Welcome to Albany, California

Introduction

I live in Albany, California. If you’re not from around here, you probably haven’t heard of it. When I talk to people in other states who ask where I live, I usually just say “Berkeley area.” Well, perhaps it’s about time you learned about your blogger’s town.

This post is inspired by a great travel book I picked up recently: Roz Chast’s Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Of course there’s been more than enough written about that famous city, but Chast is a very funny writer and cartoonist. Not so much has been written about Albany and I’ll do my best to give you a chuckle or two.

(I’ve laid out this post according to Chast’s chapters, but that’s about where the similarities will end. I cannot do cartoons, but I did get some nice sketches from a budding local landscape architect on condition of anonymity.)

Let’s start here

Over a century ago, Albany was an unincorporated area where Berkeley people came to dump their garbage. One day in 1908 an angry band of shotgun-toting local women turned them away. This triumph inspired the residents to incorporate as the City of Ocean View, which (thanks to people’s good taste) was changed to Albany (after the city’s first mayor, who came from Albany, NY). The story of the armed women is acted out every year by students at our local elementary school. I suppose it wouldn’t be so charming if it had been men wielding the guns. Nobody knows where the men were on that day, as this was before video gaming and televised sports.

When I was in college I was aware of Albany, but only vaguely. I thought maybe Albany was the name of a district of Berkeley, like Westbrae or Elmwood. After living in San Francisco for about five years, my wife and I decided to head back to the East Bay where we could more realistically afford a house. “How about Albany?” my wife asked. “I hear they have good schools.” I shrugged and was like, “Yeah, sure, okay.” After a mere nine months of open houses every weekend and having more than forty offers rejected, we finally got a place and became Albanians. I’m not sure that’s what we’re called, actually … makes it sound like we’re from Albania. So … Albanites? Albanyites? Albanyans? Albanyone?

Basic layout

You don’t need to know that much about getting around Albany because it’s not very big—less than two square miles. You could cover it on foot in a day, but why would you, when it’s a great place to bike? Here’s a bike path map.

That green north-south route is the Ohlone Greenway, a bike path well off the street with a separate walking path. That east-west thoroughfare shown in white, Solano Ave, is where the cute shops are. There’s a busier, wider thoroughfare called San Pablo Ave that runs north-south and is more industrial, where you’ll find some solid restaurants, garages, and the Hotsy-Totsy Club (more on this later). Another bike path goes all the way out to the ocean.

Walking around

Albany, like its surrounding community, is a great for walking because it was built up before the Second World War, so it wasn’t designed around cars. This means it has wide sidewalks separated from the street by a median, so you can really enjoy a stroll without feeling like you’re always about to get run over. A lot of these sidewalks still have the imprint from the construction company that built them, showing the date:

Good sidewalks may not strike you as such a big deal, but not all communities have them. In this regard Albany is the polar opposite of Irvine, California, which caters to cars so completely it’s essentially illegal to walk there. (I think the city planners down in Irvine have given up and are just waiting for the kind of natural disaster that would require the whole city to be evacuated, so they can blast off, nuke the entire site from orbit, and just start over.) In Albany, by contrast, city planners are forever thinking of new ways to be cool, like installing bike lanes, allowing restaurants to build patios out into the street, and putting button-activated flashing lights up at our zebra crossings to help distracted motorists understand that “Hey, I’m walkin’ heah!” Nobody seems to mind that our houses have tiny garages built for Model-T Fords.

The subway

Okay, we don’t have a subway exactly, not like NYC. But we do have the Bay Area Rapid Transit line running through town. The stations and tracks are underground in Berkeley, because those guys wisely insisted on that, but in Albany it’s elevated. When you take the Ohlone Greenway you’re pretty much right under the tracks, so occasionally a train goes by overhead and your fillings rattle. 

The North Berkeley station is just a twelve-minute walk from the southern border of Albany. BART can take you to useful destinations like San Francisco and San Jose, and to the Oakland and San Francisco airports (and I mean all the way—no stupid shuttle bus required).

Stuff to do

Look, I’m not going to try to go toe-to-toe with Roz Chast’s list of goings-on in NYC. Obviously that’s your place if you just dig museums and live theater and such. That said, there’s a lot of culture in this region, such as the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley, the Museum of Paleontology on the UC Berkeley campus, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley hills. Needless to say San Francisco has all kinds of world class museums and stuff. (Don’t expect to see King Tut, though, even if they claim to have built an exhibit around him.)

Among most residents, the most popular pastime in Albany is ghost whips. This is where you head out to a large, empty parking lot, get your car going in a straight line, and then jump out and walk next to it. Okay, I confess, we don’t actually do this—our parking lots aren’t that big. I have it on good authority that for ghost whips, you need to head to Turlock, about 100 miles east.

Albany does have a couple of unique attractions, such as Golden Gate Fields, the only racetrack (horses, not dogs) in the Bay Area, and the Albany Sauna, one of the oldest Finnish-style saunas in the country (dating from 1934). According to Wikipedia, its “original furnace and rooms have been maintained to produce one of the most authentic sauna experiences outside of Finland.” I guess I should mention I’ve never actually been; saunas are not really my thing. But here’s a tip: if you want to sound impressive, pronounce it “SOW-na” (first syllable rhymes with “now”).

I’m a cheap bastard so I have a lot to recommend here that’s free. First off, our regional parks are phenomenal. Just head toward the hills and your options are endless (Wildcat Canyon, Tilden, Sibley, Huckleberry, Chabot, Briones), or head toward the water to the Albany Bulb, Berkeley Marina, or Point Isabel. 

Hiking, road cycling, mountain biking, they’re all great in these parts. We even have the fully paved Nimitz Trail running along the ridge of the Berkeley hills with spectacular views of the bay, so even a dweeb on a Segway could have a good time. Here is some eye candy.

Walking around in town is fun too, because we have great weather. Winter is not depressing here, like in places where the cold is biting and/or everything is brown and grey. Winter is our green season and all kinds of trees are blossoming right now. And plants grow so well in this area, most homeowners become part-time gardeners.

If you favor walking with a  purpose, this is a great community for a pub crawl. Start at the Westbrae Biergarten (in Berkeley, just five minutes on foot from Albany), where you can enjoy some choice local draft beer and greasy snacks.

Then proceed down the road ten minutes to Gilman Brewing (delicious Belgian style brews), then stroll another four minutes to Fieldwork Brewing Company, which in my opinion makes the best IPAs on the planet. After all this you’ll need some exercise, so fortunately it’s over a mile to an old standby, the Hotsy Totsy Club (slogan: “Keeping Albany tipsy since 1939”). The best thing about the Hotsy Totsy is that it has an awesome taco truck next door.

