie Upsoon

•November 27, 2007 • 1 Comment

L-O-N-G nights mean that I am wide eyed at four a.m.
Bright moon means I am doing quick calculations: what time izzit?
Is it too cold to face that night air at 5 miles per hour, and give up some of this warmth in exchange for some views that I can’t even put together with my half-accurate photographic memory?
And: can I be back in time for the Tom Morton show on BBC Scotland (it’s on at 6 a.m. our time)?
THis morning all signs were affirmative.
Out into the dark with Orion plunging down behind the hills, I take a shortcut to get up to the moondrenched rocks over our canyon. The weeds offer resistance as I churn cross country, but the traction’s great because of the recent rains.
Again I send up a grateful prayer: I am ALIVE and my entire self feels so strong I could do damn near anything.
Underfoot I kick something as big and tough as a soccer ball. It’s a mushroom! Holy mackerel, it’s a boletus from planet big!
Can I get it home without crushing it, but still ride out to catch a sunrise over Elliot Preserve, where the No Houses For Perpetuity blackness broods?
A careful wrapping in my by-now redundant whim breaker, and we’re underway again.
The mushroom is so heavy it needs re-wrapping within two minutes.
I am not from the Do It Once, Do It Right Academy.
I’m from the Slapdash Reformatory, among all the high stakes compulsive gambolers…where every third undertaking is undone ‘for the want of a nail’.
We inmates try, try again, and relearn what benefits “planning’ and “care” confer.
We can only learn by doing, re-doing, re-undoing, ad nauseum.
This of course is pleasantly juxtaposed to the PhD degree brandished by the compulsive control freak.
So ok, the mushroom didn’t escape but it took two tie-downs, and will look a bit battered when it arrives back at the kitchen.

"Aren't all Boletus species edible?"

By the time I reach the flattish fire road, the deep midnight sky color pales to green in the northeast.
After I turn around (tis an out-and-back jaunt of about 40 minutes total , door-to-door with shortcut) the horizon develops black serrate hills overrun with that trout-belly colored light.
Haven’t seen that in many a month.
Life in a holler is like that.
You really have to work to see a sun rise.

Posted in Blogroll, Cycling, food, insomnia, Night, Scotland
Tags: , , ,

Paingiving Thankstaking or the reverse?

•November 24, 2007 • 4 Comments

Morning 2 a.m. Moon in eyes, another fool moon has come round, this time much colder. Downstairs the snoring neighborhood is unruffled by the couple of cars tearing home from the bars.It’s the eve of the annual Appetite Seminar, a fat tire tradition in Fairfax each Thanksgiving Day, and I am wide awake as a Christmas crazed kid. T-giving is a sacred anniversary for me, indeed a birthday. The guy that pulled me into that world –let’s call him the “mid-werf” (werf as in ‘throw’) is our guest tonight at Taj Mahovel. Darryl Skrabak is his name…a lifetime ago he guided the bowling ball of my destiny in its swift and curved course, making sure I was aware that I would be making some kind of history, and to keep my eyes and ears open. I met my life partner, and he his, and we stayed closer than I did with my family of origin.

I put my ear to the ice-cold aluminum door of the trailer shining in the yard, but gather no sounds at all…DS is out cold, under the influence of a hand-numbing ride from the City (at 65 it’s getting tougher to just knock off twenty five miles) weighed down with plates of ravioli, long beans, a couple cups of potato soup and apple crisp with cream. Only the bibb lettuce salad (no dressing) went un-touched. Typical, if you live by the motto “No calorie left behind”, the non-caloric stuff remains untouched.

Over our supper, I reminded him about how he fed me Thanksgiving morning at his place in the Haight almost thirty years ago. How he’d impressed me by grinding the wheat, making a yeast-raised batter, offhandedly checking the hot waffle iron…what a PRODUCTION!

Come to think of it, it wasn’ t just one meal…he was always feeding me. Most Wednesdays around supper time I’d visit him and his cat. That big Siamese was louder and more obnoxious than I was, but I was better at withholding affection.

Years passed and our bond loosened and in the last decade I scarcely saw him.

