Summer Is Just Another Word for Torture

The heat is ruining my life. I may have said something similar when I was living in Arizona, but only because it was. And it is now. At least in Arizona we had central air conditioning. Right now we're keeping our house cool with electric window units and fans. It's very ineffective and very trashy. The house we bought was built in the forties and none of the previous owners had felt inspired to get central air. We're inspired to, but first there are other pressing matters, like the roof.

Anyway, the heat is killing me. Each day that brings me both high temperatures and high levels of humidity wipe me out. The only thing I can do is swear, curse Tennessee, long for Utah and sometimes cry in frustration. Not to give you the wrong idea, I don't really cry. We have this air conditioner the previous owners left us and it sucks. Something is broken about it, I'm not sure what, probably the temperature gauge because it fluctuates so drastically, one minute it's 54 degrees and the next it's 83. When it thinks it's 54 it turns off and I swear at it and cut the power to it and then restart it. Stoker thinks it doesn't help, but I know it does.

Another thing that's killing me is the hills of Tennessee. Oft cited as beautiful in song, these hills are a bane and a curse and I curse them. The extreme heat and humidity and the hills have put the brakes on exercise. Last year I could tolerate it because I ran by the river amidst the trees and that lowered the temperature a little. Plus I ran home to the central air conditioner. This summer I run home and never cool down and I want to die. And there's no river and very few trees and everything is a hill. Stoker thinks I overdo it, but I assure you I do not. If you came to my house and we took a run on a day at 92 degrees and 65% humidity, or even 40%, you'd melt with me. And it wouldn't resemble a romantic song. It would be like a house of wax. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And swearing at Tennessee.

Stoker says there are lots of hills in Utah, but there aren't. There are mountains. When there's a sort of hill, it looks like a hill and feels like a hill. In Tennessee, there's some kind of weird optical illusion going on and you can't tell it's a hill with teeth until you're running up it and dying in the extreme humidity and heat.

Long ago my pioneer ancestors tried to settle in Missouri and then Illinois, but things didn't work out. So they moved on and eventually set up camp in the Utah territory. It was hard for them and stuff, but after living in a humid climate and having been to some of the places that didn't work out for them, I thank my lucky stars things didn't workout in the Midwest. The desert is a superior climate. So maybe water was scarce and harder to come by and maybe it was grueling to drag those rocks out of the quarries to build with because there weren't a lot of trees, those things worked out, right? Once you live in a swamp, it's always a swamp and it breeds swamp creatures. The desert breeds hearty stock. Tall, lean, strong people. I can't decide for sure if this holds merit, it's just my perception, I'm sure.

I'm telling you, the heat is killing me. I'm very depressed right now. That's probably not super obvious because I'm being so hilarious at the moment. But I am. I'm wilting like a flower in a damn car out in the sun.

I tried to find scientific proof that extreme temperatures cause depression and other problems in people. I don't have time to rummage through all the studies, so I let the BBC do it for me. They came up with this article on the effects of extreme heat on moods. So I'm right, then. Thanks for playing. Now I'm going to go cry and melt in the pointless heat.



p.s. Recently I read this line from a short story by Chekhov ("He Understood"): "It was a stifling June morning; the air was sultry, the leaves drooped, the dry ground cracked." And I finally understood the power of that word sultry. Sultry only has power if you've been exposed to extreme humidity. I hadn't until Tennessee. Do I obsess? I do, I know I do.

Where I Stand Right This Very Minute on Music: Pierce Brosnan, Babs and "Evergreen," and Celine

Is it so wrong to think that the best song on the new Mamma Mia! movie is the one Pierce Brosnan sings all by himself? I mean, I know that he's no Pavarotti or Bono or Miley Cyrus, and I know that, as Stoker mentioned, his song seems to have had the most digital editing done to it, but still . . . I love it. Why? Why do I love it?

