2012 - The Year in Review

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

There was an awful lot of news in 2012.  In my opinion, far too much—I’m actually kind of relieved I won’t be getting “Newsweek” anymore.  (I canceled because they’ve gone to an online-only format, but would have probably canceled anyway because they started running cigarette ads, which for me is automatic grounds for a lifetime boycott.)

If, like me, you did a halfhearted job of staying on top of all the news last year, you’re in luck:  in this annual post I recap the most important stories, and as a special bonus show how I’d actually already covered them in an easily-digested and (I hope) humorous way in the pages of albertnet.  As usual, I’ve had to stretch here and there to make this work, and there’s a fair chance that you’ll giggle at one or two of my gyrations.

January

Of course the really exciting story for January was the sinking of the huge cruise ship Costa Concordia, and the subsequent arrest of the captain, who abandoned ship early on.  It came out that he’d crashed it in the process of showing off, taking the ship in close to shore as a salute to some pals there.  Not surprisingly, he’d been drinking.  But not only that, he’d been drinking wine, and with a beautiful woman!  Every article I saw emphasized these things.  The Guardian wrote, “The captain who steered his 114,000-tonne vessel into rocks off the Italian coast last Friday was drinking wine at dinner with a ‘beautiful’ woman minutes earlier, a witness has claimed.”  The Daily Beast wrote that a “passenger told an Italian newspaper that Schettino had been drinking with an attractive blonde at 8:35 the night of the accident.”

Wine and fancy women … what could be more unbecoming for a ship captain to indulge in?  I have a strong feeling that he’d have gotten off easier if his drinking had been, instead, a couple cold beers with some guy friends.  Plus, he’d possibly have had more luck modulating his intake.  My “Ask Dr. Beer” post in January, which ran two days after the wreck for maximum timeliness, was designed to suggest all this without, I hoped, alienating the wine-loving readers of albertnet.  I all but openly scolded the Concordia captain:  “Ads for good booze always say, ‘Those who appreciate quality enjoy it responsibly.’  That’s a good start, but why should people who can’t appreciate quality be let off the hook?  They should behave responsibly, too!”

February

The important and exciting news event in February was “The Artist” winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and being the first silent film to win since 1927.  It’s important to acknowledge that “silent film” is really a misnomer, because “The Artist” also won the Oscar for best score.  To demonstrate my uncanny ability to predict the Oscar winner, two weeks in advance, I blogged at length about another “silent film” that should have won Oscars in these two categories.  Surely you already know what movie I’m referring to, and caught the sly reference right away when you saw my pre-Oscar post last year.  What?  You’re lost?  I’m referring, of course, to my two February posts about the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall” (here and here).

Maybe you haven’t seen that movie in a long time (in which case it’s time to find out which of your pals has the best home theater and go rent the DVD), and you don’t immediately recall that it’s a dialog-free movie.  Well, it is.  The main character, Pink (Bob Geldof) does have one line, but this line is the exception that proves the rule.  In fact, he manages to flub it.  What the audience hears—“Take that, fuckers!”—is not what his lips say, which is “Next time, fuckers!”  Maybe this glitch is what cost this fine movie the Oscars it so richly deserved.  (Best Picture that year went to “Ghandi”—yawn—and Best Adaptation Score went to “Victor/Victoria”—like anybody remembers a single note of that movie’s music.)

March

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in March, that being the long-awaited explanation of how waves and other ocean features can actually glow at night.  “National Geographic Daily News” broke the story here.  The article states, “The biological light, or bioluminescence, in the waves is the product of marine microbes called phytoplankton—and now scientists think they know how some of these life-forms create their brilliant blue glow.”

I paid tribute to this wonderful finding with my “Earth Hour” post.  Granted, it was a subtle tribute—Ididn’t lean too heavily on the light pollution angle, for fear of diluting my more important message about energy conservation (and the only slightly less important stuff about a three-pound gummy worm, Earth Hour haters, and grizzlies mating with polar bears). 

April

In April the business world was taken by surprise when Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a tiny company valued at only half that much.  As reported in the New York Times, Zuckerberg declared, “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.” 

Do you reckon Zuckerberg was talking about photos of brilliant bioluminescent seascapes?  Yeah, right.  More likely this acquisition was simply the fastest way to drive up sexting traffic.  (Remember Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil?”  Perhaps Facebook’s should be, “Be evil.”)

I’m glad my daughters are too young for Facebook and Instagram.  The rapper Nas describes being shocked by his own daughter’s being caught up in this:  “This morning I got a call, nearly split my wig.  This social network said Nas go and get your kid.  She’s on Twitter, I know she ain’t gon’ post no pic of herself underdressed, no inappropriate shit, right.  Her mother cried when she answered.  Said she don’t know what got inside this child’s mind, she planted a box of condoms on her dresser then she Instagrammed it.”

If you’re thinking I should lighten up about social networks and teens, then I invite you to check out my April blog post “Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media.” I’m not as well-spoken as Nas, but I gave my best shot at explaining why teenagers really shouldn’t be on Facebook and Twitter.

May

Big news—and welcome news, in my opinion—hit in May when Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning soft drinks in serving sizes greater than 16 ounces (click here for details).  As reported by the Washington Post, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association responded, “The city is not going to address the obesity problem by attacking soda, because soda is not driving the obesity rate.”  This certainly has an NRA-esque whiff of BS about it … he might as well say, “Sugary drinks don’t make people fat—fat makes people fat!”  McDonald’s tweeted, “We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them.”  Yeah, McDonald’s, that’s been working out really well.

Perhaps it seems hypocritical for me to condemn sources of empty calories, because I devoted an entire blog post in May to describing my desperate quest for sugary substances.  I lamented, “The giant handful of gels I’d hastily grabbed somehow numbered only two.  I had two bottles of energy drink but no mix.  By the time I reached the ranger’s station on Diablo I’d gone through 1 2/3 bottles of the drink and both gels.”  I went on to describe my salvation in the form of free frozen green tea gelato:  “It tasted like lotion, that expensive lotion you get at spas.  Frankly I didn’t care for it whatsoever except it was free, it had 140 calories, and as I said before I had no plan for feeding myself.”  There’s no hypocrisy here though:  like all distance athletes, I represent a special case.  Someday I’m going to write an entire post about why buying soft drinks should require a special license.

