What We Eat (ode to a lesser peak)

This article was originally published in Mountain Gazette magazine #166 - Spring 2010

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“He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock that shadows a dry, thirsty land."

Fanny Crosby, 1890 

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I watch the rocks.

From my desk at work all day long, for years, I’ve watched the rocks of Mount Elden, one of Flagstaff’s lesser landforms, out the window of my classroom.

Little has changed.

Again today, as it always has since I’ve known it, this mountain compels me: Come.

Three seasons of the year for the better part of the past two decades now, I’ve ridden its trails home each day, a few too-short miles of amazing boulder-covered, dacitic, woodsy singletrack with inspiring, evocative names like: Spring, Tree, Fat Man’s and Forces of Nature.

Along the way, I’ve sat near small trickling springs and watched birds, butterflies and bees drink and fight and fly away home. I’ve watched huge, complicated rain-borne waterfalls form and dissipate, both in the short span of minutes. I’ve taken refuge beneath overhanging rocks, huddled in narrow pockets while riotous storms roiled and lightning flashed close by.

Climbing aimlessly among its cracks and crags, I’ve found mysterious ancient glyphs and dark caches strewn with smoky potsherd.

And, once, I saw a lion with her kit.

Let's ride bikes for re-creation!

 "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Henry David Thoreau

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"I thought of that while riding my bicycle."
Albert Einstein
commenting on the origins of the theory of relativity
(and also me, commenting on the origins of this blog post)

Everything was difficult, everything hurt, after I got divorced.  

But surely, dear reader, you already know this. And perhaps that's because you have been gracious enough to have read the words I've previously written on this subject here on my blog.  

Likewise, perhaps, you're not super-stoked to read more of them. This is, after all, a bleak topic.

FEAR NOT! For my intention as pertains this latest entry (the one you're still reading (Thanks!)) is to explain to you how, in my attempts to reorient myself post-divorce, after having turned 'round many dark and disappointing corners, I'm starting to feel like, maybe, I'm getting somewhere. 

I'm hopeful in this post to describe for you the origins of this newfound perspective, how I arrived here, a few paces beyond the landscape of my annihilation, my ground-zero, to a place where I have regained some small measure of the Good which I believe still resides in my heart.

An unironical inverse ordering of sundry broken things

My father always said, "If it's a problem that can be fixed with money, it's not really a problem." 

He was, for much of his life, a person of some means, however, so this was a fairly simple thing for him to be able to say. Nonetheless, I get it.  There are problems in this life that cannot be fixed, no matter how much money you have.  Real, heartbreaking, chronic, sometimes fatal problems.  I understand this difference all too well.

I, unlike my father, am not a person of means.  To that end, I, personally, have found that the compounding effects of encountering many broken things in a short span of time can be challenging, despite the fact that many of those things are, indeed, fully reconcilable assuming you're willing/able to spend of the appropriate amount of money to purchase a solution.  

Which is to say, most but not all of my recent problems have been of this type, the kind that can be fixed with money.

Below is a list of a few of the recent challenges I've faced, described in inverse order of the impact the broken thing had on my emotional and/or financial well-being, from least to greatest...

The Settlement Of The Night Monster

[audio]

This post was originally written and published at rockchrysler.com in July 2013.

What follows is a true tale, or at least as true a tale as I am able to tell of it these days, so many years later, about a trip I took to the Galapagos Islands with my grandparents when I was 10 years old in 1977. It is a tale based, at least in terms of its sequence and style, on this poem which I wrote for Beckian Goldberg's ENG 200-something Introduction to Creative Writing poetry workshop as a sophomore at Arizona State University in 1987.

The photos below are also mine, taken by ten-year-old me with my prized Kodak Instamatic camera.

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"Yes, the night monster will settle there and will find herself a resting place."

Isaiah 34:14b

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Santa Fe Island, Galápagos
27 October 1977

It was a sharp knife, much sharper than most ten-year-old boys would tyically be allowed to possess.

And it was the right knife, too, its stainless three-inch-long blade and array of Swiss-army implements perfect for carrying confidently in one's front pocket all day long, especially on a grand, far-away excursion such as this.

The fish, lying on its side on the deck, a large trolling-hook pinned in its lower jaw, also gauged the sharpness of the boy's knife; its wide, unblinking eyes betrayed its awareness, as it gaped and gasped in desperate need of oxygen. It needed to die, wanted to now.

"Kill me," the fish told him.

Let's work at the local bicycle shop!

This post was originally workshopped on my Instagram and in the Fifty+ Years Old forum at mtbr.com.

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Old-man. Mouthbreather.

I never thought of myself as old. 

Until recently. 

The harsh reality of being me in this moment is that I’m at least 30, and in several cases 40 years older than everyone I work with at the bike shop (except for my good friend, Ken, who owns the place and has a couple years on me). Despite this constant reminder of my ever increasing age, it is, nonetheless, my privilege to toil alongside all of these amazing young people selling this thing (selling an experience, really) that we all passionately, even obsessively love. 

But this work, like all work, is hard work. "That's why they call it Work," my hard-working baby brother is fond of saying.  Retail at the sales-floor level, no matter what you're selling, is super tough and any amount of time spent working on the (concrete) floor during the summer season at Absolute Bikes Flagstaff is guaranteed to be a marathon endeavor. Not only is there a lot to know about each make and model of bike we sell, and an obtuse and thoroughly unintuitive point-of-sale system to master, there's also the simple fact that every customer who comes in through the front door brings with them a unique set of challenges due to their distinct personal peculiarities and predilictions.  

Just about a bike: Surly Moonlander

This is my Surly Moonlander. 

It is a first generation Moonlander, which Surly debuted in 2011, and discontinued in 2016.  This bike should not be confused in any way with Surly's new freaky-deaky ground-up redesigned 2025 Moonlander; they are two completely different bikes.

Actually, technically, this bike is not really mine.  It's a loaner from a good friend who moved away. He asked me, while I was helping him load the last of his family's stuff into their moving-truck, if I would be willing to keep it in my garage, on stand-by, for him to ride whenever he came back to town to visit.

Like I said, he's a good friend, so of course I agreed. Especially after he told me it would be fine with him if I rode it around whenever I cared to. 

In the years that it's been housed here at my place, of course, I have.  Many, many times.

Meantime, my friend, well, I'm happy to say he has been back to visit several times. 

Nonetheless, despite his repeated visits, he's ridden the bike just once... So...

Let's get a new tattoo!

It has long been said regarding semantics that “the word is not the thing,” the implication being that all language, both text and speech, can only attempt to represent ideas and feelings but cannot actually be the Real thoughts or sensations it describes.

In December 1996 I sat down to get my first tattoo, three small Hebrew letters (חֶסֶד = lovingkindness) on the ring finger of my left hand. It took the artist about five minutes to install it and cost me a grand total of $45, which I paid in cash.  I used the word, chesed (pronounced KHES-ed), as a framework for a part of my vows a few days later.  

And I meant it.  I know I was an imperfect partner at times.  But I really did try to live every implication of the word, as well as the indelibility of the deed, each day of my 28-year marriage.