I have no idea. How can I explain it? I can't. But let me say, there's something to be said about the virginal voice. And by virginal voice I mean the young, untrained sound. There's still the capacity for emotion and that's what I must be hearing. And there's the unique phrasing and emphasis that comes from someone who is NOT a singer first and foremost.

And since his days as the one and only Remington Steele, I have been a fan of Pierce Brosnan. And Streep does a great job harmonizing with him. It sounds good. That's all I can say.

And is it so wrong to sometimes just crave some old Barbara Streisand song ("Ahhhh ahhh, ahhhh ahh, loooove soft as an easy chair . . .")? Or some Celine Dion favorite, "A whisper in the moonlight . . ."? No, no, it's not. Occasionally a person just gets tired of all the new crap and the onslaught of new bands and the next fly-by-night sensation and they just want to hear Babs singing, "Like a rose, under the April snow, IIIIIII was always certain love would grow," and stuff. Because it's SO good. You can't deny it. You must relent, Babs' voice is butter and "Evergreen" makes you want to fall in love. It does. Even the most hard-hearted, Harley-riding, hard fightin', hard fartin' man's man's man wants to swoon and fall for someone when he hears Babs belt out the melody of that song.

When Cassi came to visit during the fourth, I was really into listening to these old easy-listening favorites. And I thought it would be really hilarious to have that song or maybe a Conway Twitty song playing when she got into the car at the airport. Stoker agreed. So I had it all cued up on the old Ipod (Stoker: "What I want to know is what the hell these songs are doing on your Ipod?"), and Cas was in the car, trapped in the backseat and as we're exiting the airport, the strains of "Evergreen" come lilting out of the car speakers, "Ahhhh ahh ahhhhh ahhh ahh loooooove soft as an easy chair . . ." Two seconds later, she hadn't even finished the first line, Cassi says, "What the hell are you guys listening to? Is this the radio?"

And I kept a straight face.

"Noooo, it's what we're listening to."
"What?" And what she meant here was something more like, "What's happened to you, Nik? You've gotten OLD or something."

So then we put on Conway Twitty "You've Never Been This Far Before," and we tried to tell her that EVERYONE listens to that kind of music in Nashville. Duh. She didn't buy it. But oh man, we got a kick out of it. Playing up being old (Stoker's only 25) and listening to what she would deem crap, because see, she's at that age where you MUST listen to cool music and go to lots of shows and wear band t-shirts and go to music festivals and your cool capital comes from WHAT you like, not what YOU'RE like.

Personally I think my cool capital comes from being so cool that I don't give a shit if someone thinks I'm cool or not, having the breadth to listen to Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich and Dolly and Porter and Babs, in addition to indie favorites like Devotchka, makes me the coolest. Ha ha ha.

Hemingway and Nashville Local Color

I'm about to finish "A Moveable Feast." It's a great book. I read on Wikipedia that some call it Hemingway's finest writing. I haven't read all of his writing, but I have to agree. Maybe that's because he knew the protagonist so well and he wasn't being deceptive that the protagonist was himself.

I don't know. The thing that bugs me is the critics who say that Hemingway is still being deceptive in his portrayal of himself as the hero. Critics bug me, I even bug myself when I'm being a critic. Sometimes I think, "Poor Stoker, always stuck listening to me being a critic." And then I think, "Poor me, always stuck listening to me being critical." But there's no way to escape that. I'm stuck with me.

At lunch I have to leave my workplace. I have to get away, I have to think that I'm not fixed to this place like some kind of Dickens character. What's his name? The guy who worked for Scrooge who was forever positive and helpful and hopeful? I don't recall. But I'm not him. I like to think I'm not a cog in the machinery and that I could get away from it permanently if I had to.

I could live on the streets like the lady on Demonbreun. Demonbreun is a main road in Nashville. It takes one over to Music Row and it's not pronounced "deman-brewin" like one might think. It's pronounced "de-MON-bri-un." That's not an offical phonetical spelling, so don't check Webster's to see if I did it right. I'll spare you, I didn't.

