A bicycle is the most efficient transportation machine.  A little input and I’m gliding, moving a useful measurable distance but more than that. I like going fast enough so the wind in my ears is louder than my thoughts.  On a tough day I like riding until I can be grateful again; sometimes that takes a couple hours but every ride is a good ride.

My youth’s independence was a banana seat Huffy pulled from an under-appreciated pile of rust in the back of St. Vincent’s Thrift Shop.  No school bus meant riding to school, the first 45 minutes of every day in all weather. Afternoons were exploring detours; summers were expeditions to the city limits, sometimes beyond.  I needed an upgrade for high school; I found a spotless antique 3 speed Raleigh, the cultural English workhorse collecting dust in an unlikely garage for $50.

I kept it through two foster homes. The first one kept me busy with farm chores, but the second was back in town. There, I had the bike back, and as an aside, they had a phenomenally sophisticated wall sized sound system: reel-to-reel and amazing headphones. I would forget myself in records: Sgt. Peppers, Genesis, Yes, etc, and another favorite. Just a guitar and piano instrumental album with a simple melody called Bricklayer’s Beautiful Daughter. Something about that one song in particular I heard faint glimmerings of contentment that was denied to me.  I would replay it to cling to this hint of a simple happiness I didn’t understand; that if it was in the song, it was somewhere deep in me.
Without a car for 10 years, one used 10-speed or another got me to various eccentric jobs.  

Fast forward to the life-changer, after a divorce. Needing to reconnect with myself, I searched for a decent bike. I found it hanging dusty in the back of a cluttered boutique shop smelling of tire rubber, quiet with racers’ confidence. They had a Lemond thoroughbred on consignment, assembled custom 5 years earlier to race. It was slightly outdated, but a dent on the top tube put it out to pasture. It was steel though, so rideable enough for me.  My entire $300 savings and it was mine. Then I discovered the special pedals needed special shoes, so another month saving for those.  I wasn’t going to wear those silly spiderman outfits, until I started to ride more than 10 miles and my **** demanded it.  And those pockets in the back of the shirt were handy.  I met a friend who taught me how to draft: my skinny wheel a few inches behind the bike in front at 20 mph, to save precious energy in the slipstream. Truly dangerous, vulnerable, and effectively blinded; but he pointed at the ground with various hand signals to warn of upcoming road hazards. I was touched by this wordless language of trust and camaraderie. This innate concern is essential to the sport, even among competitors, so it seems to attract quality people I liked.  My new life expanded with friends.

I discovered biking exercise could stabilize the life-long effects of brain injury, lost some weight, grew stronger, and started setting goals.  First longer group rides, then a century (100 miles in one ride), then mountain biking: epic fun in nature, unadulterated happiness.  Then novice racing, then the next category up with a team, then a triathlon.  It became an admitted obsession but I won a pair of socks or bike parts every now and then.  Eventually tattooed two bike chains around my ankle, one twisted and the other broken.  I loved the lifestyle, and had truly reinvented and rediscovered myself.

A 500 mile ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles with fellow wounded veterans helped dissipate the old shame from the military.  I had joined the ride to raise money for a good cause.  I respected the program and knew personally that cycling had changed my life.  They turned out to be inspiring, helping me more than I could have helped them.  Some had only just started riding a bike for only a few weeks, some were amputees fit with special-made adapters on regular bikes, some had no legs using hand cycles.  They all joined on to the task of riding 500 miles. No one whined, and helping each other finish the day was the only goal.  While riding with them, I began to open up about my experience.  I found a few others who also had TBI, and we could laugh about similar mishaps.  The other veterans didn’t judge me about anything, like when I was injured, the nature of my disability, how much I did or didn’t accomplish. I had signed up just like them, had to recover back to a functioning life just like them.  It was the first time in my life that whole chapter in my life was accepted; I wasn't odd, and they helped close the shame on that old chapter.  (Thank you, R2R.)  The next year I took a 1500 mile self-supported bike trip through western mountain ranges with my husband and soulmate, whom I had met mt. biking.

There was one late Spring day, finally warm after a long winter, when I just wanted to ride for a few hours by myself.  No speedometer or training intervals, just enjoy the park road winding under the trees. I had downloaded some new music on the IPod, a sampler from the library.  I felt happy.  Life is Good.  Rounding a bend by the river, coasting through sunbeams sparkling the park’s peaceful road, my earphones unexpectedly played Bricklayer’s Beautiful Daughter.  I hadn’t heard that simple guitar tune in three decades.  My God, time suddenly disappeared.  I was right back in the forgotten foster home, listening for the faint silver threads of the contentment I was feeling at this very moment on the bike.  The full force of this sudden connection, the wholeness of the life and unity of myself in one epiphany, brought me to tears. I found myself pouring my heart into praying hang in there, girl, hang in there, you’ll find it and I felt my younger self hearing echoes of birds singing in new green leaves.

I was pulling up in the car park at the Immigration Removal Centre
When I realised that I'd completely f 'ed up

Having remembered:
- portable recording studio
- condensor microphones x 2 (one of them doesn't work, dunno which one, they look the same)
- dynamic microphone (sometimes works)
- XLR cables x 2 (in a tangled mess)
- Jack cables x 2 (joining the party)
- headphones
- headphone splitter (a remedy for people who are always on their phone?!)
- big-to-little adapters
- kettle lead (so named because it dates back from when the kettle was king)
- guitar
- and two folders of important bits of paper (well, at least some of it might be important)

I suddenly realised that I'd forgotten the only genuinely essential thing.
My passport.
You can't get in without your passport.
That's the rule and the rules don't bend.
Security is paramount.

I find my colleague, Lucky, sitting in his car.
Lucky: "Kev, you aren't gonna believe this but..."
He didn't need to say anymore.
I knew that he had done the same thing.
Lucky and I were in the same *** of s*.

But for some reason they made an exception.
We were lucky.
It must had rubbed off.

(true story)

2020 - day 120

Wednesday, April 29, 2020
12:21 PM

passport day, despite the masks, there is humor, for a while,
in social distancing, plus masks...

yesterday on the Sunrise Highway stretch of the Pacific Crest,
we saw
flag men and the whole road gang, employees, not prison contract labor,

these guys are all smart enough to get the job, there they are, smart guys,
and all wearing masks, I wonder

who made sense of that, and who did it in solidarity with an us narrative.

United, we stand, divided, we fall...

Global Brain reports Mortal

Brains being trained to new normal,
such concarne systems, can,
if willed, pupose-ful, con determination mit energetic application made,
freely,
it appears, according to Youtube and Facebook,
that
such brains, meat-mind-gut-heart-skin sensation interpretation systems,

only get upgrades on this scale, once, in a generation.

The augmental roll out hits first adapters about fifty years after first frontal cortex
call, plea, actually,
for myination, squeeky voices, peeps, feed me, feed me
urges and cravings unheard of before,
BTW,
puberty models future imaginations of hell, the body remembers,
advertisers play to that
comfort sells better than ***, in a hormonal reset crisis, *** needs no ads...

so many signals cross in chaotic knots, even stretching that last nerve
so tight...
some result in broken strands, but
human brains evolved the idea of normal, calm and continuing, carry on...
says the king of the village,
head of the clan,
da man o'dehouse; twas he who said what we do next,
and come a time, some say you remember wrong,
so writer man,
him say I write what seer say he see,
so
scribblers writ what was agreed, we all formed a public, for crying out
loud,

and neighbors had public faces, same as private faces... no opposing faces.

We danced with no masks... spaceship earthers have no secrets...

Time was, man's inhumanity to man was intolerable, now,
man's humanity
is intolerable,

--- you doubt? --- later, we talk how tuning and balancing was lost as senses,
but to a few... who knew the life in words can dissipate authority,
if left lying idle, too long.

2020

the power in a free press belongs to the owner of the presses,
and we have voice activated presses connected to any hearing ear or seeing eye,
willing to listen in...

before radio evolved to the smart-phone,
a soap box in the village square was as far as freedom of expression could go.
Now, we have four and more generations of
normal
humans who have heard radio music and commentary, from the womb.

These are the first adapters, sapien sapien augmented
radio heads, wired
naturally
with some vagus curve capacity to signal gut responses
faster, by virtue of habing
some bits slicker than, say
normal wierdos,
literal
*** heads, like Johnny Appleseed Chapman...
re
ference: Certified Disneyfied Americana Clue founded,
standing on--
American Bogus Science Fable, which
teaches of JA as a crazy old man with something like a plan,

to live happy as ever, right now, as best he knew how,
thus
Shane, and so on, mindphuck for boys in the fifties,
whose dad's had won the war and built the bomb,
and broke the unions...

lonely boys had songs, tuned to their comfort in sorrow shared circuit
being installed from early 1953 through -- current time

music in the air, or from the air, is took for granted by any child
as something doable, the poorest of the poor can play at playing internet games,
using Poke'mon cards...manually,

and their brains work different than even Turing and Von Neuman imagined.
Feynman and Teller both admitted the sense of humor,
kids have and
AI can imagine,
Ai ai ai can imagine,
in light of history, they agree,
that sense of the playful, ludologous letting go.
is the same sense in humans...

which does good, like a medicine.
So,
a solitary man makes a solitary plan, leaving a mark mattered not,

living free as one man can be.
Pioneer social distancing, all my heros were outlaws,
rustlers, mostly,
my ancestors never wished to live in towns,
so they never did.

But, you know they poached turkeys and deer as order set in.

Old normal is fully functional, add electricity... how happy can a man be?

Alone?
Less than not-alone, more than in a maddened crowd.

Out on the edge of civilization,
we walk along Al Gore's old info super hiway, asking for sneezers
willing to give a viral idea blowing in the wind,
one good whiff,
wrinkle y' gnose,
tickling fancies we
fancy few have tickled since Tesla became a car.

We make next up. No lie. Keep kicking.

When I was 15, I remember buying singles like
The Lion Sleeps Tonight,  Louie, Louie,  Wild Thing,
I Got You Under My Skin…
I remember buying 45 RMP plastic speed adapters for pennies-
pressing them into the center of the records
hearing them click in place.

They were a part of my youth,
little plastic things that popped out of the pockets of my jeans
whenever my mom did the wash,

invaluable, necessary, plastic discs that appeared everywhere -
inside my jewelry box, on top of my dresser,
even in bottom of my black & white, catholic saddle-shoes…

incredible, magically, musically endowed, little middle plastic things,
like guitar-picks,

strumming radiant sounds in a back-yard universe
across the beams of a basement winter's homily
inside the space-lined ears of a bleached blond teenager

whose heart & soul
were permanently scorched.

You succeed.
In laws of three. You will find the peace you
Wish to believe exists but for now is hidden under heaving fits of painful death, a test to draw out that which never minds rejecting the demands of other beings
Hammer under nail, no compare to restless privy minds slowly counting time until the new tragedies arrive.
Release your hold of pieces calling out for pain to pair once treasured memories. Now staring out with infectious longing, ready to be looked upon smirking and expectant the turncoat thoughts revel in the task at hand. Their assault starts as soon as the thought is called
Aftermath
Released to the gravity, by themselves they fall apart
Into place, covering flesh torn with sympathy
Released from beasts that grit their teeth in painful defeat, as, yes,
you rise to your feet, Torn to pieces, yet completely at peace, distant memory terror dreams distort to bring chaotic memoirs of cataclysmic merriment.
You utilize the pieces to assure your release from pains prison to pleasant pastures. Please just remember never obey the masters. Create sarcastic narratives pledging senators to heretics. Don't trust fantasy banner ******* brand name Promoters. Lœsers leading children to sheep eye machîne, specially crafted master adapters hard wire minds to the one percent agenda, intuition driven minions giving men to temptress, hoof to fenthris, dope to misfits, coke bottles to **** maker accomplices driven awkward and subsequently dove off for bottom place.
Freebie

I mote it. Be recieved with sight conscious of that which truth and wisdom delight.
Everfolding hands coalesce in geometry of design, symbols to be applied to help those who can't live. Honestly.
A prophetic glance manifests what this prophet percieves within this mess.

This species will mirror the mentality of the dust
It's depths a source of nourishment and plenty to us, the rust
Will we find the hero to navigate the puppetmasters collective cluster conglomerate commissioning commonwealth copperpot penny peasantry meat, footwoorkin the fleet floggers, ambushing citizens in the streets with collars, brainwashing caverns codependent on caging the masses like sheep to slaughter.
"But if we'd known we'd scream and holler! I'd rise to protect my property, my guns, my freedoms, my rights!"
Right, no, I'm sure you'd fight, you'd obviously gather friends to your plight, indigenous rage at the thought that the night would defend those evil shadow people encroaching on your ability to reason.
Shut the **** up, what the **** have you done to avenge those innocents of fate, unknowingly recollecting secrets of the state
Hate not flaking over city lake waters like mirrors hiding secrets well obvious.

