An Actual Bag of Turds

    I was out on my bike today and I found an actual bag of turds. It felt sort of like a metaphor for my entire week.

    I was tooling along the Springwater Corridor, which runs eastwards along a former train right-of-way out past Gresham, and is home to a lot of Portland’s homeless population. The homeless people who live out along the Corridor tend to be older than the ones you find downtown — they’re middle-aged or older, a lot of them evidently Vietnam vets, and they tend to collect around the picnic benches and in camps back behind the blackberry brambles, where I assume they can feel a semblance of privacy. For the most part they’re just there, no more a nuisance than the teenyboppers who tend to ride tiny BMXes very slowly near the Gresham City Park, or the careless drivers who tend to miss the stopsigns near the rural road crossings. But now and again, you find an actual bag of turds in the middle of the pavement. That’s what happened today. I saw a plastic bag, spilled over, and some stuff coming out of it. As I approached it became clear that the stuff had some kind of human smell. And as I rode by the bag, I understood that the smell was that of shit. Let there be no more graphic description than that. It smelled bad. There were flies.

    It seemed a fitting way to cap off a week in which I injured myself while out running, came down with a runny nose and a fever, had my car broken into for the second time in the last six months, and came home late three straight nights to find that my neighbors had parked so poorly that I couldn’t fit my car in the parking lot out in front of my building, necessitating a grueling, 30-step climb up vertiginous stairs from the alley behind. Oh, and my deductible on my car insurance is $500, meaning that I’ll be paying for all but $90 of the repair, thank you very much. For the second straight time, the assholes couldn’t find anything to steal.* They might as well have mugged me, forced me to withdraw $500 from an ATM, and then set the money on fire as I watched.

*UPDATE: My brother tells me that this was part of a window-smashing spree by an unhinged local vandal. The cops caught him, I’m told. So at least there’s that. Not that that makes any real difference to me.

    Meanwhile, all the wrong teams lost in the baseball playoffs, I grew increasingly lame in my right arm and leg from walking with a cane, I suffered several indignities as a result of not being very good with said cane (viz stubbed toes, barked shins, pitying looks from strangers), and my mood has swooned because it’s hard to exercise. I finally got out on the bike today because the ankle isn’t as bad as it was (still swollen, though) and the doctor said low-impact stuff should be okay. That was how I came to be riding my bike down the Springwater Corridor when I found the actual bag of turds.

    Now it’s raining. I’m worried about the pending winter. Winters in Portland are generally grim, with days that last less than 8 hours at their shortest and often feel nonexistent, because the sun is hidden behind miles of dark cloudcover.

    Maybe I should move to Australia. I hear it’s nice there.

It Always Devolves into a Grumpy Rant Anyway

I think the technical name for this is "irony".

    I sat down just now to write and found myself composing a list — not an interesting or fun list, just a list — of stuff I don’t like. I didn’t get too deep before I stopped myself, but still. I suppose it’s a sign of a grumpy mood that I was already down to “vocab-shaming on Reddit”, maybe six items deep, before I thought, Hey, this isn’t a recipe for a good afternoon.

    I think I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve overtaxed myself with exercise. I know this comes close to that most heinous of complaints, the humblebrag, but it really is what’s going on in my life lately, so it’s what’s on my mind. I ran 11 miles on Saturday. It was terrible. I mean, really, much more terrible than that kind of distance usually is; by the end I was, for all intents and purposes, walking, taking close to twelve minutes to push through mile after painful mile, and when I finished I found I hurt in all kinds of unexpected places: my armpits had chafed, as had my thighs; when I slumped dejectedly into the shower afterwards a searing pain went shooting up my buttcrack. Ah, the joys of endurance athletics.

    I think this is happening because I’m fatter than I was the last time I did this sort of thing. My first year of graduate school (just four years ago), I was tipping the scales anywhere from 159-165 pounds, and a men’s medium shirt billowed out around my midsection and flapped like a sail in the wind. I’m not going to tell you what I weigh now, but it’s a lot more than that. A lot. And that’s even after I managed to peel off about fifteen pounds in the last few months.

    The upshot is that I feel like I’m running around hauling a backpack full of bowling balls sometimes, as I did on Saturday. It’s a conundrum, because the only way I have ever been able to lose weight and keep it off has been sustained, massive amounts of exercise. I know people who would take a diet every day of the week and twice on Sunday over exercise, but that’s not how it works for me, for whatever reason. It’s not as though I have no will — I wouldn’t be able to haul my fat ass eleven miles, even at a slow clip, if I didn’t — but that will doesn’t extend to abstemiousness. I can manage a diet for a week or two, but it always falls apart. For a long time this meant that I was just doomed to obesity. Then I discovered exercise.

    Most of the time, massive amounts of exercise also have the perhipheral benefit of improving my mood massively, keeping me out of the black doldrums and cycles of self-recrimination and doubt that sometimes prevent me from moving forward with my life. Or is that the primary benefit? Maybe it is. Anyway, the point is — sometimes you can overdo it. I took a day off after the long run, but I tried to go out on a leisurely, very short bike ride this morning, and it instead turned into a grim, grueling slog over low hills that felt like mountains, into a light breeze that might as well have been a hurricane-force gale. I got home and promptly went to sleep — for two hours. I didn’t really have two hours to spare; I have two radio projects and a novel to finish. But then there I was, waking up with half the day gone and composing a mental list of things I don’t like.

    Including: The radical misapproproation of adjectives in Oregon’s food culture (I’m sorry, food doesn’t have “integrity”, it’s just not possible); people who don’t leash their dogs in urban settings and then act as though you’re weird when said dogs come tearing after you hell-for-leather and this upsets you; people who assume you agree with them politically and talk as though you do, making it too awkward to vocally disagree; Orphan Black and Dr Who, which are both awful shows for different reasons but which it sometimes feels like you’re not allowed to criticize without being called an old stuffed shirt; superheroes, which, ditto; people who say “thank you” when you agree with them, as though this were some sort of personal service to them and their identity that you have performed for their benefit; golf on television; vets who refer to me as my cat’s “dad” (gross); people under 40 who listen exclusively to classic rock; most classic rock; acquisitive hippies; people who stand outside the 7-11 smoking and mean-mugging everybody who walks by; big families including many children too young for school who come to brewpubs and treat them like their rumpus room; assholes in big trucks — it’s always assholes in big trucks — who don’t make any room at all for cyclists even on completely open highway; people who define themselves by their hobbies; clueless liberals who believe that Bernie Sanders is going to be anything other than another far-left stalking horse who gets sloughed off like a bad haircut when the general election comes around; clueless conservatives who think Ted Cruz is anything other than a crazytown bananapants nobody; Donald Trump; people who bitch about immigrants; people who reflexively rally to the side of cops who shoot black people; the MLB All Star Game; people who think golf visors make acceptable everyday headwear; people who run sprinklers that mostly water the sidewalk; climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, gluten fearers, and other people who mistake being stupid for “thinking outside the box”; and, of course, giraffes.

The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist / Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

1. The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist

    I started getting fat right out of college because I had no idea how to take care of myself. In school my friends and I played basketball and soccer — not well, but competitively — and the food was at best fair in the cafeterias.* I’ve always tended to portly, especially as a kid, but puberty had done a pretty good job of leaving my body issues mostly in my mind by the time I graduated. Then, suddenly, I was underemployed, drinking too much, and expected to feed myself. I ate a lot of burritos. I ate a lot of pizza. I sat on my ass a lot. I think I must have gained sixty pounds in just three years. I do know I quit weighing myself when I saw 240 on the scale. (I’m 5’9”, for reference.)

* Jesus, we complained about that food a lot. Sometimes I remember the things I used to say or think when I was in college and I kind of shiver. To bitch that the free, twice-daily buffet didn’t taste good enough? I was Marie Antoinette’s spiritual heir. I’m lucky nobody chopped my head off.

    I was a 24-year-old kid whose knees creaked and popped when he crouched down to pick something up off the floor. I got winded walking up the one flight of stairs to my studio apartment. I had the sort of back pain that usually plagues men in their 50s. It was a bad scene, man. Pretty pathetic.

    There was never a moment when I decided, I am no longer going to be a fat sack of crap. At some point, I acquired a recumbent exercise bike and would ride it, very slowly, deep into the night — sometimes while drinking beer at the same time. Then, one day in the late spring of 2004 or 2005 (I no longer remember), I tipped my fat ass onto a bicycle, and rode it down my driveway, out through Little John Lane (my neighborhood was, for reasons that still escape me, Robin Hood-themed, as though I lived not in Oregon but at Disneyland), and fifteen miles over the rolling scrubgrass of the high desert. I stopped at a little market in an unincorporated town — really just a house, a church, and a gas station — called Alfalfa.** I bought a Payday bar. Then I rode home. Three or four times a week, all through that summer, I would ride this same route, so often that I came to know intimately everything about it. I knew the good spots to stop and pee. I knew the blind corners. I knew which hills were murder in the summer heat.

