Serving Two Masters (introspection to distress)

Yes, I am skewered with chaos and confusion. My life is out of whack. I am not a happy camper and reside as much in depression and avoidance as in joy and achievement. This pinch between the rock and hard place is not a place to hang out.

It's my fault. I just can't seem to make choices. On the one hand, I want to be healthy, have a community that shares an interest, or, as some say, the same disease. This is the land of serious cycling. On the other, I have agreed to a life of the mind, of letters, of reading and writing.

The problem is that, given my status as a full-time worker bee, each of these requires all of my free time if I am to do them well. (I don't want to do things half-slow or half-fast.)

I love both of them equally in different ways. Each feeds my soul. Each carries its rewards and drawbacks. One provides me with a livelihood, the other a heart throb. One a deeply satisfying creative outlet, the other wind, rain, sun, and rushes of dopamine. In both I feel at home at times, outside myself, suspended in time, realized. Yet they compete with each other for time and attention.

I feel like Solomon holding a child in the air, knife poised.

If I were really good at one of these, that might help with the choice, but I am fair to middlin writer and a so-so cyclist. This is personal. (Well, maybe it is between me and God, but I can't go there.)  

If I could just sit here and not make any choices, I would do that forever. But the tension is wearing me out, sapping my days of energy, banging a tin cup on the bars of its urgency. Time is always tight and I am aware that it is running out. My body an brain both are retreating faster than glaciers in this age of climate change.

If I want to do something with either of these, I need to act, and soon. commitment and focus and follow through all require sacrifice and energy.

So what do I do?

I guess for now I'll just go teach and then follow my feet as they take the rest of me into the next moment. And the choice may be made for me by fate or circumstance.

More practically, I need to juggle and move back and forth. Expect nothing. Show up and do what you can and want and let the results follow.

Beneath both of these lies the demon born in my childhood -- fear of loss. I don't want to do what I love for fear of failing and losing. There it is. My passion is starving because I strangle it with my fear. That is the monster under the bed and perhaps the real master.

The Mountain Bike Racer (Fiction -- sort of...)

           The "A" line was a risk, but he took it. It led straight down the nasty incline and was laced with hazards: cracks that could trap a front wheel, ledges that might stall forward movement, and drop-offs that might buck a rider forward into space. It was the path of broken bones but also of speed.
         As he approached, the path appeared above the lip of the outcrop of granite. Too late to bail he thought to himself, stretching his arms to full length and dropping his butt off the back end of the saddle.

         The line was steep, and he let the bike drop into a descent along the primitive, harshly sharp granite wall. From this point of entry there could be no retreat. As the front wheel fell away over the lip, he could feel the rear un-weight and threaten to rise forward, potentially throwing man and machine into a cartwheel down an unforgiving slope of naked rock. He feathered the brakes so the front would not lock up and pitch him forward. He sat further back and dropped his butt down lower, almost scraping on the rear tire as his abdomen rested on the seat. This was it, the balance point, beyond which any steeper angle of descent would toss him into space.

            The bike rolled forward, the front fork absorbing the impacts of ledges, and he steered clear of the wide fissures running down the ramp; he kept the bike and rider from stalling.

            Now he could see the line around the steepest section and took it, nailing the curve perfectly as the rock leveled out onto the packed dirt of the trail. He could hear chasers behind him clicking out of their pedals, shouldering the bikes and making their way down the drop on foot, sliding when their cleats caused them to lose purchase on the exposed edges of stone.

            He caught his breath and settled back into his rhythm, cutting through the tight curves of the fast, rolling, packed trail. He cut the corners close, just missing the overhanging cholla that, if touched, could attach itself to his shoulder or knee and burn there with its spines that pulled the skin in a tug-of-war, stretching it too many directions to easily dislodge.

           Finally, it was just the trail, the line of the trail, and his breathing as he hunted for the zone, the zone that would heighten the dangers and his reflexes, would let him breathe through the pain rising and falling in his neck, his triceps, the burning in his legs. He had to move fast, that much was a given, but better, he had to move as fluidly and gracefully as water running through a gauntlet of boulders.

