Sisyphus Rides a Bike

The sky is streaked red and yellow, the colors of blood and urine. Dirty, gray clouds, the color of broken asphalt, hover silent and somber over endless miles of broken asphalt the color of dirty gray clouds. I scratch at my amygdala with a Popsicle stick, but there’s nothing but numbness. I poke at my hippocampus with a toothpick, and stab at my prefrontal lobes with a yakitori skewer, and find nothing but empty space. Wherever I prod at my brain, like I would a bad tooth with my tongue, I find dead, numbing nothingness. Everything above the brainstem has been truncated, and locked away in packing peanuts for safekeeping. Like the dirty clouds over the miles of broken asphalt, I hover over myself, silent and somber, blinking into the blood- and urine-streaked sky.

Blinking against the wind and the sun and the dust from all the fires since the dawn of time, I amble somnambulantly, leaning against objects when I can, to compensate for my lack of equilibrium. The world sits on a turtle. It wobbles there precariously, tipping first to one side then the other, rolling forward then back, but never quite falling off the turtle’s back. The turtle occasionally shifts its weight or shuffles from side to side, looking for a comfortable position in which to support the weight of the world. Below it, other turtles hold it up in turn, and also shift occasionally in the listless way that turtles have of shifting, first listing left, then listing right in a cosmic, eternal dance of near toppling balance. Below the turtles there are more turtles. "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Sandpipers run up and down the water’s edge with every swell, but what will the sandpipers do now the oceans have all boiled away? My eyes sting from my own salt water, and also from the sand kicked up from the vast wastelands of the dried up seas. Sandpiper bones skitter and skate across the ground, ringing like wind chimes, building up in mounds in the dark corners of darker alleys. Decaying plutonium quietly sets the rhythm of my inner clock. The darkening sky turns from blood and urine to ink and charcoal. Buildings splinter the sky into jagged black glass, smoky and translucent, absorbing warmth, and reflecting back only ghostly luminosity.

Far away, like in the dark reflection of a distant mirror, it’s time to take the saddle. Astride a bike, vague shapes are still vague, and sharp contrasts stay sharp. There is nothing there that wasn’t there before. The turtles quiver, and the world adjusts accordingly. Nonsensical things stay nonsensical. A platypus and a platitude do not become interchangeable on a bike, “but this is a pleasant place for a ride.” And the endless miles of broken asphalt slowly start to fall away behind the slowly turning wheels. Track marks are the only trace of passage in the inexorable trundle forward through concrete crags and potholed asphalt canyons. Push forward across a minefield of brittle sandpiper bones, and broken beer bottles. The music of plutonium and green bottle flies reverberates off the poison-gas-colored windows along the way.

I see the pedals orbiting like planets, wheels within wheels. They move of their own volition. I see the blur of spokes, made almost invisible by the speed of their motion. The broken asphalt stays broken but continues to fall away. Everywhere I look there are planes and circles and lines, spheres and cylinders, cones and tori, polytopes of every description. But there are no points. Everywhere I look, the world around me is pointless – except for the vanishing point, the convergence of lines on the horizon that stays ever distant no matter how far I pedal across this sea of broken asphalt.

When the Mothership Comes

(Conceived Friday, Nov. 13, 2009. Completed Monday, Nov. 16, 2009.)


Where will you be when the Mothership comes?

When the Mothership comes,
The blazing lights will blot the stars,
And icy golf course mists will swirl at our feet.

The tunnel of lights will reverberate
With the shrill screams
And cacophonous chorus
Of a thousand hellish angels on wheels
When the Mothership comes

When the Mothership comes, Mariachis will play,
And tequila will flow.
Salty glasses
Will sell like hotcakes,
At exorbitant prices,
Across greasy, shaded bars
While a Wall of Voodoo blares
From crackly speakers
In the background,
Almost drowning out
- The Blaring
- - Mariachi
- - - Trumpets.

When the Mothership comes,
Gwyneth Paltrow will be found
[redundant]
To no one's surprise…

Rose Kennedy will snicker from deep in her grave.

And Maynard may finally realize
He stopped being original ten years ago.

The pope will shiver in fear in the darkness,
And his God will be oblivious.

Obliviousness will be almost ubiquitous,
- Same as it ever was.

But David Byrne won't be
On the bridge of the Mothership
When the Mothership comes.
He has other bridges to cross
And crosses to bear
And barely formulated ideas to bridge.

When the Mothership comes
We will all be in our own darkest places
And the hairs on our arms will stand rigid.

We will all feel the pain
Of Frida’s steel-stiff spine.
It will tremble and topple like Jenga.

And I will voice my disdain for Diego.

The stain of our crimes
Will drip down like slime
From the rafters
When the Mothership comes.

When the Mothership comes,
Cowboys will show a stiff upper lip,
Stirring grounds in their coffee,
While loudly asserting,
To whoever will listen,
"I want to be buried
While wearing my boots."

When the Mothership comes,
Portishead may release a fourth album called Forth.
And Keith Carradine will rise from the ashes.

