Inheritance, Environment, and Acquisitions

Renunciation of possessions has a very long if not very thick history. Siddhartha Guatama and Francis of Assisi are two rock stars of that tradition, and they all have received a lot of press and not much shade. Somehow not having things is supposed to be a sort of spiritual path, some way of finding one's true self. I would suggest that supposition is seldom true, and that more often it is in acquisitions that one finds one's true identity. One cannot choose one's inheritance, nor have much control over one's environment. But one can choose what one acquires, even if one has a very small budget and can only afford pebbles and feathers.

Much of my life has been an average one of getting and spending. When I was a kid, I had dreams of a somewhat wild and adventurous life, but fear of facing my homosexuality led me into marriage and fear of getting shot in Vietnam (and repulsion at the idea of shooting others) led me into teaching, and soon I had a family and bills, mini van and golden retriever. I often thought of the scene in Zorba the Greek when the Englishman asks Zorba, 'Are you married?' Zorba's response defined my condition for years: 'Am I not a man? I am a man. And is not a man stupid? So I married. Wife, children, house, everything: the full catastrophe.'

It would have been convenient for me and for many other people, probably, had I not been so stupid, if on one Saturday outside a Shoney's on Poplar Avenue in Memphis, when my future wife had said to me about my orange hunting cap, which embarrassed her, 'Choose between me or the hat', I had kept the hat and walked away. But, I married. After too many years, I divorced and went out in search, I suppose, of 'my true self', as well as the joys of sex and love which I had been told I would find in marriage, to which I had pretended all those years.

All of those years, and in the years following divorce, I collected things, mostly books and pottery, two of the heaviest collections, but also clothes and textiles and paintings. Those collections of things were much more a window into my 'true' self than the various roles I played in the various societies that formed my environment.  But, as I began to become something of a traveler, those collections became more and more of a burden. Looking for a new home, I would discard and recollect. One of the first things I did when I arrived in Santa Fe was to donate all of my Memphis clothes to the Holy Faith Episcopal Church rummage sale, along with my matching set of Land's End luggage, and start to acquire Santa Fe style duds.

A common metaphor claims that life is a journey. One can easily look at the journey without much consideration of the life within the travels. Bruce Chatwin's books describe the search for home, for one's place in the worl. He was always disappointed that they were placed in the travel section of book stores. When, in Santa Fe, I discovered his books, they were like a mirror to my own life, except that it seemed Chatwin's life had been the one I had imagined in high school, and he had a bigger budget.  Chatwin was introduced to collecting and wandering by a curio cabinet in his aunts' house, I by a curious round cardboard box in my father's dresser. Both of us collected things, had problems finding homes for them, and often spent long periods away from them, Both of us kept setting up housekeeping somewhere just to wander off and abandon the home fire for a campfire in some strange place. Both of us had a tendency to show up on some friend's door step and expect room and board in exchange for the pleasure of our company.  He had a slight advantage in that he and his wife maintained a mariage glanc, something I had hoped might have been arranged with my wife, so he had an agent for selling and storage. Just as it can be hard to separate the  journey from the life, it can be hard to separate the collection from the collector. Having no agent, I trimmed down to very few things indeed for a three-year kayak adventure.

When I came again to land, I had even less. That story can be revisited here, if one should desire. What is interesting about my having few things is that people thought I must be 'spiritual', must be anti-materialism. It gave me a certain entirely undeserved attractiveness. What was much worse is that I began to believe it myself, as one can tell from the linked post. I became for a willing public the detached monk they thought they admired. What is missing from that post is how carefully I had selected--the hipster term is 'curated'--the items with which I awoke at 6:00 am in my little hut, beginning with the blanket, woven by the abbot at Christ in the Desert Monastery from wool of the monastery's sheep, and certainly including the Eyre & Spottiswoode books from which I read the offices and the riranium pot in which I boiled water for coffee in my carefully selected mug--at that time I think it was a Francoma piece from the 1930's. Everything I had was carefully selected--curated--not because I was anti-material but because, despite my 'put an axe in your television' rant, I had and have a deep respect for material. The wind may blow where it will, but without a body to blow into and out of, it don't mean much.

What is often overlooked in stories such as Siddhartha's or Francis' is that in order to renounce possessions, one must have them. Both of them had inherited possessions and roles in an accepted social structure. Because they had wealth, they had the freedom to renounce it.  (It was harder for Siddhartha's servant Channa, and would have been even harder for the people Siddhartha saw along his way.)

