You're

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark, as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools' Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels, all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on. SP

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My spring schedule with Team TIBCO

Drentse 8: March 8
Ronde Drenthe: March 10
Novillon: March 11
San Dimas: March 16-18
Flanders: April 1
Energiewacht Tour: April 4-8
Presbyterian: April 14
Gelderland: April 15
Fleche Wellone: April 18
Sunny King: April 21
Speedweek: May 4-6
Gatineau: May 19-21
Philadelphia: June 6

I've decided to keep a more thorough record of this year's racing season. Primarily because it will be my first year with a team of this magnitude - a crew of super-talents... I'm among greatness. I am excited, motivated, and inspired. It's everything I've been working for since I started pedaling with a messenger bag and knobby tires. It's why I could never go too far away from the ectasy and suffering of a bicycle race, even with all the school and work piling up around me. It would be a waste of wild experiences to become too busy to document the coming year. All begins in a week when I will be heading west to the Santa Barbara area of California for our team's training camp.

Last night I finally started dreaming about racing and it was good.

Tim Furey's Beings

Channeling inner-superheroes and inter-dimensional beings from New Jersey based Tim Furey.

Helen Frankenthaler

December 12, 1928 - December 27, 2011

I haven't been writing much lately. I've been reading a little instead, trail riding, stretching more, and running regularly. All of my favorite ways to adjust to the change of season and dropping temps.

September from start to finish was still morbidly hot and a total blur.
I spent it hurting from a crash into a brutally hard fence in the final sprint out of the last corner at the Tour of Austin. The rest of the time off and in bed I tried to focus on how to better let go of the crash and not to be angry about it. Andrew helped a lot along the way and by October I was able to run again. Naturally, I did so daily for two weeks straight. My first ride back was the North American bicycle courier championships which I didn't do very well in but I wanted to go to just to be around the whole messenger culture since it had been so long since the last NACCC I did in 2002. The best part was seeing a familar face or two and all the heckling going on along the sidelines going on from Andrew, Logan, Heath & Sharron.
During the courier race it was like going back to visit school grounds I grew up in but finding all the buildings and land have since been remodeled or completely renovated. It all felt vaguely familiar, but like trying to remember a dream after waking, only hints of familiarity. Nothing concretely nostalgic. If there is such a thing.

Despite not keeping up with writing, I still feel the desire to record the beauty I see in the world around me; but I'm doing so in different ways. Like sharing it a bit more privately, not in as many traditional mediums. It's the way it has to be for the place I'm at and probably will be this way for some time. I'm trying to keep up with photographing and keeping my libraries current and organized. Still full of inspiration, but within the inspiration, a new inspiration is born. I'm now learning how to grow into it all, old and new. I'm keeping up, or trying my best to keep up with but doing so quietly. As if acquiring a covert collection of all of my favorite things for preservation and refinement, only to one day pop open like a bottle of champagne at the blink of a new year.

Not to say that I'm at a failure to produce or follow art right now. It shouldn't be classified as a failure at all, of any sort, but more a way of internalizing this energy and keeping all inside, like fuel for the coming journey.

Or I'll sign off with this instead...


Reaching my voice over miles and miles to touch another quiet voice. The strangeness of love, longing, jealousy, like doors brushed with fingertips. Open some, keep others closed, others try to open a little, peeking inside the peephole.
Ghost colored dust blanketing the lampshades, the silent glow of 60 watt luminescence.
The drifting of separate people, each occupied in separate ways.
Big blue eyes and sun freckles.
The smell of earth, rotten wood, crumbling moss, the sent of damp cedar.
The debate about whether to replace, make new again, silence.
The sound of breathing. These are what my dreams are like.

I'm in an airport heading to NYC to race my bicycle. I'm flipping through the September edition of Vogue, sitting in a long, hidden, silvery corridor. Here I am at a silver table and chair, looking out onto the massive runways the heat rolls off the planes in quivering waves. I'm thinking, typing, and listening, watching the quicksilver of heat smearing its way across the engine air.
A cool breeze of AC occasionally swirls and drafts around my new birthday perfume from my sweetie.