June

There was an important Supreme Court ruling in June, but it didn’t get much press; halfway through the year people must have already been tired of serious news.  ABC News came to the rescue with a classic fluff piece about Bon Jovi launching a new line of pasta sauces.  That was the headline, anyway.  In actuality, it wasn’t the singer who launched the product, but his father, whose name isn’t really Bon Jovi.  Both father and son are actually named Bongiovi, which is a great name for a pasta sauce but perhaps not the best for a rock star.  So, to recap:  a rock singer who is not named Bon Jovi didn’t launch a pasta sauce, but his non-famous father did.

Naturally you'll wonder why I didn't include anything about this in my June advice column, “Ask Dr. Pasta.”  Well, it’s because nobody wrote in to ask about it!  What?  You thought I made up all those questions?  You think “Ask Dr. Pasta,” and “Ask Dr. Beer” before it, were fake advice columns?  You think there’s no such person as Chip M of Boston, MA or Lawrence H of Greensboro, NC?  Well ... you’re right.  But if Bon Jovi isn’t really Bon Jovi, can’t I cut some corners too?

July

Needless to say, the biggest story of the year came out in July:  the discovery—or possible discovery—of the Higgs boson.  The importance of this scientific achievement cannot be overstated.  In fact, it cannot be understated, or even stated, unless you’re a rock star of the scientific world.  After reading several accounts of this discovery by very enthusiastic writers with great flair for confusing the reader, I’ve decided this Higgs boson thing should be nicknamed “the Emperor’s new particle.”  (The most helpful reference I found on this is here, though the “American Voices” feature in “The Onion” was also helpful, with a woman on the street declaring, “Yeah, the Higgs boson is getting a lot of attention, but there are a lot of lower-profile bosons that are worth checking out if you get the chance.”)

Perhaps most noteworthy thing I can point out about the Higgs boson was that it was just about the only thing that is universally acknowledged to be “a thing” that I didn’t mention in my July “Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass” post, a sprawling epic docucomedventurdrama covering such diverse topics as camping, cycling, logical fallacies, missing receipts, Mono Lake, Vladimir Nabokov, paranoia, RVs, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, Tioga Pass, the undistributed middle, and Yosemite National Park.  And yet, to those who actually understand boson particles, this post, upon careful reading, turns out to be a masterpiece of understatement and subtle insinuation.  The story is, in fact, thoroughly flooded with between-the-lines illumination of the true nature of the Higgs boson.  If anybody ever creates the literary equivalent of the CERN particle accelerator, I will finally enjoy the sterling reputation I have so long deserved.

August

The most exciting news in August was the Curiosity rover landing on Mars.  This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the rover were simply a remote-controlled vehicle.  The really cool thing is that it will be able to think for itself when it gets its next software update, as described here. 

Speaking of thinking for yourself, I hope I don’t need to point out the obvious tie-in between this rover news and my three-part albertnet series on Artificial Intelligence that ran in August and September (click here, here, and here).  Naturally, being more interested in Earth than Mars, I focused my investigation on real-world—as in, our real-world—applications, such as whether you can speak into your iPhone and have it transcribe the text.  As I noted in my post, the iPhone does just well enough to be dangerous:  “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4S” comes out “I need to make some videos about the iPhone 4 ass.”  I hope the Curiosity rover does better.

September

I know that I could drive lots of traffic to this blog by focusing on a really splashy news item for this month—namely, the release of the iPhone 5—but I’m not going to take the bait.  I also won’t pretend that the “Gangnam Style” Youtube video was actually important news.  (I’m hoping that using the phrases “iPhone 5” and “Gangham Style Youtube” twice each will be enough to get me a lot of pageviews.)  Well-informed people worldwide know that the big news this month was the groundbreaking BYU study finding that exercise can reduce the urgeto eat.

It’s kind of a shame this article beat me to the press (by just one day!) and thus my own article, “Nutrition for Endurance Cycling,” didn’t cause as great a sensation.  Echoing the BYU article, in my nutrition post I lament the lack of appetite I have right after a long bike ride, when eating is important:  “For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this ‘glycogen window.’  So, right after my ride, during which I drank a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies."  Yuck.

October

This month brought another toss-up for top news story:  Hurricane Sandy, or Felix Baumgartner parachuting from space?  Two things have swayed me to choose the latter.  First, Hurricane Sandy was downgraded from a full hurricane to a “super-storm,” which has the hackneyed sound of a Wal Mart promotional slogan.  Second, hurricanes are becoming so routine now, they'll eventually cease to make the news at all, along with senseless school shootings.  But parachuting from space?  That’s a totally new one.

Did albertnet cover Baumgartner’s exploit?  Well, not exactly, but it covered a similarly daring and/or foolish challenge that I myself took on.  What’s that?  You don’t remember it?  Well, didn’t I do something difficult involving altitude?  Didn’t I too fall to earth, albeit metaphorically, like a modern day Icarus?  Didn’t I too fuel myself with Red Bull?  (Okay, in my case it was sugar and caffeine from Cytomax and NoDoz, respectively, but we’re still talking about the core components of Red Bull.)  The main difference between my adventure and Baumgartner’s is that his looked really amazing though it came off without a hitch, while mine would have looked pretty boring and yet went horribly.  Oh, yeah:  and my brain, not Baumgartner’s, was a thin porridge by the end.  Check out this post if you don’t believe me.