The lady is a permanent fixture on Demonbreun. She's beautiful. I've never spoken to her, but she's got my heart. She's there in the middle of cold winter days, sitting on her bench in a big coat, and she's there in the swampy hot weather of summer, sitting on her bench under a big sun umbrella. She has Swedish features that have been bronzed to a sort of leathery complexion by the wind and the cold and the sun. Sometimes I'll see her eating a lunch off of one of the brick walls that separate the little shops along Demonbreun, and I've seen her drinking something from a styrofoam cup, with her pinkie in the air like someone with real class.

There are days that I wonder where she goes at night. Does she go to the mission? I look for her when I drive by and if I don't see her, I worry. I worry and wonder if she's safe. I wonder about her choice of "office." There's an abandoned newspaper stand next to her preferred bench. The glass has been broken out and I have noticed that she puts stuff in there, like her dayplanner and maybe a notebook.

She has class. She does. She wears dark velvety jumpsuits, the kind your grandma might wear. I guess they're called leisure suits. They have embroidered designs on them.

The most I've said to her is "hi." And I wave and she waves back. I don't know anything else about her. But I feel a sense of responsibility for her. That probably makes me an ass and if I ever spoke to her and if she found out I had said this or written a word about her, she would probably resent it and think, "How dare you!" She's got class and dignity, you see. She's not a stray cat or something. And I've never given her anything, not even spare change.

It's stupid to say, but I feel like she's given me something.

Talking to Strangers: An Inordinately Long Post (Worth It; Very Entertaining)

I have a stalker.

Ok. I use that term loosely. He’s not one hundred percent bona fide stalker, but he’s around and he’s undesirable and I don’t know how to get rid of him. No, I’m not talking sarcastically about Stoker. Stoker is still one hundred percent desirable and as it stands now, he’s not around near enough.

The stalker doesn’t seem to follow me, per se. And that’s why I use the term loosely. But suddenly, I can’t go anywhere outside my office without running into him. It’s annoying.

Here’s the story. In riding my bike home from work, I was waved over to a parking lot by a guy who was in workout clothes. I thought he was going for an after work run. Or maybe they were playing a pickup game of basketball. I stopped. The dude assured me that all he wanted to know was bike stuff and then he asked me a bunch of questions about my bike. I answered his questions while still being cautious, under the impression that I was speaking with a working professional, which somehow at that time meant to me that he wasn’t creepy. Not one hundred percent creepy, anyway. When the questions got uncomfortable, I started to want to leave, like when he asked if I go for group rides or what. I thought to myself that I didn’t want him knowing whether or not I rode alone. He wanted to know where I rode, I didn’t tell him. I told him I ride with my husband, which is true.

After a few minutes, a woman appeared on the front steps of his office building. She was shouting and waving for him. “His wife,” I thought, even though that didn’t really make sense. He said he had to go and left. So I left too.

Oh, and initially, he mentioned that he was glad I had stopped. He said he had seen me riding my bike by before and he was so glad he caught me. One of the other things he said was that he wanted to get a bike and that at one point he had done triathlons. Which is cool, great for him. Apparently he had been out of the scene for a while. Fine, awesome. Go to it, man.

A few days later, I was out walking on my lunch. I went about a half mile to find a place to eat. As I was returning to my office, I stopped on a street corner while I waited for the light to change. There was a dude in the bike lane and he looked at me. I ignored him. Then he asked, “Are you the bike girl?” And what did I do?

I said yes, because I’m an idiot. Why the hell would I say yes? First of all, why the hell would I talk to a stranger? In the very first place, why would I do that? Why would I not heed my mother’s advice and the advice of the public education system and the advice of all the television commercials during Saturday morning cartoons? Why?