I think back on the events of the day leading up to this quiet moment. Before I left the house today I baked a turkey and grilled all the veggies in the fridge. I stir fried quiona and lentils, made a salad to nibble with a carrots and tomotoes and a couple pieces of bacon. I drank the last of the milk, brewed coffee, when it cooled, I slammed the rest of it. Then I placed all the food from the oven and range into the freezer to freeze until after I return. So Andrew and I can enjoy a good home cooked meal together, it's been a while.

So now my hair smells a little like a restaurant kitchen. It would have been nice to have time to shower before the airport. Water somehow clears my mind. I never know how long I've been in the shower. Time ceases to exist in there because my mind spaces out a little bit. Which is allowed when in the shower. Sometimes the same thing happens when I'm riding too, all of a sudden the sun is about to set and I'm miles and miles from home. It's just it's too beautiful to abandon a setting sky. Everything surrenders, the wind changes, the birds fly in waves, thd bugs come out to sing. When I realize that I don't remember the last 10 miles, I somehow know they included a couple stoplights and several turns, and that's when I know it was a good ride. It all fuzes together like a long spine and time disappears into a mental vortex.

*schllllloooooop*

There are a couple of tiny tree branches painted red and purple on my windowsil. One of them is deep violet, and the other is arterial red and violet stripped. Strangely, in a childlike way. I'm glad i didn't throw them away, they have a certain beauty this way too.

Today I rode my bicycle alone. I miss my guy. It was a little lonesome but I saw funny things on the way home. It all made me laugh a little, but it's not the same when alone.

Outside of the window, it's black black black except for the streetlight shining on the hood of my nearby car. There is no wind, everything looks so still. I wonder if Andrew is sleeping.

I can see my reflection in the window, superimposed over the street light. If I focus on the window, I'm a bit clearer, but if I focus on the light, I become a blur of eyes and hair. A conscious memory, a subconscious dream. A blur, out of sight, and I dissipate into thin air.

Words are so awesome. They're an intellectual-sensual-emotional batter like a layer cake that you taste in your imagination through known experiences, visualized through love, understood through smell, touch, excitement, pleasure, even pain. Frosted in ink, out of the oven, and into our brain. This is why I had to go back to school, to study theory behind literature. All kinds, so much to learn and to absorb, but there's only so much theory can teach, it's merely a path to a door, wherein lies a world of creativity.

I want you to stay in my head for a little while, because it's a fun place to be.

I'll go to bed soon. Sleep is usually a better preparation for bike racing than training is, usually.

A piece of information for you: On warm nights, I like to sleep with my head on the windowsill and my arms outstretched of the window. The warm breeze over the crickets as I drift away are wonderful things.

This summer I realized I'll always spend more time in the sun and always get more freckles. And you know what? I love having freckles. I like when the sun sings into my eyes, blinding and deafening them. Today I looked back to the sun, and its white light shivered into a burst of a billion pieces, icy, triangular brightness. When the mists around my eyes cleared, the sky shone white, then blue and the twin curves of spinning crowns twisted away from helical view. I looked into the trees too. And each leaf danced a different dance, quickly, each a fluttering staccato.

Everything feels heavy, I'm not going to say anything else - you should tell me something.

The ceiling of the hands arching, like an old-world cathedral. Marveling. The world spins slightly, as though I'm a little drunk. I'm not thinking about anything but the tactile sensation. The slight dampness between our hands like dew in a hollow because of the contours of our palms.
My eyes snap open, suddenly. Wide and engaging. Courageous and vulnerable; the softest, most subtle elements of happiness.

It's amazing what fingers will do if you cut the connection between the brain to the hands, taking all the little tollbooths out along the way.

I watched the landscape inside of a wine glass for a couple of minutes the other night. It varies depending on the body of the wine. Sometimes with heavier reds the legs are thick and strong, sometimes with champagne, they're thin and dissipating, waif-like. I tipped the flute up to take a drink, and ended up transfixed by the bubbles, silhouetted on the surface of the inside of the glass, like a firework on the fourth of July. My fingerprint became a blurring pyrotechnic effect. Then I took a drink, and watched as it all sparkle and twinkle away.
Worth noting, for dinner tonight: Steamed garlic and bok choy, asparagus, and celery with peanuts and sesame-garlinc pork. Mmmm.