I and most of my friends are, by historical standards, almost unimaginably wealthy. It is easy for us to renounce stuff, and just as easy, perhaps easier, to reacquire stuff. What I think is more important than renunciation is what one then chooses to acquire, symbolized by the Buddha's begging bowl and  the Saint's grey habit made of rags and belted with rope. That's the tricky part. I am going to risk great heresy here and say that I think that both Siddhartha and Francis never really got past their renunciation to explore their potential. When he sees the parts of life that had been screened from him, Sid decides that all life is suffering and wants to escape it. After abandoning his monks for a bit of self-indulgent masochism, Frank returns to yell at them because they have built huts against the snow and rain. People who have those cute little statues of Frank in their garden, preaching to the birds, forget that basically what he said to the birds was 'Shut the fuck up! I'm talking.' These rock stars were still arguing with their fathers.  Hugh Chatwin, Bruce's brother, thought that the reason Bruce never admitted to having AIDS is that he didn't want to disappoint their father.

Insofar as one can go beyond one's inheritance and environment,  it is with acquisitions. They may be physical, or they may be ideas or knowledge. It is often the physical acquisitions that give one strength to pursue the journey to finding oneself. They are like sacraments, outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. I mentioned pebbles and feathers as I started this essay, and it is I think an interesting coincidence that Chatwin's most closely held possessions were Peruvian feathers and some small objects almost like pebbles, little Inuit carvings that reminded him of Brancusi's stone-like sculptures. When I was wandering on the bounding main, I carried with me a stone from the bottom of the White River and a hawk feather from along the Buffalo. These are the sorts of things anyone can cling to to assert who they are, to define themselves in a grasping environment.

As I have gotten older, I have come to refuse, as much as possible, to be surrounded by things that I do not love, that do not encourage me to be true to what I think is real and dear. I do not want many things. Whether that makes me nearer the gods or not, I only want things that I really like, that I enjoy seeing around me. I cannot control all of my environment, or I am too lazy to try--I hate aluminum window frames but am too lazy to change them--but I can control the things I touch and that touch me every day. This is more difficult than one might think. I am bombarded by suggestions that the proper home environment is designed by Jony Ive. It is much the same in the world of ideas. One who would be acceptable in my environment should mouth the platitudes of Progressivism. But I think iOS icons are tacky, and Progressivism and facts just don't jive. So, I walk a more difficult path of discernment and selection.

So, just as I had spent an extra $1000 on a kayak than the cost of the more common fibreglass boats that might have taken me to the same places because it was more beautiful to my eyes, or as I spent $350 less than the cost of an iPhone because I find my V20 more beautiful, more personal, I spent an extra $200 for a new Kindle Oasis on which to read Utz, because I like it's balance in the hand, and its grey colour. It's easy for me to be choosy in most of my purchases, because I have chosen not to have a car and its expenses. In all of the acquisitions the primary consideration was whether I wanted this thing to become part of my world, part of my life.


Utz was Chatwin's last novel, the story of a very discerning collector of Meissen figurines, who used them to maintain a degree of liberty in a totalitarian state, but who is also bound to them with ties that restrict his liberty. They become his world, and he a character in that world. *

I know: this sounds almost like the old New Yorker cartoon of a newly married couple in which the wife asks the husband as they survey their wedding gifts, 'Do you think we can ever live up to our dinnerware, dear?'. But in a world swirling with values and claims, it is necessary to have both rocks and feathers. One needs at least a small pebble for ballast, to keep one from being tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind. And one needs a feather to mount up with wings as eagles, to renew one's strength, and to look beyond's one suppositions and prejudices.

*I am giving Utz very little due here, for it is actually a rather densely packed little book that deals with politics and journalism and sexuality and academia and more. I reread it a few weeks ago, as I was thinking about writing a blog post about collecting, and I was surprised by how much I had forgotten.

Data Storage, Retrieval, and Sharing

This essay is an attempt--isn't that what all essays are?--to put into context some ideas that have come up in conversations I have had with friends on Facebook over the past few days about how many things I have, how many things there are, and why I now live with only one 'physical' (molecular?) book.