Because I’m an idiot. I am. There’s no way around it. My stupidness surprises even me. So I say yes to the dude’s question, “Are you the bike girl?” I say yes and nod, dumbly, because I’m a little surprised and confused and I respond too quickly, automatically. When I’m taken by surprise I tend to become a deer in the headlights, I’m very shocked that there’s a car, I can’t believe there’s a car, why would there be a car here, why is it speeding into my face? That’s what I do. I get confused. That’s what happens right before you die.*

And the dude thinks it’s divine intervention or something. He’s like, “Wow, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m running into you again. My friends said that you rode by one day when I wasn’t there and there were all, ‘______, she came by again, the Bike Girl. She came by when you weren’t here.’ And now here you are.” And then he showed off the bike he got for $400 off of craigslist.com. He was so thrilled about the bike and I pretended to be impressed because I didn’t give a shit. All I was thinking about was how the hell** to get out of this.

The light changes and the dude rides his bike across the street. I wait for the cars and begin crossing the road. The dude gets to the other side and what does he do? He WAITS for me.

There’s no where for me to go. He’s on a bike and I’m walking and my work is half a mile away. He begins riding his bike real slow next to me and he begins gabbing. He chatters on and on about the bike and how he’s getting a fresh start and how he’s been out of the scene for four years and he just got to Nashville and he’s real excited about everything, to get a fresh start. I’ve got my hand in my bag and I’m texting Stoker to “CALL ME RIGHT NOW.” And I’m not listening real close, but I catch the thing about being gone for four years. So I ask him where he’s been for four years, feeling my blood turning cold.

“Prison. I was locked up for four years. But I’m rehabilitated now and I’ve got a fresh start. I don’t want to freak you out or scare you, I’ve got two sons and everything.”

I play it cool. And what the hell? PRISON? I’m not going to tell you my life story, but what is it with me and ex-cons? I’m not kidding. Somehow I seem to attract them and it’s not like I’m hanging out in bars. They find me in the oddest places. The climbing gym, college, the street. Ok, the street is a weird one. But that’s the first weird one.

At this point, I’m really concerned about how to deter to this guy. Stoker hasn’t called me and I’m getting annoyed about that. I ask the dude why he was in prison, but he pretends not to hear. He tries to tell me his life story, his name, where he’s from, that he has some kids, etc. It turns out that that office is not an office, but is rather a HALFWAY HOUSE. It turns out that that halfway house looks out on my parking lot (he was puzzling over why he keeps running into me in such a fortuitous way). It turns out that there have been a bunch of ex-whatevers oogling me as I ride by on my bicycle.

This stirs a ton of unpleasant realizations in me, as I walk along, thinking of how to get rid of him without being offensive.

And why on earth shouldn’t I be offensive? Why on earth is there a strange man riding beside me, trying to be my friend or something when I’ve already mentioned that I have a husband? Obviously there’s something wrong with him. Something anti-social about him. I hate to be an ass, but sometimes a person needs to get a brain. By person I mean this man, who clearly doesn’t have enough mental power to get out of his own experience and recognize that I’m a girl walking by myself and whether or not he’s harmless, his actions might appear otherwise.

What kills me is that I actually feel like I should try to preserve this guy’s feelings. Why is that? Why should I care? He’s clearly crossing all sorts of lines of decorum. I’m not his friend. Usually I don’t talk to strangers, and there are a lot of seedy guys hanging around Nashville, if you’ve never been here. They love to try to rope girls into conversation. Typically I mutter something unintelligible to them and hurry on. But one time I didn’t do that and it turns out that that one time just happened to introduce me to a guy who has been in PRISON.

I wrap the conversation up with that guy after he asks me my name and where I work and what I do. I tell him something along these lines, “I’m sorry, I have nothing against you, but you’re a stranger and because I hardly know you, I’m not going to tell you my name. I don’t feel comfortable telling you anything about me. But good luck with the bike, bye.”