**Edited to correct the spelling. My mom texted to let me know I'd got it wrong.

    It was an act of sheer will, done without planning or cunning. Often I rode through 95-degree heat, guzzling water, stopping in almost every shady spot to catch my breath. Sometimes I weathered the furious swoop of self-righteous truck drivers who took pleasure in terrorizing cyclists who had the temerity to ride out along that road. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw a stray cat kill a bird. I saw a dead steer, being consumed where it had fallen by a swarm of flies and a hopping, cawing flock of crows. A few days later I saw some young men hauling its torn carcass onto the back of a truck.

    I don’t ride that route very often anymore, mostly because I moved away and only come back to visit my parents. When I do I find I still remember it. I also find, having lost the weight, I no longer have the will I once did. I rode that route — a version of it, anyway — this morning. I left early in the morning to avoid the heat. Onceago, as a fat young man pointed at fitness, there was something self-flagellating about riding through hot afternoons; there was a weird way in which I got off on the sunburn, the exhaustion, the near-delirium I experienced. Today, riding through the morning, with temperatures twenty degrees lower, I suffered, and I did not like it. Next time I get on my bike I won’t be going nearly as far. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw an osprey in a nest high upon a telephone pole. I did not see the body of a steer. I saw myself, ten years older, and I mourned the passing of the years.

I AM A GREAT PHOTOGRAPHER!!!

 

2. Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

    I haven’t watched the Federer match yet, so nobody say anything!

    I don’t have much in particular to say about the tennis — Serena won, Andy won, despite having a bit of a scare thrown into him by a seven-foot-tall scarecrow with a 135-mph serve. I will say that I don’t like watching tennis with people who obviously don’t care about it, who would like their television back so they can watch something — anything — else. I was watching the Murray-Karlovic match at my parents’ house and I could feel my mother’s boredom, to the point that it started to infect me. She would leave the room and come back and say, “What’s happening?” After a while, I couldn’t say. They were trading games. Karlovic was massive and awkward and just skilled enough to keep up. Andy was fast and dazzling and volatile and frustrating and frustrated and all the things that make him my favorite player and everybody else’s least favorite. (I have a sneaking suspicion that he and I have similar personalities. This is why I like him.) In the end, Andy’s brilliance proved too much for Karlovic’s plodding power-serve-and-volley game. One wonders, however, how a player reaches #3 in the world with such a terrible second serve. What the hell, Andy?

    Throughout the proceedings I kept going out to the back yard to visit my father, who has developed another quixotic hobby. For years, he walked the streets of Bend and made it his mission to pick up as many empty bottles and cans as he could. These he would throw away or take back to his recycling bin; then he would mark them down in a notebook. Ask him and he’ll tell you how many he’s collected. It is many thousands.

    Anyhoozy, now they’ve moved out to the country and there isn’t nearly so much litter available. Instead, he hunts animals that are called, locally, “scrub rats” — actually, two kinds of varmint, one of which is a vole and the other one of which is not a vole.*** They’re tearing up the yard out there, digging holes and leaving mounds all over, so that the place looks, to use my dad’s colorful comparison, “like Verdun”. So he spends his afternoons out on his back deck with a book and a high-powered pellet gun, waiting. The things are brazen, all right — I’ve seen him get within two or three yards before pulling the trigger, and they don't seem to care.

***This second animal looks exactly like a vole.

    He is as yet to hit one. My mom is blaming the sights on the gun. This is possible, I suppose, but I suspect mostly it’s a lack of experience that impedes his aim. We were city mice, my family. It’s funny to go out to the middle of nowhere and find them doing country things. It seems to me that his bad aim is for the best. What happens the first time some tiny animal’s brains are spattered all over the lawn? I mean, who knows, maybe it’ll be fine — this is a man whose grandmother used to wring the heads off chickens’ necks and set their golem-bodies shivering around the backyard. But that was a long time ago. Mostly I’m glad I won’t be there to see it.