It is not a coincidence that the one meatware book I keep around is by McLuhan, who predicted, explained, understood far more than most, but lamented books' being replaced by other media as the primary shapers of our minds. Over the nearly 72 years of my life, I have owned thousands and thousands of books. One of my first possessions was an Encyclopedia: my father bought it for me soon after I was born. (He also bought me a swim suit at about the same time, but I outgrew it much sooner than the books.) I have owned Aubrey Johnson's books on Ritual and Kingship in the original hardback University of Wales editions. (The University of Wales Press had similar dust covers to those of Oxford, but replaced the green buckram of Oxford with a somewhat less robust grey.) I spent much more money than I had for the OUP publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls.I have had a collection of Psalters that took up a book case 8 feet by 8 feet, and some did not fit within i.I could go on for a very long time--Peter Beard's photography books and journals, The Sacred Books of the East in the OUP Bombay Edition, which smelled like sandlewood. But I also like to be able to wander. One day, sitting in an beautiful apartment in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which included my little chapel, and a closet full of vestment, whose every wall was lined with book cases, I realized that I was confusing the container for the thing contained. I was paying rent on an apartment from which I would be gone many months at a time, in order to house my containers. Let me assure you that divesting of my collection was not easy. When I asked the local library if they would like some of my books, they of course said yes--until they saw how many there were. But I did find them new homes, and bought a Kindle. I still enjoy fondling books, and from time to time buy one that has a particularly nice hand.

More importantly has been my growing realization that books are not the only way ideas and knowledge can be shared, and they are not necessarily the best way, even though they have ruled of our lives and minds since Gutenberg made the printing press the master of all things. Indeed, printed books, which are what we usually mean when we say books, have been around only a few hundred years. Writing, especially as a medium for anything more erudite than shipping letters and invoices, only a few thousand. Socrates expected writing to be a curse on human knowledge. Consider especially the Phaedrus.) A. R. Johnson (from the beautiful grey books above) theorized that the Psalms were written descriptions of dramatic rituals.I have the I think good fortune to be living at the time which bridges writing and neo-iconic/neo-oral forms of data sharing. And frankly, I often find books are second- best or less. An example: I am a fan/follower of the works of Max Tegmark, whom partly I enjoy because he illustrates his ideas with bicycling stores. I have some of his written works, in fact, stored in my new Kindle Oasis which is at my side as I type. But I much more enjoy watching his videos, because then I can see his body language, his facial expressions, his emotional involvement in his work.Another example: I prefer even a mediocre performance of one of Shakespeare's plays to reading them.

I find digital publication a wonderfully democratic thing. This week I have read two sorts of memoirs. One was Bruce Chatwin's letters, published as 'Under the Sun'. An easy choice to publish for whoever is the head publisher of Viking&tc. this century. The other was a memoir by a young dude I saw on YouTube once, accidentally, who has been trying to carve out a career for himself as an entertainer, either in clubs or on the internet. They are both stories of people trying to find a way of living that is rewarding and answers their basic questions and pays the rent. One of the really nice things about reading them as ebooks is that they are equally printed. I can read Chatwin and Damien on the same medium, which takes away a lot of the glamour that can accompany the production given to 'big' authors.

The wider context of how I read, of whether or not I have books, is the emergence of the whole new, connected, electronic world in which I live. I had posted a memory on Facebook from a time that I 'owned; 117 things. A friend asked how many things I own now. I counted. It wasn't that hard, and Goodwill will probably benefit from my inventory. The number came to 142. But that's a cheat number, because most of what I 'own' is digital. Another friend, when I said I wouldn't know how to begin to count my digital stuff, suggested 'value'. 'This,' I suggested, 'is actually part of a much larger problem of how we value "things'"in a post-scarcity world, where "things" can be given away without losing them. A lot of very important productivity doesn't get counted because it can't be inventoried by bin number. What about, for example, the picture of a subdivision I posted in response to [a] link about city planning? I still have it in my computer. It's still on Google Earth View. Is that one thing or three things or four things?'

It makes no sense to consider the things that surround me in The Arcadia, my humble tiny house, as comprising my total possessions. (I am not even considering that many of my digital 'possessions' are not owned but merely licensed for my use.) Here I have a small cabinet for clothes, another small cabinet for food, a somewhat larger cabinet for everything else except what lives on two long plain wooden shelves, things like my one book, my game consoles, my Iron Man action figure. But I have at my disposal much more storage, and access to many more 'things'.