November

Am I a man?  Well, my kids, when asked this question, usually say something like “Not really—you’re just a big daddy guy.”  It’s safe to say, however, that I’m a male, because I can’t see the forest for the trees, or however that goes.  To wit, I failed to notice an important post-election news story concerning a novel solution to the problem of leftover campaign signs.  A guy up in the Pacific Northwest recycles them, turning them into bicycle accessories:  “Peterson occasionally holds workshops in the art, demonstrating how he reuses the corrugated plastic material that’s used for lots of front yard-type political signs.  He cuts the sheets with a sharp craft knife or scissors into desired shapes and then stitches pieces together with nylon cable ties.  On some items, he uses a more sophisticated technique involving scoring the plastic and folding it.”

This is almost as good as not having election signs in the first place, a desire I expounded upon in detail that month.

December

The big news I was waiting for in December is more notable for almost not being reported at all.  I’m talking of course about the outcome of the Novartis drug recall I blogged about last month.  Several drugs—Excedrin, Gas-X, and my precious NoDoz among them—were recalled by Novartis a year ago because quality control problems in the factory were resulting in broken tablets and, worse, prescription drugs such as Percocet getting mixed up with over-the-counter remedies.

Novartis finally did get its act together, but the media barely covered this.  I searched this evening on “excedrin recall” and got just five Google News hits.  Four of them were unrelated to this topic (e.g., “Female Orgasm:  Serving an Evolutionary Function?”), but one—exactly one—covered the return of Excedrin to the shelves.  This was the Patch.com site for Hazelwood, MO.  Its editor wrote, “When Hazelwood Patch announced the recall, the article quickly became one of our most viewed articles.”  I think it’s worth noting that this article didn’t mention Gas-X or NoDoz.  I guess Hazelwood citizens are an alert, non-gassy people who mainly get a lot of headaches.  A quick look at its home page offers, I think, some insight into why.  The main headlines for today:  “Elderly Woman Robbed at Gunpoint and Carjacked, Assailant Captured in North County”; “Man Breaks In[to] Hazelwood Pet Store”; and, “Ask the Patch Pro:  Seeking Gun Safety Experts.”  Other articles on the homepage include “Gun Brought to Mall” and “Mugs in the News:  The Faces That Made This Week’s Crime Headlines.”  All this really makes me appreciate my relatively peaceful community.  If our local Patch had covered the Novartis recall at all, they’d probably have focused on Gas-X, given the popularity of legumes and vegan fare here.

Conclusion

If you made it to the end of this lengthy post, I think the rest of your 2013 will be gravy!  And if you’re reading this long, long after the year 2012, I hope this recap gave you a good sense of what life was like in that difficult, exciting, tedious year.

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2012 (Stage 2)

Note:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and mature themes.

Introduction

In last week’s post I described the exploits, particularly the gastronomic ones, of my friends and me as we tackled Stage 1 of the 2012 Everest Challenge stage race.  Now, with the professional sport of cycling collapsing around us—Lance Armstrong’s team, his maid, and even his pet hamster have confessed to participation in his doping ring—I offer the sorry tale of my un-drug un-fueled assault on Stage 2 of the 2012 EC.

Pre-race

I slept unusually well for an EC second night; that is to say, I slept some.  As my roommate John pointed out, the AC unit had a continuous fan feature, as opposed to those enemy-of-sleep versions that turn on and off all night.  Still, as the chilled air compressor periodically cycled on and off, its low, deep groaning came and went.  (Or was that John?)

The Uncle Sam cereal was even harder going the second day, because I was at the end of the box and all the heavy stuff—various kinds of seeds and, I think, gravel—had settled to the bottom.  John and I ate in silence, which frightened me.  Normally, the EC motel room banter is the giddy, profanity-laced stuff of locker rooms, but this was almost gloomy, like a wake.  John and I could be accused of having a poor attitude, but as you shall see, prescience would be the better description.

We got to the start line as the sun was rising and the moon was setting.  I think there was even an occultation of Venus in progress, but I was a bit distracted and didn’t look for it.

The main source of my distraction was my bowels.  You may be rolling your eyes and groaning:  “This again?!”  Well, remember, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”  The fact is, evacuation is a critical part of this sport, and is too often swept under the carpet.  Now.  Don’t get me wrong, the organization of EC is excellent overall, but they need more San-O-Lets (aka Port-A-Potties).  On this day there were only two, and what’s worse, they were still atop a trailer.  Not only did I not have time to wait in line, but I feared, albeit irrationally, that somebody would drive off while I was in there.

Fortunately, I took a lesson from last year when a guy coming out of a San-O-Let told me, “That thing’s out of toilet paper.  I had to use my arm warmers.”  So I’d brought a roll of TP from the motel.  I found a good bush off the side of the road that would provide excellent cover from most vantage points—but not including, alas, that of the van.  And that’s where the setting moon came into play.  All the guys were about to photograph the moon over the jagged saw blade mountains when I entered the frame.  There was nothing I could do—I had to go.  You will not be seeing this “double moon” shot on this blog, though I hear it’ll be on the cover of “Forbes” next month.

Stage 2 – 76 miles, 14,030 feet of climbing

During the race, I drank four bottles of Cytomax, two bottles of Gatorade, a bottle of Heed, and two bottles of water.  I ate four gels.  I swallowed enough pride to produce a glut of bile, which tasted only a bit better than the Gatorade (which was lemon-lime, a flavor I burned out on during my 1994 bike tour and have wisely avoided ever since).

The first climb went pretty well, except for a) knowing that I was in 10th place and should defend that, while b) knowing I should pace myself, which meant watching twenty of my competitors ride away as soon as the road went uphill.  It was sort of the “presidential primary” strategy:  don’t do anything bold that might backfire; and, hope my opponents do. 

John and I did the first climb and about half of the second climb together.  It was hot and dry and my legs were heavy and I plinked along in my lowest gear a lot of the time, remembering how I’d cracked on the third climb the previous year.  The idea was to save up my strength and finish strong, but I couldn’t find much strength to save.  Paul, racing in the 45+ category that started ten minutes behind, blew by us, inspiring me to … well, to train better next year, or race smarter, or switch to an activity I’m better suited to, like typing.

