Legs pump, crank turns, chain whizzes, and wheels turn.  It’s a never-ending ballet of up-down being converted into round-around.   And down the road we go.

Pressure increases as the hill starts to rise underneath my tires.    My breath catches a bit as my body struggles to adjust.

“Don’t you puss out on me,” he injects harshly.

I look up, the bright rays of the late-afternoon sun splashing at the edges of my glasses, rendering the world into a half-washed-out landscape.   I gaze up the road to the top of the rise, several hundred yards away and far too many upwards.    My neck drops my head.

“It’s a damned hill.   ‘Tough’ is kind of the point here, I’m going to have to gear down,” I retort.

“Bullshit.   ‘It’s a damned hill’,” he sing-songs.    “Weak.    So it’s a hill.   One of, what, half a billion on the roads?  Suck it up.”

Brain negotiates contract terms with legs and they dig in harder, pushing the pressure gradient steeply upwards on the pedals, and causing my lungs to panic into a pant.  Teeth bared, silence pervades for a bit as we concentrate on the act of hoisting upwards, thoughts turned towards the effort being expelled and the aching of the muscles involved.   Sweat collects in my helmet band and beads down my face.

“Come on!   COME ON!”

I can feel myself faltering at the edge of potential.   “Stupid.”  I gasp, “Why am I doing this?”

“Because you need to actually move your nearly 300-pound ass for once in your life?” he cackles.   “Because you know you can and you just insist on being a wuss about it?”

I sigh.   It’s the same old story; the same inability to live up.    It’s like a record whose needle resets automatically, starting all over with the same message, in the same, crackly fidelity.

I gear down.   It was inevitable.   But not so much that he’ll complain a lot.    “So why bother, then?    I’m just going to end up where I was before.”

He’s suddenly fierce, right there, in my face.    His mocking has disappeared.

“Because it doesn’t have to.    You know you can change this, you have the ability.   You just need to be convinced of it.    Now, MOVE!”

I move.   Not because the entirety of myself wants to, but because somewhere inside there’s a small kernel of myself that believes him, however unlikely the fantasy might be, surrounded by a lot more that desperately wants to have faith.    So I move.   I dig, and crank, and push, and pant.    And the top comes closer.    As I feel the crest beginning to flow underneath my tires, he chants softly beside me.

“Thaaaaat’s it, yes, that’s it.   Keep it up, keep it up.    That’s what I’m talking about!”

I round the top of the hill and the pressure releases from my legs, although my lungs have yet to read the telegram and still grab hungrily at great gobs of air.    I keep moving — staying in motion is the only way to prevent the large knotted muscles from freezing solid.

“Wooof,” I exhale.    I take in a breath and look around, taking in the grasses, the fields, the waving corn, the stretch of road ahead of me.

As the bike sinks into the downhill side, I can see him grinning at me, and I cannot help but crack a small, ironic, but meaningful smile out of the corner of my mouth.   I feel a new-found vigor rush into my legs, infusing them with a renewed energy and excitement for the next challenge ahead.   Pedals push, speed increases, and the wind rushes past.

The miles tick down.   He is still there, mostly damning.   Sometimes encouraging.   At the best of times, seemingly at war with me, but that’s how it always is.   The motivation is not that of the heroes, not that of the stories.   This is hard-won, struggled, squeezed out of every fibre unwillingly.   But in the end, it is real.

I glance down to look at our silhouette; two wheels, two legs, one body, and a hundred miles of hot pavement.

And down the road we go.

I sometimes wonder what my mind would be like to not have a million voices and thoughtstreams flowing through it at any given time.   To just for once have the ability to shut everything else out except that one, singular path that I wanted — or needed — to tread upon and to stay the course until it was completely thought out.

In computer programming, we call this any number of names, but it’s usually, “getting in the zone” or “going on a coding spree” or a “hackathon”.    We have the ability to get into a mode, a method of thinking and reacting, that shuts out 98% of everything else and distills your neurons down into a fine, smooth wine of design and bits and logic.   It’s a beautiful thing to be in…when it happens.

Writers talk about finding a similar comfortable spot of mental clarity and developing that into a habit for producing their prose.   It’s a shut-out against everything else for that one, sacred, glowing spot of white in the middle.

I’ve been terribly distracted and unable to silence the voices that ramble in my head all the time and so I’m finding it increasingly difficult to be at my peak performance.   Tactile things seem much more do-able at the moment and pure thought is fleeting at best and shouting crowds of bullcrap at the worst.     Whoever is driving the crazy-train in my head is certainly having fun trying to jump the tracks.

Much like the weather outside, my brain is like a blowing snowstorm, things flying this way and that, eddies of wind whipping around hidden corners and swirling in the middle of the room.    To hold onto a thought is like trying to fly a kite in a jet engine it seems.

I should have been a carpenter.

In Other News…

Despite my concentration issues at hand, on March 6th I will be guest-blogging at the ever-revealing blog Morning Erection.   To say that I’m excited about this is like saying that I like taffy a lot, and I’m a man who likes his taffy.   I’m currently planning out the piece that I will be doing there and it should be a good, fun opportunity.     Tom is a great guy and often writes a lot of varied pieces (much like this blog) that touch, inspire, and make you tilt your head sideways.