He’ll fly into the sun
While the dead Tsars of Russia
Display satisfaction
With crackers and caviar,
With vodka on ice,
With ribbons and medals
And Imperial decorum
From a lost former age.

And the coroner will yawn with bored overwork.
Never mind that the dead are now walking.

When the Mothership comes,
I will fight for my right to survival,
But it will be much too late.
So I'll go to a nice Sunday Brunch
In Marina Del Rey,
Where I'll pay way too much
For cold eggs
And fresh salt-spray air.

Dogs will chase slimy Frisbees.

BMX bikes will shine in the sun.

Dolphins will catch waves at Venice
And rats will all nest in cradles
When the Mothership comes.

When the Mothership comes,
We'll assert with conviction
That the Mayans were wrong.

We will travel in time to the past.
Eclipses will dominate the future past sky,
Burning our eyes, and slipping our fingers
On mortars and pestles of lesser and greater refinement.

Saffron will cost a king's ransom,
And will smell like Nirvana,
But will taste
Like the dust of the dead.

Teen Spirit will finally be a thing of the past
When the Mothership comes.

Neither Newton nor Einstein will accept what we find
That space-time is liquid and poorly defined,
With soft, fuzzy outlines, and pictograph rocks
From the time when the hatchet
Lopped off the head of the latest messiah
For the price of a can of Jolt cola.

And the Mothership crests the horizon.
Forever blocking the sun…

When the Mothership comes
I will buy my degree from a matchbook.
And the matchbook will flame
Like the fire in the heart and the crotch of a virgin.

I will die by degrees
And will dye my white linens
The deep bluish-purple
Of the burial shrouds
Of the Ancients.

And the Gorgon will untie the Gordian knot
With the patience and knowledge
Of untold millennia.

To the front.
To the back of the bus.
And the bust of poor Caesar will crack
Down the middle,
And will crumble to dust
As Cicero documents Scipio's Dream.

There's a bias to cloth and a bias to mind
And I haven't a clue to the difference.

A dead pig won’t feel
The sympathetic harmonics
As the ground shakes and vibrates
When the Mothership comes.

Wheels within wheels,
But spokes do not speak,
And spokes are not spoken to.
All feeling is broken, and yellow and flat.

To be neither and nor
To my last trembling pore
Is the target;
To imagine a draft from a crypt or a tomb,
To imagine a door and a room without light,
And a powder-blue something
That hides in the full light of day
When the Mothership comes.

When the Mothership comes
I will see my dead father
For the very last time.
He will smile
With his teeth in his hand.
And the cancerous stench
Of his shriveled, maudlin humility
Will be a rose by any other name.

Where will you be when the Mothership comes?
Will you tremble alone in the darkness?
Will you tumble and roll down a long grassy hill,
Laughing and manic,
Disguising the panic you feel?

When the Mothership comes, will you whimper and quake,
Or embrace the face of the pearly unknown?

When the Mothership comes, all the past will be gone.
And the future will shiver, then die.

When the Mothership comes, the flowers will bloom
And a choir of angels will sing.

When the Mothership comes, I’ll get lost in your smile.
I will cradle your head in my arms.
Your breath and your heartbeat
Set the cadence of our final embrace.
I will gaze at your face,
And with infinite patience we'll meld into one
When the Mother ship comes.

Code 4 - A Story of Profiling

Moonlight shines on the schoolyard -
And on the glowing innocent faces.

The innocents imbibe
And laugh
And smoke
And ponder:
One bellows occasionally.

A roaring sounds from the left.
And the stocky brown uniform
Throws his car up the driveway;
An angry, menacing move
By an angry, menacing car
With floodlight eyes
That shine on the glowing
innocent faces,
Drowning out moonlight
And making the innocents squint.

The stocky brown uniform jumps from the car,
And is followed by another brown uniform.
And with flashlights and truncheons
And batman belts full of shiny accoutrements,
The stocky brown uniforms
Amble and step toward the innocents,
While the innocents innocently
Drop,
Hide,
Kick out of sight
And otherwise make disappear
Anything innocently incriminating.

Casual, innocent faces,
blink and smile
At the stocky brown uniforms.

But uniforms have jobs to do
And aren't easily dissuaded,
Certainly not by blinks,
And smiles on innocent faces.

But what are these things
Surrounding the innocents?
Bikes?
Road bikes.
Cute, furry, cuddly road bikes.
Not at all dangerous.
Likely housebroken
And obedient.

"You don't seem to be causing a ruckus,"
Says the stocky brown uniform.

"No, sir, we're not,"
Say the innocents in unison,
Smiling innocent smiles,
Kicking innocent things further under the tables.

"Well, there've been complaints
Of Belligerence
And Ruckus
And Mayhem
And Cacophony here,
From otherwise reputable sources,"
Says the uniformed mouthpiece.

"Not that we've seen...
Not that we've heard...
Not that we have any knowledge of"
Chorus the chorus of innocents.

"Hmmm," says the stocky brown mouthpiece,
"Sometimes people exaggerate."

Then the mic with the curlicue tail
Screeches and squeals for attention.

The stocky brown uniform
Listens a while
While the innocents look on in innocence.