He called the other day, without having spoken with me since February–a lapse this long in cat years is an eternity–to see if I’d be at the Appetite Seminar.

I was and I would be thrilled to have an excuse to do some serious cooking for the night before, as the larder was overflowing. When he appeared an hour after dark, I was relieved he’d arrived alive. No cycling hostess is immune to this sickening feeling, waiting for the two wheeled guest to roll in. One cannot relax until one’s visitor arrives in one piece. This is vaguely reminiscent of people in another era when travelers faced routes stalked by highwaymen. Only this generation’s highwayman is just as likely to be a highwaywoman, or a highway teen.

We swapped stories. He described his first Appetite Seminar (1979), how he wrote it up for City Sports Magazine…Initially the owners Jake & Maggie didn’t like the piece, but the women down in the art department loved it, and they pointed out that they’d already sold a couple of ads based on the strength of that story. So in it went…(do read it, it is very fine writing, funny and soooooo true! )He’d typed it out barely hours after completing the ride and finishing his dinner at his parent’s place on Ulloa St… 

Proof that same-day writing gives an added zing to any account because nothing has interfered with all those raw impressions. 

Reader, I didn’ t take that lesson to heart yesterday when I returned from my umpteenth Appetite Seminar. I went straight to Toad Hall and buried my fresh impressions under a feast!

Still I recall echoes of that unforgettable First Time (1980) during yesterday’s ride. Both times, the weather was perfect, cold , sunny and clean (appetite sharpening) air. There seemed to be far fewer people this year (other rides duplicate the fun, the rigor, and one doesn’t have to be in a car for 4 hours, should one live in the South Bay).
Few women.
Endless pleasant gab, shared food (thank you SeeKAY for the cookies that Mary and Dana must’ve made)and overhead, a big cloud of blue grey smoke. If you click on CK’s “Mountain Bike History Hubsite” you will see a photo of the riders atop Smoker’s Knoll, including a very easy-to-spot (only one with helmet, helmet has duck on it) Yours Truly. Only this year, instead of a long ride from San Francisco on my Raleigh Sprite five-speed, I zoomed around my valley scrounging more good grub for the inevitable picnic on the knoll.

I packed my ‘good’ banjo, the SS. Stewart American Princess. Yes, it’s heavy and yes, it’s 90 years old but what the hell….I won’t crash. 

Problem: Tea thermos + banjo + sandwiches + boastcards + a dozen or so freshly-fallen feijoa fruit = WEIGHT. 

Weight=gouged ribs. I’m 150 pounds and damn if my luggage didn’t feel like about twenty.

First friend encountered: Paul McWhirr and his bubbly sister Carol, who accompanied me up the pa-vay. A few racers blew by, I resisted chasing. It’s easy to forget how hard it is climbing with a real burden.

Arrived at knoll at ten, and stayed til noon, spread out in the oatgrass in the sunshine, swilling and pouring tea, and overhearing fascinating conversations about the little demon that lives inside us all…to my left,Fisher and his friend Sheila Moon the clothing designing entrepreneuse, Charlie Kelly, the piano mover, Pat Reddix, er… Chris Ioakamedes probably one of the youngest grommets back in the late 70’s. Retains a distinct youthful grommetiness. Chris Ryan. As above. John Loomis (racing legend and spiritual teammate, who was in reality Joe Murray’s Fisher teammate) Barry London and Steve (Gravy) Gravenitis , defendants in the Federal case over bicycle access to Pt Reyes area… John and Suzanne Aronson, and most surprisingly, Peter Lewendal who was inducting his new friend into the trials and tribs of first-time mountain bike rides…

If she still speaks to you after this, she’s a keeper , Pete.

These days most of the riders are able to pedal up even the steepest steeps. In the first years EVERYONE pushed up “triple ripple”. A truly weak rider rarely attempts this ride anymore. I was chagrined to see at least a half dozen 4×4 motorcycle things, with pudgy uniformed patromen (unsmilng variety) plus trucks, trucks and more trucks. At least four of ’em…Perhaps they really rescued someone, I’ll hear about it if they did.

I headed back the way I’d come…a novelty. In fact, “wrong way” for the first time ever. I was astonished at the difference in the views…never noticed those “raisins” (chunky rocks) in the chapparal before!

