Snakes On A Plane

Yesterday Terren took my 2 cent softball and tried to knock it out of the yard. He's gay like that.
Terren

"Honestly, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to shit in the oven. It seems like at the very least you'd have to remove the wire racks and then awkwardly stick your ass in while straddling the oven door, all while maintaining your balance. And if you're considering this act, you're probably not sober. Anyway, to your point about the news. I think most everyone (myself included) seeks escape in one form or another from things we think of as bad. For some it takes the form of news, but it can also be food, sex, sports, drugs, video games, tv, the internet, gambling, and so on. Even say, I don't know, biking. :-] There can be a fine line between healthy activity and escapism. You're not usually aware of it when you cross the line. I'm constantly examining my crystal meth habit to see if other things in my life are suffering. They are. Not. I meant not. As in not suffering. Much."

No actually this is good because it keeps this from becoming JOBABOFP (just another blog about biking Orion fucks pie). Does it do me any good to throw in references that I know only 1 person understands?

Walter, any chance you can get details of how exactly this guy was shitting in the oven? Was it just on the door? Or did he really stick his ass all the way in? I know it's probably a touchy subject with soon-to-be-ex-Mrs-Oven but do your best. We're curious.

I think this conversation could go on forever. And I think a clean, cohesive discussion is out of the realm of possibility sitting on the train to Hoboken. But I'll throw out random thoughts as they come. One "deep thoughts" question is, what is reality?

I have read part of the book, Wherever You Go There You Are. Same premise as Be Here Now but without the funny format of book. The basic premise is to stop diverting your attention from the here and now. I tried this on and off over the past few years and the question that invariably spring up is, what if Here sucks? When I'm on the subway going to work, "here" is the last place I want to be. So I read to escape Here. Is that bad?

This happens a lot, too much maybe. Is it too much or is it normal? Is my tuning out on the train to write this blog entry too much? What about in the shower this morning? I was thinking of how to approach this entry and basically went through the motions while I got ready for work. Without realizing it I'm rarely Here, Now.

Body of woman found in car

Does that headline do anything but convince me the Here and Now sucks? Or does it desensitize me to the Here and Now? If I read that the government was selling low-rate caskets in 2000 because there were not enough deaths in Dessert Storm do I think it's good that people didn't die or am I reminded that death is just another industry? Or do I ignore it all and seek the sports scores from last night?

I do think there's a difference between discussing back-fires and biking, but let's leave that alone because it's too personal to be objective, since I see biking as participation in life not escapism from it. I also think food, sex, and drugs are also in the realm of participation not escapism, within reason of course. But I'm being naive if I suggest that Americans aren't overweight hogs that fuck anything that moves and gets high to free themselves from their caged reality.

At this conversational juncture I'll ask the question again, what is reality? Is it what we observe? What's in our head? Or is it what Huxley experienced when he took peyote? Is reality with the Doors of Perception opened or closed? There's no answer but the conversation invariably comes back to this no matter which avenue you take. Some suggest that reality is an illusion, one of the Big Questions posed by philosophers and some scientists along with Is time an illusion? Why do we need to sleep? How do entangled particles communicate? Where does information inside a black hole go? Why don't we understand turbulence?

Seriously on the entangled particles question, how does information travel 7 million times faster than the speed of light? Why does the solution to Bell's Inequality suggest that either we have no free will or that reality is an illusion? When I get to work, am I going to say fuck it and get a buttered bagel?

I know, I know I've gone into the realm of mental gymnastics except with the last question. It's fun, neat, entertaining. But it always begs the question, what is reality? And if I have a set answer to that question do I then ask, should I immerse myself in it or seek escape from it? Is life on earth really Hell and we seek that Heaven in some form of escape?

Or getting back to the ground here, are we just bored? I'm bored with work. It's my generational upbringing to get sick of any job in 2 years I guess. It's not that it sucks, per se. It's just not challenging. At the same time I admit that my daughter and biking present enough challenges in my life so I don't really need another one. So I'm fine with the status quo as long as they don't wake me up.

I'm going to wrap this up because I really haven't gotten anywhere other than flinging a bunch of shit on the walls. Maybe this fall we can build a fire in my back yard, drink beer, and discuss it further. I'll invite Walter and Woody as well. Figure the more people the more different kinds of beer to try.

Time to pick up a book and divert my attention from the Path and then the subway. You ever try and just be on the Path? People hate eye contact. Look around in most public places. Here and Now isn't where most of them are.

PS. I got the bagel

PPS. This morning apparently my daughter looked at this image and said, "Daddy."

More Attention

There's more to yesterday's blog entry. If you haven't read it yet have a look now. And let me show Walter's comment:

Walter

"How ironic, this past Saturday my neighbor shit in his oven, and today he was served with support, custody and divorce papers. Huh, imagine that."

So there you go, the oven stuff is a real story, I didn't just make it up. I now need to backpedal a bit and make a note that sometimes, life is so miserable that you don't actually want to pay attention. Paying attention is often the straight road to insanity.

Sometimes I can understand why backfires might be more interesting than the life that surrounds you. I still maintain you should drop the silly News fixation. In front of me on the train right now I see this headline:

Cajun jockeys a dying breed.

Can't make this stuff up. Here's the tough part, the support, custody and divorce papers. So often the abused women won't follow through on that. I understand it - yet I'm not going to be so naive I claim to understand what Walter's neighbor is going through. Still I do "get" that Walter's neighbor once fell in love with a man who didn't have a girlfriend on the side, didn't come home drunk, and didn't shit in the oven. She probably remembers that and, when push comes to shove, thinks that this man before her is a facade, a brief low point in an otherwise acceptable life of fatherhood. The support, custody and divorce papers serves as an indication that she has finally started paying more attention, and knows this isn't the case.

But it's hard, I understand that.

Boy this blog has taken a detour from the normal bike obsession, huh? Well it's the offseason now so there's not much to talk about. I did an hour on the ToD last night, Trainer of Doom. I'm pretty fucking motivated now, the race season still a vivid recollection as I spin away. I'm sure it will fade some but the end of this season has shown me what I need to work on and I'm stoked to get there and make it happen. I've been wearing the HRM again recently as another metric. I'm probably already going at a higher clip than I should be.

For reference the "offseason" lasts until I get back from vacation on November 15th. That's a solid month of no structure. After that we start the long, slow build to 2008. Stay, as they say, tuned.

My whirlwind week is getting closer to being done but man I cannot believe it's only Thursday. Tonight I get the child while mom goes out and decompresses, whatever that turns out to mean. Again, I'm leaning towards TV and lessons on sloth.