From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIV

Introduction

This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.

If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.

May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara

You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.

Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!

So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!

Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.

January 19, 1991 – Berkeley

Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?

April 6, 1991 – Berkeley

Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.

Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else”  anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!

August 19, 1992 – Berkeley

School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.

November 6, 1992 – Berkeley

Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.

I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.

I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.

November 16, 1992 – Berkeley

I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” It never ends.

In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.

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What Hurts?

Introduction

This post is about what hurts right now: physically, emotionally, existentially. I guess it’s also about what doesn’t hurt.

Scrapes and scratches

I have some new scrapes and scratches from a mountain bike crash. (Was this the impetus for this post? Oddly, no … I’d been planning it anyway. Maybe I’m clairvoyant.)

These scrapes don’t really hurt, they just sting a little. Even when I swabbed them with alcohol it didn’t really hurt, per se. It was more like the thrilling zing of eating too much wasabi in one bite.

My back etc.

My back hurts for no good reason and this just happens sometimes. It’s not intense or anything. On a scale of 1 to 10 this pain is only about a 1, but it’s annoying because it’s persistent, and affects how I inhabit my body. I have to bend over slowly to pick something up from the floor, which makes me feel geriatric. It’s also a distraction when I’m cycling. On top of that, I did something to a groin muscle, probably during an ad hoc yoga session my wife led me through. There’s something called a lunge, which would be a huge exaggeration for what I kind of did, but even so I practically maimed myself, so I’ve been walking funny. It hurts a fair bit (perhaps a 2) to put on my right sock. 

Overall, this pain isn’t so much physical; it’s more of a morale thing. The scrapes from my bike crash  are practically refreshing ... I mean, at least they ought to hurt.

Ageing

Obviously the back pain I just described is related to ageing, but at least it’s (presumably) temporary. The groin thing should subside too. But there’s new pain it looks like I’ll have to live with forever: soreness after cycling. Perhaps as recently as ten or fifteen years ago, I could do any bike ride—200 miles, even—with no soreness the next day, as if the ride never happened. Now, I’m sore after my standard 20-mile loop. It’s ridiculous. And age-related pain isn’t just depressing, it’s kind of foreboding … it carries with it the whiff of mortality. It’s like God telling me, “Yes, everything will get harder, and your bodily systems will work less and less well, and then one day your heart will stop.”

Empty nest

There was no intense moment of emotional anguish when (a few years back) I dropped my older daughter off at college, and then more recently my younger daughter. I was kind of surprised, both times, at my casual reaction … this is a really big deal, but it didn’t seem like it in the moment. But after the fact I’ll occasionally be hit with the reality of it at unpredictable times. For example, after my older daughter visited for a couple of weeks recently, and I dropped her at the train station and was driving home by myself, I felt a lump in my throat, and was kind of down. I’d enjoyed hanging out with her, and the fact that that she no longer calls our home home, was, well, brought home.

Of course, my older daughter’s original departure didn’t fully empty the nest; we still had her younger sister at home. I’ve had more of this poignancy since we dropped the younger one off for her freshman year. I felt a prick of it the other day when my wife absentmindedly put three plates down when setting the table, having utterly forgotten for a moment it’s down to the two of us. And I had a sharper pang when I was clothes shopping with a friend recently and bought something for my younger daughter. I was about to explain to my friend that this was for my daughter’s birthday, and this would be her first away from home, without a family party or possibly even a friend party since she’s still new to her college community. Before I could utter a word of this, though, I realized I was unable to talk, and my eyes were filling with tears. So I just stood there, silently crying while also laughing at myself.

Is this actual pain? Yes, and no. It hurts to miss your children, obviously, but all is according to plan. They’re happy to be gone, which means they’re thriving, and what parent wouldn’t want that? And yet, and yet…

Inflation

Does inflation hurt? Well, I sure hear a lot of complaining about it, and about related matters like supply chain and staffing problems that are making it more difficult to get the stuff and have the “experiences” we’re accustomed to. Obviously some people will feel the sting of this more than others, based on their overall financial picture, but as a middle class American I don’t personally know anybody who is so badly affected as to have to worry about homelessness or starvation. And looking at my own situation, I benefit far too much from the unfairness of the world to ever feel butt-hurt about prices going up.

Here’s a thought exercise I like to do when I’ve just paid $13 for a block of cheese and am tempted to bitch about it: I think about thrift shopping. In the Bay Area, you can get incredibly high-end stuff in perfect condition at a consignment store. A lot of the time a garment is brand new, with the tags still on it. This is made possible by people around here having so much money, they can afford to buy this stuff new on a whim and then casually change their mind and sell it for practically nothing, probably by the bushel, to a consignment store, just to have it out of their way. This kind of wealth can only occur in a world where the human experience is massively lopsided. Think of how little money went to the factory worker who made that garment. That worker surely could not fathom the idea of paying, say, $400 for a jacket and then deciding he didn’t really like it after all. The idea that I am a beneficiary of this system disqualifies me, in my opinion, from ever opening my mouth about inflation.

Other people’s problems

There are people in this world who devote their careers to helping others. I don’t mean something trivial like helping smartphone users have a more intuitive interface; I’m talking about people who work to help underserved groups who struggle. I’m glad such devoted people exist. They are making a sacrifice. Let’s consider the experience of a person whose life work is helping the poor. Facing this ongoing, persistent poverty—though they are not themselves poor—does cause them legitimate pain, because it is a professional frustration, and perhaps because they ponder the condition of needy people so as to find motivation.

That being said, for the rest of us, I think it’s kind of an affectation to get worked up about problems that don’t affect us. If I’m eating seared ahi at an upscale outdoor café while sipping an $8 beer, in my opinion it would be poor form for me to talk the whole time about, say, the Bay Area’s housing problem. And this is just a simplistic example; people get worked up about all kinds of problems, many imaginary or exaggerated, that are introduced into the public dialogue by politicians, pundits, talking heads, and the AI algorithms that spread bullshit all over the Internet with the focused intent to fan the flames of outrage and indignation. I am not denying that people can feel real anguish about problems (real or fabricated) that don’t (or can’t) affect them, but is there any point in this?