My bike behaved (barely), the long neck of the banjo holding down my head… Over the top of my sunglasses, the trail seemed foreign (like a person on a cassette tapespeaking backwards). The descents seemed too steep. My hands, feet, eyes were trading primitive, jumbled phrases with the well-worn fire road, and I kept a sharp ear for on-coming late arrivals…since a brand new (THANK YOU NOAH) six oz camera was part of my luggage I forced myself to stop (I’d ostensibly been in a hurry to get back to reach Mildew Valley by 3) and click off a fiew of the view. I am becoming just like everyone else, and I want my friends and associates to put MY skin on and see the ride through MY eyes, despite the plain truth: tain’t possible.

A rider came along during my photo moment, and we exchanged pleasantries, and within a half an hour I’d learned he played accordion, taught himself Keith Jarrett style improvisational piano, and really liked my mud boastcard…Friendly exchange on a bike is nothing new, but brief intense exchanges of world view, opinion and other less nameable units of communication come about only rarely. William Binzen is such a soul, and as I usually do, I said I’d keep in touch.
After all, the two wheel tribe is my chosen tribe, and tending these web-lines is my life line.
Or is it : “My village raised me” ?
Sometimes planned
other times accidental
delicate and strong as a bee’s wing
those connected lines makes my whirl go ’round.

Posted in Cycling, Jacquie Phelan, Ride

Let Us Sprint For The Line

•November 19, 2007 • 5 Comments

“And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors,we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit“. (New Yorker Cartoon by Mankoff)- 

Such words recall the scene in The Pianist (Roman Polanski film, true story of Polska pianist who survived WW 2 Warsaw Ghetto). The pianist’s family, an erudite father and mother, grown children both professional musicians, have been herded into a town square with hundreds of other Jews…a young boy approached them to sells some candy for an exorbitant amount of money. The father admonishes him: “what are you selling them for, don’t you know you’ll be shipped out too, and then what will that money do for you?“… nevertheless, the kid demands his five zloty.

The starving old father pays, unwraps, and then very carefully divides up the candy six ways. It’s the last ‘meal’ the family shares before being put on different trains.It’s a little bit like the prospect we have before us now, only the Nazis are us, not some malevolent Other. We are silently agreeing with some disembodied Hitlerian directive that money, commerce, growth and war are the ways to solve global crises… and we somehow are not doing enough to get rid of this Hitler, this directive.

At least this is how it feels to me.At last the American news media are covering the news of the upcoming UN meeting on climate in Bali. A month ago, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Al Gore and the IPPC, Fox News was still insisting the global warming ‘question’ was a ‘controversial topic’ that is ‘hard to prove’. Upon putting a link in this blog, I see a US Govt. url stating that the Bush Administration is also doing its share of raising environmental awareness..!! look at it yourselves.I have trouble feelling hopeful, knowing how many households accept everything they are told.

Marin is reputed to be progressive, liberal, eco-friendly. Sometimes it’s true. But many times, it’s all about Shopping For Stuff (psst! wrong tactic!) with a “green ” sticker on it to mitigate your secret guilt. A place like Marin is a giant oxymoron, since all the Save Lake Tahoe and Buck Fush bumper stickers are on SUV’s… we are so clueless!!!

Today was a quiet day here in Fairfax, yet my neighbors seemed only to drive in and out of their parking spots, and three different times I heard a car pull up, park, door slam, person then jumps into a different car…slam door, and speed off. So someone nearby just comes home to change cars! Charlie and I looked at one another and he said, “if not for them this would seem like a country lane”.

It’s true. There are people on our cute little street whose lives seem utterly defined by their (minimum 2 per person) cars. It takes a lot to keep those babies running.The odds are that at some point I’ll be ‘tapped’ by one of them, a fact that keeps my helmet on until I get up onto our walkway. What do these people think about the war, the climate, the greenhouse gases? I am afraid to ask them.