I encourage you to stop on over to Morning Erection and get a feel for what Tom’s doing and to stop over there on March 6th to see my guest post.    I’ll be sure to mention it here and on my Twitter to let you know as well.

I’ll be brief, because sometimes it’s ok to be men’s underwear.

Today I had an OK day and a simply shocking, horrific evening, and the only saving grace was that I was able to come upstairs after banging my head against a brick wall for long, tedious hours, plop my ass down on the floor, and say to the cute little boy across the room, “Come give Daddy snuggles.”    He padded across the room, wrapped his arms around my neck, and laid his head on my shoulder for a few moments before dragging me off to the table to play with trains and cars and to comment on the TV cartoon.

I wonder if he knows that as much as he needs me at this time in his life, sometimes I need him just as badly.     Thanks a ton, buddy.

Modern workers such as myself are big on our vacations.   Unlike the serfdom of times gone by, where obtaining permission to leave the ditch to pee behind a bush was considered “getting away from it all”, we spend a lot of time, money, and thought into exactly how we are going to spend a week or two this year pretending we don’t have a house, job, bills, or responsibilities.     The possibilities for doing so are numerous and nowadays almost nothing is outside of a couple of flights, sleeping on a well-traveled bed in a small room for some ungodly sum, and spending the day traipsing arounds and gawking while the locals are all thinking, “Man, when I get a vacation, I am getting the Hell Out Of Here.”

The rest of the year we are usually content to work and beat the living shit out of ourselves in doing so simply so we can obtain those few short days of bliss in a foreign clime.     We try to buck it up and say that we love our jobs, but the truth is, we don’t; if we truly loved our jobs, we wouldn’t insist on being handed a check a few times a month.    We are working hard so we can spend nights, weekends, holidays, and Vacation Time™ doing…NOT work.

Big, big trips, of course, cost an awful lot of time, money, patience, good luck, and planning, and if any one of those things goes awry, you will quickly find yourself at a loss for figuring out what to do with your precious Vacation Time™ because your plans just hit a rotating air movement device at high speed and shot off in multiple directions.

Such it is with our plans this year or, at least, my plans for my own precious Vacation Time™ which I’ve been saving up since January in anticipation of putting it to good use at the end of the year.   Instead of taking time off during these past warm, sunny summer months, spending time outside or traveling or having fun, I’ve been working, and sometimes working a lot, just so I can make the most of two, maybe 3 weeks at the end of December by taking a well-deserved (in my mind) trip to Australia with my family to see all of our relatives and friends over there in that distant, poisonous-animal-filled land.

Wouldn’t you know it that life has come along and blown in all to hell, eh?  *sigh*

Money being the fickle and transitional thing that it is has chosen to waft its way out of my grasp for the time being and we find ourselves within a month or so of buying the necessary travel for this trip and — utterly broke with little chance to gain even a small percentage of the funds required for our amusements.     And be ye not disillusioned about how much these sorts of trips cost, for verily they causeth much strain upon thy pocketbook.   But we’ve done it before, the cause is good, and family, friends, mince pies, sausages, pasties, schnitzels, chips, Tim Tams, seagulls, spiders that would rather kill you than look at you, sandy beaches, and the smell of the ocean are all more than worth the price of admission.    One needs only to find themselves gazing out over the infinite azure expanse of waves and the stresses of finances just…melts away.

So, now I’m stuck.   My vacation time is a use-it-or-lose it sort of proposition and it’s all going to have to be taken in the ass-end of the year when weather is questionable at best and places like Iowa are not where you want to be.    The thought of staying home for the entire time and spending it doing domestic activities like cleaning, painting, and working on freelance jobs makes me so depressed that I could sit in a corner and impale my forehead on a stick.    The term, “staycation,” might as well be a Barry Manilow record on repeat for all the comfort it gives me.   And yet, of course, the primary factor in canceling a good vacation is still present, so I cannot take off for Aruba, either.   I will have to think and be mightily creative about this or I will end up in a very sorry state by the end of the year.

And just to head off all of you who are going to comment and say helpful things like, “you’re lucky you have a job to take vacation from” and “it could be worse” and “I hate Australia; damned good thing you’re not going”, I say this:    I get ya.   And don’t think I’m not thankful for the opportunity to work and support my family.    That isn’t what this is about, it’s more about disappointment and trying to figure out how to recharge myself when the options are limited, so I can go back to doing exactly that…working and supporting my family.    Some people aren’t lucky enough to be in this position in the first place and I’m sorry.

So, there it is…barring a miracle of impressive proportions (hey, I’m still up for the Lottery if the fates are), this is where I sit and, apparently, where I’m going to stay for awhile.     I’ll work and work and add brochures about sunny places and tiki bars with scantily-clad women to my bathroom reading and sometime, someday, I might manage to unplug myself and enjoy a day or two for once.

(All pictures taken in Decorah, IA, on a day much nicer than the ones we’re having right now.   Sigh.)