In exchange for my data, Google gives me data, and storage, and easy retrieval anywhere that has any sort of internet connection. We are slowly coming to realize that it is the data which are valuable, and some of us have our knickers knotted that our data are being stolen. It is, however, a subtle kind of thievery, if thievery it is, when I leave something in public view and someone 'takes' it, but I still have it, unaltered. Copyright is a complicated issue, which I do not pretend to be able to solve, but I would remind folks that there are heroic saints such as Columba who were copyright violators, who were exiled for stealing data.

Man and Machine Merger

I have been thinking for a while about my relationship with things, with possessions. Despite having lived at times with very few possessions, which led some people to think I was some sort of spirtualist or ascetic, I am actually a devout materialist. As I described at the beginning of another of my too-many-blog posts, one of the most important influences on my understanding of the world and my place in it has been Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan claims that all of our inventions are extensions of ourselves. We are our technologies. Technology in current common use seems to be limited to our electronic devices, but of course we humans have a long history of developing technologies which we mold, and which then remolded us. If we are aware of the technological soup in which we swim, if we can understand it, we might not escape it but we can at least be a bit selective in how we are remolded.

This is going to be a longer ramble than most of even my ramblings, so feel free,  as if you didn't already, to skip the whole thing, or at least to skip past all the pictures to the final paragraphs, by which time I hope my review of my life with bicycles and how they have influenced me will have made more sense to me.

One of the most important human inventions has been the wheel. In it's many and varied iterations it has remolded everything about us from how we move to how we make war, from how we use our rivers and streams to how we build our cities. Of the many iterations of the wheel, my favourite is the bicycle. It is probably the bit of technological kit that, besides the book and more recently the smart phone, with which I have chosen to be most intertwined, the extension of myself that I treasure the most.

My great grandmother called bicycles 'the wheel'. I suspect now that it is because she grew up at the time when the bicycle was the first wheeled device available to people of moderate income that was uniquely individual in a way that ox carts seldom are. I found her use of 'the wheel' to describe bicycles particularly interesting because by the time I knew her, she was confined to a wheelchair. I never thought to ask her, and she never volunteered to tell me, if she had ridden a bicycle when she was a young woman, when riding a bicycle was a liberating event. but I suspect she either had or wished that she had, because she made sure that her daughters all went to college.  Her daughters extended themselves with cars. Nell in particular was an avid motorist, buying a new Chevy every two years. Her first test of her new wheels was a particularly twisty route up Crowley's ridge and back. The new car needed to be faster than the old one, or she would wait a year.

I had a period of intense interaction with the automobile, mostly because I spent a period of my life trying rather desperately to be 'normal'.  I had disliked cars before I was married, and when I came out of the closet and was divorced, I allowed myself to dislike cars again. I think they are interesting as art, but not very useful as urban transportation, and that they are rather overpowering extensions that tend to overwhelm the persons inside them ,who become reduced to a sort of removeable brains.

Bicycles, however, I have found to be empowering without also being diminishing. I can ride for days and still walk or run afterwards.  My entanglement with bicycles began when I was about five. My grandmother won it in something downtown Jonesboro merchants called 'tradesdays', when every purchase gave one a ticket for prizes. It was  a Schwinn Panther, pretty much the two-wheeled version of a Buick Roadmaster.

It was much bigger than I was, but it was a device of great splendour, surpassing in my eyes anything I had previously hoped for or imagined. I could only mount it by standing on ab old water tank that was between a neighbor's garage, and I had to stay on it until some similar step came along. I could not sit on the seat, but that was no matter. I had the freedom of the road. When I was a bit older, I got a huge basket for it and it could carry almost anything. I would cruise the town looking for coke bottles to sell at Big Star for money for important camping or scientific equipment. It would carry all my camping equipment or my portable lab. Alas, it had a sad but noble end. I tried to make it into a submarine, with ballast tanks and much too small paddle wheels that never really did stay on the rear hubs. It submerged fine, but the snorkel I thought would let me blow the ballast did not work fine. It sank in the mire of a local stock pond.

Its immediate replacement was a bike of similar design but much less pretension, a sort of Chevrolet Biscayne of red utility from the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Company. But soon I found the ride that would take me into adulthood: the Schwinn Varsity.

