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The Never Ending Story: A Brief & Overdue Review

Awesome music, makes you want to put on your leg warmers and start dancing like you’ve never danced before.

Young Bastian’s dad is fucking terrifying. He drinks two blended eggs for breakfast and demands that his son “stop daydreaming” and face up to the cruel inhumanity of the real world, tiger.

On his way to school our protagonist gets mugged by the goonies. Don’t these kids have social workers or something?

The local booksmithe blames all the youth ultraviolence on videogames, rock and roll, staggering illiteracy, and probably a lack of religious guidance as well.

Bastian hides in an asbestos riddled attic of the school and reads a book that is almost as magical as a television. He is transported to a land of imagination.

Imagination Land is promptly destroyed, but not really. Imagination Land is a lot like the death star.

Deus Ex Machina, giant fuzzy homo erotic dragon, cue awesome theme song, roll credits.

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We’ve been reading Plato’s dialogues in my class on History of Ancient Philosophy, most recently Phaedro. In this story, Socrates, at this point more of a fictional character and mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas, describes the concept of the Forms and the relationship of the soul and the body. The priority he gives to the soul over the body is contrary to popular Athenian beliefs of the time, and of course as is the nature of Plato’s dialogues, it requires some arguing and explanation.

At the same time, in my philosophy/biology class on the intersection of Science and Human Values, we’ve been reading David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. Quammen’s history of the two decades between Darwin’s brief stint as a field biologist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle and the publishing of his theory of evolution reads remarkably well, and it paints an explicit picture of both a man and a theory not yet widely understood.

I found a nice thread connecting these two topics, and I’d like to test its tensile strength. Read the rest of this entry »

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Whereas most people would change, shower, or at least take off their clipless shoes, I don’t think it’s too strange that the first thing I do when I get home from riding is take some self portraits. Not too strange.

On a related note, today was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

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In Greta Christina’s recent post The Scarlet Letter: Visibility and the Atheist Logo she talks about her adoption of the a graphic of Richard Dawkins’ The OUT Campaign, which is essentially a signature red A as a sign of atheist strength in numbers. Popular on atheist blogs, it’s seen as a badge of pride by many.

When I first read about The OUT Campaign, I considered throwing the big red letter up on the sidebar here since “I have a blog!” and “I’m an atheist!”. But there’s a couple reasons why I didn’t, why I don’t, and why I probably won’t. Firstly, I enjoy the aesthetic control I have on my blog. While I don’t necessarily value the content less than the context, I wouldn’t be as proud of it if I had to post on, say, the MySpace blogging platform.

And then there’s the idea of what this blog is about. While it still feels like my writing voice is shifting more than that of a pubescent teen sweating his first debate club meeting, I’m at least getting a handle on what I like to write about. There are persons who blog about atheism, and their are atheists who blog about the personal. I’d say I’ve fallen into the latter category.

While I may occasionally write about my atheism, it’s not the central focus of this blog, and on the subject of modern atheist activism I don’t feel so completely knowledgeable. Which is why I don’t feel a need to adorn my sidebar with a scarlet letter, declaring to all my rejection of theism and the supernatural.

But my Facebook profile is a much different situation.
Read the rest of this entry »

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There’s a song by Paul Baribeau called Hard Work.

Took two hours to wake up today
took two hours to wake up today
took a half an hour to get into the shower
the shower took an hour

the hard work helps the time go by
hard work helps the time go by

Lately I’ve been thinking about the regular schedule I’ve set for myself; I’ve been thinking about it in terms of my bicycle. Six days a week it’s a short and well versed commute to school or work and the same jaunt home ten hours later. When I can wake well rested and it’s dry outside, I try to ride through the park for maybe an hour before the day really begins. Long rides get postponed until Sunday comes around, and longer rides fill my imagination by Monday afternoon.

Sleep, eat, ride, school, work, eat, ride.
And this regularity is good, I look forward to it.

On a different scale, I’ve been considering what I want to do with this like of bike. I’ve developed a strong loyalty to the shop I’m wrenching at currently, along with a lot of friendship and admiration for my coworkers. I can say I wouldn’t mind working at Pullins Cyclery as long as I live in Chico. After I graduate though, I think I’d like to explore some.

NAHBS really reinforced my feelings that I’d like to try my hand as a framebuilder, but at the same time it struck me how sufferable such an endeavor might be. Less than $2,500 can buy tools for building lugged steel frames, but the investment of time and energy required to develop the necessary skills prior to this is much harder to calculate. Ron Sutphin, president of the United Bicycle Institute in Oregon, estimates one out of twenty graduates of UBI’s frame building class make a significant portion of their income framebuilding, and that fewer than one in a hundred succeed making a solo career of it.