Here’s a thought exercise to illustrate my point. Suppose you’re traveling overseas and lose your passport. This is a big deal, and throws your whole trip into a tailspin. You’re definitely suffering the loss of that passport. But now imagine that after searching for several hours, you actually find it; ergo, it was never actually lost … but for hours you suffered. Was there any point to that period of anguish? Of course not. Is this different than spending hours and hours fuming about, say, the catastrophic health consequences of 5G wireless networks? Of course not, since both situations concern a problem that does not actually exist. And yet googling “health problems from 5G wireless networks” just now produced 84 million hits.

My point is, don’t borrow pain, from those who (you suppose) suffer it, based on problems you don’t have. That’s my $0.02, anyway.

Loss

I lost my father in 2017 and of course that was painful, and it’s possible I think of him more now than when he was alive. But to be very candid about it, we weren’t great chums and he had lived a long life. His death was not a tragedy.

On the other hand, I do feel real pangs when I think about friends, my age, who have died: M— in 2016 and T— four years later. It’s not only that they were struck down far too early in their lives, with so much left to do … it’s also just that I miss them so much. I saw much less of them than I’d have liked when they were alive (based on busy lives, family stuff, etc.) and now they’re totally gone.

All kinds of things remind me of M—: roads we used to ride together, photos that flit by on my screen saver, components on my bike that I bought from him, brewpubs we drank at together, so many things both obvious and surprising. I often think of him when I’m watching pro bike racing and Richard Carapaz comes on the screen. Carapaz looks a bit like M— he … has the same grin when he’s suffering. It looks like his mouth is trying to form a grimace but he’s just too good-natured.

Recently I was walking by a new-ish Sichuan restaurant in town and paused to look at their menu, wondering if they use Sichuan peppercorns, aka “ma” (spelled 麻). Suddenly, my eyes teared up. I had learned all about these peppercorns from T—, who even recommended his favorite place and advised me on what to order. This was the last time I ever hung out with him, having coffee after a bike ride in late February, 2020. By this point it was too late in his losing battle with colon cancer to hope I could visit the restaurant with him, but I thought I could at least try the place and report back. (His last email to me was, “Let me know how it goes.”) The pandemic kept me from this field trip, and from ever seeing T— again.

Silver lining?

Pain obviously serves a role in providing the kind of feedback that keeps you from, say, touching something that’s burning hot. But beyond this, does it serve any purpose? I believe it can. Pain is very personal, direct, and non-abstract. It pins us down into our immediate reality, and in doing so it can remind us we’re alive. I guess that’s not an entirely bad thing…

Additional reading on pain & suffering

• Cycling, Suffering, & the Cold Pressor Test
• Race Report: Mount San Bruno
• The Femur Report – Part I
• Physical Therapy
• Everest Challenge Pep Talk
• Brutal Bicycle Training Contest – Part II
• Riding La Marmotte – Part II                  

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I’ll Drink to COVID - the Pandemic Beck'sts

Introduction

I feel like we’re finally far enough along in our nationwide recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic that we can start reflecting on it instead of just reacting to it. Of course the virus is still raging, and morphing, but hospitals haven’t been overwhelmed in a long time, and most of us are out and about in the world again. Throughout the ordeal, I drank a lot of beer and sent a lot of Beck’sts, but it seemed “too soon,” until now, to blog about it. I think now it’s finally okay to look back and that strange, shut-in, deeply isolated period, through the lens of what beers my friends and I were drinking, in what environments, and how we attempted to safely share that experience.

(What? You haven’t heard of Beck’sting? What rock have you been sheltering-in-place under? Get thee to a brewery! Or, click here.)

Note: as with previous posts about Beck’sts, I’ve grouped these thematically. I’ve included captions and commentary, and the initials of the Beck’ster. Where you see one letter only (e.g., “E—”) that’s generally somebody’s spouse. These are arranged chronologically, oldest at the top, spanning the period from late March through late July, 2020.

Newbie Beck’st

JH: Aaaahhh. [This was a Beck’st snapped during our first Virtual Pub Night (VPN) the previous week.]

MC: Nice one! Let’s do another session very soon!

JH: Agree. I’m free every night forever.

DA: JH, I think that’s your very first Beck’st, innit? And it’s a great one ... interesting beer, we get to see the color, it’s good lighting, and the Clorox wipe for context. A solid debut! As for our next VPN, I’d be up for tonight! I don’t have a lot of variety in the beer department but I just stocked the fridge so quantity-wise I can totally outlast this coronavirus... Should we do Hangouts or does someone have a Zoom?

JH: I’ll set up a Zoom. Otherwise my carefully selected wallpapers will go to waste.

Temperance Beck’st

DA: Since I did Virtual Pub Night (VPN) last night I figured I better go easy on the booze tonight, so E— and I are splitting this watery lager. (As watery lagers go, Stella is hard to beat.) DW, please pardon the unsightly stemware ... these little etched glasses, which we got from somebody’s driveway “FREE” box, are the perfect size for this. It’s weird going for walks because Albany is like a ghost town, and shelter-in-place seems to be awakening people to how overcrowded their homes are with stuff, because every other driveway seems to have a box of unwanted treasures. It’s like a garage sale except nobody wants any money.

JL: I went alcohol-free for eight weeks [to lose weight for cycling] but couldn’t take it anymore about two weeks ago when things started to get “real” with the ‘Rona. But even without any pandemic anxiety, I can’t imagine ever drinking just half a Stella and being satisfied! I admire your fortitude in these uncertain times…

Shelter-in-place Beck’st

DA: It’s tempting to complain about being stuck at home and about work being overly busy, but then I think of Dr. S manning up and caring for the sick and I stop myself. Nevertheless I do turn to beer in these trying times, such as this very good Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA. Would you fellers be up for a Virtual Pub Night (VPN) soon, maybe Friday? PCS, can you make that work?

