4.28.2004

"Bush To Iraqi Militants: 'Please Stop Bringing It On'

WASHINGTON, DC—In an internationally televised statement Monday, President Bush modified a July 2003 challenge to Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces. "Terrorists, Saddam loyalists, and anti-American insurgents: Please stop bringing it on now," Bush said at a Monday press conference. "Nine months and 500 U.S. casualties ago, I may have invited y'all to bring it on, but as of today, I formally rescind that statement. I would officially like for you to step back." The president added that the "it" Iraqis should stop bringing includes gunfire, bombings, grenade attacks, and suicide missions of all types."

-- The Onion

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4.11.2004

FORMAL APOLOGY TO LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI:

Oh, my. I failed to credit you, dear Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for the beautiful quote about the light of your fair city San Francisco in my previous entry. I quoted it as coming from Ginsberg, but you were the artist who so lovingly strung those words together to perfectly describe something that I can not. For this I apologize and pledge to never mix my beat poets again. For repentance I shall read A Coney Island of the Mind in one day. Someday.

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4.7.2004

I watched her take a long drag off of her cigarette with naked envy. I drank my one beer slowly, savoring each sip before cycling the 2 miles uphill back home. I had to go to bed early and well hydrated as I would be getting up at 7 o'clock the next morning to ride my bike for 77 miles.

"The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light, and the light of fog blanketing the hills, drifting in at night through the golden gate to lie on the city at dawn, and then the halcyon late mornings after the fog burns off and the sun paints White Houses with the sea light of Greece, with sharp, clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted, but the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills, and then the veil of light of early morning, and then another scrim, when the new night fog floats in and in that vale of light the city drifts, anchorless, upon the ocean."
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I walked out of my front door and into the halcyon light of Saturday morning. It was 8:00, and the street was empty except for the birds singing, and I felt so responsible. I was up and out of the door, carrying my bike down the stairs and swinging up onto the seat, my feet clicking into the pedals, right one click!, left one fumble fumble, there it is, click! The clicks of my cleats into the pedals echoed off of the trees as they warmed their trunks in the new light. A happy and chattering group of four riders glided past me, loud and trailing an excited energy. I pedaled out into the street and drifted behind them, wondering if they were going where I was. At the end of the park, we all pulled into the lodge's driveway and my chest softened and wobbled as I looked at the crowd of 85 people here to train together to ride their bikes against the AIDS pandemic.

I kept to myself as usual for me in a large crowd until one of the riders that I had followed down Page street looked at me and asked me if this was my first training ride. I answered yes, and he started clapping and saying, "Oh! This is your first training ride!" and introduced himself as James and then to his three friends who had ridden in with him. From then on throughout the morning, I could tell that he was looking out for me, clapping for me at the top of a hill, asking me how I was doing as he passed me, always remembering my name and calling me by it. As I would pedal with these people for 77 miles that day, I would learn that he would not be the only one looking out for his own, pulling people through the mileage and making it fun. They all do it. All of the riders who have ridden in previous AIDS rides, the veterans.

We stretched together, people hugging each other and talking about the ride. I leaned over to stare at my toes and stretch my hamstrings and admired the guy next to me's socks that said "Bitch" on the sides. We got on our bikes and started through the park and towards the bridge, loud bunches of cyclists yelling "slowing", "stopping" or "car back" to let our fellows know what was going on around us. "Slow down!" as a car gunned their engines, passing us in the park. It was like critical mass but on a spotless Saturday morning, fresh and new.

At parties with groups of people that I don't know, I tend to isolate and talk only to the two or three people that I do know. I rode by myself for only the first few miles of the ride. As we rode through the small towns of Marin towards Farifax I found myself repeatedly involved in conversations with people as I rode beside them or more often with riders whose faces I had not yet seen as we rode single-file up a hill, at a slowed pace perfect for conversation. I talked and laughed with these voices, one ahead of me and one behind me so naturally, so comfortably, with none of the pressures of face to face conversation that is relentless at social gatherings. Then, after making it to the top and flying down one after another like birds to the bottom, then we would shake hands, exchange names. After I had already learned who they were.

As we began to enter the Nicasio area, the scenery was too beautiful to talk, and the riders had spaced out pretty widely by then so that I was riding with a group of three other people only, every once in a while passing other groups of two or three or solitary riders. I flowed through the miles, my body locking into a rhythm, efficient and smooth as I stared at the decompressing expanses of green fields, of black and white dairy cows, the air punctuated with the cry of hawks or the gargling song of red-winged blackbirds. We passed a piles of bones on the side of the road, surrounding a giant ribcage. There were fields of wildflowers, and some of dried, brown grass.

We circled a park full of sport fields where kids were playing something, and I saw the scene unfolding before I was very near it. I knew what had happened and what I would have to ride past. I knew it, and my body reacted, wanted to stop, and I could hear my voice out loud saying, "Oh no. No. No. Oh no." talking to myself, preparing myself. There was a big black dog down on the side of the road. There was a sheriff's car parked on the other side of the road and a big refrigerated truck behind the sheriff's. A woman was trying to slow traffic as the owner knelt beside his fallen friend, petting him as he lay on the side of the road, not moving. A few other people stood around, concerned and on cell phones. I tried not to look, to just keep pedaling, but I couldn't help but notice the dog's red leash and think of him running excitedly just a few minutes before.

I kept going, looking at the rider in front of me. He had seen it too. The people behind me saw it, and we all kept riding, silently up the hill. I thought of the dog as I wound my way up the long incline and then of the human beings dying at that very moment. A human life flickering out in a bed with a partner, a mother or father, kneeling beside them and patting their heads, speaking soothingly. At that moment, there were people dying of AIDs too, and my muscles cranked the pedals for them. I mourned the dog. I mourned the men and women. I breathed and watched as the hills unfolded before me.

