A carnival of technology

I decided to take another long bicycle ride today. I tried to apply some of the lessons learned from last time and did a few things differently:

Freaking eat something first. The last time I attempted this ride I rolled out of bed and onto the bike with only a pot of coffee in between. It turns out that black coffee isn’t as much the breakfast of champions as I may have hoped. Today I fixed myself a big plate of grits (I probably need carbs or something), an orange (don’t want no scurvy) and some bacon (delicious). I could have used some eggs or toast or some of those other things pictured in the “complete breakfast” on boxes of sugary cereal, but I didn’t have any of that stuff. Regardless, I suspect that the meal improved my performance a bit.

The roof is not on fire, but I still need some water. I got pretty thirsty on the last ride, but I do have a problem of capacity with regards to water. I decided to attempt to apply a lesson from Dune: the best place to carry water is inside you. I drank about a quart before starting, half-expecting to need to stop and pee in someone’s bushes halfway through, but instead I just sweat it all out in the first five minutes. Maybe I should get one of those bottle cages that attaches behind the saddle.

No errands. No trips to Blockbuster, no stops at grocery stores, and no bags or backpacks or other carrying devices. I stripped El Blue Demon down to just 18 pounds of rubber and aluminum and carbon fiber, leaving only my under-saddle bag, stuffed full with a patch kit, tire levers, spare tube, chain tool, my cell phone and I think an Allen wrench or two, to bail me out a variety of emergencies. I didn’t need any of it, thankfully, and it was really nice to let my road bike handle like a road bike. I did leave the rack on, but it’s reasonably light and a pain to remove.

Start earlier. I really only wanted to do this earlier so I’d have some daylight left after the ride to do some other stuff. For me “early” is “before noon” (I guess that coffee I mentioned earlier was more a lunch of champions), so putting my ride between 11 and 2 probably wasn’t the greatest idea. Did you know it’s 87° today?

When I checked the Green Tour website to plan my route, I noticed that they’ve made a couple of changes. The “Intermediate” portion of the route that loops through the Long Island Creek area removed all that twisting and turning around Long Island Dr and the surrounding roads, instead starting the route with a straight shot down Mt. Vernon. Apparently they felt that the extra-gnarly hills in that area were a bit too much. There’s also an extra bit of course: whereas last time they described a 30mi “Advanced” course and a 60mi double-advanced (or something like that) that was really just regular-advanced twice, this time there is a ~15mi extension that continues south on Glenridge at the end of the Dunwoody loop and crosses the southern edge of Sandy Springs before continuing back north on Mt. Vernon. They say the route is still being finalized, and I suspect one reason for that is that the roads they specify don’t actually connect. I stuck with the 30mi course.

I rode the route in order this time, except for the part where I turned the wrong way on Northside and ended up taking the Riverview counterclockwise. Eh. I felt like I was doing pretty good this time around. Maybe the removal of the extra hills helped, or maybe going the correct direction through Long Island and Powers Ferry and all that results in fewer steep climbs. I ended up finishing the first of my two bottles of water somewhere on Dunwoody Club Dr, and I was still going pretty good. I gave a moment’s thought to continuing along the extra-advanced course, maybe stopping at that park on Hammond to get more water, but that idea was thoroughly crushed by the time I got back to Glenridge. Just north of Abernathy, a little after Glenridge turns right into itself, there’s a somewhat steep hill, and when I got to the foot of that I just couldn’t go any farther. My knees where aching, my legs were sore, and each new stroke took more and more of my waning will to complete. I probably would have made up some nuclear secrets right there and sold them to al-Qaeda if I thought it would get me a cold glass of water and a soft bed. I pulled over and lied down for a while around the same spot as the 3:40 break on last ride’s map. This was my first non-traffic stop after a little over two hours of riding, so that’s probably not too bad.

