Introduction
This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.
If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.
What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.
May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara
You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.
Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!
So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!
Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.
January 19, 1991 – Berkeley
Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?
April 6, 1991 – Berkeley
Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.
Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else” anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!
August 19, 1992 – Berkeley
School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.
November 6, 1992 – Berkeley
Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.
I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.
I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.
November 16, 1992 – Berkeley
I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” So I told her, “I’ve got a job lined up in a factory deburring plastic parts on an assembly line. You see, when plastics are molded, there are flashings left over from the holes the liquid material was poured through. It’s actually pretty tricky, because if you slip with the file you can ruin the whole piece.” I was pleased to have pulled off the entire speech with a straight face. “Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s great!” Still managing not to laugh, I retorted, “No it isn’t, T—! It’s pathetic! I’m so ashamed!”
In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For
a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment