Maybe it's the poison ivy spreading like a gated sub division over my legs and arms. Maybe it's the groin injury I keep aggravating. Maybe it's the jammed ring finger that just doesn't feel right, months after my first crash of the year. Maybe it's the hammered knee, from the jump track crash. What diff does it make?
I hoped to be healed in the company of crew and magic trails in Ellijay and Pisgah. The riding was epic, no question. When I got home, I had the worst respiratory infection I have had since I laid in bed for three weeks with pneumonia. My house decided it needed several thousand of our dollars. My computer hard drive crashed and so did I...AGAIN! I have averaged a crash every two weeks, since late February. Whats the rub? My neck feels great! Go f#@^*+*# figure.
Then there are the human challenges. The confrontations out of the school yard play book. The small indignities that one must suffer as a price for turning O2, into exhaled breath. The subtle, passive aggressive pokes to the chest, that normally I don't acknowledge. In the current climate (tired, hurt, and out of reserves) the message goes to the bridge, where the pissed off captain fingers the "launch" buttons.
I know I am a comical character to all that know me. You would rather hear a funny story of how I fell in a creek, while my crew all stood around laughing. Sorry, I don't feel like putting on black face and singing "Mammy" for you. I am fresh off an engagement as the pissed middle aged guy, confronting a twenty year old douche bag, at the movies. I'm not coming to you as a repentant parishioner in the confessional, but as a guy ready to roll in the grass with the next prick, that flips my switch.
And the contenders are lining up. They started with the two dicks on carbon Scott's talking shit at the Stomp Out A Cure race in February. Even though I beat them both by a ton, all that remained was the anger. Not one shred of satisfaction survived the day. I had a mild skirmish with a rich Soflorida punk that almost crashed into my son. I held my tongue when the shop rat pushed my buttons. I have to say, when a local rider professed a high school love crush he had for the mother of my children, I think I behaved admirably. I gave him several outs, which he ran by like remote exits, on a desert highway. A few weeks later he let me know (in front of my wife) that he would have beaten me in the Red Bug Challenge, had he not been late.
Had any one of these grounders come my way, during a normal epoch, I would have dispatched with them like Pedroia. These incidents stack up like pancakes, and it just makes me want to box.
The bike is the cure. The miles are the meds. When the cure becomes the curse, and the conduit for all the bullshit, nothing flows. No matter where I go, the hate finds me. It could go either way, armistice or Armageddon. All I know is: the more I try to evolve, the more neanderthals I find.
W.B.Z.N.