DW: I’d be down for that sometime. I have a standing “Book Club” @ 4pm on Fridays with my [school] staff via Webex and I think we have another one with some friends going this Saturday. Geesh...sounds like we drink a lot. This pilsner from Terminal Gravity is outstanding. Tiny little brewery in Enterprise, Oregon, which is pretty much far away from everything.

DW (continued): Looking forward to it - now on to my day of public school Distance Learning administration!

Tall, fluty Beck’st

DA: DW, where do you come down on the question of tall, narrow beer glasses? Are such fluty vessels as offensive as stemware? Frankly, l like how full this is from a mere 12-oz bottle. The empty space at the top of a pint glass always irritates me. Anyway, this Racer 5 is really taking the edge off my shelter-in-place.

DA (continued): In other news, JL, I took the liberty of including your full name in my latest blog post. I hope that’s okay. You’re famous now! In other news, how does Saturday night work for a VPN?

JL: Aw yeah, more free press for me! That public relations firm I hired is really earning their keep! Are you charging them pay-per-click or something? I can’t wait to parlay this notoriety into a popular podcast — maybe something like, Homeschooling for Dummies! Or, How to Gain 15 Pounds and Keep it On! Or, Takes One To Know One: A Podcast About Bipedal Hominids! I’ll make a million. Oh, and yeah, I’d be up for a VPN on Saturday.

Cooped-up, stir-crazy Beck’st

DA: After a couple weeks of grey and cold we got some lovely weather today. When’s our next VPN!?

BA: I’m sorry I missed the last VPN! I didn’t open my email in time, you know, what with the virus and all. Let me know about when the next one is and I’ll try to get over to the store to buy some beers. I’ve been out of beer for a week now … I haven’t been in a store since I hear they put face shields up for the clerks, so that we can’t cough on them as easily. I don’t get out much...

DA: PCS, since you’re the one out there saving lives and can’t work from home, why don’t you suggest a few times? I’ll text BA this time since he clearly can’t stay on top of his email. Maybe he’s trying to be cool like our teenage children...

DW: I’m going to bring some serious, that is Orygun, IPA to the next VPN. No more of this Pilsner nonsense. Boneyard RPMs are available in cans now. Just happened. So there’s that.

DA: OMG, Boneyard RPM ... I love that beer! Alas, E— has us on this crazy pandemic lockdown where we can only shop like every two weeks, so my beer variety is almost nil. Not that we can get Boneyard here anyway…

Free Beck’st

DA: So, we haven’t had restaurant food since March 15 when we picked up Alexa from college for the lockdown. E— just isn’t comfortable. So I said what if we get a slightly underdone Zach’s pizza and put it in our oven for a while? She’s fine with that so I ordered it uncut so it wouldn’t slop over on the pizza stone. But when I went to pick it up, they’d screwed up and cut it. So they had to make me a whole new pizza, meaning I had to hang around for over half an hour, risking my life in their (albeit entirely deserted) restaurant. In recompense they offered me a free beer so I picked this giant Racer 5!

DA (continued): So, it turns out E— wants to bake the crap out of this pizza, long past the agreed upon five minutes. With the delay I already incurred, the family will be eating without me at this point, since I have virtual book club, but at least I have plenty of good beer to drown my sorrows in. Family and pizza (especially overcooked pizza) are overrated ... am I right?

PCS: Look at that MASSIVE brew, how many ounces are in that? Damn, no sorrow for you. So, was the pizza good or no??

DA: 22 ounces, baybee! The pizza was delish. I’m not sure it was worth the hassle but I’m sure my kids were stoked and that their stokage was unalloyed. Maybe they’ll look kindly on me one day.

JL: That beer looks epic! We’ve been getting restaurant food delivered about once a week. We usually stick it in the oven for a few minutes once it gets here, but none of us are convinced it’s doing anything... it’s just a matter of how much risk is acceptable and from whence that risk comes!

Dura-Ace Beck’st

DA: Do I look like I’m f***ing around?! (Hint: I am not. Not with this Double IPA, and not with my new Dura-Ace wheels...)

JL: That’s a nice looking Beck’st. I counter it with this not f***ing around Beck’st. Nothing in my photo is in focus because I’m already drunk — with power!

Anger management Beck’st

DA: If the anger is not too pronounced, beer can actually help. So what am I angry about? Two things: 1) the sad fact that this beer, the highlight of my day after ten hours of teleworking, will soon be gone; 2) the lack of Beck’sts I have lately received (or, more to the point, not received); 3) the dearth of VPNs lately; and 4) my evident inability to predict how many items will be included in my lists. You bitches are on the hook for items 2 and 3. I have taken care of item 1. Item 4 is hopeless. Item 5 is pending. So how about a 5pm PDT VPN on Sunday, 5/24!? DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT. RSVP ASAP.

PCS: Angry white man....BAM!

DW: I could potentially make a Sunday PM VPN. However, I have a Herd Immunity Get-Together at a pub at 4pm with my anti-vaxxer group. Those tend to go on for while… Also, I will only attend the VPN if we can dedicate some portion of the discussion to my wheel dilemma, without bringing up the fact that they are not Dura-Ace.

JL: Yeah, 6 pm PDT works for me. And I am happy to discuss at this VPN all subjects, as long as they are about Dura Ace wheels or wheels that are not Dura-Ace (but secretly wish they were Dura-Ace).

Broken hero Beck’st

DA: I bought this Kick-Ass fieldwork IPA crowler for our VPN that never happened. Since these crowlers have a shelf life, and I’m not allowed to drink until late next week at the earliest (due to my upcoming surgery), I have to give this away to a nearby friend. Alas, ye broken hero, I never got to drink ya...

DW: Alas...what the heck happened? Are you OK? Are you having surgery because of a bike accident? Not sure I can wait for our next VPN.

JL: Yeah, what DW said — what’s up? Upcoming surgery?? This was not discussed during the Dura-Ace wheel VPN.

DA: Dudes, here is what I had originally written about it before I decided to get an x-ray.