In all, the ride was 32.5mi, and I completed it with an average speed of 13mph or so. I did notice a lot of other cyclists today, maybe because it’s more into race season now or maybe because I was sticking more to the path, and man do those people piss me off. I have a different mindset from these people, and I realize that: I don’t have the lycra shorts or the fancy jersies or anything, and I realize that biking in a hawaiian shirt and jeans means that I’m carrying about five pounds of sweat around with me, but it’s comfortable enough and doesn’t make me look like a complete tool. I’m not out here to win any races. So I’m not in a big hurry to begin with, and maybe the endorphins make me friendlier, but I feel it’s appropriate to acknowledge other bikers’ presence. Are we not all brothers and sisters in transportation? Ride on, and godspeed! And it wouldn’t kill you to nod or wave or shout “howdy” back when I do so for you, jerks. I hope their overpriced titanium spokes snap.

I’ve reached the end of section 2 on page 282. Pynchon has proven to me that even within the structure of a steadily-advancing plot, he can still write twisting, confusing, and sometimes absolutely disgusting prose. I have no idea what is going to happen in section 3. I doubt it will be a complete return to the form of section 1 and its mad, whirling style, but I expect there to be longer concentrations on other characters, and maybe even more long tangents to examine a different setting and subplot. But I don’t know. I’m over a third of the way through the book now. It’s been rough at some points, but I want to find out what happens next.

I’ve had my Merkur double-edge single-blade razor for a couple weeks now, and I really like it. I’m not really sure what the point is in having edges on both sides, and the differences from a double-blade razor took a little bit to get used to, but I no longer feel like I’ve scraped off the top of my face and replaced it with cheap lotion whenever I shave.

The razor took a little getting used to. It has a good heft to it, and it’s that weight that controls the pressure of the blade against the skin rather than needing any additional push, so I got a nice case of razor burn on my first shave. It also takes a little more work to control the angle of the blade than a modern disposable razor cartridge. While a Gillette whatever basically sits flat against your face with the blades angled appropriately within the assembly, this razor has a greater freedom of movement and requires some control to keep the blade angled properly. It’s not as bad as using a straight razor, since the safety razor housing provides a guide, but it takes a little more thought and concentration than a flat cartridge.

The shave I get from this thing isn’t as “smooth” as what I had from Gillette, but I don’t really mind. As I mentioned, I don’t feel like I’m mutilating my face by cutting whiskers below the skin in the name of an unnaturally close shave. I get a bit of a five-o-clock shadow now, which is kind of neat. My face isn’t going to be compared to silk sheets or baby butts or whatever else appears in those ridiculous commercials, but for once I feel great. If I have to shave in the evening before a date, so be it. Maybe I’ll keep going along this line and get one of those fancy brushes at some point.

Car-driving Asian dude (as Simon noted in a comment, dude’s probably Filipino. Boy do I feel dumb.) called back. Apparently I did scratch up his car a little, but he doesn’t care. Apparently he used to bike a bit himself and is familiar with the sensation of hitting cars, and he just wanted to make sure I was alright. That seems nice, and I don’t have to go through the hassle of trying to figure out if I’m legally liable or need to pay for anything. Hooray.

Well, I hit a car today. This is my first. Do I now have some kind of newfound street cred? I don’t know. Maybe? It was my fault and I’m fine. I probably wouldn’t have hit the guy at all if I had bothered to adjust my brakes properly.