On the way home, swing by Schmidt’s Pub, an Albany fixture since 1978 that kind of feels like a house (because it is) and always has great beers on draft, plus some nice original art.

Nerdy stuff

If you decide to live here, let me dangle this nice bonus in front of you: Albany residents get to use both the Alameda County library system and the City of Berkeley library system. That’s fifteen locations! Not that you’d visit all of them, of course, but it means a ton of inventory, and you can have books or movies sent to your local branch for free. The main Berkeley library is a beautiful old building with five floors of goodness. And the gorgeous North Branch, which is the closest to Albany, is a designated historical landmark, having been built by the famous architect James Plachek and funded by the Federal Works Progress Administration.

Now, if you’re sneering at that last paragraph thinking I’m some kind of total nerd, well of course I am! But this area might rub off on you in a good (i.e., intellectual) way. After all, lots of UC Berkeley faculty live in Albany (particularly if they want to raise children in a good school district), and Albany is also home to the University Village, which houses Cal grad students and their families. According to US Census data , Albany has a highly educated population: about 87% of our adult residents have at least some college education; 5% have an Associate degree; 32% have up to a Bachelor’s degree; and 40% also have a Graduate degree.

What does this mean? Well, if you want expert guidance in literature or film, look at what videos were recently returned to the library and not yet re-shelved, or what’s on the hold shelf. You can also get advice from bookstore employees, such as at Pegasus Books (which is technically in Berkeley but a stone’s throw away), who are as stoked on great books as you are. And if you’re looking for free books, we have scores of those little libraries along the sidewalks—I mean, they’re everywhere, and the books in them are top-notch (not just the crap you see in airport newsstands).

What’s more, your book club can occasionally invite, as a guest, the writer of the book you’re reading. We also get pretty good lectures; I’ve attended readings by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. And when chatting over your back fence with your neighbor, you can switch seamlessly among English, French, and Latin. (Okay, now I’m exaggerating.)

Flora and fauna

I know I already talked about the flora but let me add that it’s a true Mediterranean climate, which is one of the rarest climates on earth. According to the Atlas of the Biodiversity of California, the only other places on Earth with this climate are the Mediterranean Sea region (duh!), Australia, South Africa, and Chile. In this climate, everything grows amazingly well. Spit out a sunflower seed and you’ll have a giant yellow flower in what seems like mere seconds. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but really, all kinds of groovy stuff grows in abundance here. The only thing we don’t have a lot of is lawns, because we refuse. They’re so vulgar.

In terms of fauna, the Albany area is great for bird watching because it’s along the Pacific Flyway, so we get all kinds of cool birds: ospreys, great blue herons, terns, and all manner of shorebirds. Up in the hills I see hawks and falcons and even the occasional owl. Check out this great horned owl that perched one day in our neighbor’s tree.

In town here we get lots of songbirds and a surprising number of wild turkeys, which fearlessly stand down cars, sometimes at major intersections.

We don’t get the alligators in our sewers like in NYC, but I have seen plenty of coyotes up in the hills, and a couple of bobcats. I haven’t seen a mountain lion but we do have them, and I’ve seen the remains of their kills. Twice during bike rides, at dusk, I’ve been hit by a bat. (Their echolocation actually isn’t all that good and they dart around crazily, like moths.) We also get cute little newts, and in fact one of my favorite cycling roads, South Park Drive, is closed to cars five months out of the year for the annual newt crossing.

And, of course, we get deer wandering the streets with oddly little fear of anything. The expression “deer in the headlights” doesn’t apply because they never seem to even look up.

Food

Suffice to say there is all kinds of good food either in Albany or a short walk or bike ride away. The dim sum in Albany is very good; the dim sum in Oakland’s Chinatown is great; the dim sum in San Francisco (a BART ride away) is surely on par with anything in NYC. We have an embarrassment of Sushi places, great taquerias (even Calvin Trillin, writing in The New Yorker, admits San Francisco bests NYC in this regard), and top-notch pizza. (I’ve had both Giordano’s and the original Uno, arguably the most famous pizza places in Chicago, and find them identical to Zachary’s and Little Star, respectively, which are competing places on either end of Solano Ave.) Of course restaurants come and go so I can’t go down a huge list other than to say dining out here is legit. And in terms of famous restaurants that aren’t going anywhere, Albany is walking distance from Chez Panisse, where California Cuisine was invented.

We also have a number of top-notch bakeries. Not far away is Grace Baking, a well-loved place, and in Berkeley there’s Cheese Board, which has lots of tasty baked doodads but is particularly known for pizza. They’ll sell you the dough so your pies can come out great at home, too. Albany’s newest place, Pâtisserie Rotha, has such great pastries, people will stand in line for hours for them (or so I’m told). A friend brought us some of Rotha’s stuff and it was darn good. (Had I waited hours for it, I’m sure I’d have liked it even more.) 

There’s also Semifreddi’s, which I always thought was the best in the business for baguettes and such until I tried Acme Bread Company and realized it was vastly superior. Technically Acme is in Berkeley but it’s a short walk from my house.

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado which is at too high an altitude for baking, so I am just blown away at the great baked goods here. When I’ve traveled on business I’ve tried in vain to get good bread, pastries, etc. Of course I’ve had great stuff in France (though no better than here, honestly). I will concede that for bagels, there is absolutely no substitute for NYC. And, having racked my brain, I realize also that the Vogel’s sandwich bread my family had in Glasgow is better than what we get in the grocery store here. But still: Albany is a great place for foodies.

Apartments & housing

Housing is really expensive here. I could go on about this, but it would be boring.

Final stop

You may be wondering why I chose this topic. Well, I figured if you live in a place where winter is harsh, you might like a little escapist travelogue. On the other hand, if you live near Albany—i.e., anywhere in Alameda County—property tax is due in about a month. This is a good time to count the many blessings we have here!

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume II

Introduction

It’s another slow news day. So, taking a cue from Can’t and Won’t, a collection of very short stories, essays, letters, and recounted dreams from Lydia Davis (click here for details), I’m assembling and posting some excerpts from some old letters to my brothers. (My first set of these is here.) These bits and bobs should be better than actual diary excerpts because at least I wrote them with an audience in mind, so I had incentive to make them good. I’ve provided, for each snippet below, the locale I was writing from.