In Memphis and Chicago and again Memphis, I rode a series of those sturdy Schwinns enough miles to go to the Moon, if not to Mars. I would always take off the fenders, and if they came with flat bars, I would replace them with drop bars. I say they because they were a favourite of bicycle thieves. Fortunately, my homeowners insurance policy paid for itself by replacing them with a wide array of stylish colours. Once, when I was living on the south side of Chicago and had ridden from 53rd. Street to Congress Expressway for class, I came out of the Auditorium Building to find my bike buried in snow. It was several days before the snow had melted enough that I could ride it home, but when I came out of the building, some thief had beat me to it.

The bike which would replace my line of brightly coloured Varsities was perhaps the most expensive bike I have ever owned, and the blandest in colour. A 1972 Raleigh Carlton, it was certainly the most expensive I had had until then. Perhaps its very bland brown paint was the reason it was never stolen. It didn't always get the riding it deserved, because I had it through much of my married life, but when I did ride it, it was a joy.

I rode that wheel for seventeen years, through all sorts of Mississippi Delta Weather, and only gave it up because Raleigh went sort of belly up and I couldn't find parts for it. I was about to move to Santa Fe, in the mountains, and I convinced myself that I needed a mountain bike, ugly though I thought they were. So I bought a  1999 Giant Sedona. It was Santa Fe garish. Giant called it Banta Blue, but it was turquoise, with pink tubing on the cables and yellow letters. It was, of course stolen, to be replaced with a dark purple  of the same model, also stolen. A few years later I would buy a used Sedona, which I gave away. It was red, and if it has been stolen, it was from its new owner.

When the second Sedona was stolen, I entered the world, the very reasonable, it seemed, world of cross bikes. My next Giant was an Innova, and it was a dark green. The first weekend I had it, it carried me on my first trip up Atalya Mountain in Santa Fe, the first time in four years I made the trip on my bike. It was a delightful wheel, but its colour was perhaps prophetic. I moved with it to Charleston, where I discovered that it was in fact Charleston green.

If I had good sense, I would probably still have that bike. In Charleston I lived on Folly Beach but got my mail downtown, so I had a forty mile round trip to the mail box. I loved it, but it was not considered very sexy by many people. My bike mechanic would always ask, 'Do you still have that same old bike?' So, when a friend had his bike stolen, I found an excuse to get something more socially acceptable. I gave him the faithful green Innova, and bought another mountain bike, this time one from Marin County itself: a Marin Eldridge Grade.

The colour was a surprise to me. I had looked at one in San Rafael, but hadn't bought it then. I ordered one from a shop in Santa Fe where my friend whose bike had been stolen lived and where I would make the self-serving gift. But just enough time had passed that the gun metal grey I had seen in Marin County was replaced by a new model year's red. Again, the colour proved prophetic, for I would soon move to the Pacific Northwest, where the red and black of the Eldridge Grade was central to the palette of the art of the coastal Indian Tribes. And again it was a somewhat ironic purchase. I had never ridden my first mountain bike on mountain trails, but I rode the cross bike on mountains from its firs day out of the box. The Eldridge Grade would take me on road trips all over western Washington, often from Bellingham to Seattle and back. But it was study as a mule, and I bought panniers and toured with it. Finally, I decided that it was silly to ride such a heavy bike. A friend had an orange Schwinn Collegiate which he gave me. I felt like a kid again. I sold the Marin. But when I left Washington for Arkansas--again--I left the Schwinn with another friend who seemed to need it more than I. It was stolen from him. Thieves love Schwinn Collegiates.

I was in Arkansas for a while with no bike. Eureka Springs has too many tourists on too narrow roads to be a very good biking town. Several times I almost bought something. There is a bike dealer there who kept having just the bike for me. Each time, I would be about to go on a hike or a paddle  somewhere and thought I would buy it when I returned, and each time someone else would have given it a good home. I would see those bikes around town with their happy owners, much more sincere than I, and share their happiness. But finally, Denton said he really did have the bike for me this time. It was a Globe, one of a line of bikes Specialized made for a while in an effort to save the world. It was black, the colour of my first Schwinn, with a curvaceous frame like that first love, and it even had a sticker that said 'one less car'. I did my part to save the world and bought it. Everywhere I went, people said it was a beautiful bike. I was living in a tent on the edge of town at the time, having camped there for a weekend before finding an apartment in Fayetteville, a weekend that lasted for six beautiful months. Dominic--the Black Friar--did look beautiful among the oaks and pines.