I decided to stop at the Publix on Hammond this evening, and the route I chose was to take Peachtree Dunwoody all the way south from North Springs station. It’s all goes downhill around Abernathy or so, so it’s not a bad ride. There was a lot of traffic on Hammond today, so I started zipping by on the right edge, bypassing cars and riding in blind spots and generally being what people hate about cyclists. Just before Hammond there are two right turns: one into an inn and a wider one into that horrible shopping center where the Publix is. Traffic was completely stopped, I was passing cars on the right about 50 yards north of the Publix turn, and some dude in a compact (Hyundai? I can’t remember) suddenly turned right to get to La Quinta Inn. I couldn’t swerve or brake quite quickly enough, so I ended up hitting the guy’s right rear quarter panel at five or ten mph. It wasn’t exactly graceful—I pulled my feet out of the clips and I think one hand touched the ground—but I was completely unharmed and my first reaction was to just keep going. The guy in the car reacted, however, as one is supposed to react in an accident; he got out in a panic, probably afraid that he ran over my leg or something. I assured him that I was uninjured, I did not need to go the hospital, and I tried to apologize for sneaking up on the right and hitting his car, all the while anxious to just leave the scene and get out of there. One thing that occurred to me afterward, after I calmed down a bit, is that I didn’t get a good luck at the car. I don’t know if I hit hard enough to dent the panel, and I feel like it’s my fault if I did. He gave me his business card, and I left a message for him on La Quinta’s voicemail, where he is apparently an Assistant General Manager. I wonder if he’ll call back.

One thing I did notice about the business card, since I think about inappropriate things, is that, while the guy looked pretty azn, he has a Spanish surname. Neat.

I’m on page 208. So far this second section has shifted from spastic examinations of an ever-growing menagerie of characters and their feelings and the world around them to concentrating only on the guy who I guess is the main character. Chris says that this section is more about plot, and I’m not sure what to think of that. Looking back, I really enjoyed the first section for what it was. I was able to get lost in the meandering tangents and sudden changes of perspective, and it was a hell of a ride through a bunch of confusing words. I liked it. I’m not sure yet what to make of this introduction of a story a quarter of the way in. I’ve realized that at this point that I really don’t care about Slothrop. I’m interested in what happens to him, but if he dies or fails or fades away, so it goes. I’m more interested in the motives and actions of the Pavlovian experimenter, and maybe that’ll come back to the surface. Recalling V. again, I felt the same lack of care for Profane, the schlemiel who hardly cared about himself, and Slothrop has some similar traits. I suppose that Pointsman could make a comeback much in the way that Stencil, whose eccentricities and interests eventually became the main thrust of V., did, but one of the things that kept that earlier novel interesting to me was how each chapter seemed to promise a new setting and new set of characters: maybe this one’s about a siege in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, or a poet writing about the war in Malta, or revolution in Florence—the story was composed of so many bizarre flashbacks that it was hard to keep up, and I liked that about it. This single plotline seems so mundane in comparison. The next set of boxes is about twenty pages off, so I’m going to call it quits for the night. I hope something changes soon.

And now I’m going to try writing about things that have nothing to do with Gravity’s Rainbow. I got free banananas today. I guess my food buying habits might seem a little weird. I don’t give one single damn whether the farmers I buy from sprayed their crops with DDT or Thalidomide or whatever. Whatever works, man; just so long as it tastes good when you’re done. I do, however, buy some items from the Publix semi-hippie label, Greenwise. The last meat I bought came from chickens that weren’t fed antibiotics or cow waste and went to good schools, and the milk, though not organic, comes from cows not treated with growth hormones. The label says right there that the FDA thinks I’m an idiot and the milk is exactly the same, but I know that the growth hormone creates a problem with udder infections, and that sounds super gross. Mainly I’m concerned about antibiotic abuse. That shit is bad news and we are all going to die of some invincible staph infection one of these days. I think I bought Greenwise tomato juice the last time I needed some, but there weren’t antibiotics involved in that decision; I think the organic stuff was just redder.

Anyhow, the news tells me that organic eating is old and busted, and the new hotness is local eating. I don’t shop at that little stand on Sandy Springs Circle out an effort to eat locally but more out of an effort to buy locally. Support local business and fight the man and all that. I like to know that the dude or lady I am giving my money to represents a small business that is able to keep its customers in sight rather than some huge corporation that is able to abstract customers into graphs and numbers. The health of small businesses seems to me to be in the best interest of the consumer, and I try to support that idea when possible. And sometimes I get free bananas. I don’t know where they came from: Florida or Costa Rica or somewhere. Who cares? Rick’s Farmers Market has a bunch of ripe bananas that need to move fast, and maybe all the sweating I do in a day really is causing a potassium deficiency.