April 24, 1989 – UC Santa Barbara

I went to see this movie, required for my English class, in one of the lecture halls on campus tonight. I planned to hit Gold’s Gym afterward since it was closed at 6:00 this morning when we rode down there (they said due to “water damage,” whatever that means). Anyhow, the movie’s supposed to be at 7:30, but the bozos can’t figure out how to lower the screen. They spend twenty minutes on that. Then, they can’t figure out how to turn off the lights—another ten minutes down the drain. Then, for twenty more minutes they can’t get any sound for the movie. Meanwhile I’m sitting next to this funny looking guy and this stupid girl with him who’s staring at the ceiling and laughing at everything and reminding me of one of one of the groupies I’d have if I were a rock star. Out of the blue, the guy turns to me and says, “You want gum?” Is it okay to accept gum from strangers? It’s Extra gum so I take the risk. It’s really rubbery, really slippery, good for blowing bubbles. Finally, after forty-five minutes they get the movie going. Halfway through, I blow a bubble a bit too aggressively and the gum goes flying out of my mouth, and you know what? I never found it! I was really slouching, with my feet up on the seat in front of me, so I was sure it landed on my clothes, but it was nowhere to be found. Not on the floor, my clothes, anywhere. Gone. Vanished. Anyhow, the movie was great but needless to say I didn’t have time to lift weights afterward.

I’ve got some new music. First of all, and don’t scream, I’ve been turned on to rap music by Captain John Pelstar. So I’m getting into Kool Moe Dee, Public Enemy, and Ice-T. You can hate me if you want, but once you start listening to this shit it’ll probably grow on you too.

Jesus, what the hell am I doing? I’ve gotta read Huis Clos (aka No Exit) by Sartre, in the original French; memorize about 4.5 billion vocab words for same; and write a 6-8 page paper on a 400-page book! I’ve got a final exam on Friday, on Saturday, on Monday, on Wednesday, and the following Friday! Holy shit!

But wait, there’s one more thing I gotta tell you. I’m spreading a new rumor through the cycling team. The rumor is: we’re being sponsored by Club Tan this season! Unlimited free tanning for everybody on the team! But you didn’t hear it from me! What’s scary is we’re scraping so low now for sponsors that everybody actually believes this. I told Mike B–, who’s on the sponsorship committee, and even he believed it! Now that he knows it’s just a BS rumor, he’s been spreading it around too. By the time the season rolls around, everybody will “know” about it. Shit, I really gotta go.

October 28, 1989 – Isla Vista

So I’m riding with Brett, a really cool guy on the cycling team (aren’t they all) and we’re exiting Highway 101 toward Goleta. The exit is long and uphill, and we’re going really slow because it’s a rest day. We pass this racer type, wearing some fancy Rincon team outfit, and we say hi but she doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. So we keep riding up the hill, and at the top there’s a stop sign where we turn right. I always run it, since there’s never any cars there. In fact, I once ran it right in front of a cop and he didn’t bat an eye. It’s that much of a blow-off. So I’m behind Brett, and oddly enough he actually starts to slow down. So I decide to go around him on the right, and no sooner do I start to pass him than the Rincon girl comes surging up the right side, without warning, almost plowing into me. Stunned, but still unwilling to brake, I decide to go around Brett’s left side instead. As I’m coming around, I look again at the girl, like, “What is she thinkin’?” Then, I hear a noise behind me. I look over my left shoulder and this truck is suddenly bearing down on us. No problem, he has plenty of room, I think. So I look forward again, and to my horror, Brett has slowed down even more and I’m hopelessly hooked on him. I have nowhere to go because of the truck, and my bike seems to have locked into his somehow. My bike gets pulled out from under me, and my butt is falling towards the rear wheel. If my butt were to land on the wheel, it would drag my balls into the brake caliper and drag me along like that, ruining my chances of ever being a father. In the nick of time, I manage to pull my right foot out of the toe-clip and stand up on it, though the bike is still being dragged along, and my left foot is still in its pedal. My left hand is holding onto the top of the handlebar, and I’m sliding on my right foot now, with my right arm swung high like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. To give you a better perspective of how grave the situation is, I should perhaps mention that the right side of the handlebar is dragging on the ground, while my puny left arm is holding the bike up as I watch my brand new Dura-Ace Integrated 8 rear derailleur coming precariously close to hitting the asphalt. I also need to protect my precious Dura-Ace right brake lever so I’m yarding on that handlebar with all my might. I slide like this for some fifteen feet, before Brett’s bike finally lets go of mine and I grind slowly to a stop. Total damage: to body, none. To bike, three inches of torn Benotto tape valued at 95 cents. (I fixed it up with electrical tape; I don’t use that part of the handlebar anyway.) I can’t believe I didn’t go down; indeed, Brett said later he was just waiting for the terrible scraping sound and my blood-curdling scream. So the end result was that disaster was once again narrowly averted, making me more cocky than ever.

October 31, 1990 – Berkeley

The owner of the bike shop has got a really cute kid, like eighteen months old. The wife brings him by daily. He already seems intrigued with the bike parts, and likes to drag a floor pump around the shop with him. He’ll hold the hose up to his face and point the handle towards you, so you pump it and give him a blast of air. This makes him giggle like crazy. Every now and then he’ll wander into the shop area and look up at me and say “Papa?” Today I said, “Can you say Dana?” and he did, the little rascal. Then he took a few swipes at a bottom bracket with a screwdriver, which is about the level of proficiency of most of our mechanics, so I figure he’ll be doing spot repairs within a year and everything else before kindergarten. That’ll be good for the shop, because he’ll be free to work full time unlike us college kids who only do 10 or 12 hours a week.

September 12, 1991 – Berkeley

So I’m biking down Bancroft, a street that borders the campus to the south, and I see this young female student being heckled by a homeless dude in army fatigues. He’s in the street spitting on a car (presumably hers), and she’s across the car on the sidewalk, and in a rage she throws this jar at him. Of course it misses, and hits the ground like a foot from me, sending broken glass flying across my legs. In shocked disbelief I watch as the homeless dude runs around the car at her as if to attack her, but before I can see what happens this car behind me, totally oblivious to the mêlée, starts honking at me and I have to get out of the way. I tell you, this is a weird place.

September 22, 1993 – San Francisco

Planetary Gear is a kinda dumb name for a really cool bike shop. It’s this tiny, cramped place with a giant Simplex clock on the wall, posters of great racers of the past, and old antique bikes everywhere. All kinds of ancient celeste-green Bianchi framesets, these cool Dutch Mary Poppins bikes like Geoff’s probably riding these days, old Gazelles and Allegros and an occasional Basso. It definitely has that old, retro Euro flavor. Not a click shifter or clipless pedal in the place. The owner, Grant, is this youngish looking guy, as Euro as his shop, who coolly dangles a cigarette from his lips and looks at you with a curious, slightly judgmental look, his eyes twinkling boyishly like Mickey Rourke’s, as if he’s deciding whether to laugh at you or take your money or both. He’s an expert at maximizing the flash and panache of a tired old Italian road bike, and selling it for more than it cost when it was new and state-of-the-art. I’ve seen him really rip some people off, but I figure, heck, at least they’re not being ripped off on something lame, like one of those Allsop Softride monstrosities. Besides, he is selling the last vestige of Western Civilization; he should be well compensated for that.

I drop by every so often, but I never actually do any business. For the most part, my bikes are pretty modern. And then when I finally did go in on Saturday to do buy something—I needed a spring for the ancient Mafac cantilever brake on my commuting bike—Grant wasn’t even there. Some other guy was working who didn’t seem too with it. No shirt, no shoes, no service—and I mean the guy, not the shop policy. Anyway, he ignored me for a while, but after I stared at him long enough he finally said, “Yeah.” I asked if they had a Mafac cantilever spring, and I pointed to an old cross bike that, of course, had them. “For this brake right here.”

He smirked. “Yeah, I’ve got that, but I can’t sell it to you.” This seemed to please him and—oddly enough—me as well. “You gotta come in Wednesday or Thursday and talk to Grant about that,” he said.

          “Why,” I said.

          “Well, because … huh. Let me see your bike.”

          “It’s not here. I’ll bring it in Wednesday and show it to Grant.”

          “Yeah. Do that. Cause he’s real picky about where that stuff goes.”

December 11, 1995 – San Francisco

I started my new job today. They took me out to lunch to a really cool place. It was nice, but not exactly posh—very old-fashioned San Francisco-ey. Our booth was solid oak. There was a button on the wall that rang a buzzer to call our waiter. He was an old but spunky fellow with a mouth. Somebody asked if the lemonade was fresh squeezed; he returned with a glass of water and pointed to a bowl of fresh lemon wedges that had been on the table the whole time. “Make it yourself,” he said. Later, when somebody tried to order a chicken dish, he said, “Come back at dinner. We haven’t killed the chicken yet. It would be way underdone.”

Our discussion during lunch ranged from the industry and technology itself—which is sufficiently interesting that even non-dorks can participate—to the tale of a fellow employee who, when skydiving for pleasure, had a parachute failure. The failure, the raconteur explained, was of the “Mae West” variety: the cord somehow got flung up over the parachute, causing it to fail to fill all the way. The name derives from its looking like a bra. It is less drastic than another type of failure called the “candle,” which is almost always fatal. This colleague lived, but was in traction for a while.

September 18, 2008 – Albany/Boulder

Sorry to hear about [your daughter] Lydia’s bike crash. You can tell her the following story to cheer her up. On the day of freshman orientation [back in 1984] at Fairview High [in Boulder, Colorado], I somehow found myself in the position of getting a ride there from D—. But not in a car, of course, but on the rack of his bike. So we were flying down Greenbriar Blvd, where it drops down from Shanahan Ridge, and D—’s Dr. Who scarf was flying out behind him, and he let out a couple of whoops, for sheer joy. Suddenly, the weak part of my brain, the insecure part, the part that fixates about good First Impressions and whatnot, kind of took over, and I worried about what people would think, since I was starting at this new school that none of my junior high classmates were attending, so I had to make all new friends. What would my classmates think if they saw me on the back of D—’s bike? They’d probably think I was his bitch.

I decided I just couldn’t stay on there, on the rack of this bike piloted by Dr. Who. So I bailed off the back. The weak, insecure part of my brain is pretty stupid, of course, and neglected to notice that we were really flying. How fast? Well, it was a steep downhill, so we probably doing like 20 mph, and I’m thinking maybe even more. I mean, it was enough speed to start D— whooping, after all.

So, you can guess the rest. I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but I sure hit the ground. I did one of those stage slides like heavy metal rockers were doing during that era, where I slid on the tops of my shoes and—more importantly—my knees. Just ripped those kneecaps right open, like you’d taken a planer or a rasp to them or something. (I was wearing shorts, unfortunately.)

So after that I was going around freshman orientation gushing blood from both knees. I considered for a moment that the girls might be impressed by my toughness and my stoicism, but of course they were just grossed out, I mean just totally disgusted. I’m amazed I don’t have scars from it. And of course I had to try to answer to D— when he asked, incredulously, “What did you do that for?”

I really didn’t know what to say. I guess I just shrugged. “Didn’t realize how fast we were going, I guess.” It was odd, though ... I felt somehow as though justice had been served. I felt like I deserved the pain and the public scorn, for thinking I was too cool for my friend.

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I Will Disrupt Your Coffee

Introduction

I want to disrupt your coffee.  I’m using the word “disrupt” because it’s so current and powerful.  Dang it!  I just realized maybe it’s already passé… maybe “disrupt” was current when I started the sentence but lapsed by the end.  Whatever.  I’m going to use it anyway.

(By the way, I’m just being flippant with the title of this post.  I hope to disrupt your coffee, but I don’t kid myself that I have much influence over my readers.)

What I’m saying is, I’m a newcomer to drinking coffee—in the last week or so I finally learned how to make it, albeit in a very old-fashioned way—but I’m going to have the audacity to try to get you, a coffee veteran, to change your approach to this ancient beverage.  That’s what I understand this whole “disruption” thing to be.

The ask

I’m going to ask you to consider drinking your coffee black from now on.  It’s that simple.  I’ll provide the rationale as we go along.  (If you already drink your coffee black, read this anyway because it might give you a pleasurable smugness.)

I am emboldened to suggest this because I’m not the first one to do so.  I learned this when talking to my daughter about the soda tax passed two years ago in nearby Berkeley.  Berkeley is the first city in the U.S. to pass an excise tax on sugary drinks, and according to this article it’s working out well.  Berkeley’s law covers “flavored coffee drinks,” a category which includes not just premixed, bottled beverages but also any coffee to which a barista adds sweetener:  “The distributor [pays] a tax based on the quantity of sweetener used according to the printed instructions,” according to this article.  (If you add your own sugar, oddly enough, it doesn’t get taxed.  A little loophole, I guess.)

So, how is it that Berkeley voters—despite fierce opposition from the American Beverage Association—gave this complicated proposition a landslide victory?  Simple:  Berkeleyites (aka Berzerkers, Berkleyistas) are enemies of freedom.  I don’t mean to imply that that’s a bad thing.  I myself am an enemy of freedom.  Society gives us freedom and what do we do with it?  We read Us magazine, buy microwave popcorn, and rudely lash out at strangers via the Internet.

What’s wrong with cream and sugar?

Look, I have no real problem with putting cream and sugar in coffee and am not here to render any expert opinion on what a cup of coffee ought to be.  As coffee achievers go, I’m pretty much a dabbler; I only have coffee when I really need the caffeine (though that’s more and more often these days).  For most of my life, I tended to dress up that rare cup of coffee with sugar, or maybe Sugar In the Raw if I was feeling all fancy, and either cream, half-and-half, or milk.  This increased the charisma of the beverage, and to this day I enjoy that flavor.

But then the other morning I had an epiphany.  I was rushing to get on a very early conference call (the downside of being the odd West Coast employee) and made up some instant coffee.  The brand I use—never mind what it is, especially since I’m about to bag on it—is fairly upscale and describes itself as “amazingly close to a freshly brewed cup of coffee.”  I used to tolerate this product okay, but either my jar has gone bad or my tastes have changed… this time, it tasted awful.  It wasn’t just bitter—it was sour.  I added plenty of sugar and milk but they didn’t help.  And then I thought, wait—is that what we use cream and sugar for?  To dampen the flavor?  That might make sense with a lousy product, but aren’t most coffee drinkers buying pretty good stuff?  The fresh beans, the Peets, the Keurigs, and all that?  Why would you dilute that?

Think of it this way.  Imagine you lined up a row of giant mugs, each a quarter filled, with a variety of coffees progressing from barebones to deluxe:  Brim, McDonald’s, Peet’s from frozen ground beans, Peet’s from their store, Peet’s from beans you grind to order, and whatever is served at the Four Seasons Hotel in Florence.  If you took a sip of each, you’d surely notice a great range of quality.  Now add a normal amount of sugar and cream:  you’d still notice a big difference, even if you used the same grade A organic cream and pure unadulterated cane sugar in each mug.  Now imagine adding more and more cream and sugar to each mug, tasting each at intervals.  The difference from one cup to the next would get blurred.  Eventually they’d all taste the same (i.e., like sweet cream).

So assuming you’ve settled on a favorite brand of coffee, something very upscale and high-quality, perhaps to the point that you even have a favorite bean and/or a favorite roast … why would you then go and add these very basic products—cream or milk and/or sugar—which blunt your coffee’s distinctive flavor?

Is coffee too bitter to drink black?

Perhaps you just like coffee better with cream and sugar, full stop.  And no, it’s not because you’re some kind of wuss and find the undiluted flavor of coffee too bitter to handle.  You don’t mind the bitterness; you just like a little cream and sugar, and you are this close to abandoning this essay except that on some level you’re enjoying your growing hatred of me and my unsophisticated opinions.

You know what?  I agree with you—coffee isn’t that bitter!  Nobody is trying to cover up the flavor!  Meanwhile, even if it is a tiny bit bitter, humans can learn to enjoy bitterness.  I give you the India Pale Ales that are all the rage nowadays.  I really do love them, and know from personal experience that they’re an acquired taste.  I remember the first time I had a Racer 5, which—at 75 IBUs—is a pretty bitter beer.  Man, I hated it.  But now it’s one of my favorites.  (My absolute favorite is the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which is rated at 90 IBUs; when I tried that one for the first time, I was far enough into IPAs that I loved it right away.)

And—though I’m no expert on coffee—I gather that to the extent that it is bitter, this is a failing.  This article suggests four possible causes of coffee being bitter:  it’s brewed wrong, the grind size is wrong, the water is too hot, or the brewing equipment is dirty.  So a really good cup shouldn’t be that bitter anyway.  So why do we sweeten it?

I don’t know for sure how people get into the habit of putting sugar and cream in their coffee, but I’d guess that when they started drinking it, the flavor struck them as unusual and they dressed it up to make it more familiar.  From there it just became habit.

“But wait!” you may be thinking.  “It’s not that!  It’s just that coffee with cream and sugar tastes really good!  You’re overthinking this!”

What makes us enjoy a flavor?

Let’s not be so hasty.  Let’s think about this.  What makes us decide something tastes good?  I read some article on sweetness and I’m not going to do try to dig that up, but it was something to the effect that we humans are hardwired to like the flavor of things that are calorically dense.  This was an evolutionary adaptation, a way nature gets us to lay in all the calories we can when they’re available, to avoid famine.  So a sweet tooth is pretty unsophisticated, isn’t it?  Like kids with their damn sodas and candy and Froot Loops!  Loving sweet things is natural … but I think it’s also kind of weak.  Fat isn’t so different … it’s calorically dense, too.

But coffee?  Black coffee has almost no calories.  Maybe we like it because, as described by this article, “caffeine enhances dopamine (DA) signaling in the brain.”  In other words, coffee produces a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.  But a) people also like decaf, and b) if this was only about caffeine, people would just pop NoDoz.  So coffee provides a more sophisticated enjoyment than mere dopamine response.  It appeals to our cultured side, not just our primitive impulses.  (Maybe this is why dogs and cats don’t crave it.)

So why blend this acquired taste with extra stuff?  Is it really necessary to pile these treats on top of each other?  If so, why not make every cup of coffee an Irish coffee by adding whisky, and/or always having a donut with it?  

I have two problems with this treat-upon-treat enhancement of coffee.  First off, the cheap dopamine buzz of fat and sugar seems like a vulgar addition to a fairy sophisticated product.  Nobody adds sugar or fat to an IPA, after all, and  I’m not the only person who considers it a travesty to put corn-syrup-laden ketchup on a hot dog.  Second, coffee isn’t a treat—for so many of us, it’s a habit we indulge several times a day.  If we can learn to enjoy it on its own merit, we don’t only elevate our taste, but we avoid gratuitous sugar and fat (and the temptation to ever make do with non-dairy creamer and/or Sweet'N Low).

I’m not saying we should cut out cream and sugar entirely—just that we get over the habit of always including them.  I think they really are just a habit, a rote add-on to the coffee ritual.  I remember watching a colleague customizing his Starbuck’s coffee:  first a splash of milk, then a splash of half-and-half, then two packets of sugar, then a little shake of cocoa on top.  He assembled this concoction several times a day.  I asked him, “Why not add the sugar first, when the coffee is hotter, so it’ll dissolve better?”  He shrugged and said, “I’ve always done it this way.”

Trust me:  it’s not hard to learn to like coffee black.  It took me all of three cups to see the light, whereas it took at least a dozen introductions to IPA before I acquired the taste.  (I’d inherited a bunch of it after throwing a party a few years back, and by the time they were gone, I was a convert.)  Black coffee is actually pretty dang tasty.  And you know what?  Now that I have a taste for it, I’m more versatile:  I can drink it black as a matter of course, but next time I’m at a fancy restaurant with the cute little pitcher of cream and the little hinge-lidded cup of fancy brown sugar cubes, I can fuss pleasurably with all of that because it’ll still taste good to me.

One more rationale

I’ll give you one more reason to drink your coffee black:  it makes you more cool.  At least, drinking black coffee makes me feel a bit more cool.  Not many behaviors can achieve this sense of cool.  I could smoke a cigarette, but that would just make me an idiot.  I could drive a sporty little convertible, but that would feel like a pose.  I could wear a badass leather jacket and/or ride a Harley, but—being a forty-seven year old dad—I would look ridiculous.  But to like my coffee black … that’s a little bit of cool that is still within my reach.

(This isn’t a male macho thing.  Drinking coffee black is also cool for a woman.  For example, the woman celebrated in the Cake song “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” would surely drink her coffee black.)

Call to action

To be clear, I’m not asking you to give up cream and sugar altogether.  I’m suggesting that the next time you have a cup of coffee—which is probably only hours from now—you not add anything to it.  Give this a taste.  If it doesn’t appeal to you, taste it some more and contemplate the flavor for a moment.  What’s wrong with it?  Couldn’t you learn to like this? 

Take like a week.  See if you don’t develop a taste for pure, adulterated coffee.  Assuming you do, now you can ask if there’s any reason to go back to cream and sugar.  And if there is—if you just plain enjoy that more—well that’s fine too and now you know your preference is real, and not just a habit born of unthinking repetition.

(Should you put milk in your tea?  That’s a whole other question….)

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From the Archives - Haircut Gone Wrong

Introduction

I’ve always lacked a vocabulary for hair styles. When the barber asks what I want, I never know what to say. Directions like “take off an inch” seem meaningless—I have no real sense of how long my average hair shaft is, nor how much they vary. Today at Supercuts I went through the normal struggle before the hair stylist brought out a visual aid: photos of six men, none of whose hair looked anything like mine. They were swarthy men with curly hair and names like “Rado” and “Moose.” I pointed essentially at random and let the hair stylist use her discretion. The haircut came out fine.

That isn’t to say my haircuts have always come out fine. The worst one? Well, right before I moved from Colorado to California in 1987, my buddy Pete offered to cut my hair. He’d never cut hair before, but I gave him a shot. He snipped away for awhile with what seemed like great confidence, but then stepped back, frowned, and said, “Dude, it’s all screwed up. I better buzz it.” So I started my California life with a sub-Sinead buzz-cut. (Adding insult to injury, Pete then had the nerve to nickname me “Curious,” as in “Curious George.”)

After that buzz cut finally grew out, I experimented a lot, letting my hair get pretty long at times and having fun with hair gel. During my freewheeling late-‘80s SoCal years, my ‘do often looked something like this: 

When I moved to the Bay Area in summer of 1990, I wanted to get a high-paying office job so I decided to get a nice short haircut. (With hindsight, I should have gone native and grown my hair even longer, since I ended up with yet another bike shop job anyway.)

Below is the tale of my first Berkeley haircut experience, which didn’t go at all as I’d expected.

Haircut Gone Wrong - July 27, 1990

The hair stylist I used to go to in Boulder always told me, “Women should not cut hair. They’re too emotional, too unpredictable. They’ll screw up another woman’s hair if they’re jealous of her looks. And when they’re in a bad mood, no customer is safe.” Or something to that effect; I forget exactly what he said or just how he put it. I wasn’t ever sure how much stock to put in this judgment. I once got a haircut from this Italian woman who seemed to have her own ideas about what would look good, and did exactly the opposite of what I asked for. Thing is, it grew out really well and became one of the best haircuts I’ve ever had.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately leave the other day when, during my first week living in Berkeley, I went to get my hair cut at a hair salon on Bancroft Ave and found only female stylists. I was looking for a little trim (I mean a haircut—get your mind out of the gutter!), because it had been awhile since my last haircut, from my brother Geoff, and it was growing out really unevenly. Ordinarily I wouldn’t really care, but I’m trying to get a job right now and if I can’t dress as nicely as the next guy for these interviews I might as well not look too scraggly.

Besides, there’s something so right about having your hair cut as soon as you land in a new place. All the old cowboys always went straight to the barber as soon as they hit a town, right after they’d had a good meal and a drink at the saloon. You’ve seen it in the movies. Of course, if it was a Clint Eastwood western, the hero also wasted no time in shooting half a dozen people and bedding down some fine woman. Well, I’m no Eastwood but at least I can have the old hair evened out a little bit.

So here’s what transpired. I sit down in the barber chair and right off the woman with the scissors is fuming mad about something. “Whaddya want,” she scowls as she spins me around in the chair. I start to tell her but I don’t think she’s listening. Instead, she’s muttering furiously: “Every day it’s that damn radio: first this station, then that, why don’t they just find a station and leave it instead of always switching around, all day long. It’s making me sick.” I almost decide to make a run for the door, but it’s too late, she’s already begun.

I can’t even see the carnage because she has me turned away from the mirror. Usually a barber will keep you facing the mirror so you can watch him or her work, but throughout this haircut the chair faces away. Every time my hair stylist finishes a strafing run of snip‑snip‑ snip‑snip‑snip she exhales briskly, the exhaust phase of her constant seething. I look at the other two women working there, and they seem to be the overly cheerful type that always rankle grumpy women like the one who is attacking my head.

I look at the guy in the next chair, who looks something like a fat Stephen Roche. He’s cheerfully chatting away with the youngish woman cutting his hair and constantly asking technical questions. I’d hate to be in her shoes, because his is the kind of hair that just can’t really be made to look good. I don’t mean to hack on the guy, but his hair is so thick and has such tight little curls that all I can see in its future is that trimmed hedge look—his hair is doomed to be a big cube or melon‑ball unless shaped creatively, like Grace Jones’ anvil‑shaped job or the strange skewed‑plane look sported by rap artists. I met a black guy with such a hairdo at the optometrist’s, and he was getting mismatched contact lenses: one magenta, one green. But that’s another story.

Anyhow, I’m pondering the futility of this other guy’s hair, and the increasingly tragic plight of my own, when one of the bubbly women looks right at me and says, “What’s your name?” I tell her and she says, “Well, Dana, you look angry. Why is that?” The only thing I can think to say is “I just ran over my cat in my parents’ Blazer.” This response has popped into my head, and won’t go away, and I can’t think of any other. I’m tempted to actually utter it, but being bitter or sarcastic with people is no way to conduct yourself in a strange city, even if it’s Berkeley.

So while I’m trying to assemble a nice, safe response to this really stupid question, Jackie the Ripper snorts in my ear, “Don’t even listen to her. Just don’t pay any attention.” Now a new response to the question has rooted in my head: “I’m not angry, I’m just really concerned about the unstable and obviously upset woman cutting my hair.” I can’t really use this response either because I feel like somehow I’ve created a bond with the psycho woman in our mutual dislike for ol’ Mary Lou Retton over there … a bond which I don’t want to disturb because the snip‑snip‑snip sound is now slowing down somewhat, and the terrible nasal fuming sound has gotten a bit quieter.

In time, the breathing in my ear begins to sound pretty normal and the snipping is at a higher pitch, indicating that only the very tips of the scissors are being used. This is a very slow, deliberate cutting now. So slow, in fact, that cutting the back of my hair takes about twice as long as the top and sides combined. An eternity later she’s done, but instead of turning me around to face the mirror she gives me a hand mirror and asks, “How do you like the back?” I am shocked to see a graceful semicircle where the hair ends on my neck. She’s obviously very proud of it. And geometrically, it’s perfect. Aesthetically, I really don’t know what to say. I’ve really never seen anything like it. It’s so short and precise . . . truly bizarre.

Without another word, she takes off my little poncho cape deal and starts putting away her stuff. Paddling with my feet, I sort of walk my chair around to where I can see the mirror, and as soon as my reflection comes into my field of vision, I stop dead. The horror! What’s left of my hair is running down my forehead in miserable little wet strands. I’ve never been one to be obsessed with my appearance, but this is really serious. I feel a strange sort of detachment from the whole thing, like it’s too horrible to really be me. It’s the same sense of withdrawn awe I felt when I once severely cut the knuckle of my ring finger on some glass and could clearly see the full depth of the incision and the massive flap of skin, only a second before spraying blood brought me back to reality.

The haircutting woman must notice the strange look on my face because she hands me a comb and says, “Oh, here. Style it.” How? There’s nothing to style! And my head is so . . . so round! It’s not that every strand is uniformly short; it’s that most of the strands are just plain gone. But the detached feeling continues and I’m oddly calm. I have this inexplicable faith that by the time I’ve paid my eight bucks and gone home, my hair will look different. It’ll be dry then, maybe, and . . . aw, who cares anyhow.

Besides, there are two reasons I should be happy with this haircut. First, like I said earlier, I’m trying to get a job right now, and I’ll bet employers just love dorky, Young‑Republican haircuts. Secondly, this will be a very durable haircut: it’ll be a long, long time before I let anybody with scissors near my hair again.

Ode to South Park

Introduction

This post does not concern the TV cartoon “South Park.”  If you were looking for something about that show, you won’t find it here, but wait!  Don’t leave just yet.  I really like that show (though I’ve only seen one episode, the one with the babysitter and the cat and Cartman pretending he’s protecting Salma Hayek), so your sensibilities and mine might be compatible.

The following sonnet is an ode not to a TV show but to one of my favorite roads for bike riding, in Berkeley’s Tilden Park.  Obviously my ode will have special resonance for those who have ridden this road, but should also strike a chord with anybody who has a favorite climb, or anybody who seeks out a challenging course precisely because he knows it will kick his ass.

Poem

Ode to South Park

Of course I like this road—what’s not to like?

It’s quiet here and  green, and lush, and there’soooooooooo2

A grade of 10.5 percent:  to bike

Up here’s like running flights of stairs.

When young and strong, obsessed with going fast,

 I feared this road and thus avoided it. Ooooooooooooiooo6

Then age, though slowing, helped me to amass

The muster to be humble and submit.

Until last fall I liked this climb the best,

With pals or not, it was a battleground. Oooooooooooooo10

And then cruel fate decided to divest

Me of my strength.  Can I rebound?

This South Park climb will force the turning worm:

I slowly beat myself back into form. Oooooooooooooooo14

Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1:  like this road

The perspective here is of the poet in real-time as he pedals up the road.  I had the oxygen-starved inspiration for this sonnet while riding South Park the other day.

Line 2:  quiet

South Park Drive is particularly quiet from November through March when it’s closed to cars due to the mating season for newts, which has them crossing the road en masse.  One year, at the end of October, the newts got started a little early and I saw just how important the road closure is.  It was depressing:  I saw like two dozen of them, smashed completely flat.  As it happened, I had bad legs that day and the dead newts were such a blow to my morale, I almost turned around and went home.  South Park is that kind of climb:  the kind that has you searching for excuses not to go on.

Line 2:  green, and lush

I’m not botanist, but I can tell you the trees and plants along South Park Drive are the kind that are green and lush year-round.  It’s never dead and grey and brown like you get in places with real winters.  Sometimes fog gives the landscape a bleak, blasted look, but even that’s pleasurable; I always associate such conditions with the play “King Lear,” where the dethroned king is blind and groping and miserable on some vast wind-swept tundra.

Once, we had snow on South Park.  It’s close to 1,700 feet above sea level and very likely the only place in Berkeley that ever gets snow.

Line 3:  10.5 percent

A grade of 10.5 percent is pretty serious.  The steepest 0.9 miles of the road are particularly steep, climbing about 600 feet per mile for a grade of 11.4%:

Line 3:  to bike

You might think I used the word “bike” instead of “cycle” or “bicycle” simply to fit the meter of the poem.  No, I would never do that.  The word “bike” is a challenge to relative newcomers to the sport who, ever obsessed with image, insist on “cycling” over “biking.”  As I’ve documented elsewhere, crusty old veterans like me prefer “biking,” to show how little we care for semantic flourishes.

Line 5:  young and strong

As I have gloomily pondered before, I am no longer young and strong.  This is a bit different from saying I’m no longer young or strong.  Forty-somethings can still be strong, but it’s more of a battle.  When you’re young, the strength is something fresh and new and renewable.  Most importantly, you’re still growing it—your best fitness is still ahead of you.  As you age, strength becomes something you cling to:  the residue of your youth.  This strength is still a satisfaction, of course, but there’s also something slightly pathetic about it.  (Not, however, as pathetic as just letting it go.)

Line 5:  going fast

In cycling—er, biking—parlance, “fast” and “strong” aren’t quite the same thing.  Fast is more impressive.  First you get “in shape,” and then you get “fit,” and then you get “strong,” and then, if you train just right, you get “fast.”  The twenty-something racer takes little satisfaction in the century-ride goal of just finishing.  He must finish fast.  If he can’t do this—and only on a good day could a fit racer-type make it up a grade like South Park with anything that feels like speed—he can be surprisingly cowardly.  At least, I could, when I was young and strong.

Line 7:  amass

I believe it is possible to age without acquiring wisdom.  I don’t think you can chase wisdom.  I hope that my life experience, and all the great stuff I read, will gradually cause wisdom to accumulate.  So it is with muster in the next line of the poem.

Line 8:  the muster to be humble and submit

This is really what it takes to routinely attack a climb like South Park.  When I first started riding South Park with any regularity at all, I’d only do it when I was rested and fresh.  But as I got more disciplined about my training, those days grew scarce.  Something finally shifted in my attitude:  I realized it was okay for a climb to kick my ass.  I couldn’t keep pretending I could lick any road in my midst.  I learned to blow myself out completely without feeling a sense of loss.  I made South Park my go-to climb, that I would do almost every time I rode.  This didn’t make me any faster, but it made me tougher.  Gradually, this humility shaded into something more complex, involving the pride of hardened character.

Line 9:  until last fall

Both senses of “fall” are intended here:  autumn and crash.

Line 10:  with pals or not, a battleground

Riding with pals is a great way to stay motivated and ride jolly hard.  When I ride alone, which is most of the time, I’m often tempted to slack off.  The beauty of a steep climb is that you can’t choose to loaf:  like it or not, you’re trapped in the struggle of Man vs. Nature.  Often, the battle against nature turns into a battle against yourself:  naturally, “can I make it?” becomes “how fast can I make it?”

On a brutal climb, Man vs. Man becomes a fearsome endeavor.  At high speeds, savvy and tactical know-how can shelter you from your physical shortcomings.  On a climb, there’s nowhere to hide.  When I think back to the epic showdowns I’ve had with pals, the best ones always involve climbs.  So it was with South Park.  Here’s a excerpt from my training diary, dated March 27, 2008: 

We started off pretty mellow, but three minutes in Kromer unexpectedly threw down.  Suddenly he had a huge gap.  I started chasing him down.  Man, it was absurd how gradually I was gaining on him.  He’s a big, strong guy , a rolleur, a sprinter, and a fair bit older than I:  surely he couldn’t dispatch me this swiftly!  I finally caught on and, pretending I wasn’t redlined, nonchalantly asked him what his power was.  He said 460 watts.  I took his wheel.  On this steep pitch we were only going 8 mph so it’s not like I was getting a sweet draft or anything, but I stayed close so as not to give psychological comfort to the enemy.  Towards the top there’s a very short downhill section before the final wall.  I’ve found in the past that dudes instinctively let up a bit on that downhill.  This comes naturally, I think, when you’re suffering so badly.  Approaching this section, while still climbing, Kromer seemed to speed up even more, and the weak part of my brain took this as a sign that I was about to get dropped.  Meanwhile, the strong part of my brain, or at least the stubborn part, wondered if perhaps this meant he was cagily trying to finish me off before the really steep part at the very end.  I figured that no matter how bad I felt, I would attack on the little downhill and see what I could do.  Kind of like the dying general whose last words were a request to his men to turn him back around to face the enemy, so he wouldn’t die in shame.  I punched it over the top before the little downhill, and Kromer fell back:  no doubt to rest for a second or two on my wheel before slingshotting around and trouncing me.  Up until the moment I crested the climb, I was sure he had me, but amazingly my little ruse worked.  I crushed out the climb in 7:15, my best time of the year!  My agony, of course, was absolute.

Here’s a graph of that effort.  You can see here  the kind of elevated heart rate, and power output, involved.  (Why the disparity between Kromer’s 460-watt output and mine?  Two reasons.  One, he’s heavier.  Two, what you see below are “dog watts,” measured by a bike computer calculation involving barometric pressure, altitude gain, gravity, and my mass, and not factoring in wind resistance, rolling resistance, etc.)

You may wonder if my training diary also contains tales of battles lost.  Of course not:  why would it?  Being crushed by my pals isn’t news.  It isn’t salient.  The exceptions to the status quo, when all the planets align and I snatch a bit of glory, are what I bother to note.

Line 11:  cruel fate

Like line 9, this refers to a crash I had in November, sustaining a broken femur.  For months, the prospect of merely riding a bike again, much less climbing South Park, seemed sadly absurd.  In the poem I almost didn’t use “cruel fate,” because I’m not a particularly fatalistic person and am tormented by the idea that my crash could have been avoided.  But “cruel fate” is a nice Shakespearean reference, and in a vague, metaphorical sense I suppose we can acknowledge the role of fate in our lives.

Line 12:  can I rebound?

That is the question.  The doctors who treated me were wary about assuring me I’d be as good as new one day.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been able to ride my bike again, but with greatly reduced ambitions.  A tough ride for me now is Wildcat Canyon Road, a climb I’ve never thought difficult (and which in fact I used to call Pussycat).  Well, the other day I didn’t have time to ride all of Wildcat, but thought it would demoralize me to only ride part of it (I demoralize easily these days).  So I decided just to try South Park, which is closer to home.  I doubted I was quite ready, but remembered my long history with this road:  how I’d gone from only riding it when I was fresh to riding it no matter what.  This gave me the confidence, bordering I suppose on foolishness, for the attempt.  I barely made it to the end.  On the final steep pitch, I really wondered if my pedals would actually slow to a stop.  Would I clip out in time?  Would I fall over?  At the top I had to stop and rest (something I almost never do).  I didn’t have the energy to turn around and coast back down the hill.  Had there been a bench, I’d have sat down, or stretched out, on it.  My stopwatch time for the climb—more than a minute slower than my slowest trip up South Park of all last year—will give me something to improve on.

Line 13:  the turning worm

It is impossible to ride my bike and feel a pure gladness at my gradual progress, because I cannot help but compare my current self to my six-month-ago self.  These days I feel small and vulnerable and spineless.  The phrase “turning worm” is a reference to Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 3”:

To whom do lions cast their gentle looks?

Not to the beast that would usurp their den.

The smallest worm will turn being trodden on

And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

In my small, wormlike, dovelike way I’m turning against the injury encroaching on my body.  South Park Drive is a perfect surface against which to beat myself back into shape.  It is the opponent that may yet be my salvation.