            Yes, it was here that he was at home, oddly and paradoxically, moving, at speed, dizzy with exhaustion and endorphins. He could see nothing but the trail in front of him, hear nothing but his breath and the pounding of his blood in his ears, feel nothing but the desert terrain traveling through the aluminum of the bike frame in the form of shocks to his hands, wrists, feet, and butt. His body shook as it absorbed the vibrations, muscle flapping slightly in spite of being tensed to control the trajectory of ground flight along the desert crust.

            He thought of nothing in particular, but scraps of love, longing, and loss drifted in and out of his awareness. Sometimes the world faded behind the insistent drone of necessity and became a kind of harmony. He could see his life in perspective. It made more sense. This was the moment, the ongoing moment of utter focus and presence. The here-and-now communed with the passion of pushing hard against the terrain, the wind, and gravity. He almost caught something so elusive as to be ineffable, but there it was, just out of reach, the fulfillment of a contract written sometime before birth, signed in his DNA.

            He chewed away at the miles and lost track of time. The angry gnawing in his belly told him that he had been out for a while – an hour? Two? It didn’t matter. As he progressed he noticed spectators along the edge of the trail. He was approaching the finish. Cowbells clanged and women leaned in toward the trail, eyes behind him, looking through him for their lovers. He pushed hard and nobly. The chute grew large as he closed in on it and then it was done.

            He wheeled the bike out of the lane of finishers and bent over the bars to breathe. The air came hard. He was more tired now than on the bike. He knew he had not won and no one was waiting for him at the finish, so he walked his bike away from the flags, banners, and time clocks back into the solitude of the road where his ancient Subaru wagon waited.

            Spiffy SUVs with expensive racks, windows and bumpers covered with the exotic, splashy, mountain bike decals, lined the road leading up to the staging area. The long line vehicles stretched over a rise in the road and reappeared where the road rose again, further toward the vanishing point, beads on an undulating wire, shrinking into the distance. He ruminated on the how the numbers of people had grown over the last few years, at how the races were more professional, high-end, increasingly exclusive, with higher entry fees and more corporate sponsors.

He reveled in the euphoria that followed any hard ride, the glow of muscles that have worked hard but now got to rest. Hey old paint he said to the sway-backed wagon as he unlocked the door and threw his helmet onto the passenger seat.

            Then it was business. He flipped open the skewer of his front wheel, popped it off and lifted the frame onto the fork mount on his roof. He could do this in his sleep and he liked the mechanical efficiency of his task. The front wheel joined the helmet in the cockpit of the wagon before he lifted open the hatch to extract some clean clothes for the trip home. He sponged off with some camp soap and rinsed with cold water from a jug he placed on the bumper. The cotton shirt and cargo shorts felt good as he re-entered the anonymity of everyday costume: he was now just another guy on the road, heading home, back to life.

On the Spot

Well, today might be the day it gets out. I am scheduled to give a presentation for which I am unprepared and unable to prepare. It's one of these lecture format things, and I am the one who is supposed to talk.

I can't get a handle on what to present, how to organize it, or where to take it. The body of information is chaotic in my head, overwhelming. I just want it to go away. But it won't. Plus my socks don't match.

Yikes.

I have known about this for seven months and planned to work on it over the summer. I even brought the books to New Mexico. But, of course, I did not, and left the books there.

Then I was going to work on it when I had free time this semester. You know how that goes.

I will try my best to get through, to hide it for another day.

It's a losing battle that I don't fight, but rather slide into by default. I don't know what else to do.

I will walk into the room filled with graduate students later this afternoon. They will be sitting obediently, just a bit surly at being required to attend a large group presentation. The fluorescent lights will shine just a bit too brightly.

The scene will all soon fade into a dream that I entered with eyes straight ahead wondering how it would go. 

Solstice At the Prison

Standing in the cold, beneath a half moon, wind blowing from the north, waiting for a bus, Dick and I make small talk. I want to tell him I am in awe if what he does with the inmates in the writing workshop. He would not think it appropriate and would shrug it off. We are carrying empty plastic tubs. When we came in, they were full of books, pads, pens, and magazines.

Dick’s hair has grown out and started to curl. It’s the color of a baby’s, the lightest shade red hair can have; but Dick is no baby. He has been at this for a long time.

We met earlier tonight in the parking lot in front of the Main Gate at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson. He gave me the heavier of the two tubs, explaining that he had pulled muscle along his rib cage and could not breathe all that well. We make small talk as we pass through the metal detectors and then entered the sally port. We had badges from our photos and names and expiration dates. A bus wearing a sign for Santa Rita sped, an apparition out of the darkness, and screeched to a stop. It exhaled hot air as the doors opened and an inmate greeted us.

The race with invisible competitors began and I hung on to my tub, glad that I had seat. A barren, raked plain streaked past the windows, white under the moon.

Santa Rita’s doors are right next to the bus stop making it look more like a hospital than a prison. We entered and were let in to the visitors room through electric doors. The lighting was bad, but the tables were set up in orderly pattern, on the diagonal, with plastic chairs.

“You think we could get more light?” I asked, noticing that about half of the inmates would be sitting in the dark.

Dick tried the switch. All of the lights went out. He turned it back on. They stayed off. “Oh Shit,” he said, “now we’re really in the dark.”

I tried the switch. Same result. I asked to be let through the electric doors back to the control room and was given permission to do so. “Do you know how to turn on the lights?” Shrug.

I went back and we searched but to no avail.

Then I noticed that one of the bulbs was flickering back on. Must be one of those half-dead fluorescent lights, I muttered. As a few of them came back on we noticed that there were no inmates.

Back though the electric doors. “Of they’re under ICS. Someone found some clothes in a dumpster, so they have to do a count.”

“How long will that take?”

Shrug.

OK let’s wait I think to no one in particular.

Dick and I sit and talk about this and that. He tells me he visited Emily Dickinson’s house while on tour with his new book. “She lived in a mansion. Twenty acres at least, and a huge house.”

We go on about Whitman and Simic and Mary Oliver and Sam Hamill. I won’t tell you what he said about Sam.

An hour passes. I am relieved to think we might be leaving.

Then the first of the inmates shows up. Then a flood of orange jumpsuits and jackets comes through the door. “Good evening Mr. Shelton.” Hey Mr. Shelton.”  “How you doin Mr. Shelton?” The air is immediately congenial, relaxed, almost playful.

The guys take seats around the table. Dick calls out names and distributes folders. The inmates talk about the assignments they have done. Take one line, it is raining and us that to compose some vignettes. 

After that initial draft, they will economize, will cut some of the repeated phrases. Let them be suggested. 

He asks if some of them want to read. They do. They read well. John and Steve and Mr. Garcia.  After the reading there are comments. Dick puts me on the spot a few times. I zero in. They seem to think it’s OK, but I am not so sure. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m just going to do the best I can.

“Let’s hear that again.” “Pass that up here and let me take a look at it.” Take that back and re-work and bring it in again.”

Then a man reads about his crack cocaine addiction. The piece ends with some “Glory to God” comment, more fitted for a revival meeting than a writing workshop.

“The ending might be unnecessary,” Dick says.

“I knew you were going to say that,” the inmate laughs. “I knew it.”

“Well it is rather abstract and maybe unnecessary.”

“It is an important piece though, a breakthrough of sorts.” What I hear is that the content for the man is much more important the quality of the writing here. This piece requires a different kind of response.

Another man reads. This one is lovely, is read as a poem and takes the term from temperature, to emotional state, to spiritual hunger and soul’s despair.

“Let me see how that is written,” Dick says.

The man passes it to the front of the table. All eyes are listening. Dick reads them again. He points out that the lines of the poem are really sentences and that the piece might be better read as a prose piece. He mentions “The Bus to Vera Cruz” as an example of something he was working on, but that would not fit as a poem.

“I am convinced that any piece of writing can be successful if you can find the right form.”

Silence. I think we are all aware that there this is some great advice. I am taken by the simple profundity of the line and its implications for any student of writing.

“Take this back and re-work it as a prose piece and then let’s look at it again.”

A man reads a piece he has written before. It is a scene of domestic tension, of trying to stay out of a spat with an irate wife. The men laugh at places that ring too true, maybe too familiar.

“It’s a nice scene. There is some tension there, some good dialogue.” What do you think Erec?

“I like it when Steve tells us his thoughts about wanting to avoid conflict, and how it seems inevitable given the portrayal of the woman.” Then changing track a little, I go to the content. “It’s a good idea sometimes to just head for the bomb shelter and close the hatch until the destruction is over.”

“You know,” says Dick, “Some men can avoid the conflicts by stepping aside, others by leaving, and still others attack.” He makes a gestures of surging forward with a sword. The guys nod in agreement.

“When I was doing the women’s workshop, the one I did for about seven years, I had one woman who was very flirtatious, very good looking and I was taken with her.”

“I bet Mrs. Shelton didn’t hear about this,” one of the guys snickered, conspiratorially. A few others nodded.

“Then, two other women took me aside one day and said ‘Dick, you know that she did not just kill one, but TWO of her husbands.’ “

The table laughed and deep laugh of delight. There was more at work, of course, than humor here.

“Shall we continue? Who else wants to read?”

Another man reads a poem that stops us all in our tracks. It is about love and self deception, about helplessness and sleep. “Beer bottles fall from our drunken hands and crash to the floor. We do not know if they fell or if we dropped them.” The lines drift out into the circle of men and then hang there in a raw truth and sharp beauty. I am stunned. All of us are stunned.

“I think it is brilliant,” Dick says. “What do you think, Erec?”

“I think it’s ready to publish.”

“Give that to me and I’ll get it re-typed.” The Holy Grail of the workshop, the destination, the ringing bell of accomplishment usher in the moment of royalty. This is magic I think to myself. Our surroundings are poor. Materials primitive. Yet, the atmosphere of learning, motivation, and collegiality is charged with intensity.

“Can you help with the tables?” Dick asks when it is time to go. I join in moving the tables. We set them back into the ordered pattern, under the dim lights. We are again back in prison, but not before shaking hands, wishing a happy holiday, and gathering up the sign up sheets.

The electric doors slide open to let us out into the cold night air. A wind is building out of the north. A cold front is coming in. I carry the warmth of the room, the excitement of the talk with me into the night. We stand under a light, hoping the driver will see us, will appear of darkness, surge to a stop, swing open the door with its blast of heat.

I want to tell him that I see. I am still trying to find the words.

 

All In

The boys wanted to stop in Summerhaven so they could ride their longboards the rest of the way down the road to the cabin. It was about a mile of steady, in some places steep, descent. The first hundred yards or so had just been paved, so was seductively smooth, unblemished black asphalt, the stuff of a longboarder’s dream track.

They did a few practice passes, swooping like barn swallows in wide carving arcs across the road. I wanted them to wear helmets. They complained.

“I know what I am doing,” Sean argued when told to put on the helmet.

If I had my way, they would have worn protective arm and knee guards, thick gloves --  way more gear than they wanted.

Sean eventually agreed to wear a helmet. He had to take time to fiddle and fuss with the straps, which did not help to make him feel better about the enterprise. But he stuck it out, shaking his long blonde hair from his eyes.

He is tall and athletic. I feel the dwarf in his presence. He is now a varsity soccer player as a freshman. He is ahead of his peers, already the giant, the gifted specimen, wired with coordination, muscle, and stamina.

He began to roll down the hill toward the cabin and quickly accelerated to the point where he could not jump off without falling. I watched him shrink as he sped down the road, straight as an arrow, not able to brake by carving back and forth across the road. A rooster tail of dust kicked up as hit some gravel, but still he kept going, gaining speed. I was too stunned to be afraid. He was all-in, a state I have avoided my entire life. I do not know what it feels like to let go, leave off the brakes, to fly without restraint into a future or present full of potential, full of mystery.

We followed Kyle, who took a slower path. He took a slower line, but still realized that the road was too steep to descend.

Kyle, being equally gifted for the undertaking, but of sound mind, abandoned the adventure and hopped in the Jeep. We three drove down the road. I was preparing myself to find Sean injured, scraped up, maybe with broken bones, lying in the road or in the ditch. I might have to peel him off a tree, some demented part of me wondered. The risk and the consequences imagined pinned me to my seat, made my knuckles white as I gripped the wheel.

We saw him finally, walking uphill toward us, carrying his board, uninjured.

When asked how he survived, he just said he pointed the board up a side road and used it like a runaway truck ramp. He was shaken, glad to be in one piece. “That was enlightening ... and stupid,” he said.