"Code 4," he says to the mic,
In the codified language
Of stocky brown uniforms.
And he looks at the innocents
With slight disappointment,
As if somehow he'd hoped
There'd have been more to do.
Then again to the mic,
with finality,
"It's, uh, just bicycle people."

So the stocky brown uniforms
Return to their car
To prowl for some other
Less innocent quarry,
While the innocents innocently
Pick up,
Un-hide,
Kick into sight
And otherwise make appear
Their innocently incriminating things.

1984 in Las Vegas

(Actually written on Friday, October 30, 2009, in Las Vegas)…












I’m lying on the bed of a 22nd floor room in a hotel in Sin City. And I’m reading George Orwell’s “1984”. Seems weird to be reading it here in the center of decadence, in a place that, at least through reputation, if no longer in reality, epitomizes everything Orwell’s dystopian future is set on eliminating.

This isn’t the first time I’ve read “1984”. But it has been long enough that I had forgotten how frightening the described future is – more chilling than I could have imagined. But the scariest part is that in my day to day existence, when I’m going about the business of making a living – of working, and being responsible, paying bills, and generally being a respectable citizen – I feel very much like Winston, the (protagonist?) in the book; just a cog in the wheels, a tool that must meet its utility or be replaced. Or, worse yet, be found by the Thought Police to be a non-conforming piece in the machinery, to be retooled or vaporized.

Funny, I came to Las Vegas to have “fun” but the streams of thought caused by reading this book are sobering – though I have downed half a bottle of Scotch…

…And I have no BIKE here.

That is an important point. And it is becoming increasingly important every day…

There are a lot of reasons to ride a bicycle, I guess, not least of which is I’m older, have put on a few pounds, and could use the exercise. But mostly I started riding again for social reasons. Not that long ago, a nighttime party ride went by my apartment. A few weeks or months later, it happened again. And they all were clearly having a great time. With the music and tall bikes and costumes, it looked like a rolling carnival with no motive other than to have fun.

After a Google search or two, I found some local night rides, and I went on a few of them. They were great fun with great people. And I’ve been to quite a few more since – both epic rides, and more intimate ones. But it wasn’t until I was sitting here reading “1984” that I realized what is so important about them to me. Sure the biking is fun, and the partying is fun, blah, blah. But what is really important is the feeling that I am not just a cog or a tool, that I have freedom and expression. None of these are things I learned or acquired through riding, just reminded of them, and of the fact that they should be part of my everyday life; that I have the power to make my daily life whatever I want it to be, and not just what I want it to be, but also the attitude with which I approach the things I choose to do.

I guess a reason the group rides bring this out is that they are more than the sum of the individuals who participate in them. There is a culture, for lack of a better word, that has built up (is building up?) around the riding – a camaraderie that has grown among the participants. And this is what’s becoming so important to me: this culture or kinship. Since I started doing group rides recently, I’ve been seeing people interacting, loving, caring for one another (much like family), many of which, in “normal” life would likely never have met. The love of bikes, riding and partying has brought them (us) together from different geographical areas, cultural backgrounds, and age groups. It spans racial, cultural, economic, educational, and generational divides. A patchwork quilt, haphazard community emerges from the disparate pieces, joined together by an ideology of chains and spokes and sprockets, and of beer and moonlight and other such things, and the desire to share the joy of these things with each other.

And though it may seem incongruous to someone on the outside, it is (we are) a closer-knit community than most modern ones. It is, I think, somewhat of a step back to the village communities of our past – a more primitive community model.

There are no laws, really, but there are rules. There is what is considered acceptable or desirable behavior, as well as undesirable or unacceptable behavior. Good behavior is taught through example, and is by and large practiced by all. Undesirable and unacceptable behaviors are dealt with through varying degrees of public shaming, or in extreme cases, I assume, ostracism – and maybe even ratting out, in really extreme cases of violence.

Desired behavior is a feeling of sharing, fun, love, acceptance, and respect for members of the group and the group’s belongings. Undesirable behavior includes theft, violence, disrespect, meanness, and acts that put the group in danger, whether physical danger, or simply danger of persecution from the community at large, or prosecution by the law. Like a village, members abide by the village rules and are protected by the village community.

…I’ve gotten way off track… And it’s not like I’m an expert. Nor is there any expertise to be had, necessarily. I’m just sharing observations. And these observations are from someone who is still somewhat of an outsider. Those who are outside must earn their way in. And the earning of membership is subtle. It reminds me somewhat of how I suppose the ancient Polynesian tribes and villages must have been. Close-knit communities with extreme openness and caring for their own members, open arms for members of neighboring communities, and welcome for strangers. But, though a stranger might be welcomed, or nearby villages traded and shared with, the village is the village.

Membership in the village is a very desirable thing. Not only does it provide camaraderie and human connection – both highly prized commodities in this modern world of disconnectedness, alienation and gray anonymity – but, in providing those, it abolishes the feelings of being a cog or tool in a vast machine that Winston was fighting through rebellion in “1984”, and that I’m seeking to destroy through pumping my pedals.