I’m resorting to this fallible voice recognition software instead of just typing, since I can’t type right now. That’s because I took a little spill on my bike the other day. I was descending after a bit of rain, but it had rained all night so the oil should have been rinsed off the road, but I came around a curve and my tires slid right out. I got up and got off the road and was putting my chain back on, and another guy came around the curve and stacked exactly as I had, and then a few seconds later a third guy came through, and he hit the tarmac exactly as we did, as though we had all rehearsed this together beforehand. Another guy came riding back up the road who had come through right behind me and almost crashed. He said his tires were sliding all over the place. The road was slicker than snot as they say, really almost like a bunch of soap or oil. So it was just kind of a freak thing, maybe something spilled in the road, I don’t know. I’ve done that descent many hundreds of times and my line was perfect. Anyway, my hand is all scraped up and swollen so I can’t really type, and I think I cracked some ribs because it hurts to breathe, and my shoulder seems pretty wrecked up. But, I was able to ride home, and I don’t think I’ll need to go to the ER or anything, which is good because they’re pretty packed lately, because of all the riots and so forth. Well, I suppose they’re pretty packed, I’m actually just guessing, but I don’t imagine I want to take valuable medical resources away from the agitators and so on.

Update: I went to Urgent Care for an X-ray and my collarbone turns out to be broke as f***. So I have a surgery scheduled on Tuesday. Happy happy joy joy.

DW: Damn, DanaDrive! No way that shoulder is going to grow back together. You’ll finally be riding some titanium with that break! Sorry that happened. What a bummer. The Fieldwork would be pretty handy at the moment.

DA: I donated the beer to JH and he Beck’sted it. Looks delish, eh? <sniff>

JL (a few days later): This is such a bummer of a story. Not the broken bone — the giving away of perfectly good beer! But seriously, the surgery should have happened by now … how did it go? I could VPN tonight I think.

DA: It apparently went well. I am typing with just one thumb which is really tedious so I am going to paste in a big block of recycled text now, which I’d dictated to my phone:

I have the sling that seems like it was made in shop class by a junior High kid, combining his father’s sling with a shoebox. The shoe Box presses against my belly making me feel like the Buddha, if the Buddha were an obsessed consumerist American who loves to carry around a box of treasures, if only his shoe box had a lid. I had a nerve block in my arm, which makes it feel like I fell asleep on it so my hand is all tingly, but instead of whacking the hand to wake it up because that’s annoying, I’m just leaving it because the tingling, as it spreads up my shoulder, will gradually be replaced with pain. I think it is going to be a very boring 6 weeks, followed by some very boring physical therapy, but I guess we were all destined to be bored anyway now that our library DVDs are all spent, and we realize that Netflix and Kanopy and Hoopla and YouTube are still all tools of man, and man is essentially boring. But I’ll take boring over zombie apocalypse, in the final analysis, though the way things are going I guess I wouldn’t be all that surprised if a zombie apocalypse did come to pass. I guess the silver lining there would be that all of their staggering around and flesh eating would be diverting.

I can give you more detail if we ever get the next VPN pinned down. That’s right, I’m off the pain meds and can have booze again! BA, are you back from your road trip yet?

BA: I am indeed back from the road trip and [our late] Dad’s teardrop camper trailer [which BA inherited] is now parked in front of the house. I don’t believe I contracted COVID-19 along the way, only time will tell on that (or not, depending, I guess). I had to figure out why T—’s van (a newer and shorter version of our 15 passenger van) wouldn’t drive the running lights on the trailer, and I managed that. I ended up pulling a relay from the fuse box in the engine room and installing a jumper instead, and lo and behold, it worked. It’s kind of surreal seeing the trailer there, like I expect to see Dad cooking out of the back of it when I look out. I don’t even know what to do with the thing, I don’t even have a vehicle that can tow a trailer.

DA: So BA, I’m glad your road trip went well and the teardrop came through okay. I’m quite impressed that you thought to pull a relay from the fuse box and replace it with a jumper to get the taillights working … that’s an ingenious trick the likes of which English majors don’t generally learn until grad school (though we did mess around a bit with jumpers during my honors post-modernism seminar). So here’s what to do with the trailer: you need to start a celebrity blog/vlog called “Teardrop Life” or something and drive around to scenic places in the US taking glamorous photos and shooting tantalizing video footage. You and J— are getting pretty old, so to stay “current” and “vital” you’ll need to attract a steady stream of groupies to help “fill the frame.” I think you still have the star power to make good money with that. Just be sure to wear your masks around those groupies. Don’t worry, the masks add an air of mystery and emphasize your eyes, one of your strong points. Well, two of them I guess, technically.

Controversial Beck’st

DA: Just because.

PCS: Wait....is it legit to Beck’st Heineken?

DA: Oh, so since you’re a big fancy doctor, you’re too good for Heineken?

PCS: I just don’t know why you would Beck’st a bottle of water! But please, feel free to send pictures of the next LaCroix you’re having. I know you love those.

DA: Now you look here, Mr. Big Shot, if I happen to like my water to have a golden glow to it, and its green bottle to cast a lovely green shadow, and if I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit I like flowers, and nice arrangements, I think maybe you should just honor that and remember that some of us have feelings, and we don’t need to be pushed around by the big Associate Professor of Medicine with the American car, the big bully who always took the top spot on the podium. Sometimes our wives try to tease out our sensitive side by refusing to buy the IPAs we like, and so tonight it was either this Heineken or another 11.2 ounce 4.2% ABV Spanish thing. Oh, sure, you can stand in judgment, all high and mighty with your Deschutes Juicy Haze IPAs and your dual suspension mountain bike. Just kick a man when he’s down, would you? All injured and everything? Really? Does that make you feel powerful? I have to go. I think I’m starting to cry.

