Haiku Friday

Nightfall: clip clip clip

In bed I hear Lei's toenails

Fall like snow on tile

Mexican Bike Ride

Last weekend, I participated in the bi-annual Rosarito-Ensenada 50-mile bike ride, now in its 32nd year. In the weeks beforehand, whenever I mentioned the ride to someone, the response was invariably the same.

"Is that safe?"

"I'll let you know."

It's an organized event and thousands of people participate each year. On the route's urban stretches, children lined the road with outstretched hands, waiting for the passing riders to toss candy. I felt bad that I was unprepared for this, so I plan to load up next year.

Here's the ride in photos, most of which were taken by Chris.

Chris sizing up the competition at the start line. I appreciated his ensemble because the yellow shorts were easy to spot in the distance when we got separated.

Lady Gladiators (Kathy included).

"If only he was towing a dog . . . and not drinking Tecate Light."

Jesus Shaves.

Message to Zico Coconut Water: SMD.

Fun with photostitch.

The ride is billed as the "number one party on wheels." It seemed like a lot of riders blew their wads early and walked some of the gnarly hills. The route was challenging (and an interesting choice for a party ride), but even after stopping for the occasional beer or margarita along the way, I never considered walking my bike.

And the video that says it all:

exercises in restraint

I don't know how to throw, hit or catch a ball. I have no aim, no follow-through, no swagger. It's a glaring omission from my jock's repertoire, but I was a bookish kid, a late-blooming athlete. In school, I barely participated in P.E. Even tetherball filled me with existential dread.

My dad was an obsessive baseball fan, but he was a listener -- not a player. The dial on his car radio never strayed from 660 AM, New York's WFAN. It became the soundtrack to certain stretches of my childhood: every other weekend and then, for a few years after I'd moved to Phoenix with my mother, Long Island summers. But when my dad moved to Florida, that signal faded, and I didn't see him anymore. I read A Fan's Notes in my mid-20s, and it remains one of my favorite books. Exquisitely written, it's a brilliant portrait of the emptiness found at the heart of fandom.

My mom worked all the time, but she wasn't really a thrower anyway. She is a nurse, but once, she was a surfer. In her late teens or early 20s, she went surfing during a hurricane, lost her board and then found it again when it smashed her in the face. Late 1960s reconstructive surgery left her with a golf ball-sized lump above her cheekbone, which I don't really see when I look at her. She's my mother after all -- in possession of the first face I ever laid eyes upon. I never realized there was anything wrong with it until she told the surfing story, which delighted me as a child. Another beloved mom story: the time she drank gasoline. Another favorite: the time she and her first husband robbed two members of Steely Dan at gunpoint. Another favorite: the time she jumped off the Bayville drawbridge on a dare. Every time I rode shotgun over that bridge as a kid, I pictured my teenage mother, plummeting.

I didn't throw things to my half-brother, either. Seven years my junior, we mostly watched TV together. Sometimes we played Nintendo. During the excruciating Phoenix summers, we played Marco Polo in our condominium complex's swimming pool, enclosed inside a gated stucco fortress, posted signs warning "no lifeguard on duty." Mostly we floated on inner tubes, barely moving across the too-blue water, basted in chlorine, hors d'oeuvres crisping under the sun.

At the beach a couple of weekends ago, I tried to play frisbee, but quickly became frustrated with my ineptitude. My friends were patient, but I don't enjoy doing things I'm bad at. I bowed out of the game, sat on my towel, and watched Dicky wade slowly, gingerly into the rocky ocean. He hadn't been interested in frisbee. His white shoulders reflected the sunlight and I felt a kinship with him: we were aliens here, desert people. But really, we weren't: I spent my earliest years on Long Island, he on the Jersey Shore. Displaced persons, we craved the warm Atlantic.

I have spent several summers, with multi-year gaps in between, on this particular beach in Corona del Mar, and this will probably be my last. During those gaps, other lives were hatched. In front of Chris's parents' house, a "for sale" sign hangs with the "sold" attachment dangling beneath. It's not a private beach, but there is a gate at the end of his street, and his parents still hold the key for now.

My mother's home is also sold. In a few weeks, she'll move from her four-bedroom stucco Peoria home to a North Phoenix stucco condominium that she plans to share with my brother, who is now 25.