They see me every single morning. Compost digging has become a ritual, and it coincides with the climbing into the car ritual of Neighbor #1. So to them I look like a person who does nothing but turns food scraps into the compost heap. To me they look like babysitters-for-automobiles. They are either washing the cars or vaccuming them, driving them or parking them. Since there are half a dozen members of the family (all driving age) and an average of 4 trips each per day (2 driving episodes per trip) we have a bizzy little scene going.

I wonder if they know I’m silently judging them. I know they are silently judging me, because when the kids were younger, they didn’t hide their contempt, which was probably passed down. I am praying my contempt is well-buried. Neighbor-baiting never settled any scores.

I believe that in the pre-end-period might have a few joys in store (like the ‘feast’ on the curb in Polanski’s film) and I’m determined to be savoring them, while clinging to my belongings, my illusion of safety, my little asylum.

Posted in Jacquie Phelan

Mud Life Crisis

•November 15, 2007 • Leave a Comment

If you’re reading this, you probably have my postcard (taken by Jan Oswald) stuck to your fridge…If you don’t have that picture (you can see it at the right of my wiki-pedia page), but wish you did, just pop a fiver (euros, dollars, moon units) in an envelope, throw in a couple of stamps, AND your address.
Send to Mudwoman, Box 757 Fairfax CA 94978

My prize winning Rock Shox “Mud Life Crisis” card will wend its way to you (and your fridge)
Allow a month to reach the U.K.
Got a brushed stainless steel refridgerator? Magnets don’t work on ’em!
If you have this kind of fridge, please send TEN dollars. I’ll include Technology Guaranteed To Keep Card On Fridge.

This card’s primary job is to look cool, but its secondary job is to encourage you to:
a) eat more chocolate
b) play in the mud
c) ride more often this winter
This card is a CLASSIC. But at fifteen years old, it’s also ancient!
Bikers are novelty nuts, right?
A fifty two year old racer is not new.
It’s time for a MUD MAKEOVER.
Don’t you want to see the new me?
(Hint: SAY YES!)
(If you said NO, please step around back, we’ll discuss this after I’m through being crass.)
This is to be part of a photographic series shot once every fifteen years.
Unlike the growing Wonderbread Kid, mine will show the inevitable sliding back into the ooze…
May I suggest that this may not be as bad as the alternative?
I tapped Anne Cutler to tackle the job.
She readily agreed.
(Next morning)
It is a fine day, and we head out to a Body Of Water Which Shall Remain Nameless to smear some nice gooey real mud all over, and see if much has changed since that December morning in 1991 when I spent three hours at Oswald’s Denver warehouse studio patting myself down with gritty commercial soil (wetted down, reeking of steer manure), arranging feathers in my hair, and allowing Ming, the photo assistant, to squirt me periodically with water to keep up the shine. I recall the studio didn’t have much heat.

Oh, yeah… don’t forget a squirt bottle.
Bucket. Trowel.
Face cloth.
Tea thermos.
Shortbread (Mrs. Dean’s, smuggled into USA from Rothimurchus Forest Centre, in Scotland)
Why in the world should I spend another minute shivering for art’s sake?
Well, that first one was an advertisement. This time the only product around will be…terra firma. Well, maybe terra slurra.
We got straight to work, and even found a cool piece of driftwood to use as a focal point.
On the lake–sorry, on the body of water–that same hundred birds from a few blogs ago flapped and called “keeerrrr-keeer-keeeer!”…
The sun threw tiny diamonds on the surface while tiny fish darted below.
A certain someone had fun reapplying mud.
Anne clicked away, two cameras, three lenses. Her jeans got muddy knees.
Once we’d gotten seventy shots or so, it was time.
Tea and cookies and warm earth. Overhead a few clouds had begun to form.
When we came down the hill into town, fog was fingering White’s Hill and by the time we were at her house it was cold and dark, mid-afternoon. We had caught the Fillet of Day.

If the pix come out, we’ll do a calendar. There will be only a hundred made, and of course since they have to be ready by Christmas, we have a little work ahead of us.
Stay tuned.

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, infrared, Trees, Uncategorized

Your Inattention Please!