We rode through Samuel Taylor park on a paved cycling path, down deep into a shaded redwood forest, the air made me high as I breathed in the resinous sap diffused into mossy hillsides. I threw my chain and got off the bike to fix it, surrounded only by quiet giants, the glittering panels of sunlight reaching through the branches and down to dapple the earth.

Then I was tired and hungry and I shook up my bottle of cytomax, and the top came off and sticky but delicious electrolytes splashed all over my bike and my shorts and my shoes and my legs. Potassium and salt that I would not have the pleasure of absorbing, and that I needed because it was hot. The kind of hot where you stop riding, and there are salt crystals formed on your face.

We stopped for lunch in Lagunitas, and the people who were already there clapped for each new group of riders who joined them. I sat with James and Fred and Lisa who I had ridden into the park with early that morning and two other riders, Megan and Kim. We talked about the ride that day and about the AIDS rides past. They gave me hints and tips on training and chafing. We laughed at our voracious eating habits and James told a story of eating half of a tuna sandwich off of some complete stranger's plate from an empty table one day when he had had two flats before he had pedaled into the lunch spot. He had been too hungry to wait for his own to be fixed. As my stomach growled and my blood sugar felt like it was about ten, I thought, "I would totally do that and not think twice." We talked about the dog. Someone mentioned the blood that was coming from its head. The red leash. "I thought that he had a red leash." "Oh! He did! You're right that was a red leash." We all knew it wasn't. We had all seen it, and we had all seen it together.

I decided to ride with James, Fred, Lisa, and their other friend who I absolutely adored and had some conversations with but never caught his name for the rest of the way home. We crowed and laughed and talked about how much "this hill sucks" as we rode up, smiling and breathing hard as a little pack. We crested White's Hill, the one where the dog had been hit on the way out, and I stopped to let my friends go around me since I am a brake-rider on the downhill. I don't trust the little road bike yet, and the skinny tires and dragon-fly wing construction of the little beauty make me imagine some part falling off as I fly down a hill at 45 miles per hour. I am easing up on the brakes each time I go out on it, though. I let go of them a little and got going up to about 35 miles per hour before noticing a lot of people motioning for me to slow down as I zoomed past them in their cars. "Assholes." Everyone in a car while I am on a bike is an asshole.

Then I noticed that there were cars pulled over on the side of the road and a bunch of people standing on the shoulder. I slowed my bike with great effort, and my eyes locked onto the face of a man. His look shocked me, and I felt like I was floating or like my back tire had come off of the ground, a surreal feeling as I saw his face and knew that something horrible was wrong. "What's going on?" He answered, "There's a biker down." "I'm a nurse." He begged, "Can you please help? It looks bad." I got off my bike and walked it down to a scene. A biker lay on the shoulder, covered by a green blanket. There was blood coming from the front of his face and from his leg, making red puddles that pooled and then continued their coarse off of the road. He looked around, panicked, needing eye contact with those who knelt beside him, speaking soothingly to him, patting his leg and face. I joined them, clamping my fingers around his wrist to check his pulse. Weak, thready. He would struggle for air sometimes, complaining of a pain in his chest. There were a few other people around him. A chiropractor stabilized his neck and had her calming fingers on pressure points on his chest. There was another nurse and an ob/gyn. Lisa was a doctor, an internist with emergency room trauma training, and she immediately started a head-to-toe assessment. He had overcompensated after passing another cyclist while going down the hill. At a speed of probably 40 miles per hour he had hit the shoulder at such great force that he had come unclipped from his pedals and slammed repeatedly into the side of the mountain. His helmet was on the ground, bloody, and the lenses had popped out of his glasses.

I moved to the other side of him and lifted up the blanket to check his legs. A huge chunk had been torn out of his left leg, a piece of muscle missing like someone had carved it out, scooped it. I didn't allow my expression to change as I looked at it, like nothing I had ever seen before. I didn't want him to see my reaction. I put my hands on his feet, checking them for warmth and feeling for pulses as he held up his left hand. "I can't feel my thumb." It was pale blue-white, and Lisa quickly assured him that he had probably just banged it really hard. "You're going to be ok." We all told him that. He would be.

The fire department got there with their ambulance and loaded him up. He asked about his bike. He was an AIDS ride cyclist. He was 38. We stayed beside him until we left him in the good hands of the paramedics.

We rode the rest of the way home slower, calmer, closer knit. We watched out for each other and slowed when someone lost their chain. We performed frequent head counts, and when we stopped for the bathroom in Farifax at the Coffee Roastery, James hugged me. We had just met that morning. But we had been nearly 65 miles together, and today we would go 77. We had seen things together, and I hugged him back and marveled at the number of other people that I had met that day that I felt instantly close to. The fog began to roll in as we rode through Sausalito and up the unbearable hill coming out of that town.

We crossed the bridge with the wind gusting to the right and left so hard in each direction at the same time, that I felt as though I could see it in front of my face. I felt it stir my heart, and the bridge's cables moaned, crying their songs of the sea and the mist and the fog in a high-pitched wailing, and the water beneath me churned. There was a large spot of blinding golden light far out into the sea where the sun had broken through.

I had set off that day through Ferlinghetti's halcyon morning and was welcomed home by the new night fog. I had seen whole revolutions of life and death and God's miraculous creation, I had breathed the old wisdom of redwoods and ridden through lonely stretches of open space. And I had done it all with 84 other people who wanted to make a difference in it all somewhere.



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