What Dominic, or what Dominic and I, did not do, however, was really bond. He never felt like an extension of myself. So, he went to live with one of his admirers, and they got along fine. I mentioned that I thought I might like a white bike, and that same admirer ordered me a very beautiful white bike. It was another Schwinn, and I thought that was rather wonderful. I tried to take very good care of that bike, and it carried me all over several Northwest Arkansas counties.

I named that bike St John, for the only apostle who lived to a ripe old age, thinking that this might be the last bike I would ever need. I gave it showers. I oiled the chain every Thursday. What I could not do was find spare parts, Schwinn having fallen into the same black hole as Raleigh, and St. John needed a part. So he also went to a new home, to be ridden for quite a long time by a friend who wasn't so particularly about consistency as I--that is, he's less obsessive compulsive. So I bought the next last bicycle I would ever buy, a nice sensible flat-bar Trek. I had never owned a Trek, and had admired several of their models. I had actually ordered something else, but a dock strike in San Francisco prevented its delivery, and I had already given St. John to his new rider, so I was having serious withdrawal symptoms. Enter Diablo Negro.

 

There was a lot to like about that bike. Black is beautiful, and there was an elegant simplicity to its structure, but my hands hurt when I rode him great distances, which I often did, in the Arkansas heat. I realized that I had reached the age when the warnings about old people staying out of the heat were aimed at me, and I decided that I could learn as much about quantum physics on line as I was doing at the University of Arkansas--the excuse I had given for the move--so I sold the Black Devil and moved back to cooler climes, where I expected to live to a comfortable ripeness.

In my old age my head is still easily turned by beauty, and when I got back to Port Townsend, I met a beauty which was willing to be mine for just a big more than $800, including tax. It was another Trek, but with geometry like my old Raleigh, and it was a red hot number.

It was quick. There was no reasonable way to junk it up with racks because the short wheelbase didnt leave room for panniers. I really liked riding that bike. I felt young again. Silly me. I felt young again enough to think I would take on the Arkansas heat again, and had it shipped to Fayetteville. Unfortunately, in less than a year that bike did not seem young. It had rust in places no other bike I have owned has ever had rust. And the Trek dealer was worse than useless. He actually asked me if I had ridden it often. So I sold it and went back to the brand of bikes which has been most faithful to me over the years, Giant. And I bought a bike that seems to me like an old man's bike, not so quick as the Trek, with flat bars, but which happily never makes my hands hurt. 

I call the last-so-far last bike I will have to buy Grey Wolf. Giant calls it an Escape.

Adjusted for inflation, the Escape probably is in the same price range as the old Schwinn Varsity. I confess I bought it because I like the way it looks. I didn't want to at first, because it's heavy by today's standards. But it takes me comfortably everywhere I want to go, and so far it hasn't begun to rust. It feels like a part of me.

If you are still on this ride, faithful reader, then you are very faithful indeed, and I thank you. What I have realized writing about these bicycles, these machines that have been extensions of myself for the past sixty-seven years, is that my memories of them are much more vivid than my memories of nearly anything else I have known, including most people. And their styles and colours have been the biggest influences on my clothes and backpacks and other kit that I have chosen to 'express myself'.  There is much talk these days about interactive technologies as if that were a new thing. But all technologies are interactive. Some interactions take more than they give. I realize that different people interact differently, so I am not condemning you for not riding a bicycle or going everywhere by car.  I find I get the better part of the interaction with bicycles. I was amused last summer when I came to the top of a very steel hill in Fayetteville and a woman in a Prius rolled down the window of her air-conditioned traveling living room, something that is very useful for people who spend a lot of time in traffic, and thanked me for doing my part for saving the planet. Shit. I hadn't ridden up that hill thinking I was saving the planet.  I hadn't even ridden up that hill in the sweltering heat thinking I was saving me, although I do think bicycle riding helps avoid clotting from my incompetent veins. I rode up that hill in the sweltering heat because I could, because it was just as much fun as it had been to ride my first bike, that big black Schwinn, up the hill  on Jefferson Avenue in Jonesboro I was breathing heavy just like when I was six. I think Giant misnamed my bike. I don't think it's an Escape. I think it's an Entrance, an entrance to a deeper understanding of who I am as a human animal, an animal who is part meat and part machine.