Money & public resources alleviate proof of collusion simple doors of power hold new potential outcomes timed each revolution the little hand dares to travel. that of a sacrifice, willing or not, to help scare the sheep into buying as much of their stock, if your worried please do not, the flock will forget what they saw as soon as the image and story are gone.

Gotta be.

A solution so fitting it belongs in the movies, but that's how we forgot how to think, outside
For ourselves,for them, or the others
Rebelling as one towards sisters and brothers
*******, I need show my true face
Walk calmy down the streets,
Calm sure pace.
Talk macabre to the one's who own the fleets, spread the sheets to occupy the godhead, sift the merry morning stocks press against the current sea, then bust out enough to make me n mine a new currency.
Probably
Not so sore plot B soars blotting lenses before but not training more thoughts to war forescore before plot thickening remorse runs it course.
A new day in gotham city means unity throughout forgotten realms of hypocrisy. A cure-all demonstration that revels insanity for placid reasonably dressed persons composed, unfearing conversations of dominating resolve, stoicism spinning round professional mannerisms focusing on abilities that take the core of our rotten hearts and heal the waste, now it stays, hurting less sounds okay away from the corrupted hunting of weak willed pumpkins jumped over plummeting suns, all for one's been a worn out joke, once well spoken juxtaposed to unholy notions unnaposed sides take thrill **** maxxing to disastrous uprising in past the warcasters
Talked with the enemy over tea and brunch of tables shared only with tokens of luck, fliping thrice indicates which squadron lots gets iced.
Word gets out and like fire it don't take much for a war to sprout in the bogs of ire, but before it's allowed, the dog rise together finally to figure **** out, creating together masterpieces on earth to reoccur annually until our home is brought back to a state we continue symbiotically.
Fate to be

**** it all, the last of my regrets was all reasoning needed to keep breathing.
Something other than this wretch that I am
Existing for no reason but to help others pass the seasons with my singing

Shelves need a dusting
Recover a brush
Into the bathroom it goes
Look at those toothpaste stains
In the basin
I surely need to clean those
Under the kitchen sink
To get me a sponge
Look at all those ***** dishes
I’ve gotta clean at least some
First put the clean ones away
The cabinet is in such disarray
Here’s that stupid electronic adapter
I looked for yesterday
Gotta put it in place right away
But look at this unorganized drawer
What a cluttered way to store
Electronic adapters, or anything more
Organization is what it needs
Here’s that book I was looking for
Back in it’s place, it goes
Oh my
Shelves need a dusting

Yeah. We got a course.
We tied a knot around our knacks and

threw away the keys, mixed all our metaphorical

nanobot thoughts re
bits
and pieces of sound forming words on rock, a sign.

-- we have such rocks, I can show you, on my phone.
-- I went there, when I buried my brother, in a pauper grave.
un marked, like Cochise, in cowboy movies.

What's a cowboy movie, grandpa?

Those were used, used to, teach us not to lie and cheat and steal.

But a few among us were chosen, marked with kneckerchiefs,

mine was pinksilk,as I recall the shame and feel the blush
on the face of a child,

like a slap, exactly
like a slap, so you read this story after good at games grandpa

releases the forget me not spell embodied in my grand intention.

I was going to tell stories on the radio and fiddle and yodel
and square dance with the actual little red headed girl

none of which makes any sense, so I yodel and laugh at the fact

I am alive
at this moment in history and I can in fact hold the wind in my fist.

Mymetalmental fist of reason - logos in greek, I hear soul spirit daemon
fist of the being kind who trouble their own house and

survive to inherit the wind. Life is not boring after that.

But the rapids in rivers of reasons to believe are no danger to the fluent
substance of things hoped for, annihilator of things we dread.

I said I was good in this game. There is no making of evil here, we have

make overs and do overs ad infun items, grammerly is dis-allowed,

but, if I were your age, I would take a chance on gramps, experience wise,
punctuation makes the habakkuk habit easier, but limiting

Some of these early adapters... Usenetshit and vacuum tubes for transisters,

the code is gold. Axiomatic as all get out.But no empty space

--- really. Test me, if you felt like life was this scary when this story started;

how scary is it now?

{thread breaks 844 whatever hello sir im calling on a recordeline on belaf of president trump}