And he rode off. Since then I have seen him several times. Each time I wish I hadn’t seen him and I worry about my safety. Has he marked me? He’s obviously being monitored to some degree, but what the hell was he in prison for? I have no idea and I didn’t listen well enough to do a search for him and find out what he did. I don’t buy that he’s rehabilitated. I’m the person who thinks that prisons don’t turn prisoners around, they make them worse. Today he rode his bike past me and waved and said in a real aggressive-sounding way, “Hey there!”

I saw him last week and ignored him so I guess that’s why today’s hello sounded like this, “Yeah, I know you’re trying to ignore me. But I don’t care. I’m going to acknowledge the hell out of you.” Which bothers me. What kind of a-hole doesn’t get it?

Oh yeah, and the world? Full of a-holes. Sometimes, and I hate to be a big whiner and complain, but sometimes it really gets me that a large portion of my thinking powers are put to trying to protect myself from men. It bugs me that forever and ever, men will always have the upper hand. I guess someone will always have the upper hand because life really is one big competition, whether or not pacificists and all those people who say to me “it’s not a competition” want to admit it. NEWS FLASH: It is too. Everything is a competition and I’m determined as hell to win it. And if it means carrying pepper spray all the time, I’ll do it. And if it means carrying a concealable bazooka, I’ll do it. I can field strip a bazooka in two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Beat that, a-hole.





*Word to the wise, don’t get confused and you’ll stay alive.
**I swear a lot when I feel like my life is threatened. Just be glad I’m not dropping F-bombs like 99% the bloggers out there.


Some really good men read my blog. Thanks for being good men. I’d make a list of your names, but it would be too long, as my entire fan base is composed almost entirely of men.

Buying Lolita in Nashville (But Really Buying Pnin). Great Cover, Though.

I bought this book today. Notice how big the word Lolita is. That's why I bought it, I thought it was Lolita and I've wanted to read Lolita for a long time. I can't believe I fell for that marketing scheme. It worked! Who would have thought it would work? Especially on someone as brilliant as me. I blame the heat. It was so hot in the bookstore. I was dying. The pants I'm wearing today are this really heavy denim but they may as well be an electric blanket. They're bottling the heat up. And the bookstore is small and it was particularly crowded and there was this man sitting on a chair near me trying to have a conversation with me about the book he was reading and I couldn't understand a word he was saying. Poor guy. He was missing his front teeth. I think the bookstore owner, a part-time criminal justice lawyer, had just switched off the air conditioner. Maybe he was trying to sweat us out. So we were all stuck in there like houseflies in a mason jar, suffocating. I had to make a decision quick. I thought the book was Lolita and I've wanted to read Lolita for a while now, ever since I heard Robert Michael Pyle talk about Nabokov's love for butterflies*. . . . No wait, ever since hearing the Police song about the young teacher, the subject, of schoolgirl fantasy**. And Pyle just fed the fire. So I bought the book (it was ten dollars). I bought Pnin. I meant to buy Lolita.

In case you've never seen this edition of the book, the spine also says Lolita*** in huge letters, before anything else. It says, "By the author of LOLITA." Nevertheless, I'm excited to read Pnin. It's supposed to be great as well.




*If someone loves butterflies that much, they must be beautiful and therefore must write beautifully.

**First heard in junior high, 1991.

***At this point, Lolita is starting to sound like a bunch of nonsense.


I know you find the cover as irresistible as I find it.

The Joys of Commuting by Bicycle

I’m riding my bike home today. If you’ve never been to Nashville, then you’d hardly understand. There’s a song by the Kamikaze Hearts called “Tennessee.” A line in it says, “I never knew there was* hills in Tennessee, I always thought that it would be flat.” Yeah, me too. But no, no, it’s not flat. I guess a lot of places in the U.S. are hilly**, but are they hilly, hot, and humid all at once and are you on a bike with a bag strapped to your back?

