This invisible fella is off for a quick spin. But not me.
March is going out like … like it really, really, really wants out.
The wind is rattling our cage here in the Duke City, and our various mobiles, chimes and ornaments are taking a good shellacking.
I had enough of that bullshit yesterday, flogging the Voodoo Wazoo and its low end of 37.7 gear inches around the southern trail network for an hour. The wind out of the southeast was lionesque, and my legs were lamblike, so today, like the Lord, I shall rest and contemplate my handiwork. Legwork. Whatevs.
And it was good. A 131-mile week ain’t bad for a geezer.
“Is it dinnertime yet?” inquires the persistent Mister Boo. “How about now? Now? NOW? NOW!!!”
My suffering knows no bounds. Herself is tormenting me from Hawaii with still photos of snorkeling, videos of playing bikini-clad footsie with the Pacific, and tantalizing tales of fresh fish, guacamole made from homegrown avocados and free drinks.
Meanwhile, packed like a sequence of overstuffed Irish bangers into pants, socks and long-sleeved shirt I wrangle Elly Mae’s critters, burn my brand onto some wandering word count and push a whole passel of pixels in the service of what passes for bicycle journalism in these parts. There has been little free time for tomfoolery in the ocean Bibleburg does not border or the eating of the avocados it does not grow.
As novelist Thomas McGuane had a leathery 60-year-old rancher put it in “Nothing But Blue Skies,” “Why does the Lord want me to serve him in this way?”
Who knows? The Lord works in mysterious ways, or so I’m told. So do I, although the mystery lies mostly in why anyone would offer me work. Or marriage, for that matter. As Richard Pryor once said of himself in “Live On the Sunset Strip,” I am no day at the beach, especially when the beach is there and I am here.
We do have sand, however. And before I reapply nose to grindstone this morning I believe I will go out and run on it, or ride in it.
And you needn’t fear that I’ll be doing it in a Big Tex-style banana hammock, either. I ain’t no tri-toad, and anyway, it’s 30 degrees, f’chrissakes. Oh, to be a son of a beach instead of the other thing.