And so I worry, as I am wont to do. Maybe I won’t have an eye or hand for framebuilding, maybe I won’t have the frugality or wherewithal, maybe I won’t have the salesmanship, maybe I won’t have the ambition or passion.

But I might. As long as there’s no rush to test my metallurgy, these worries weigh less than the air in my tires. For now I’m comfortable with the prospect of wrenching for years to come, riding regularly, and watching the time go by.

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As good as Sunday gets.

Woke up plenty early and did some stretches. I think I’m learning how my body works. Breakfasted on a well blended parfait of honey granola, almonds, maple syrup, blackberry jam, soymilk, banana, and old mashed raspberries.

Met up around ten for a ride with Renée, Paul, Steve and Lau. We drove about 14 miles South East to begin our clockwise ascent of Table Mountain. I’ve never been driven out of town on 99 South before, and it was nice to see the rolling foothills and erect power-towers from a different perspective. I’m still not acclimated to how beautiful it can get out here. We parked outside a small schoolhouse and pulled our bikes from the roof racks.

An hour and a half later we were sitting on the top of the plateau trying to lure cows into a photo op with pieces of cliff bars and fig newtons. We didn’t see any other riders on the way up, which was surprising considering the phenomenal weather. Starting the 800’ descent I grabbed onto Steve’s wheel and didn’t let go until we were halfway down. As far as frame materials go, steel’s what you want for long curvaceous downhills, and my Atala rode rock-solid. This was probably my third time riding down from Table Mountain on Cherokee Road, and the most confident I’ve ever felt doing it. Being able to see the lines Steve was picking and to just lay into the turns behind him was fun. I wouldn’t yet say I “Descend With Conviction”, but I’m enjoying it more and more every time, white knuckles be damned!

On the flats back to the car I meandered off the road and onto the gravel shoulder only once or twice, because secretly I want to ride mountain bikes, and because secretly I want to crash on the side of the highway. It was in these last stretches that I was able to coax some speed out of Steve and Lau, when Renée and Paul had dropped off the back. Maybe it’s just my youth, but today I felt fast.

Got home around one and muckety mucked around on the internet for about an hour before taking off the sunday riding clothes, gross. Made some warm and savory lunch out of rice, curry, french onion soup, broccoli and naan, and then proceeded to pass out on the couch while watching All The Kings Men. I developed the syndrome a few years ago watching some classic films with my dad, but now I can’t stay awake for more than an hour if I’m watching a black and white movie.

Three hours of nap later and it’s time to do some homework. Tomorrow’s supposed to be the last day of this superbly warm and sunny “February-Fakeout”, before the wind and rain return. Hitting the bed early tonight to hit the road early tomorrow morning.

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So last weekend I took an eleven hour bus ride to Portland to attend the fourth annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show. For three days straight the Oregon Convention Center was packed to the gills with the dorkiest bike nerds, the biggest small frame builders, and the most interesting things on two wheels; the bike racks outside were piled high like some promethean offering to a cyclical deity.

If anything, the massive gains in attendance and the number of exhibitors since NAHBS ‘07 is a sign of good health for both the small and big end of the bicycle industry. Sure, Portland is a hotbed/brothel of bicycle activity on its own, but attendees came from near and far to look upon the bike works.

If you want real reporting on what can only be described as the best trade-show in the industry, read up at BikePortland.org or VeloNews.

It dawned on me pretty quickly that such an abundance of overwhelmingly nice bikes can glaze over your eyes and burn a hole in the back of your skull. I was only at the convention center for Saturday, and I so wish I could have had one more day to recuperate and revisit some of the exhibitors. Looking at galleries online I’m still finding cool things I missed as I wandered about the show in a drunken stupor, eyes rolled back into my head and jaw hanging slack.

Here’s what I can remember:
Read the rest of this entry »

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Dear Internet,
won’t you be mine?

I know I’ve been awful busy in real life lately, but you’re never far from my thoughts. Oh how I desire sweet respite, the kind of leisure that would allow me to dance my fingers across a keyboard and pour into you prosaic parcels of mine life.

I’d tell you of Portland, the little city that could. I’d recount the innumerable handmade bicycles polished almost to the point of fluorescence, the none too few bridges between buildings of appropriately modest heights.

I would regale you with kernels of the knowledge under my predation. How funny, you would think it, were I to quote the student who asked what Parmenides and Zeno would have thought, with their understanding of a finite indeterminate spherical unifying Being, of this student’s empty gas tank. How could it have been emptied though, responded the professor, if the motion of driving was but an empirical illusion? Chuckles, they were abound.

All this and more, Internet, if you would be mine.

For serious though? Work + School + Late night dark room hours = not much time for blagging. Failing my ability to find more hours for the day hidden beneath dirty laundry or behind the toilet paper in the bathroom closet, don’t expect anything too regular at this location. Fans of the (semi)daily covers should also hold their breath until I buy some new guitar strings.

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