Because if you’re not, you should be. It’s the only way to travel. Riding your bike in a place like, oh, Salt Lake City? That’s nothing until you’ve ridden Tennessee. Ha ha. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha. (Riding crazily into the misty distance, uphill, with a bag strapped to my back.)




*sic -- yeah, I know, it should be WERE.
** The world, really.

Julius Caesar: Impostor or Emperor-Incarnate?

So, recently some divers in France found this, the oldest known bust of Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone in southern France. But what really happened was, my friend Mike posed for someone during his brief stint in the art program at Utah State, and the student—in a fit of rage because he couldn't get the nose right— flew to France and . . . . dropped it . . . . in the river. Is anyone buying this?

That's really what happened.

The Golden Age of Film

This weekend I realized the truth about movies, again. That’s how life is, I believe, learning the same lessons over and over again until you die, and by that time, hopefully you understand everything that you should.

The truth about movies is that modern films suck. Old films have it all.

Just ask Stoker. Finally, after all these years, I sat down and watched Cool Hand Luke. Stoker watched it with me, but I said “I” in that last sentence because I have known that I ought to watch this film for a long time. At least since my first years in college, but I put it off and put if off, since I’m not a huge Paul Newman fan. I’ve got my Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and from time to time Rock Hudson and Robert Mitchum (I’ve heard tell that Gary Cooper should be in there somewhere, but I’ve never indulged in a Gary Cooper film). So anyway, I should have known. I should have known better, should have seen Cool Hand Luke a long time ago.

Anyway, Stoker, bless his insight, pointed out that the Coen brothers’ style isn’t really a style at all, it’s a rip off of the techniques from old films. And I mean, the day before we watched Cool Hand Luke (I was very sick this past weekend) I watched (again) North By Northwest and had noticed the same thing. Recently Stoker and I rented and viewed that let down film, No Country for Old Men, and what we loved about it (didn’t make up for what we loathed about it) was the absence of a film score. Older films didn’t have overproduced sounds. Many of them DID have film scores, but there is a distinct absence of, say, a microphone right next to the actor’s mouths, so we don’t have to listen to the suction and sloppy noises of a kiss. C’mon! Who wants to hear the details of a kiss!? No one. It doesn’t ADD to the moment, it’s a distraction!

Anyway, though I love many of the Coen brothers’ movies, I have to say, what I realized this weekend is that I don’t need to overdo it. My first love was correct and true. My first love, which bloomed in junior high and high school, was old films. There was a short period during graduate school when I watched an old Cary Grant show and felt a little embarrassed at its innocence, and I swore I’d never go back. I was cynical and bitter, I thought my eyes had been opened to the real world and that I finally knew what great art was. But I was naïve to assume so much.

The truth is, old films are pure and untouched by the dirty hands of modernity. What directors like Hitchcock couldn’t say outright, they said through implication and innuendo, they crafted a story around what could not be explained and in doing so, shed light on the dark corners of the human psyche. They created meaningful dialogue through what was said as much as what was UNSAID. Their sparse sets and stark images, such as those in North By Northwest (i.e. the scene outside the United Nations), say as much in the positive space as they do in the negative spaces. The color in North By Northwest is gorgeous. Tell me, have you ever seen anything like it?

In any case, I have always known that Stoker is a genius. He understands things and he has ideas about things. I’m an idea-lover. I can’t help it. And when I hear his ideas, I realize I’m madly in love with him all over again. Tonight or tomorrow night, I’ll finally see a Steve McQueen movie. I had this mentor a long time ago who raved about Steve McQueen. All this time I’ve never seen a Steve McQueen film. Can you believe it? It’s nice to still have things to do even though I’ve lived such a long life.

Air Travel

I leave for Utah today and I can't think about anything else. I'm plagued with worries. Traveling sucks, in a way. I don't mind the part where you're on the road or in the plane, but everything leading up to that time is rather stressful. All I can think about is getting to the airport on time, or being certain I've packed everything -- as we all know, if you forget something the trip will dissolve into a nightmare. Not really, but with the way I obsess you'd think that was the case.

In other people's lives, I'm sure that traveling is really smooth. Other people appear unruffled. These are also the kind of people who never pass gas or do the dishes or put their pants on one leg at a time. They walk through the airport with their laptop bag slung over their shoulder, their suits are neatly pressed, they exude confidence. They hang out with their peers at the airport bar, drinking and laughing like a beer commercial. Their teeth glimmer when they smile, their eyes are bright and sparkly and photoshopped. Everything is easy. Everything is good. Before the trip they have a manservant pack their bags for them. They know if they forget all their pants or socks, they'll just buy a new wardrobe. No big deal. A limo picks them up and takes them to the airport on a private back road. They can charter a helicopter if traffic is monstrous.

At least, this is how it looks from the outside. There's always people running around the airport who you'd think could never afford a ticket. They look like they just rolled out of a garbage can. There seems to be a windstorm of chaos following in their wake. You see them and expect to find loose newspapers trailing behind them and cookie crumbs stuck to their sweater. They look like they couldn't decide whether to travel comfortably, in their sweats, or business casual, in their freshly ironed sweats. You pass them as they sit in the McDonald's of the airport food court munching on fries and they look as harried as someone forced from bed at three in the morning to pick up their son who just got a DUI.

I fit into the harried crowd. I look like I've had second thoughts about my carry-on, like I wish I'd checked it after all. I look like I'm always just about to miss my plane and I'm lost and I can't read the sign announcing my gate. I don't wear sweats, but I'd be at home in them and everyone knows it and the flight attendants always ask if I want a blanket and a pillow as though they suspect I might have my own in that carry-on I've been sneering at the whole time. That would be wise, actually, since the blankets have been used by other passengers and who knows what diseases they were carrying. Small pox. Measles. Something like that.

Wish me luck.

Belated Birthday Post

Last Thursday I turned thirty. I could go on and on about the woes of aging and how strange it feels to say, "I'm thirty," and all that, but what's the point? This isn't a Hallmark card, or Shoebox Greeting or whatever brand of greeting card it is out there perpetuating all the hilarious jokes about getting old. In fact, why am I even talking about it?

Birthdays are still great, even when you get old. Honestly, I'm not really SAD about aging, if for no other reason than that the older I get, the better the presents get. Okay, so not really every year, just this year, otherwise by the time I am thirty-five I should have a Hummer . . . or a tank (the kind with cannons on it, not the ones seen driving around American towns doubling as Cadillac Escalades or some other "family" vehicle). And what's with all the crap about the economy being bad? I'm still spending money. Loads of it.

Last year I got a Trek 4300 for my birthday. That's a mountain bike. This year I got a Scott S40, that's a road bike. A picture:



What's with the bikes, you might ask. Simple. I haven't ruled out nuclear holocaust and when the shit is coming down, how else am I going to get around quickly? The rest of you will be in wheelchairs. I'll be gliding along on all my bikes.

Really I just wanted to say "the shit's coming down." For my sensitive readers out there, I've given up on you. The only sensitive people I know stopped reading my blog long ago. I'm too crass, I guess.*

I almost got a Sledgehammer this year, but instead I just put pegs on my Trek.

Seriously, who knew Scott was out there making bikes? Ski poles, ski goggles . . . and bikes. I guess I'm WAY behind the times.



Special thanks to my lover for working all the long hours just to put bread on the table and a bike in my back pocket (it weighs so little, you see). And also thanks to all the relatives who kindly sent me money (even though I KNOW you don't read my blog [secretly YOU are the sensitive readers I was talking about]). This is where it went: the bike and bike accoutrements. Happy birthday.



*Understatement is funny because it's understated. No one in their right mind could presume to think that the word "shit" is offensive. Understatement is a form of exaggeration, and we all know exaggeration is funnier than hell.