All manner of humanity lies tucked and smothered into narrow valleys between five perfectly spaced ridges.  Moms and tennis instructors and drug dealers and old men mowing their lawns and young men flipping their skateboards live and breathe and eat in the squalid air bottled down there.  Glimmering lights begin to wink on, one after another.  Streets begin to ignite slowly with headlamps, perfectly spaced thin grids of headlamps.

The five ridges stand ragged and stark against the soft blanket of incoming ocean fog.  A low breeze rustles the plastic ribbon against the stake at my side.  Click, click clic-k.  Silence reigns.

The valley sweeps away below my feet, a valley of scrub oak and sage and wasteland.  Here and there, if I peer carefully, I can make out a house.  But it is all wild.  Completely empty and wild all the way down the hill till the brown air of the valley begins.  The fence in front of my chest has a yellow tag on it that says "ELECTRIC FENCE".  I want to touch it with something metal and make it spark, but no, there is too much dry sagebrush about and last year the worst fires were all arson.

There is so much room in the world I am surprised that we insist on cramming ourselves into such narrow corners and then complaining that there is not enough room or food for everyone.  I have seen open spaces that have nothing in them, and then tried to ride to the end of the spaces and there is no end, really.  I eventually just find a road that takes me away in another direction and steers me back to another crowded corner of population.

Here there is a quiet crag on a silent mountaintop, an island of silence and sanity in an ocean of crawling, panting humans whoring after happiness according to the laws of technology, economy and sociology.  Anyone who wants to take a minute from all that can come up here and park their car at the gate and walk out into the silence as far as they want.   Answers are tied to noise and solutions and frustration; only in the quiet may one ask questions.  Brown air can't reach up here, the smells of barbecue and cigarettes and the sound of hip-hop can't reach. One may be still and think whether the laws of technology, economy and sociology must rule life, and where those laws might come from.  The quiet is friendly to inquiry within and the beauty keeps curiosity occupied in the meantime.

Beauty also reminds me, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and glare at the sun and wish she were here, and all reflection about sociology and economy becomes irrelevant.  Gravel crunches under my feet as I drag along back toward where I came from.  It is a gorgeous view, to be sure; all these multitude of mini-valleys but here I am all alone like a fool or a homeless person with my hands in my pockets crunching gravel and kicking stones along ahead.

The chair is comfortable, the ceiling filled with demons, and the feeling of peace remains like a buffer between me and them, the peace that covers a multitude of sins. Peace, like a down blanket over the room, is receding slowly out the window. It's following her, I'm sure it's following her back home. I've been graced with this comfort for one day, unasked, uninvited, like a wraith. And now that comfort is gone again, as if it never existed - but it has left me settled, happy again and I smile at the demons. Kill me now, please, while I'm happy.

I could never figure this out: the times in my life when I have been really alone, but unwilling to recognize the fact, there is one person who shows up from nowhere to take the sting away like a healing salve. This is the second time this has happened. I've always been angry with this person. I don't want to be healed. Pain is weakness leaving the soul, so don't heal me. But she comes with sudden comfort and I become soft and pain is not useful anymore but something that is ugly and hurts. She can't make it go away, but she makes it not hurt.

And then I can't get away from her, everywhere I go I keep running into her, like a guardian angel. She lives in the hallways of my daily life. This is the really weird part. I never seek her out but I can't get away from her as long as she chooses to stay. Perhaps she IS my guardian angel. Poor guardian angel. I'm so sorry you have me for a job.

And this guardian angel is of such caliber that when she does leave, she leaves comfort behind for hours. And I am happy until enough time passes and things happen that I forget and assume again the accustomed cold burden and weakness and the demons come back to take up their posts and life is the same as always.

posting about posting

My posts are too long.  I can't seem to fix this.  Whenever I try to recount a serial experience from beginning to end, well, I recount it serially; and motorcycling is of is nature such a firestorm of sense experience that every sensation is labeled clearly in my memory; everything from the nasty butterfly that decorates my windshield five minutes from home, to the Old Dominion freight truck with the words "flash me" scrawled in the diesel crud on the trailer doors.  The slowly rotating boat propeller glistening ahead in the 2-second following distance; the young dentist hanging a pressed white broadcloth arm out the window of the nameless black SUV.

the world isn't big enough to hold it all....