The race promoters lengthened the second climb this year.  They’d announced this on Friday evening, but didn’t say how much longer it would be.  Looking back, I think we were all unknowing subjects in some kind of cruel psychological experiment.  I kept expecting to see the leaders of my race coming down the other side, and the longer I went not seeing them, the closer to despair I came.  (A more foolhardy rider would have supposed he was simply not that far behind.  I knew better.) 

I spent much of the climb trying to work out how I might calculate how far behind I was, based on when and where the leaders passed me on their way down.  Doing math during bike races is notoriously hard, but I had plenty of time to think.  By the time I finally saw Craig coming down, I had it worked out:  I held in my head the current altitude at that moment (a better landmark than anything visual in this stark, Road Runner terrain) and the clock time.  When, an eternity later (the climb having been, finally, four miles longer this year), I crossed that altitude again on my way down, I checked the new clock time and subtracted.  Craig, it turned out, was twelve minutes ahead of me at that point.  Pretty amazing, since he was still as sick as a dog, breathing raspily and almost unable to talk.

I couldn’t be bothered to pedal or get in an aerodynamic tuck during that descent.  I just sat there, coasting, and waited for it to be over.  I finally reached the van, which was parked at the base of the third and final climb, and saw Craig there, off his bike and in street clothes.  As well as he’d’ been riding, he was still sick, and the heat and altitude made it impossible for him to breathe well enough to continue.  He and Ian gave me some drink, gels, and encouragement, and I struck out for the final climb.

I was feeling pretty close to despondent.  Where was all that energy I’d been saving up?  Where was the enthusiasm I’d had on this climb the first couple times I raced EC?  I couldn’t face the reality of what I had left to do:  over two hours of climbing, with over 6,000 feet of elevation gain, in the baking heat.  In previous years I had a teammate or two to ride with; this time I was off the back and oddly, breathtakingly alone.  No rider in sight, anywhere.  I could be anybody out here, on any day, in any era.

I couldn’t use my mileage to measure my progress because I hadn’t worked out how much longer that second climb had been.  Meanwhile, the thought of slowly ticking off the altitude benchmarks—4000 feet, 5000 feet, 6000 feet, 7000 feet, 8000 feet, 9000 feet, and, yes, even 10000 feet—was far too demoralizing to face.  (Plus, as often as I wiped the sweat off my bike computer, I couldn’t keep the screen clear enough to read it anyway.) 

I devised a plan:  instead of looking around me at the terrain to figure my progress, I’d just keep my eyes on the road ten feet ahead.  That created the illusion of speed, at least.  And I decided to “play” the entire double-album “Pink Floyd The Wall” in my head, including all the background sounds, TV snippets, the schoolteacher yelling “wrong, do it again!”, etc.  Because I knew my frazzled brain would get caught in endless loops of certain songs, I could be confident that by the time I got to “Outside the Wall,” I’d have been climbing for at least 90 minutes.  Then I’d be close enough to the end to monitor my progress without sliding into despair.

(The other benefit of this strategy was preventing the random songs that sometimes pop into my head while I’m riding.  All the way up Alpe d’Huez during the 2003 La Marmotte, I had Ravel’s “Bolero” in my head, which was the musical equivalent of a prison sentence.  John had had it even worse during the final EC climb of Stage 1:  pondering that he had such a long way to go, he suddenly got “Ride Like the Wind” by Christopher Cross stuck in his head, and couldn’t get rid of it.  Poor bastard.)

Around the time my brain got to “Goodbye Cruel World” I was actually doing a little better.  At the higher elevation the heat had subsided a bit and I had a decent rhythm.  I passed a couple of fellow Masters who had dropped me at the base of the second climb, well over an hour before.  They were really crawling.  “Dude, you’re a fucking stud!” one of them said.  I have to admit, that encouragement felt pretty good.

There’s a descent about 2/3 of the way up this climb.  The road drops some 200 feet, erasing your progress toward the finish.  It’s totally demoralizing.  I took the opportunity to eat a gel.  Hunting in my jersey pocket I came upon a sleeve of Clif Shot Blocks that Craig had given me.  My hand groped it, trying to figure out what it was.  Once I’d identified it, my brain tried to comprehend what Shot Blocks were and what they did.  You eat them, right?  But what are they?  And how do you get into the package?  Is it like Pez?  I give up trying to fathom this great Shot Block mystery and managed to find a gel.

I ran out of head-music.  The last lyric, “Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall,” was eerily apropos.  My own heart was working far better than my poor legs; in fact, the heart’s foreman had sent half the chambers home.  On the shallower pitches my heart rate wasn’t even in the 130s.  My breathing was strangely, unsettlingly slow at times.  I kept pushing on the right shift lever, hoping in vain that I actually had one lower gear.  The final few miles were like slow motion.  The guy I’d passed earlier, who’d called me a stud, now passed me back; if I’d had the energy I’d have said, “Do you care to rescind your earlier statement?”  Worst of all, I was starting to feel lightheaded.  Stretches of the climb appeared that I don’t recall ever having seen before.  It was like when something familiar, looked at too closely, starts to look odd and strange.

Finally I reached a terribly steep ramp with a couple spectators on it, and someone said, “200 feet to go!”  I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t dare.  But then, why would he lie?  I saw race officials sitting on lawn chairs.  I saw a line painted across the road labeled “FINIS.”  Still I couldn’t believe it (even though the finish line seemed long overdue).  “Is this the finish?  Am I done?” I cried out desperately.  The officials laughed.  “Yeah, you’re done.”  Normally I would coast a few hundred feet down the other side to where the food was, but I couldn’t manage it.  I clipped out and stopped.  “Did you get my number, 802?” I asked half a dozen times.  They had.  “Can I borrow that empty chair?”  Yes, I could.  I sat there at the finish line for a good ten minutes, watching other riders come across.  Two or three of them cried out desperately, “Is this the finish?  Am I done?”