While I'm not a thrower or a catcher, I am tenacious. On the beach in Corona del Mar, Dicky moved carefully through the water, and I rose from my towel. I let Jesse toss me the frisbee again, and this time, I caught it in my cleavage.

Game, set, match.

beach reading

I am always resolving to be friendlier to strangers. In Tulum, I felt uncharacteristically open. I smiled and sung "Hola!" to nearly every person I passed on the street. Mysteriously, "hola" is more difficult for me to say in English.

On the beach, I read things, though not necessarily in this order:

1. "Freckled skin ages prematurely." -- Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

2. "The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them."--Jonathan Franzen, "Farther Away"

3. "The first Europeans to see Tulum were probably Juan de Grijalva and his men as they sailed reconnaissance along the Eastern coast of Yucatán in 1518. The Spaniards later returned to conquer the Peninsula unwittingly bringing Old World diseases which decimated the native population. And so Tulum, like so many cities before it, was abandoned to the elements." --guidebook.

4. "And when did we just, like, throw in the towel? I'm surrounded by adults wearing jammiez and eating Chips Ahoy." --personal correspondence

5. "The curious thing about David's fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved his most devoted readers feel when reading it. To the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island -- and I think it's approximately correct to say that his most susceptible readers are ones familiar with the socially and spiritually isolating effects of addiction or compulsion or depression -- we gratefully seized on each new dispatch from that farthest-away island which was David." --Jonathan Franzen, "Farther Away"

6. "Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it." --Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein

7. "come home soon!" --personal correspondence

On our last day in Tulum, I was chatting with one of the hotel employees.

"What do you do for a living?" he asked in flawless English. He'd lived in Santa Barbara for 18 years.

"I'm a librarian," I said.

"You don't look like a librarian."

No one has ever said that to me before.

(more photos here)

when librarians take ill

Tuesday at the reference desk, a patron sat before me and muttered something unintelligible.

"Excuse me?"

[mumble mumble]

"Excuse me? I need you to enunciate more clearly."

"YOU HAVE A BOOGER IN YOUR NOSE."

"Is it a big one?"

"Nah, but I can see it."

"Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Now, why don't you tell me what you need so I can go take care of my booger?"

"A book of speeches for my public speaking class."

race wrap

The final stretch of the race was a two-mile descent. At the bottom of the hill, I looked out onto a beach and watched the gray waves roll in, the kids building sandcastles as their parents sat on blankets. It was an idyllic ending to a race that had taken me 2,200 feet into the rolling headlands, past just-blooming poppies, through marshes, under canopies of eucalyptus trees, past World War II gun bunkers, and awarded a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco skyline in the distance.

Then I realized I would have to run my last half-mile across the sand.

A tide pool separated the beach from the finish line. I removed my shoes, waded through, and crawled up a small dirt hill onto the asphalt. I ran the last 100 feet sans shoes, crossing the finish line barefoot, covered in mud.

I finished the race in 2:22, four minutes under the average finish time and placed within the top half of runners. Not bad considering how completely unprepared I felt going into it. My friend Kathy finished in 2:06. When we had speculated on our finish times the day prior, we were both shooting for three hours.

Back in Kathy's apartment post-race. We didn't make any of our three dinner reservations that night.

Given the difficulty of the course, I think this was the most physically challenging thing I've ever done. It's a an entirely different mindset from derby where I had thirteen teammates depending on me to deliver points, and in turn, I could depend on them to help me through the pack (and let's not delve into the countless instances where we let each other down. It's all part of the game). At the Doll Factory, there were 2,000 people cheering me on -- something I've always had a complicated relationship with. When I finished the race, I had Kathy to high-five and encouraging text messages from my friends. But I also had a singular sense of accomplishment and euphoria that I've never experienced before. I knew immediately that I wanted to do more Envirosports half-marathons (an ordinary half-marathon would probably seem boring after this).

On Monday, I started my research. Big Sur half-marathon in September? Sign me up. Death Valley 30K in December? Yes please. Then I calculated that 30K = 18.6 miles, and thought, well, I still have seven months to train....

Fan Mail

"I'm enjoying your journal after roller derby" -- Jace, South Carolina.