Sean has the gift of nerve. He can stay with something that would make most of us bail in panic, jump to the side, to safety, or serious injury. He has the calm of a test pilot, the steady hand of a Formula One racer, the courage of a surgeon. He can stick things out, follow through.

By contrast I have become more of a jumper, a bailer, a nervous Nellie. Looking back at that speed --  a fast-motion, improbable, almost cartoonish acceleration -- he should have crashed. I think it was a miracle that he did not, a miracle or a gift.

The boy is charmed. He has some guardian angel, some serious luck mojo. I hope it lasts. And sometimes intensity is more important than longevity, mileage more telling than the year and make.

The Late Cyclist

My watch has a life of its own. It lost an hour on Sunday morning without my knowing about it. Not a big deal, except that I was scheduled to join friends on an early morning bike ride. I arrived at our meeting place at what I thought was almost an hour early, only to realize I was an hour late. My group had gone on without me I am sad to say.

That meant that I would be riding alone into the wind for almost a hundred miles. I would lose the physical benefits of drafting and the psychological benefits of company and working for the group. It was my day to go deep before El Tour de Tucson, part of the "training," if you can call what I squeeze into a life of teaching, house-holding, and volunteer work training.

"S*#t!" I thought, followed shortly after by "Oh well..."

So, I pulled my bike off the rack and set out into the climbs, the flats, the intermittent downhills, and the winds.

The ride ran its course from feeling fit and strong to labored pain. And, of course, as the pain increased, the focus on the here and now grew sharper and sharper and more basic. My thoughts progressed from the lofty "What am I in this life?" to "Man, my butt hurts," to "I doubt I can keep moving," to no thoughts at all in a dogged, animal stubbornness to finish.

I got to the bottom of things: breath, blood, movement, solitude.

I wore myself out, which, I guess, was the point of going deep. And, more than anything, it was where I wanted to be on this lovely November day of the All Souls Procession. I would go downtown after the ride and join the Tucson ceremony that honors death, and by extension, life.

So, with long, lonely miles in my legs I walked with the others who remembered those who have left us. Several tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand, lined the streets and walked in memory. I carried a drum and danced in the street, with painted face and wearing a cyclist cap: I was the dead cyclist. The late cyclist.

Maybe, as much any label, that it is what I will leave behind, how people will describe me. Even though I have never been very fast, or accomplished, recognized as a cyclist. It was part of what runs through me, independent of talent or winning anything.

In this life, anyway, the clock time did not coincide with talent, opportunity, or strength of will.

A woman next to me in the All Souls Procession asked me if I knew a man who had died recently on Mount Lemmon while descending on his bike. I did, but only by name and appearance.

"He loved to ride," she said.

She then told me she was walking in his memory, in honor of his vision.

So was I, I guess, so was I.

The Road to Zuni (Fiction)

I first saw him thumbing a ride in front of the trading post south of Gallup. Stricken with a lapse of mind or a rebellious impulse, maybe both, I decided to pick him up.

At the time I thought it was the right thing to do. I had been playing it too safe and wanted to remember what it felt like to do something for the first time, to remember what it felt like to be young.

Back then, I thought I had some talent, raw talent, something to follow. I see now the delusions, but over the years, unfinished business stalked me like a shadow. I took another path, the one of love -- not crazy love, but love that pulls you to Earth, clips your wings, allows a saddle of duty to cinch down tight your dreams.

That was until I met her anyway. Her voice, her eyes, her skin. All of her acted on me like a drug. I thought I would die before feeling those rushes again.

All this memory rushes through me as I disengaged the cruise control, activated the directional, and pulled over. There is a voice still that says I probably should have kept driving. I have a faint memory of that doubt, a whisper that I shouldn't do this, followed by a reflex to lock the door and just pull back out into traffic.

I must have wanted to open things up again, or wanted something to wake me up, maybe to court the risk one feels playing Russian Roulette.

Reticence undone, acceptance plugged in, I unlocked the door so he could climb into the car. 

Yes I stopped. You get what you get from your actions. It's a law. I see that now. 

No regrets about that. Just a fact.

He wasn't Zuni or Navajo, not even native, but was roughed red enough by the wind, sun, and cold to pass for tribal. No, he was something else, gypsy maybe, or Mexican.

