With Abandon

It has been another tough week, one tough enough to break the back of anyone who still draws breath and has two fully functioning heart valves. Life is a hammer sometimes, most times actually.

A friend, a young woman, died last Friday. She drank herself to death, and is survived by an infant son and unemployed husband. Another friend, a young man got his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. A teacher of mine, called, his voice slurred with pain-numbing smoke, to tell me his wife is not doing well, is a 24 hour job that he can no longer handle.

This list could go on, and yes,  there is suffering everywhere I look.

All of this plays in my head as I commute to my job teaching at the university. My heavy bike doesn't complain and is a steady companion. I love him/her for all that solid dependability, that pig-iron charm.

And it talks to me as we turn off of Dodge (fitting, given what we have to sometimes do in car traffic) and Speedway (also fitting for obvious reasons). The fat tires roll over cracks in the pavement and the detritus of city castoffs that end up on the shoulder of busy streets: broken bottles, carpet tacks, scrap lumber, dead animals, a toilet tank. It doesn't complain or even slow down. In fact, it speeds up when gravity has its way.

I try to follow the example and take some of the brakes off my own life.

Students expect an onerous day of editing analysis essays and they likely will groan when I breeze into the room, all sparkly with English teacher jargon and didactic enthusiasm for critical thinking. We will slip on the masks of student and teacher, will play our roles with predictable outcomes.

At least that is one possible scenario. But my bike, a matte black clunker that looks like it has survived a nuclear blast, is having none of it. It is flying into the cavernous slot of the Death Star en route to either death or salvation of the universe. It whispers "Feel the Force, Erk."

I say "What!?"

Again, a little clearer, "Feel the Force, Erk."

Only family and weird people like my wife call me Erk, although many associate me with the word "twerk," but that is another essay.

So, yes, I am going down Speedway toward campus and I feel the bike come to life as we become the Great Pizza -- One-With-Everything -- in a rolling dance of grace, power, exquisite harmony amid the broken glass of the bike lane.

A storm trooper in a dually-wheeled pickup truck whizzes past, mirror dangerously close to my ear.  (No, I am not wearing a helmet. There are days when a helmet seems to miss the point.)

I pick up the pace, my sandals driving into the pedals, toes curling to better grip the bear traps.

Waters part.

A path appears through the blur of a chaotic, post-modern subverted liminal space, heteroglossic, fragmented tangle of grief, paradox, and conflicting, relativist contingencies.

In other words, laser cannons blaze away as I pass through the gray machinery of indifference and duty, unharmed through the barrage.

We will break out today, I think. We will deviate from the syllabus, use technology like we stole it, and find a reason to sing the songs of academic analysis.

Yeah, that sounds good.

"Let it go. See what happens. You will never know if you don't try."

This stinker of a bike just won't shut up.

"OK," I say. "OK."

It's a one-in-a-million chance, but I've got to take it. No one else will, or can; it's my only shot. Yes, no one can do this for me, but I can do it for a woman now gone, a motherless son, a young man trapped in genius cage.

"Feel the force, Erk."

"Squeeze the trigger softly when the moment is right because that is the only last ongoing chance you will get."