Rim of the World

"Ok, for god's sake, youre going to get up at 5:45 AM in the morning and try to make early Mass in Pasadena so you can be that much further along on this gas-wasting, timewasting entirely unnecessary diversion of yours?  It's just another twisty scenic road, ok, you know the type.  Mountains.  Rocks.  Sagebrush.  Trash, lots of trash.  Graffiti. What exactly again are you looking for here?  What's different about this one?"

Difference? What difference? There isn't any, if your asking me to quantify it in color or temperature or solitude or lack thereof.  But it's a road I haven't seen yet.  Okay I admit, those roads are getting further and further from my radius of operations.  But California Highway 18 is another legend of motorbikers, tourists and (firemen) that I haven't seen yet.

So do I really need to think twice?  It means I nix whatever I'd be doing to Suzi's guts over the weekend, but I've given up the idea of getting her back together by August.  And I only live once and I only have gas money once, so is there really a contest here?

Not really.  And I can get away with early Mass at TAC if I hurry afterwards.

The next morning was cool and foggy.  A bit of surreality that always makes the (hurried) cruise down the 126 a trip through fantasyland.  The breath of the leftover irrigation mists cloud the celery fields; mixing with the upper airs to cloak the mountain shoulders hither and yon.  I glide on along the empty ribbon of asphalt, v-twin in its happy-zone, humming to itself in its peaceful refrigerator hmm.  All manner of smells flow by along my face: the everpresent citrus, blended to the everpresent sage and tumbleweed (yes, tumbleweed smells) and the occasional whiff of plowed dust, ash and diesel smoke.  Nutshells, onions and porta-potties, palm oil and lavender oil, adobe tile and citrus again, citrus and more citrus....

I swear half the scenery is smells.  You, dear reader, unless you ride a motorcycle, have no frickin' clue what I'm talking about.  But trust me, it's good.  (Has a tendency to crowd out all those gremlins that find a clench-hold, you see, in the consciousness over a stressful week.  They can't stand up to the deluge of sensations)

Uahum, freeway.  Out of the zone.  It was nice while it lasted but the onramp levers me gently into the teeth-rattling, turbulent reality of battling for my position in the left lane.  People, people everywhere encased in steel and plastic boxes - Toyota Camrys, Ford F150's, Dodge Cummins Turbodiesels, BMW 750iLs.

Two hours ensue.

I almost miss the offramp.  Then I do miss the offramp, chiding myself for falling asleep at the handlebars.  But the mistake was easy to correct, and underpass and an invigorating merge later I am headed back in the right direction.  The I-15 looms ahead and I arc off, northbound.

Wow.  Boats.  Boats everywhere.  I feel like I'm on the river.  Jeweled dashboards and salty hulls in every direction.....offramp, offramp to the 138, anyone?  Could you move away so I can see the roadsigns?

"It's been a long time."

"You're telling me." The vats of beer look shapely through the swirled bottom of the glass.  Vats of beer.  Vats.

Something settled on the surface of the bar that wasn't paper and wasn't glass.  I tried to focus and missed the paper napkin.

"Well?"

"Hell, I'm not talking.  I'm drinking."  The foam along the sides of the glass shuddered as the bottom hit the wooden board, then slowly began to evaporate.

"Your glass is empty."

"Your hand is empty."

"And?"

"You've got eyes like..."

"Like what?"

"Like the Minnethota sunset."

"Thought you didn't like Minnesota."

"I didn't.  Or I hadn't.  Tho sinth when does it mather. But I do like sunthseth."

"Spare me the bullshit."

"I ain't teasin' ya, dammith!"

The glass slid almost of its own accord toward the bartender.  I like beer, dark beer, light beer, and the wine that's saved for the last....

The tobacco shop huddled darkly next to the glaring red stoplight set off the bright white t-shirt of the teenager pedaling a very familiar bicycle.  It still has those $70 saddlebags I bought four years ago.  With sudden recognition I averted my face as the light changed green and the whole intersection got an immediate earful of angry v-twin.  It's been half a year and it still pisses me off.  I don't have information to prove the machine is mine, so even if I WERE to go all ape and confrontational and shit there would be no way to follow through.  I should have filed a police report.  I should have cared.  This is how I protect my stuff, this is how I defend myself....by convincing myself that at the time that it didn't matter, it's only a 400-dollar bicycle and I'm way to busy to worry about something I hardly ever used....

...only a 400-dollar bicycle....

....so what will it be next, coward? what will it be next? Your mailbox? Your wallet? Your motorcycle? Your girlfriend?