JL: I’m torn here. Because on the one hand I agree with PCS (as an aside, I decided against “Beck’st’ing” my white wine spritzer with a lime garnish tonight because I thought it was similarly against the rules). But on the other hand, denying a guy his Beck’st — especially when he’s injured and hurting [we assume] — seems cruel. In the end, however, I think this is a fair Beck’st, if only for the cute flower arrangement and the lovely table cloth, both of which (along with the dappled sunlight) evoke the ineffable redolence of a quaint European café — the sort of place where when you ordered, “une biere, s’il vous plait?”, they would bring you this pathetic ersatz ale, while sneering at you with that European contempt and superiority that only sweaty men from the continent, with their crisp white shirts and their glossy black hair, can muster. And even though the beer is lame and the service is perfunctory at best, it is served very cold (as evidenced by the drops of condensation languidly forming rivulets descending the emerald glass) and it is, at that moment, the best thing that you have ever tasted.

Epilogue

Did you notice that the last Beck’st in this chronological sequence made no reference to the pandemic? No inquiry about the next VPN? This was during that honeymoon period, post-vaccine but pre-Delta-variant. Alas, as we all know, that taste of unsheltered freedom was too good to last, so watch these pages for another post about Beck’sting through the pandemic…

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

World’s Second-Best Dad!

Introduction

Today, obviously, is Father’s Day. My day, really. With my own dad having passed away, this has become one of those rare holidays (my birthday being the other salient example) when I can just relax and bask in … well, in the hope, at least, that I’ll be remembered. My wife always remembers, of course, because she’s an adult. The kids are touch-and-go. Today, they rose to the occasion, but perhaps not all the way up. Metaphorically speaking they propped themselves on an elbow. But I got an unexpected bonus as well. Read on, because albertnet features some special guest stars today!

The card from Secunda

When my wife and I needed a code name for each of our kids, we went with Prima and Secunda for a short while until the kids figured it out. Well, Secunda was the first kid to give me a Father’s Day card, and since she didn’t actually sign it, I have to wonder if she’s willing to be held accountable. Thrilling to the idea that any member of her generation still values privacy, I’ll honor it. Here is the card Secunda gave to me:

My first reaction was, wait, what does age have to do with Father’s Day? But then, it seems almost impossible for my kids to even think of me without automatically cringing at how fricking old (and thus largely irrelevant) I have gotten.

Opening the card, I see that my daughter was apparently thinking ahead to my birthday (in just a few days) so the ageing theme actually makes sense. Fortunately she hadn’t gotten very far on that card—and I can’t blame her, it’s really hard to think of what to write inside—so she pivoted and repurposed it for Father’s Day. Here, you can read the whole thing:

Because her handwriting is so poor, here in legible text is what she wrote:

Hey Dana,

Thanks for making the moola all these years. Every time I buy overpriced crap I think of you, sort of. I like your Mickey Mouse pancakes. I would say they might be the second best Mickey Mouse pancakes I’ve ever had (but you don’t make them anymore). Being 2nd best at anything is pretty meh, good enough though. World’s #2 Dad! I’d buy you a mug but I don’t think they make them like that. Silver medals suit you, they match your hair. Thanks for trying your hardest!

From,
your favorite daughter

Wow. Ouch. You like how she calls me “Dana”? She’s been doing that for a couple months now. She says it in a somewhat pejorative voice, with just a touch of a sneer. I love the smiley face with $ eyes. You can see the kind of values I’ve instilled, or rather failed to instill.

Now, I have to confess, I had forgotten about the Mickey Mouse pancakes. I used to make those when the kids were very little, especially when we were camping. I’d make the batter a bit runny, and do multiple connected cakes to form a Mickey Mouse head. The kids were enchanted. Looking back, I really miss having the ability to enchant my kids. So why did I stop making these pancakes? Because the kids outgrew them? I’d like to claim that, but clearly my kid remembers them still whereas I forgot. Surely there’s at least one dad out there who still enchants his kids, so I guess I can’t protest having to settle for World’s #2 Dad. It’d be a sweeter sentiment without the dig at my hair, of course. I guess she couldn’t resist.

Speaking of silver, there really is a silver lining to my daughter razzing me like that. My brothers and I never had enough rapport with our dad to tease him, even lightly. He was always dead earnest and could not laugh at himself. There were so many opportunities, such as most nights at the dinner table when he would hold forth at length about science, engineering, and so forth … usually whatever he was doing at work. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we heard several dozen lectures about the interferometer he was building. It would have been so cathartic at some point to say, “You know what, Dad? None of us has understood a word you’ve said for the last twenty dinners. We don’t even have the slightest idea what an interferometer even does or why anybody would pay you to build one. Everything you say goes right over our heads.” But we wouldn’t dare.

The closest I came was when I took my kids to the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. They had an interferometer exhibit and I begged my younger daughter to go pose with it. I posted this photo to the album that I shared with my family, adding the caption, “Lindsay went straight for the interferometer and we could scarcely peel her away...”

I was worried this might be too much of a gibe, and that my dad would realize he was the butt of a joke, but he was clueless. He responded with a comment something like, “It’s impressive the interferometer exhibit was clever enough to engage such a young audience so effectively.” To which I replied, “Yeah … unlike you.” (No, of course I didn’t say that.)

I guess it kind of stings, to be honest, that my daughter signed off with “From” instead of “Love.” But then, affection of any sort, even verbal, seems to strike my children as tasteless.

The card from Prima

Moving on, here’s the card from Prima:

Okay, what is up with that smear? I’ll confess, given how well both my kids can draw, I was a bit less than impressed that the first card was clearly store-bought and rather uninspired, but at least it was clean. What, is that chocolate? Or did the cat throw up on it? I guess I’ll give Prima the benefit of the doubt … maybe she did the card (if you could call it that) many days ago and it floated around the house for a while. Even still, you can tell she didn’t put her heart and soul into this. Probably she was prompted: “You better have a card for your dad.” Perhaps she resented being required to produce one. Anyway, here’s what she wrote:

Now, some people just have better handwriting than others. To a large extent it’s generational—my mom, for example, has beautiful penmanship—and I could forgive a kid, even when her college classes have ended, for not taking a lot of time to painstakingly write out her card as prettily as possible. But then, this kid does calligraphy for fun, so I can’t say I’m completely blown away here. To spare you trying to decipher her accidental encryption, here’s what she wrote: 

Dad—

You’re pretty good all things considered but I think there is room for improvement. Hope you take constructive criticism.

1. Your bald spot is gross
2. You snore way too loud
3. You have weird sunglasses
4. You think listening to Eminem makes you cool (it doesn’t)
5. You drive a Volvo you dweeb
6. You have weird veins
7. You keep getting injured (stop)
8. You have a weird beard
9. You keep getting old
10. Yeah

Love,

Your better daughter

Wow. And ouch. That’s not really a greeting card, it’s a roast! And yeah, I like having solid rapport with my kids, but this might just be a little over the top. On a day when I’m supposed to kick back in the hammock, ponder with satisfaction what fatherhood means to me, and bask in the glow of a doting family, I feel blindsided … I mean, is it just me, or is this kid straight up rinsing the piss out of me?

Look, I know I have a bald spot, and it’s one of life’s disappointments since when I was growing up my mom explained that, based on the genes in my two family lines, I would have a full head of hair my whole life, which I clearly don’t. It’s like my hairline and my bald spot are racing toward each other until I only have hair left on the sides, like a clown. Suddenly the reassurances I’ve heard on this matter—for example, that I’m tall enough that not too many people can even see the bald spot—are just attempts to be nice. Attempts, I should add, that are no longer being made.

As far snoring, that’s not exactly fair. My wife tells me, perhaps honestly, that I’ve only been snoring lately, because I’m forced to sleep on my back since my arm is in a sling due to a broken collarbone. But okay, fine, I’ll own it. I snore. Sue me.

It’s number three, “You have weird sunglasses,” that really kind of stings, because I really put a lot of thought into choosing my sunglasses. They’re prescription, and cost a bundle, so I wanted to make sure I chose the frames carefully. In fact, I even dragged my wife with me to the optometrist’s, so she could weigh in. While I modeled them, I asked her to take a photo because I can never see much in those tiny little mirrors the sunglasses display cases have. Well, my wife snapped the photo and started laughing. I started to get a little annoyed—like, if they’re that bad, why am I wasting my time trying them on?—until she showed me the photo. My wife doesn’t have a smartphone, and struggles with the soft-key interface, as you can see:

She had no idea how the cartoon enhancements were made, and I don’t either. Once we figured out how to turn off the silly effect, I got a good look, and we agreed these are the cool shades. I was, I’m a little embarrassed to say, kind of proud of them. But now my daughter has weighed in, speaking of course for her entire generation, the new generation, the only generation that matters, and has pronounced them “weird.” Here, you might as well mock them too:

Moving on to #4, do I think listening to Eminem makes me cool? No, I know 50-somethings can’t be cool. This is truly a musical choice based entirely on my appreciation of Eminem’s music … but to my daughter, it’s just a pose.

And driving a Volvo makes me a dweeb? I thought I deserved credit for recognizing myself as a family man and owning it, vs. buying a big dumb SUV just to show the world how “rugged” and “sporty” and “outdoorsy” I am. And I could have done worse, style-wise, than a Volvo. What if I had a Nissan Cube, or a PT Cruiser, or a Scion XB? (Oh, wait, I do have a Scion XB.) Okay, fine, I give up. I have a dweeb-y car. Two dweeb-y cars.

On to #6, “You have weird veins.” I feel like I’m under a microscope or something. Who knew kids even noticed this kind of stuff? And to be honest, I’ve historically thought my veins were kind of cool, showing off my low body fat etc. In fact, I even mentioned in these pages how, when I donate blood, the technicians praise my for my easy-to-find veins:

But of course I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. Nobody likes prominent veins. They’re … weird.

I guess I can’t really defend myself against the next criticism, that I keep getting injured. I could argue that statistically I’ve got a pretty good track record, as I’ve ridden my bike over 200,000 miles in my lifetime, and competed in over 250 races, with only three significant injuries. Alas, all three injuries have been in my kid’s lifetime (a separated shoulder, a broken leg, and now this collarbone), so I’ll have to face the music here.

Now, this weird beard, which you can see in the sunglasses photo above, isn’t really by choice. It’s my right collarbone that’s broken, and I’m right-handed, so I think I should get points for at least shaving my neck left-handed. Yeah, I get that my beard is turning grey, particularly this little patch near the corner of my mouth so it looks like stray toothpaste. I know if my colleagues saw this graying beard, I’d probably be laid off from my job since I work in tech. So it’s kind of a race: will my shoulder heal by the time my employer reopens their offices?

On to number nine … I “keep getting old.” Well, what am I supposed to do? I guess over in Marin County, and certainly in southern California, all the 50-something men are getting testosterone shots and taking human growth hormone, and maybe they have time to meditate and be mindful, and they’re getting hair plugs, all positive steps in the war on ageing, while I’m just out injuring myself. Forgive me for living!

I asked about #10, “Yeah…” and my daughter said, “You should be grateful I ran out of things to complain about!”

Bonus card – the trifecta!

Imagine my surprise and delight when my smartphone chirped to alert me to a third Father’s Day card, this one from my brother, known to my kids as Evil Uncle Max:

This card pretty much speaks for itself. Man, what a work of art! If I’m not mistaken, this was created without the use of Photoshop. In case you’re wondering, yes—that is my mom holding me in her arms. That isn’t a baby photo of me, but it’s at least from the first half of my life, when I still had a full head of hair. Here’s what Max wrote inside:

Kind an “A for effort” sentiment, walking that fine line between showing me the love and damning me with faint praise. “Totally reasonable” indeed! I particularly appreciate “So take yourself out to dinner or something,” the subtext being, “No point waiting for anybody else to take you.” Clearly, he knows my family well!

Well, there it is, another year of fatherhood done and dusted. Some say our kids won’t fully appreciate us until they’re parents themselves. Caveats being “if and when,” I guess. But you know what? I’m going to look on the bright side … I seem to have excellent rapport with my kids. At least they know I can laugh at myself.

But wait, there’s more!

To my surprise and delight, my kids produced bonus Father’s Day cards just a bit ago, after I had written most of this post. These second cards were done with much more care than the gag ones above. Prima even wrote me this nice limerick: 

There once was a weirdo from Boulder
Who constantly messed up his shoulder.
He is always in pain   
But he’ll do it again
As he keeps getting older and older.

Okay, not that nice … I guess she couldn’t help herself!

Further albertnet reading on this topic:

Father's Day

What Are Fathers For?

A Father's Day Poem

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Physical Therapy

Introduction

My brother told me a story of a trip to the public pool. The staff was moving lane lines around to prepare the pool for the next program. They’d asked everybody to get out, but one guy was lost in his own world and didn’t hear them—he just kept swimming. Finally they pulled in the lane lines next to him anyway, and one of them clipped his hand. He raised a huge stink and was yelling at everybody for hurting his hand and they just ignored him. Finally my brother said to the guy, “Why don’t you go blog about it.”

I think that’s a good cautionary tale for any blogger. In my opinion, the point of a blog shouldn’t be to complain in public to whoever will listen. Feeling sorry for yourself in such a forum is even worse. I promise to keep these ideas in mind as I write about my recent history with physical therapy. I’ve done a lot of PT after breaking my femur fifteen weeks ago. If you’ve done PT yourself you may relate; if not, you’ll get a glimpse into this gloomy realm. I’ll also offer up some thoughts on where life philosophy meets physical therapy.

Beginning

My first exercise, technically, was just getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. At the hospital they encouraged me to be up and about as much as possible, but “possible” was a slippery concept. Just being vertical would make me dizzy, and by the time I’d dragged myself and my walker the twenty or so steps to the bathroom, I felt like I was about to pass out. A couple weeks after my surgery, I learned that it wasn’t worth it to stand to pee: that much exertion significantly increased my pain for the next several hours. A “field trip” down the stairs to entertain guests became possible by the second week or so, but the trip down and back would be my big effort for the day.

My more formal physical therapy began more than a month after my injury. Why so long? Well, the first two weeks I couldn’t really leave the house—I was in too much pain and became exhausted too easily. (I’d lost about 30% of my blood during the operation and was only gradually recovering from severe anemia.) After that, my leg was still in so much pain it seemed cruel to even move or touch it. If legs could talk, it would have said, “Just leave me the hell alone!”

I was also scared. A friend had described a post-surgery machine that forced his leg to bend; not only was this excruciating, but he could hear scar tissue being torn up inside his leg. Letting somebody inflict pain on my already hurting leg was a terrifying prospect. (Pain is much easier to handle when you’re inflicting it on yourself; check out this post for more on that topic.)

By the time I made it to the PT center I could get around on crutches pretty well, but couldn’t bend my leg enough to sit in a chair. (I’d worked hard to get my knee to bend at all. I would sit at the edge of the bed, supporting the bad leg with the good, gradually lowering them until the pain became too great.) My first therapist-prescribed exercise was perhaps the simplest of all of them, but also the worst. I was to sit on the bed, legs stretched out straight in front of me, and flex my thigh muscles. Both legs were atrophied from spending so much time in bed—I’d lost fifteen pounds after my accident—but at least my left leg could still flex and become taut. The right leg wouldn’t do anything. It was like a prosthesis or something. The physical therapist swore she could see a little flicker in the muscle, but I couldn’t. She might as well have been asking me to wiggle my ears.

Not until my wife took me to the pool did I convince myself I didn’t have major nerve damage sufficient to paralyze my leg. In the pool, I could actually lift the leg. This proved that the brain and the leg were still talking. Before that, I really worried that they weren’t.

Tedium

Is it possible to write about the tedium of PT without being tedious? I’ll try. More exercises were added to my regimen. One was to massage what was left of my muscle, pushing it toward the kneecap from either side (above and below). I was also instructed to sit in bed, loop the belt from bathrobe around my ankle, and use the belt to draw my foot toward me, so as to make my knee bend more. This was impossible at first because I couldn’t even bend my leg enough to put my foot flat on the bed. So I looped the belt under the knee and pulled up. Excruciating. I took to lying on my back in bed with my straight up, foot propped against the wall, to let gravity help pull the foot downward. I’d bend the leg as much as I could, then hold this for thirty seconds. Ten sets of this, twice a day, along with the other stuff. Painful, demoralizing, and boring.

Normally I’d satisfy the boredom problem by listening to music. But for the first month or so, I didn’t dare listen to the music I like, for fear of forming unpleasant associations. (Think of the main character in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” who is tortured while hearing Beethoven, and afterward can no longer hear Beethoven without freaking out.) So instead I tried to listen to a Top 40 station. This just added insult to injury—I could become sick of a song before I’d even finished hearing it for the first time. So I tuned in to a classic rock station, only to discover that it played Steve Miller’s “The Joker” so regularly I seemed to hear it every time I did my exercises. At first I was amused, what with “pompatus of love” and so forth. But then it got really old. I started to think maybe Steve Miller had died. What else could explain all this airplay? Eventually I got really sick of that song; I doubt I’ll ever find it tolerable again.

Life philosophy meets PT

I saw this caption on cute doggy calendar at the physical therapy office: “If you love life, it will love you back.” I see two problems with this little aphorism. First, it’s demonstrably untrue. After all, I was in the process of loving life when I suffered this crippling accident. Second, this notion is almost exactly backwards. It’s easy to love life when it does seem to love you. I’m more inspired by people who stubbornly love life even when it doesn’t. I think often of something a close friend once said to me: “I ought to be really depressed right now but I won’t take the bait.”

What is the more stirring cinematic moment for you: Leonardo DeCaprio’s character in “Titanic” standing at the prow of the ship yelling, “I’m the King of the World!” or the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who’s lost both arms and legs in a battle but yells at his departing opponent, “Come back here and take what’s coming to you! I’ll bite your legs off!”? To be plucky and sanguine when life seems hateful is far more inspirational to me than kidding myself that life is fair.

So it is with physical therapy. In the absence of any sign that I’m getting anywhere, I have to hold out hope, and go through the motions as if I had some guarantee of success. “Success,” of course, is a humble prospect here to begin with: all it means is eventually—after what ... four months, six months, a year?—getting back to the place I started, if I’m lucky. (More immediate goals are even more humble: only recently did I achieve the dream of being able to step into a pair of jeans normally, without holding on to something for balance.)

How do you manage to love life when you’re basically under house arrest and can’t do the things you normally enjoy? Years ago, I made a list of the top 20 things I do for fun, so I dug up that list and discovered I can still do ten of those fun things. Not so bad. Plus, I’ve added to the list: now, when I do my PT, I sometimes have one of my daughters read to me, or we do a Mad Lib. (Here’s a highlight from today’s Mad Lib: “So now you know how illegal politicians learned to murder like cats and dogs—from their ignorant pets!”)

The bike

Using my bike on the indoor trainer has been a useful form of physical therapy. A little over a month after my surgery I was able to climb on my bike (using a shower stool) and put my feet on the pedals. I couldn’t pedal a whole revolution, of course, as my knee wouldn’t bend enough. But through much effort I could get incrementally closer. At first I could only get the right crank to go from 3 o’clock to about 8 o’clock. I’d back-pedal to about 3 and hold it for 30 seconds, rest, and then forward-pedal to about 8, hold it for 30 seconds, and repeat, for about 10 minutes total. Each day I would try to get the pedal a little higher up. It hurt like a mother but at least I was in familiar territory.



At the PT gym, I managed a full revolution one day. This was on a stationary bike with the saddle jacked way up. Encouraged, I raised my bike saddle at home, and within a day or two was getting so close to a whole revolution that one day I ordered my left (i.e, good) leg to turn all the way around, dragging the right leg through it. Agony, but exhilaration. The next day, I bit the bullet and turned ten whole revolutions in a row. By the end I was in tears, whether from pain or relief I can’t say. Once that feat was accomplished, the return to regular pedaling (and normal saddle height) was a matter of refinement. The basic ability had returned.

Life philosophy meets PT – revisited

“That which does not kill you will make you stronger.” This bit of pop-philosophy, the darling of college freshmen, strikes me as completely false. The more accurate statement, in my opinion, is “That which does not make you stronger will kill you.” Think of all the ways people gradually kill themselves: booze, cigarettes, overeating, sloth ... these activities don’t feel like they’ll kill you, while you’re doing them, but they gradually are. They’re sure not making you stronger.

Of course, I’m being disingenuous here, and doing a disservice to Nietzsche. His point is probably more along the lines that enduring suffering, and living through a painful ordeal, strengthens your character. But I still take issue with this. True, the willingness to suffer is a gateway to mental and emotional fortitude, but the suffering itself can be good or bad. If, for example, you’re stupid about training or PT, and simply ignore all pain (whether it’s the kind that indicates intense effort or the kind that indicates you’re causing damage), you’ll end up hurting yourself—getting tendonitis or worse—and then you’re sidelined and most certainly not getting stronger, either physically or psychologically.

With physical therapy, a systematic approach—under the careful guidance of a physical therapist who knows what he or she is doing—is key to getting better. Suffering alone will not heal you. Often you must do what doesn’t come naturally, and retrain your body to behave itself. Needless to say, doing what doesn’t come naturally can get you into so much trouble if you blindly flail away. Structured, targeted suffering, of a more careful nature than the “that which does not kill you” variety, is needed.

(Re)learning to walk

Over the months my mobility has improved. I’ve gone from the walker (depressing and geriatric) to crutches (less depressing, more suggestive of a sporty injury) to one crutch (Tiny Tim) to a cane (geriatric all over again). Cane shopping was a drag. I looked at the canes at Walgreens and was shocked at how ugly they were. Most were fake wood and one was the color of streaky feces. All of the canes were too short. So I made the rounds of the cane shops: Canes R Us, the World Cane Emporium, and that boutique-y place up in Kensington, Ye Olde Cane Shoppe.

No, there aren’t really any cane shops, but my physical therapist referred me to a crazy medical supply place that looked like the home of a crazy hoarder. Stacks of stuff from floor to ceiling, with narrow walkways carved out. A salesman there, who looked and sounded like Philip Seymour Hoffman, advised another, “The long canes are in the back. We hide them so the short people won’t buy them.” I’d wanted an aluminum and foam rubber cane that looked like a loaner from a hospital, because a nice wooden cane would make my physical infirmity seem permanent. But all they could offer was a wooden cane, cut to size.

The musculature in my leg got so fouled up by the surgery that my brain stem seems to have given up on the whole limb. I guess this makes sense. For most of human history we didn’t have the medical technology to fix a broken femur, so the brain developed tactics for getting by without a working leg. I worked up a host of unconscious compensations.

At first, I would practically lock my right knee when I walked, and swing the right leg around to the side, in an arc, instead of swinging it straight forward, because that way the knee wouldn’t have to bend to keep my toe from hitting the ground. Moreover, my instinct was to put weight on the bad leg very tentatively and for as short a period of time as possible, so the left leg would shoot forward instead of my gait being balanced. I would swing my right arm to help swing the leg forward, rather than using the leg’s muscles. Watching myself in the mirror at the PT gym, I realized I walked like a drunken mummy zombie.

The absurd thing is, these habits have persisted after the leg developed much of the strength and flexibility needed for a normal gait. My brain just doesn’t trust the leg. So I’m in the peculiar position of overriding what comes naturally and applying conscious thought to walking. Normally, thinking while walking makes you more, not less, awkward (try it!) but this is the best I can do for now. There’s still a lot more strength-building and flexibility-gaining left to go.

A final note

My mom has praised me for my determination and doggedness in doing all my exercises. She kind of has to praise me—it’s her job. It’s what moms are for. But in case she actually means it, and in case you yourself had thought anything of the kind, I assure you that anybody in this situation would be just as diligent. When your body is broken, you want it back, and you’ll do anything to get there. Training for sport is totally different: you can always think of worse things than not being perfectly fit for your next big race or group ride. But there’s not much worse, for a relatively young, fit person, than limping his way through the rest of his life