Finally I made it to the rest area.  Jamie, 4th overall in the Masters 55+, greeted me enthusiastically and took my bike.  I found a chair and re-slumped.  I could smell the spinach-and-feta quesadillas the volunteers were cooking up, and I was hungry, but I literally lacked the energy to stand up and walk over there.  For a whole hour I just sat.  I couldn’t even bring myself to hunt for my bag of warm clothes.  I’ve never been so shattered after a race. 

Eventually I made it to the food tables, drank some Coke, drank some chocolate milk, drank some ginger ale, and then spied a big bottle of V-8 juice—the only real electrolyte replacement drink.  I asked if I could pour myself some.  “Yeah, please finish it up because it’s our last bottle.”  I followed this with infinity quesadilla slices, then had to sit again.  The chairs were all taken.  I sat on a tarp.  I found my bag, spent five minutes stretching my arm warmers over my squeaky, sticky arms, and got out my camera.

Paul sat down too.

At some point John showed up.  As with Stage 1, he suffered terrible cramps during the last climb.  (All my photos of the Stage 2 summit are from the seated vantage point.)

John made his pilgrimage to the food tent.  He came back after awhile asking, “Could you guys find any V-8 juice over there?”  Oops. 

Eventually we found the energy to begin the descent.  Normally I love this descent, but I really didn’t feel like being on my bike anymore.  A short way down we stopped at a scenic overlook to snap some photos.  Here’s one.

Unfortunately, the effort of descending that short distance overwhelmed me and I needed to lie down for a bit.  The sun beating down on my face was intolerable.  I was really in bad shape.

Miraculously, Ian and Craig showed up with the van.  Here’s our whole crew, stoked to be done with riding for the day.  (The exception was Paul, who manned up and rode the descent, just for fun.)

For the data nerds among you, here are my climbing stats (power and heart rate):

- 248 watts at 142 bpm on the first climb;

- 220 watts at 133 bpm on the second climb;

- 220 watts at 136 bpm on the last climb (my cadence was 61, so you can see my 39/27 gearing was actually plenty low enough, at least for a mosher like me)

Note that these are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain, my speed, and my weight (f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.

Post-race

We stopped at a little hot springs resort to shower.  (I won’t tell you where it is; it’s great that no other cyclists have discovered it.)  One of the guys complained that his coin-op shower had been ice-cold.  Craig went to investigate and determined, to his great mirth, that the rider in question had only turned the Cold handle, not the Hot.  This is how shattered an EC rider can be.

A member of our bike club, Mary Beth, had been in Bishop a few weeks before and recommended Astorga’s Mexican restaurant.  We gave it a shot.  The salsa was good and hot, I had my first beer in many weeks, and someone ingeniously ordered guacamole.  It was fantastic.  I was starting to feel normal.  But then things got really dicey because there wasn’t enough guac to go around.  The only fistfight I’ve ever seen in a restaurant was at Juan’s Place in Berkeley and I had the feeling I was about to witness, if not participate in, another.  Fortunately somebody had a cool head and simply ordered more guac.

My dinner was the giant combo plate:  chile relleno, chicken enchilada verde, beef taco, beans, rice, and—just for the empty calories—a side of flour tortillas.  It was a serious plate of food and I attacked it with a severity I only wish I could bring to bike racing.  It has been said of my eating, “Sometimes I can’t bear to look.”  I know Ken had a chile relleno burrito because I recommended it; other than that, I had tunnel vision and the rest of the table became peripheral blur, their speech a low drone.  I was in The Zone.  I should have been stuffed by the time we got out of there, but I was only just sated.

As we drove by the pizza place in Groveland, too late at night to stop, I looked longingly out the window.  I got some potato chips from a convenience store when we stopped for gas.  By the time we made the Bay Area I was more tired than hungry, and had to figure out how to get home from Rockridge.  Ken loaned John and me his old van.

“It’s been totaled and the chassis is bent, so I had to remove the gear shift template, but I made a diagram of it,” he told me.  Actually, that quote might bear no resemblance to what he said; I was barely coherent by this point.  It was surreal driving that van across Berkeley at 1:30 a.m.  Sometimes I was able to work the gears just fine; other times I couldn’t find first and just sat there, idling, hunting.  As Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “The last long lap is the hardest.”

Bride of "Pink Floyd The Wall"

NOTE:  This post is rated R for pervasive mature themes and mild strong language.

Introduction

As I described in my previous post, I recently watched “Pink Floyd The Wall,” having last seen it as a teenager.  Viewing it from my adult perspective, I realize that it’s far more coherent than the chaotic, nightmarish extended rock video I had originally taken it to be.

The movie has countless narrative threads, not nicely woven but often tangled and knotted:  the death of Pink’s father, his overprotective mother, his miserable school experience, his failing marriage, and his drug problem.  These are represented in part through an endless array—actually, more like a disarray—of symbols:  hammers, flowers, conveyer belts, airplanes, worms, and others.  Trying to follow every thread and analyze every symbol could be an endless undertaking—an analytical morass. 

This essay focuses on Pink’s wife, because—as I shall argue—she is by far the most important “brick” in Pink’s wall.  To make this case, I will concentrate on just one symbol.

Structure

The first thing we notice about this movie is that the chronology is all jumbled up—instead of a straightforward account of Pink’s life, we get his current situation combined with a mess of flashbacks.  The jumbled order creates the overall effect the moviemakers desired, but arranging the events chronologically can help tell us how Pink got here.

At first it seems like a straightforward exercise to put the movie’s events in order, starting with Pink’s dad being killed in WWII and ending with children cleaning up after Pink’s wall comes down.  But right away we run into trouble:  the scene of children cleaning up isn’t an actual event in Pink’s life—it’s a figment of his imagination, just like the animated sequences in the movie.  (No, strange humanoid creatures with snouts like gas masks didn’t really lumber away to safety under a freeway overpass.)  Pink’s flashbacks are a mix of actual memories (e.g., Pink being chewed out by a schoolmaster, Pink caring for a dying rat), and his flights of fancy (e.g., students trashing their school, Pink wandering through a battlefield looking at corpses).

Two points of view

There are two narrative points of view in this movie.  We have the objective perspective showing what is “really” happening to Pink “now” as he sits locked away in his hotel room.  The second perspective is Pink’s inner world:  his memories and his delirious visions, which engulf his mind as he molders away in his chair.  Neither point of view can give us the full story.  On the one hand, the objective perspective is limited to the present, which shows us a lot about the result of Pink’s problems but not so much about how he got here.  On the other hand, peering into Pink’s mind is problematic because he’s what we English majors like to call an “unreliable narrator”—he cannot give a clear and satisfying account because he’s a flawed character to begin with, not to mention being drugged-out and on the verge of complete mental collapse.

To examine the central question of the movie—what is Pink’s problem, really?—it’s useful to look at both perspectives.  I will start by recounting what is seen from the objective point of view:  the real-time events leading to Pink’s final collapse.  Then I will mine his memories and visions to shed light on the trajectory of his sad case.

Pink as we see him

Here is what actually transpires in “real time” during “The Wall.”  Pink sits in his chair and watches TV.  He soaks in his private pool.  He tries four times to phone his wife (three times from his room, once from a pay phone in an alley).  He picks up a groupie, terrorizes her by chasing her around the room throwing things, and completely trashes the place.  He soaks some more in the pool.  He smashes his TV.  He arranges the detritus in his room into a highly organized pattern.  He shaves off his chest hair and eyebrows.  He makes one more unsuccessful call to his wife.  Then he settles back into his chair and becomes catatonic.  Finally, his manager, along with some hotel staff and paramedics, break down the door to his room and revive him.  He is dragged to his concert in a limo.  He ends up sitting out the concert in a restroom stall.  The End.

As we watch Pink in his room, his expression is largely vacant, but (even beyond his sudden rage when he trashes the place), we do get plenty of clues about his inner turmoil:  he smashes a glass with his foot; he goes through the TV channels faster and faster, punching angrily at the remote; a tear slides down his cheek.  Every time he uses the phone, we quickly see him go from placid to despondent.  He drops the handset instead of hanging it up.  He rips the cord out of the wall.  He slides down the wall by the pay phone as if his legs will no longer hold him.  He smashes a wine glass into the phone.

Phones

The first instance of a phone in this movie is very telling.  The phone appears in one of Pink’s first flashbacks—not a memory, exactly, since it was something that happened before he was born.  It’s his father’s dying moment, during a WWII battle.  The British are being shot to pieces and Pink’s father races into a bunker to phone for help.  As he desperately cranks the handle on the wind-up field telephone, a German plane drops a bomb on the bunker.  The last we see of Pink’s father is his bloodied hand slipping off the end of the phone receiver, which dangles from its cord.

What’s curious about this scene is that we, the viewers, cannot take it as fact.  The whole bunker has been blown up, so nobody who witnessed Pink’s father’s death would have survived.  Meanwhile, the phone call he died trying to make never went through.  The entire scene is Pink’s conjecture about his father’s final moments.  The phone itself is a detail Pink contrived.

There can be no question that the death of Pink’s father marked the beginning of Pink’s troubles.  But unlike Pink’s other problems—his overbearing mother, his cruel schoolmasters, his unfaithful wife—the lack of a father is not a brick in his wall.  A lack is not something you can wall yourself off from.  Pink’s father does not show up to testify against Pink in the trial sequence of the movie.  As we shall see, he serves a different role.

The next phone in the movie is one we hear before we see it.  As it rings we’re looking at a Polaroid snapshot on a bedside table:  Pink and his wife, the happy couple.  The camera pans over to the ringing phone, also on the table.  The scene switches to Pink’s hotel room, where he’s just placed the call.  The song “Mother” begins.  What we see during this song is the most important sequence in the movie in terms of explaining Pink’s plight as he sits locked in his hotel room.  We shall give it a close inspection.

As the phone rings and rings, Pink blows his nose (he has a cold), checks his watch, figures the time zone difference (from the alarm clock behind the bed we see that it’s just after 6 o’clock in Los Angeles, so it’s about 2 a.m. at home).  There is no answer.  Pink slowly hangs up the phone, has a memory or vision of he and his wife kissing, and then suddenly rips the phone cord out of the wall.  Eyes welling up, he hugs his pillow and remembers when, as a sick child having feverish visions, he had climbed into his mother’s bed and snuggled against her.

Mother

Now, before you get all Freudian on me, remember that Freud was full of crap, as the movie’s creator, Roger Waters, was sure to have recognized.  The expression on grown-up Pink’s face in this scene tells of despair; young Pink’s expression in the flashback shows fear.  Neither condition is anything close to desire.  Have you ever, in moments of futility or despondency, thought, “I want my mom!”?  That’s what’s going on here in Pink’s hotel room.

By this point in the movie, the rock songs and their accompanying scenes have established that war is hell (“Goodbye Blue Sky”); so is its aftermath (“When the Tigers Broke Free,” “The Thin Ice,” and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1”); and that Pink’s schoolmasters were dicks (“The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”)  Presumably, “Mother,” and the visions and memories that go with it, will establish how overprotective and stifling Pink’s mother is.  But that’s not what we see.  In fact, what we do see of the mother tells an almost opposite tale.  She doesn’t take Pink into her bed when he’s sick—she gestures to him to stay in bed, and closes his door as she leaves.  She’s not smothering him; he’s seeking her out.

Pink runs through two versions of this memory.  In the first, he creeps slowly down the stairs and into his mother’s room.  In the second, he’s running to her room, and when he gets there he sees himself in bed next to her—sort of.  This time, instead of young Pink in the bed with his mother, it’s a decomposing corpse.  The point is this:  Pink isn’t repelled by an overprotective mother—he’s terrified of becoming a mama’s boy, of trying to snuggle with her all the way to his grave.  (It’s not hard to see how an insecure, fatherless boy could have this fear.)  In this light, the lyrics of the song—“Momma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing,” “Momma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm”—aren’t necessarily something she ever said.  They could easily be the kind of taunts young Pink inflicts upon himself.

Consider what comes right after the vision of the corpse snuggled in bed with his mother:  we go straight into the scene of Pink’s wedding.  Significantly, his mother is not in attendance.  Pink has successfully broken away from his mother by replacing her with a wife.  Unfortunately, spurning the love he needs seems to become a habit:  twice during this song, we see him pulling away from his wife.

Wife

The first time Pink rejects his wife, she’s giving him a striptease while he’s watching soccer on TV.  She playfully blocks his view; he cranes to see around her.  This scene is interposed with young Pink using binoculars to watch a grown-up neighbor undress in front of her window.  He’s smoking an illicit cigarette, which he hides along with the binoculars when his mother opens the door to check in on him.  Young Pink’s sexual awakening, and his cigarette, symbolize his desire to grow up and break away from his mother.  Turning back to the seduction scene, grown-up Pink rejects his wife’s advances—at the time.  Sometime later, when it’s dark in the room, he reaches for her, but she turns and rolls away.

What is going on here?  Was Pink just really into the televised soccer game?  Of course not.  He looks bored by it, until his wife starts trying to seduce him.  Then he looks slightly annoyed, but there’s also the tiniest flicker of a smile playing on his lips.  He’s screwing with her, testing her.  But why?  Well, Pink is insecure, and if love is defined as unconditional positive regard, he’s introducing conditions:  will you still love me even if I’m a pain in the ass?

Second rejection:  Pink is at home, composing on the piano, and his wife comes in and greets him.  He ignores her.  “Hello?  Hello?  Is there anybody in there?” she says.  Still nothing.  She waves her hand in front of his face.  Finally he looks up.  He’s stoned.  She jokes, “Do you remember me?  I’m the one from the registry office.”  Pink looks back down at the piano.  As his wife leaves the room she looks back over her shoulder, to see if just maybe he’s going to get up.  He doesn’t, and she closes door behind her.  Again, we must consider the point of view here:  this is Pink’s own recollection.  That we see his wife look back means that he sees her look back.  Though he pretends to ignore her, he isn’t.  He’s testing her again.

Next we catch a glimpse of Pink walking through an airport—a very recent memory—and we get a scene of his wife sitting in a chair crying.  Then Pink is in his hotel room, phoning her again.  When again she doesn’t pick up, he smashes a glass with his foot.

Infidelity

As we hear the line “Mother will she tear your little boy apart?” Pink tells himself the story of his lonely wife being seduced by another man.  She meets this man at an anti-nuke meeting where he is lecturing.  She catches the man’s eye, and after the meeting, when she gets up to leave, she looks over her shoulder at him.  Unlike Pink, the anti-nuke lecturer accepts her wordless invitation.  In this vision, Pink has worked out the logical result of the marital stalemate at the piano, replete with self-flagellating details.

 “Mother will she break my heart?”  Of course he’s not really asking his mother this—she’d be the last person he’d ask, and these are rhetorical questions.  They’re directed at his mother because once again, Pink is feeling vulnerable, and once again his vulnerability challenges his manhood.  As we hear “You’ll always be baby to me,” Pink is phoning his wife for the third time, lying in bed in a fetal position.  He drops the phone in despair.  (A final note on Pink’s sense of infantilization:  in the movie version of this song, the musical instruments include a wind-up music box like you would put in the nursery, that plays a repetitive, cloying tune to help your baby sleep.)

As the song ends, we see Pink’s wife in bed with the anti-nuke organizer.  We get a flash of a coin being put in a pay phone.  We hear a phone ringing:  it’s Pink’s bedside phone, at home, the same phone as at the beginning of the song.  The ringing wakes up his wife.  It’s the middle of the night so she knows it’s Pink calling.  She looks over at her lover, silently authorizing him to answer the phone:  a passive-aggressive act of defiance.  He picks up:  “Hello?”  When he hears that it’s a “collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd,” he hangs up.  The operator is befuddled:  “I wonder why he hung up?  Is there supposed to be somebody besides your wife there to answer?”  We flash to an alley, where the phone booth is.  As the operator tries again, Pink slumps down the wall and drops the phone receiver.  It dangles from its cord.

Reaction

Immediately following this last phone call, we get the most chilling of Pink’s visions:  two animated flowers which become genitalia, the male thrusting violently into the female, which—mantis-like—devours the male.  Needless to say, Pink feels misused.  In retaliation for his wife’s infidelity, he brings a groupie back to his hotel room.  Notably, he doesn’t seek her out, but doesn’t turn her away either:  like his wife, he is passive-aggressive.  But unlike his wife, he cannot go through with adultery.  In imagining his wife’s affair, he’s given her a somewhat suitable lover—at least the guy believes in something—but Pink himself is with a shameless groupie, who is out to exploit her own sexuality for access to a star.  Instead of hooking up, he boils over, terrorizing her and destroying his hotel room.

Surely Pink regrets his past coldness toward his wife—it’s included in his flashbacks, after all—but he also feels like a victim.  Following his big eruption, when he’s returned to watching TV, he has a deranged vision of his wife appearing in the room as some kind of crazed serpentine vagina dentata that comes after him.  The irony here is twofold:  one, the alarming vision of this terrifying wife-demon chasing him around the room mirrors his own behavior toward the groupie just before; and two, the song is “Don’t Leave Me Now.”

Though Pink’s bizarre characterization of his wife is a bit unfair, he rightly recognizes the trouble he is now in with his marriage failing.  We see this during “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3” where the previous flashbacks of Pink and his wife, and the visions of her with her lover, are juxtaposed with scenes of terrible rioting and of WWII battles.  The situation with his wife is causing violence to his life.  The lyrics—“I don’t need no arms around me”—are disingenuous; by seeming to reject everyone and everything, Pink is actually acknowledging his need. 

Very pointedly, in this sequence we get a vision of his father’s bloodied hand slipping off the phone as he dies, followed immediately by a flashback of Pink’s last phone call from the hotel, where he lets the phone slip from his hand.  The song ends with Pink again slumping down the wall by the pay phone, letting the handset drop:  but now it’s not happening in real-time; it has become another in his pile of tortured memories.  What was his dad doing in his final moment?  Calling out for help—but he was too late.  Pink’s phone calls are also a call for help—and he fears it may be too late for him, too. 

Waiting

We have seen that, in the “real-time” course of events, the only constructive actions Pink takes are these phone calls home, four of them so far.  Everything else is either pointless (watching TV), destructive (trashing his room) or just bizarre (shaving his chest and eyebrows).  It’s not entirely fair to say he’s walled himself off from everybody:  each phone call is an attempt to reconnect with his wife.  Surely his intent is to wall himself off, and make a fresh start on his own:  after “Goodbye Cruel World” he arranges all the detritus in his room, washes the blood off his hand (bloodied like his father’s!), shaves himself (a new look!), and gets dressed.  But of course he’ll try calling his wife again.  She’s all he’s got, if that.

What do you do between attempts to call somebody, when reaching that person is all you can think about?  You wait.  You try to kill time.  That’s exactly what Pink is doing throughout the movie.  He’s not watching TV because he enjoys it; he clearly doesn’t.  During “Nobody Home,” he jumps with increasing impatience from channel to channel, lamenting that though he has “thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from,” he’ll never get through to his wife. Eventually we see Pink make his fifth and final phone call; we see the bedside phone at his home once again.  We gather that, once again, she doesn’t pick up.

Then Pink and his TV are out in a field, with a cold misty wind blowing through:  he’s not at home, either.  He almost doesn’t have one anymore.  Sure, you can say he built a wall around himself, but in a way he’s been cast out, too.  What side of the wall is he really on?

No hope at all?

Pink’s restroom stall flight of fancy, “The Trial,” shows how conflicted he is about his situation.  On the one hand, the witnesses he calls to testify against him—the schoolmaster, his wife, and his mother—are grossly unfair caricatures.  The schoolmaster is a marionette being flogged by his (the schoolmaster’s) wife (!).  Pink’s wife has now become a bizarre cross between a scorpion and a whore.  His mother’s arms become a wall as she hugs him.  If he’s crazy, it’s their fault:  “They must have taken my marbles away!”  The undiscerning (and/or stoned) viewer may take these characterizations at face value, falling for the excuses Pink has made for himself.  Of course we know better:  nothing else in the movie suggests that his mother really was overbearing, and even if his schoolmasters were cruel, how was this a unique problem for Pink among all his classmates?  As for his wife, we have seen that her infidelity is a symptom of marital strife, not its root cause.

On the other hand, the judge in this sequence—who is literally a big asshole—represents Pink’s determination to finally hold himself accountable for his mistakes.  Can he see his own faults clearly enough to accept responsibility?  Possibly the most encouraging line in the song—if we can take it neat, without irony—is the judge (i.e., himself) declaring, “The way you made them suffer/  Your exquisite wife and mother/  Fills me with the urge to defecate!”  The judge’s (i.e., Pink’s) ultimate decision—that the wall must be torn down—seems like the right one.  The question is, will that be enough?

What will become of real-world Pink, who is left hiding in the restroom stall?  If nothing else, the lonely purgatory of his concert tour ends here.  When his manager found Pink catatonic in his chair, he yelled, “You vicious bastard!”  He has no concern for Pink—only for getting Pink to the concert, which we see now he’s failed to do.  Perhaps Pink can slink home, tail between his legs—the big rock star brought low—and make a fresh start with his wife.  I wish him the best.

Appendix – Random Q&A

Q.  Could it be that Pink’s wife didn’t really cheat on him?  Could the very notion of her infidelity be a fiction, like the details of the story Pink tells himself?

A.  No.  The four unanswered calls are not Pink’s recollections, but real events we see for ourselves.  The one time there is an answer, it’s a man’s voice saying “Hello?”  Pink doesn’t imagine this voice—we have the telephone operator saying, in surprise, “It’s a man answering!”  So:  a man answers Pink’s home phone in the middle of the night … you do the math.

Q.  We know that Roger Waters’ father died in WWII.  Is the failing marriage theme also autobiographical?

A.  Maybe.  Waters divorced his first wife in 1975.  Perhaps more noteworthy is that during the creation of the Wall album, band member Richard Wright fought with the others, and ultimately quit the band, in part because his time away from home was causing his marriage to founder.

Q.  Why do we have this scene of a security guard in the stadium restroom fastidiously washing his hands?

A.  It establishes that the restroom stall episode isn’t another of Pink’s delusions.  The hand washing is an activity occurring in real-time outside of Pink’s awareness—we are seeing it, not Pink.  By extension, Pink really is sitting beside the toilet in the stall, unable to perform.

Q.  How do you differentiate between actual phone calls and memories of phone calls?  In other words, how do you count five phone calls?

A.  We can identify discrete calls by noting what Pink is wearing and where he is.  Here are the calls, listed in order: 

1. In bed, clothed (beginning of “Mother”);
2. Sitting at edge of bed, shirtless;
3. Lying in bed, just in boxers;
4. From phone booth (end of “Mother”);
5. Clothed, smashing glass into phone (during “Nobody Home”).

Q.  How can you dismiss the impact of Pink’s miserable school days?

A.  In the scene where the schoolmaster mocks him for his poetry, Pink doesn’t look that upset; his expression says, “Yeah, bugger off.”  And given the poetry itself—lyrics to “Money,” which will be a huge hit one day—Pink’s nascent triumph over the schoolmaster is built right into the scene.

Q.  Why does Pink break the razor blade in half before shaving off his eyebrows?

A.  It’s a double-edged razor blade.  He breaks it in half so he’ll have a non-razor-sharp edge to hold.  Perhaps he’s not as drugged-out here as we might have thought.

Q.  Couldn’t there be a lot simpler explanation for Pink’s final unraveling?

A.  Indeed, it may be that the hideous green carpet in his hotel room finally got to him.  Such carpet could unhinge just about anyone.

dana albert blog pink floyd the wall