Steve, of Steve, Don’t Eat It! fame, recently made a post about that honey thing that shows up on every box of honey-flavored breakfast cereal. I can understand its purpose—not all honey comes in a plastic bottle shaped liked a bear (my current batch, a sourwood honey from somewhere in the Blue Ridge mountains, came in a glass jar), and drizzling honey out of a jar requires some extra utensils—but I can fill that purpose with a spoon. I want to file this tool away in my mind with the melon ballers and cherry mashers of the world, but nothing so succinctly represents the presence of honey as that honey thing. It’s apparently called a honey dripper or honey dipper or something like that. I kind of want one. I wonder if there’s a Michael Graves version.

Sheldon Brown says I’ve been locking my bike all wrong. The best way is to put the lock around only the rear wheel, inside that rear diamond in the frame. The idea looks at how bicycles are stolen: bike locks are usually either chains or U-locks, so a thief is going to be carrying around either a pair of bolt cutters or a jack. Keeping the lock away from the frame will prevent frame damage during failed theft attempts, and it’s unlikely that a thief will try or succeed in cutting through the wheel. It doesn’t usually make much sense to carry a hacksaw around, and the tension on the rim makes it difficult to cut through. This new locking method makes sense, but it’s going to take a while to get used to. My rear wheel has a lot less clearance than the one pictured, and I’d have to rest the lock against the rear fender which has an annoying tendency to push the fender against the wheel. It still seems worth a shot.

I appear to be getting sunburned. I’ve been putting on SPF a billion sunscreen in the mornings, but I tend to forget to reapply in the afternoons. The EPA says that tomorrow’s UV index is 8, which is probably a lot. I don’t remember all of the details of those genealogy projects I did in school—I think my ancestors were mostly Micks and Dagos—but whatever set of DNA brought me here, I seem to burn pretty easily. I should probably do something about that.

I’m not sure how much longer these bananas are going to make it. Maybe I’ll try making bread out of them.

I didn’t read at all on Saturday, so my progress slowed a bit. I’m now on page 156, and since the next row of boxes is about twenty pages away and I’m getting a headache, I’m calling it quits for the night.

One thing I noticed while flipping through future pages was a mostly blank page with a big number “2” and what looked like some kind of quote, like the one from Wernher Van Braun that began this crazy adventure. Looking back, that first page did have a big number “1” at the top as well as a title, “Beyond the Zero”. What the hell is this? Am I reaching the end of a 180-page chapter? Is this like the breaks between “books” in each volume of The Lord of the Rings?

V. is split up among sixteen chapters, and each one began with a short summary of the chapter’s contents that sometimes helps prepare the reader to understand what’s going on and sometimes doesn’t. The chapters are split into sections, each headed by a Roman numeral, that provide convenient resting points and are more or less replaced by the rows of boxes in Gravity’s Rainbow. Since I’ve gone a hundred and fifty freaking pages without a proper chapter break, I had since forgotten abouth that big number one at the beginning and just assumed the entire book was a single stream of violently meandering thoughts broken by the rows of boxes. What does that big number two mean? There can’t be much of a marked shift in setting or plot, since those shifts happen just as happily right in the middle of a paragraph. Will it be a shift in theme? A replacement of symbols? Is all of the time I spent trying to reconcile the Pavlovian, statistical and supernatural views as they apply to love and war going to be thrown out in another thirty pages? That big number terrifies me.

I’m on page 94. Like Monday, other activities interfered, and I’m finishing short of my potential in order to succumb to the onslaught of night. Nothing really notable happened today. Yesterday I made it through the sequence around page seventy-something that started out with the letters, and man, that was weird. I stopped there for the night because after that assault of imagery, I couldn’t go any farther. The book is still interesting, but I’m beginning to suspect that I may have wandered through about a hundred pages of fancy nothing.