•November 15, 2007 • Leave a Comment

I live in California where people on bikes routinely blow past walkers without a noise.
SINCE the trails are peopled with old folks who canna hear well for the obvious reason, and also cos they’re talking among themselves (four abreast of course).
SINCE middle aged joggers keep the sound of birds, wind and auto alarms at bay with tunes wired into their pre-deaf ears.
SINCE there are the ultra-fragile trail people ‘mindfully walking’– fresh from the week-long Thikh Naht Hanh retreat (I wonder if that is that enough H’s?)…
IN ORDER TO DEAL WITH CONFLICTING FACTS:
some want silence,
some need a warning,
others hate bells…(like me! I’ve had bells in my head since the CIA put them there (joke alert)…no really, I have platinnitus–upgraded version of tinnitus)
Most wouldn’t mind NOT being run over…
I HEREBY PROPOSE WE CLEAR OUR THROATS
While slowing to 5 mph, the better to match their speed.
Then we check to see if they heard.
If not, slow down even more…
Yes, it’s sort of disruptive to one’s rhythm…
but since bikers are lowest on the ladder
Hereabouts in Marin County everything we do ‘reflects’ for good or ill on all the others, thus we must be Excruciatingly Correct !
Throat-clearing has many attributes: it’s cheap, and you never leave it at home by accident. It’s human, as opposed to mechanical.
Unlike “ON YOUR LEFT”, throat-clearing is un-ambiguous. By yelling a command, the listener never knows if they should MOVE LEFT or if the rider is coming on the left.
“Ahem” indicates Readiness (or Request) To Speak. AND it permits the listener to choose what to do, which way to dive.
Upon hearing the ahem, the Hearer looks around.
Or they don’t look around.
We adjust our line accordingly….the speed by now cut considerably.
Please note that if I’m late somewhere, I don’t even bother with the bike path. I prefer to duke it out with the autos because I needn’t worry about my presence “bothering” them. They can’t even see me! To motorists in Marin, bicyclists are infuckingvisible, except when they roll through stop lights at 3 in the morning and get a 360 dollar citation from the friendly but way-too-bored beat cop dozing in his cruiser throughout the sleepy night.
In fact, two friend of mine, Jim B. and Joanne X. were run over by cars, and oddly, even though in both cases the car struck the cyclist from behind. In both cases, the cyclist was blamed for the accident.
It’s universsally acknowledged that if you rear-end another motorist, it’s your fault, but if you rear-end a cyclist with your car, it’s their fault. For what?
Haven’t found out yet. My guess: failure to drive.
Ah, a rant. Great way to start the day.

Posted in Uncategorized

Aging Racefully

•November 15, 2007 • Leave a Comment

On Saturday three of us wimmins got together to do a little riding, not really an official WOMBAT ride. TG was just recovering from lung surgery , HC was new to mtn biking, and hadn’t had breakfast. But she forgot to tell us this…
Me: big breakfast (see “figgy pudding” elsewhere on web), perfect health (knock on tropical hardwood).
“Lemme show ya the County like you’ve never seen it. I call it The Loll of The Wild, it’s so easy and fun” I told them. Forgetting you don’t use the word “easy” with new riders.
Isn’t it true that Every Ride Is An Education (as well as an Adventure)?
Nobody, but NOBODY wants to get dragged around on someone’s “easy” ride, and finish up half dead.
This fact is the #1 reason Wombats survived these 20 years. One person’s fun is another person’s Death March!
We set off and countoured hills without name, under extremely low fog, and heard (but did not see) a herd o’ducks splashing and quacking. I lapsed from my usual polite ride-at-the rear style (‘s not a bat ride’!) I’d conveniently forgotten each was under a Special Dispensation Not To Shred.
After a spirited damp tour of the Body Of Water Nobody Knows, egos slightly inflated from having remained intact, no Biffs, Slams or Cuts. Back in Shrivelization.
We had company immediately and, loooking down the road, I saw a dozen riders strung out. To my right, a couple of men rode with their heads hanging in between their shoulder blades. A good sign.
It was a steepish paved incline.
I rolled up to the first man and smiled winningly.
“Race ya to the top?”
He took a look over at my knobby tire bike, then at me.
“Not with you“.
Right. There’s still that one ahead of you, thought I.
With a mere five minute’s heavy breathing, I overtook the Guy In The Lead, who didn’t have a heavy head.