He threw his pack onto the back seat and climbed in.

"Hey." A nod. "Thanks for the lift." Fluent English. Maybe Spanish descent. Old family.

He sat back, and the seat belt stretched over him as he closed the door. I checked the mirror and then pulled onto the highway. He was quiet as we got up to speed.

I hoped he would not ask what I was doing out here. Likely he had noticed my out-of-state plates and figured I was here on some kind of business. Nobody would come up here this time of year for a vacation.

Plus it would be embarrassing to tell him I just wanted to take the back way home, to avoid grading the stack of papers in the trunk for another couple of hours. I'd make the work up on Monday I told myself, almost believing it. The slower highway would add the time to think, to mull over things I didn't want to face otherwise.

The Zuni mountains, with their Ponderosa pine-covered ridges, streamed past us outside the window.

"Pretty cold," he said.

Yeah, that's for sure, I thought. Cold enough to freeze a man to death if he stands next to a highway too long. 

"I've done time," he added like an afterthought. "Thought I'd just put that out in front, so it doesn't come as a surprise if you find out later." He looked straight ahead as he said it.

"Was it hard?"

"Not so bad after the first few months. Just settled in."

I nodded just to show I heard him, not that I understood what that was like.

"Worst part was when she stopped coming for visits. Stopped writing too."

"I work in a prison, part time. And teach some classes at the U." I said, surprised to hear myself say it.

He looked at me. My turn.

"GED, math, writing, basic stuff. Freshman classes at college."

"You know what it's like then," he said. "At least what it looks like, not what's it's like to have to stay night and day."

"Yeah. I don't pretend to know what that's like. I just do my job."

"Must be nice when you get to leave, after a day in and all."

"I gotta say, I'm glad to walk out of there every time."

"You ever take stuff in, you know, the stuff you're not supposed to?"

Man, if only he knew, I thought, sucking in a breath. He noticed that too.

"Yeah, you do."

"Once in a while. Just little stuff like pencil leads, drawing charcoal, stuff for school work."

"It's hard not to, isn't it? Just push a little here and there to see what you can get away with. It's human nature. How about a message? You ever carry a message?"

Oh shit. Now we were getting into it. I wondered about changing the subject, changing course, going back to the Interstate, the clean, safe, well-lit gas mega-stations.

"Only once. As a favor for a friend."

"What kind of friend?"

"Someone I met in the sally port one time."

"Was she sweet?"

Oh man, this was getting a little too close to the bone. But what was the harm?

"Yes. In fact she was beautiful. You could say I was in love with her."

"I knew it. It always goes that way. She wasn't in love with you was she?"

"It got kind of  complicated, I guess. I mean, she wanted to send stuff in for her boyfriend that she couldn't get through the visitor searches. And, well, I  knew her boyfriend. He was in a GED class. It was pretty easy to get him stuff....You could say she appreciated that and wanted to thank me."

"I bet she looked good going in for those visits. Not as good as she wanted to, but as good as she could, given all the dress code B.S. and all those sniffing dogs."

It was beyond good, I thought. She looked like rough-sawn royalty, radiated a coquettish fuckability. The air around her was thick with a musk that no one could ignore. Yes, she looked good, made you feel good. Alive.

"Yeah, but she was young, too young for me."

"That's between you and her, I say."

"You married?"

"Not any more."

"You are fruit ripe for the pickin'" he said, without malice.

"I see that now."

"You still in this thing?"

"It's going on, but is quieter now than it was. Her boyfriend is getting out soon. I don't want things to get too complicated."

"Seems like you already got things pretty complicated. ... And, by the way, you can drop me here at that cafe. That's where I cook."

I slowed and pulled into the snow-packed parking area.

Pick-up trucks, laden with ice in the wheel wells and red with mud splatter had taken all the spots close to the door. Everything looked frozen and mud-caked. The sun lit the sky with no sense of mercy.

"Thanks for the ride, and you better watch yourself. 'Less you want to take some of your classes from the INside," he laughed. "You might be in deep waters, way over your head."

I thought about what he said as the hours slid by on my way back home. I thought about desire and its price, about loneliness and how it would likely fill the rest of my days.

And, years would pass before I saw him again, this time with more at stake.



[To be continued?]