I’ve set off the smoke detector in my apartment(s) twice. The first time was in Smyrna, after I received a gift of three cast-iron skillets from my parents. The skillets hadn’t seen much use or care for several years, so I began by cleaning and reconditioning them. The idea with cast-iron cookware is to create a non-stick surface of burnt fat, so the purpose of conditioning it is to provide that initial layer, to char, blacken, soak and burn the various lipids into the pores of the metal and provide a layer above the iron for food to slide around and sometimes pick up the flavor of whatever was cooked before. That tale is detailed elsewhere, but the basic story is that I set the oven on fire.

Today I attempted a sourdough rye bread. My bread-fu is still pretty weak. The only bread I’d made before this that was even edible came from a recipe on the back of the flour bag. It was a whole wheat bread, and I guess it was ok. It wasn’t as good as something you can get at the store, but it was probably average for something baked by someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing. As for the rye bread, I don’t know. There are a lot of variables in making the sourdough, first of all, and I don’t have the experience to know how to adjust for them. I think my kneading technique could use some work. The rye dough was very dense, and I think it could have been mixed and kneaded better with an electric mixer, which I don’t have nor particularly want. The bread came out pretty thick, which is expected, but I don’t know that it rose enough. In all, it’s usable, but it could be a lot better.

One of the instructions in the recipe I used was to leave a pan full of water in the oven to steam it up while the bread bakes. I used one of my cast-iron skillets for this, and by the time the bread got going all of the fat and whatnot on the pan started to burn off and set off the smoke detector. I guess that was kind of a bad idea.

What in the fuck did I just read?

I made it to page 30 in Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve seen at least three different covers for paperback editions of this novel, and I don’t know if each is a sign of repagination. The one I have has a V-2 rocket outlined in white against something that looks like a black-and-white Pollock painting. I think I could make it a little farther, but I need to get some sleep tonight. This is certainly an odd book. I had to put it down for a little while after the sequence about a giant adenoid swallowing London (boring aside: my own adenoids were removed when I was like five. I don’t think they were the size of a city block.), but I picked it back up and continued on through a few more rows of boxes which I guess are chapter breaks.

I got a bit of a late start today since I decided to cook dinner instead of paying someone else to cook dinner for me, and that involved heating my kitchen up to approximately three billion degrees Fahrengrade and spending over an hour screwing around with some chicken, spinach and linguine. I also had a couple of drinks, fed my sourdough starter (it should be ready on Thursday), attempted to patch a bicycle tube (The patch didn’t take. I found the flat this morning (my favorite kind of flat, since fixing flats on the couch is a hell of a lot nicer than fixing them on a sidewalk), and investigation led to a tiny little hole that I thought was caused by grit caught inside the tire finally making its way into the tube. I cleaned out the tire, slapped on a new tube and forgot about it until tonight, but further investigation showed that the hole was actually on the corner of that weird rectangular seam that tubes from Performance seem to have. I think this is the last of my Performance tubes, and I swear I am never shopping at that shithole again. Seriously, why does a tube need an extra seam? I feel kind of bad now for telling that lady on MARTA that I got my bike at Performance, though I don’t think she’ll actually try to buy one. I’ve seen her before when I’ve gotten off at Dunwoody, and she’s very friendly and talkative, but there seems to be something a little off that I can quite put my finger on. I’ve always seen her wearing hospital scrubs and traveling with her nearly silent daughter. Maybe it’s just that quiet desperation shared by so many rider of public transit. Real nice lady, and I threw out that stupid tube after another spot on that goofy seam started blowing bubbles.) and watched an episode of House. I started my reading around 10 o’clock, and this book is kind of weird. It’s also very heavy. It’s hard to find a comfortable way to hold it.