Still, his super thin high-pressure tires and stylish lycra kit were no match for the raging Wombat.
Who didn’t bother to ask to race.
My lungs burned, iron-tasting air popped the alveoli out of their size-4 jeans and sent them off to Lane Bryant ‘big and tall’ shoppe. I could only hold this acceleration another thirty seconds or so…
I was too spent to support a smug look as I came past.
But in my mind I was singing “Blue Bayou’.

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, Cycle Training, Cycling, Ride

Do-Ers Profile

•November 11, 2007 • Leave a Comment


NAME: Madame Ozelle
NICKNAME: The Unmitigated Gaul
OCCUPATION: Madvice Columnist, Phlegmmaker, Pun Ditz
LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Winning a MacAdamy Award Special Citation for agreeing to cease & desist smuggling in (and showing) “Critical Mouse Halloween 1997” at every bicycle phlegm festival she attends. Sits right next to Bammy (Bay Area Music award) Honorable Mention issued in 2006 for the invention of “reverse busking” –playing extremely bad banjo until paid to take it elsewhere…. anywhere! Several awards elude Mme. Ozelle, but she’s leaving space on the mantel–just like her hero, Stephen Colbert.
LAST BOOK READ: I AM AMERICA (and SO CAN YOU!) by Stephen Colbert

WHY I DO WHAT I DO: Because I can’t NOT do it. It’s actually a condition known as OCD (over-the-computer-dithering). I like to think my thoughtful mudvice as a public service. While never asked for, it is freely administered, with American-caliber Subtlety. The grateful recipients may then proceed through life conscious that There is Some Little Thing They Could be Doing Better If Only They Would Apply Themselves. Everybody wins:gratitude-stricken madvice recipient, Society in General, The Earth.

PROFILE: slightly off-camber, owing to chip (of tarmac?) on shoulder

FUTURE ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Three books that will simultaneously de-forest a fraction of Finland and propose Glow-ball Warming solutions, namely bicycling & walking rather than motoring about.

First book: How To Ride A Bike (if you forgot to learn fifty years ago)
4″x4″ hardbound chapbook covered in recycled velvet, 82 pages, 30 illustrations.

Second book: The Year Of The Wombat (365 Days To A Smoother You) Finally put down into words, the mystical secrets of the trail riding idiot savant.
Guaranteed to unleash more non-athletic riders on trails and fire roads throughout the world.

Third book: Fabulous Me, a 300-page tell-all me-moir. Now that the autobiography genre has run its course and become “so yesterday”, it’s finally interesting to Mme. Ozelle. Things must be (prematurely) rejected in order to be embraced by this brave do-goodress. it’s time to set the record straight with the true facts of my own trajectory through the wild and wooly (as well as denimy) world of fat tire history. Unique perspective (owning to xtra X chromosome) will be a sure-fire hit with the invisible 30 million riders who elude the comprehension of the oh-so-macho bicycle industry.

Posted in Charlie Cunningham, Cycle Training, Cycling, Film, food, Jacquie Phelan, movies, MTB racing, Night, Ride, Single Speed, singlespeed, The Book, Trees, WOMBATS
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For the want of a good knot

•November 8, 2007 • 4 Comments

Some tread was lost.


Infrared photo by Anne Cutler – geckographics.com

Yesterday was the first ride I’ve done with the great Anne Cutler, infrared photographer and secret blues guitarist. Who greeted me at the Halloween party last week saying: “I was going to come as YOU (Really? Moi? Alice B.? ) but I decided “software pirate” would be cool. Aarrgh! Nice to finally meet you”.

Hard to not want to go out on a ride as soon as possible with someone so gracious, kind, articulate, with such terrific taste in roll models, and whose costume has an embedded pun.

We agreed a day or two later to do the Lagunitas Loop–your basic perfect ride, all the ingredients–and maybe climb beyond the morning fog.

Barely up to Five Corners I jump off my bike, unshoulder the banjo, and ask if A.C. has ever ‘teased spiders’ before. On misty moisty mornings the webs of the funnel spiders become shimmeringly visible, diamond-studded tissues of two sizes: momma spider (doily) or baby spider (beer coaster). The latter ones come in huge numbers…a few dozen within a couple of meter’s radius.

