You’ll never catch me riding from Davis to Santa Rosa when it’s pissing down rain. Maybe in a car, if someone in Santa Rosa is buying at a brewpub, but not on a bicycle.
My boys Merrill and Chris got together to chase the AToC around for a few stages this year, but I’ll bet Merrill wishes he’d stayed in New York, where the rain from on high is warmer, mostly generated by supervisors at The New York Times, and doesn’t continue for hours at a stretch.
It was one of those stages you’d like to watch from a lead car, listening to race radio, taking notes and tossing ledes around in your head while you wait to see if the lone breakaway actually makes it all the way to the line. But there are moments on the sideline, too, watching the poor soggy sonofabitch churn past in a spray and counting the seconds until the chase arrives.
Meanwhile, there are some very nervous dope fiends in Sacramento today, wondering how the hell they can quietly and quickly dispose of a one-off, $10,000 time trial bike belonging to a certain Texan without going to the stripey hole for felony theft. That wasn’t some college kid’s single-speed you lifted there, meth-for-brains.
If this year’s Amgen Tour of California is half as lively as the pre-race press conference, it should be big fun indeed. Lance Armstrong and Sunday Times reporter Paul Kimmage hissed at each other like a couple of tomcats, and Juliet Macur of The New York Times got in a few swipes her own bad self, chiding Armstrong for making snarky comments about her reporting after refusing to take her phone calls seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Floyd Landis has already crashed, but is said to be ready to race after a few beers and a couple shots of Black Jack. He will be supported by a water tender from the San Diego fire department.
Tales from the Shitworks, Part II: We’re on our third vinyl-floor-removal dude. He took a shot at the title with what looked like a spade, then gave up and left to fetch what he called “a ripper stripper,” some class of power chisel that scared the piss out of the cats but did the job on the laundry-room floor.
Now we have to get the futon out of there somehow so the crew can take up the rest of the carpet. I never liked the giant sonofabitch anyway, and I like it less now that I have to find a way of getting it up our narrow stairwell and out the back door. It was assembled downstairs when we bought it, and thus disassembly is indicated. With an ax.
Late update: The Intertubes are all atwitter with word that Lance Armstrong will not be attending Don Catlin’s Anti-Doping Science Institute. Frankly, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I understand Lance has a note from his mom.
Old neighborhoods are cool until they aren’t. Like, when sewer work in the alley leads to sewage in your basement.
I had deadlines out the wazoo yesterday — a column and cartoon for Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, online editing for VeloNews.com, and a cartoon for VeloNews the magazine — so I was pretty much nose to grindstone all morning while the sewer guys labored outside my office window. When finally I leaned back to look around, it struck me that I hadn’t seen Miss Mia Sopaipilla lately; she wasn’t in her donut atop the ‘fridge, so I wandered downstairs to see what she was up to.
R2D2's granddaddy supervises lesser units as they work to absorb the shit-mist in what used to be Herself's basement office. Her walk-in closet and the laundry room are down here, too.
What she was up to was viewing with alarm from the window shelf in Herself’s bathroom, which was covered wall to wall in sewage that had fountained up out of the toilet, soaked the adjoining carpet and spilled into the laundry room. Ay, Chihuahua.
So I pull the dividers out of a couple wine boxes and lay down a cardboard boardwalk into the crapper so I can rescue the cat. Bad idea. Think of trying to rescue the radiator fan from a running auto engine. My Bicycle Colorado T-shirt looks like something out of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Let’s try this again later, I thought, with some oven mitts, a cat carrier and maybe a pistol. First let’s chat with one of these Ed Nortons outside.
Oopsadaisy, says Norton, who calls his supervisor, who calls his supervisor, who calls a “mitigation crew” that arrives in what looks like a SWAT van and starts swamping out the basement with pumps and pressure washers and a laundry list of various tasty chemicals. Now it looks like we’ve had the Irish in — carpet pulled up in vast swaths, ditto vinyl flooring, drywall sawed away, furniture piled up in a dry corner. Three massive dehumidifiers have been running since about 9 last night, sounding like a Nazi U-boat on the run from Limey destroyers and periodically tripping a breaker that crashes my entire office. Nothin’ but a party.
The toilet has to come up, a couple walls have to come down, and then will follow the rebuilding, recarpeting and repainting, all while the two of us try to get our own paying work done (yes, that basement was Herself’s office before it turned into a sewage lagoon). Half our house rendered uninhabitable in one fell swoop.
But the cats sure like it. Ordinarily confined to the basement come bedtime, they got to spend the entire night upstairs, either leaping in and out of bed like furry jacks-in-the-box or draping themselves across my legs for a refreshing snooze. Sure glad someone could sleep.
Here’s a happy story: An apparently drug-addled woman suffering from dementia who is suspected of striking and killing a pedestrian with her automobile triggers a discussion of the “right” to drive. There is no such thing. Driving is a privilege one earns by passing written and driving tests, and retains through periodic re-examination as deemed necessary by the State or clued-in kinfolk concerned that Grampa Leroy may be getting a tad too daffy to slide behind the wheel of his beloved F-350.
I have some small, bitter experience in this field. My family and I were not especially close. After Dad died in 1980, Mom was pretty much on her own here in Bibleburg while I rambled around the West, burning down newspapers, and my sister worked for social services in Fort Collins.
A snap of our wedding. From left, me, Herself, her mom, my mom, and my sis. On the back of the snap is scribbled, "If this is fun, we're havin' it."
Mom had a business partner, friends and activities — she helped manage a few jointly owned rental properties, played bridge, went golfing and bowling, you name it — and the three of us would generally get together on at least one officially sanctioned national holiday per annum for a short, stiff reunion. We weren’t exactly ringing each other up once a week to dish the dirt the way Herself does with her mom and sisters, is what I’m saying.
One day I got a call from Mom’s business partner, who said she had lost her car and asked for his help buying a new one. Mom had been called to jury duty, which meant a trip downtown — a place she rarely visited — and apparently was so confused by the journey and the judiciary that she forgot where she had parked and walked the seven-odd miles home.
I drove up from Santa Fe and went car-hunting, finally locating Mom’s Mazda 626 in a parking lot not far from the courthouse. My sis came down from Fort Collins and we had a chat with Mom, who was by turns distracted, confused and indignant. Finally, exasperated, I rattled her keychain, a gag item bearing the legend, “I’ve found the keys, now where the hell’s the car?”, and said, “Mom, this isn’t funny. You lost your goddamn car!”
It was Alzheimer’s, of course, and a very long story that is. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version: My sister and I had to assume a parental role over our sole surviving parent — taking her to a series of doctors to eliminate all other medical probabilities, then hauling her into court to prove that she was no longer capable of handling her own affairs. We seized control of her finances, her house — and, yes, her vehicle — and eventually committed her to an excellent nursing home. Herself and I quit our jobs in Santa Fe and moved in with her for a while, trying but failing to play the caregivers’ role, postponing the inevitable. I was able to be there with Mom as she died, peacefully, in the Namaste Alzheimer Center.
Mom didn’t take anyone else with her. But she very well could have, and it wouldn’t have been her fault — it would have been ours.
I don’t know a thing about Mary Jo Anne Thomas’ family, and I’m not inclined to throw stones at them from my nifty glass bungalow. But I’ll say this to the rest of you: Ring Mom and Dad up now and again. Pop by for a visit, take ’em out to lunch. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. While bringing a little sunshine into your parents’ twilight years, you might just save some stranger’s life.
Addendum: Someone should run a brain scan on state Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, who told the Boulder Daily Camera: “If you say nobody with dementia can drive, that won’t go over well. I think you’d be laughed out of the Statehouse.” I ain’t laughin’, motherfucker. And neither is John Breaux, Mary Jo Anne Thomas, or anyone who knew either of them when they were still with us.