Every funnel has a perfect little black circular entrance at its center, in ominous contrast to the light-reflecting funnel that surrounds it. I took a thin strip of soft long grass, and touched it to the web , peering into the hole. The natural tremor in my huge hominid hand shook the web.

It must have been a botched job at first, but finally OUT RACED THE SPIDER to find..trick or treat ha-ha-false alarm, no fly , just a perverted person messing with the spider’s brain. And ripping a hole in the web.

It’s very cheap sport, making ’em rush onto the web to see who’s for dinner. Kind of like me when I hear the ‘ewe got mail’ ping on my computer. So predictable!

It’d be nice to train the spider legions to swarm the MMWD trucks that regularly ply this peaceful dirt road..and maybe irrevocably harm the directors of the board that are ramming the DESALINATION PLANT that we don’t need or want down our throats.
Woops, mustn’t tilt my hand!

Rode around lake, trading life stories, damn if she isn’t from a family of six kids too! How exquisitely one chooses whom to ride with, nothing conscious, it’s all vibes and Body English. Maybe like spiders and webs? False alarms? I hope to hell not!

As we rode round, she took some astonishing pics, to be shown here or somewhere, they are only the second set of infrared photos I’ve seen (our mutual friend Gary Leo has made many fine nature photos in the low infra range)…curiously there were NO PEOPLE OUT! On the lakeshore, we saw a very friendly group (brits, who love walking and don’t hate cyclists, naturally) who even said –WITH A SMILE –they’d seen someone skinny dipping right here, on a warm day a couple of weeks earlier. .

The swimmer warn’t me..I was testing a different reservoir a different day. “You know, I haven’t ridden since March!” Anne admitted. She didn’t seem out of shape, just a bit winded as anyone would be with that steep hill route to the lakes. “Yeah… on that ride, my friend split her head open on a rock only minutes after Ihad specifically asked her not to since she wasn’t wearing a helmet …”

And then she told me about witnessing a failed brake cable accident, when her neighbor kid splatted into a fence at the bottom of the huge hill they live on. “It was just like a cartoon, and she got up and dusted herself off and explained that her brakes didn’t work, and rode away”.

I wouldn’t blame Anne for having a little bit of paranoia about witnessing (=causality?) accidents…so she must have been duly impressed, when my bike’s rear tire suddenly stopped as we zoomed at a reasonable 15 mph down the last couple of hairpin turns.

As for me, I noticed it the second I touched down from a (very rare) air-grab (the water humps make it hard NOT to catch at least a foot of air). Banjo-back-slap I’m quite used to. But somehow the back end of my ‘ham began fishtailing around to the side (I let it) and then the bike went off toward the road’s edge. Think. Think. Slide…Oh, wait… my sweater, I didn’t really tie it right around my waist, did I?

Oh, shit. It’s become entrained in the back wheel…oh, well…just don’t touch that left brake…This is taking a long time, damn, I’m going to crash oh shit oh shit oh wait OK stick out right foot, and …come.to.a.stop.

Upright… and Anne looking very concerned.

“Friend, that was my fault” I assured her. “You should see my square knot”.

It has happened before. About 15 years ago, a sweater slid off my waist and into the wheel; luckily I was climbing very fast up the Sausalito hill, and just groaned to a stop wondering what the hell happened. I want to go on the record as a person who will never ever tie a sweater around my handlebars. That front wheel can’t afford to catch a garment…

We spent 5 minutes disentangling the unfortunate sweater (which happened to be forest brown, so nae harm, nae foule) and me begging her not to tell anyone she’d seen the stupidest pilot error I’ve commited in years.

Some minutes of feeling shaky because a crash at that speed would have worked wonders on my back, and that poor ol ‘El Kabong’ banjo…. I apologized for scaring her, although the more time that passed, the cockier I felt about my “superior handing skills” –so well -mated to a juvenile responsibility quotient!

Let me ride through my sixties, God, do.

Posted in Cycling, infrared, Ride, WOMBATS

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