I need to go to the ocean sometime soon. I've been feeling too worried late at night when I'm alone lately. It hasn't anything to do with the ocean, which just sits there, majestic. The tide rises, and falls. I am so tiny in relation to that. It makes me feel better. Kind of like the stars, we're just babies. We're just sub-particles of space dust, really.

I move out of this apartment tomorrow. Tonight is the last night I'll sit up late and type a blog at this table, the one with the lion's feet at the base of its legs. The last time I'll sit at this particular table in the old chair from the 1960's, the one that starts to hurt my pelvis after a little while from its steely surface. My friend & I took it from the stage after the 'Man Or Astro Man?' show at the Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton, Texas. I was 19, it's seen above in the photograph. Would I do it now, steal a chair from an space rock show? Probably not, but at the time it fit snugly in the back of my metro and we've been a good match ever since. This chair will last forever, longer than me.

I'll miss these quiet times. So quiet that I can hear the plastic frame squeaking and wrestling against the wall from its balancing counterpoint on the table. Tiny little chirps of plastic while I type.

Ahhh, sigh, I'm such a scared child sometimes. This is better than being homeless. Have I grown spoiled? Am I wicked? I keep moving forward.

I'm going to start going back to yoga, I really am. I'll find the money somehow. if i'm not going to take medication - which I may or may not need, then I need to have yoga in my life, I think.

photo: http://www.vogue.it/en

The sun was out today. Really out, not just peeking. I sat outside for a spell in shorts and a too-big t-shirt with the sleeves and neck cut open wide, knees together and feet turned inward. My favorite way to sit. The sun warms like nothing else. It's not like fireplace, nor a warm vent - which are both nice, but the sunshine is different. The sun makes the air smell different to me. So nostalgic mixed with burning charcoal grills, when I don't mind the smoke so much. I rather enjoy the smell of smoke in the summer, a campfire or a charcoal grill in the warm sunshiny air.

Today I've been sitting inside for the rest of the time. Every door and window is open. Leaves are blowing in across the floors. Right now I'm stopping to glance up occasionally and look out the door. A moment ago, there was a squirrel watching me, it was hooked onto the tree in a funny way. After that, a bold male cardinal who stopped and gazed in for a while, well, a while for a bird at least. I hear the leaves rustling again, which is different than the rustling palms of southern california, still like rushing water, but in Texas it's more like a rambling creek - less like a brooding, dreaming ocean.

This morning the sky was deep bright blue, the sun was uninterrupted. Into the late afternoon it's still blue with a wash of white, superficial and moving. Right now I'm perfectly safe. Even with the sun in my eyes, I can still see clearly.

I'm on the floor and I smell like myrrh and vanilla and salt from sweat. It's one of those scents that catches in your nose for a moment. Warm and bronzing. I think so. It smells of a mix: One part human, two parts energy and life.

I slept in Betty's bed last night while a friend came over and slept on the couch. It's a safe place with a good friend, the best combination. Where I really want to sleep is on an immense teddy bear with certain someone. Warm and soft and inviting.

Photo from http://www.zeitgeistudios.com/

I'm so poor right now that I can't afford to go to yoga, I honestly believe it has a lot to do with why I've been feeling and acting a little weird. I miss it a lot, donation classes are available, but I would donate more than I should, so I'd probably end up spending more that way. I don't have enough discipline to actually do it on my own everyday, I would rather go to the studio, that's where all the progress through practice takes place. Maybe I'll take money out of savings, it's a worthy investment, but I really ought not to, I need that for so many other things. It's just, I'm not so bendy as I was even just a month ago. Sad. I'm glad our team made a little money this weekend at Redlands.

I've been feeling like slowdancing with somebody. Billie Holiday's on, and it feels kind of soft and contented and quiet before I get up and tackle the airports today. I wish I had the voice to be a lounge singer, hushed and subdued. My voice is too high and puny. I'd love to slither all over the stage seducing everyone, lying on the piano. If only my stage fright would go away. I'm working on it.

I wish I had more self discipline. I could go to bed earlier, read, and stretch more. It's really a struggle. I've got an addictive personality. Right now it's seven-fifty am and I didn't sleep until almost 2 am. I woke up at seven and I came here, online, looking at cycling news and gretchen's blog. I can't help myself because today is her Monday Mood Board post. The problem is I'm doing all of this when I should be asleep so my eyes are burning and my back still hurts from the race yesterday. Damn stupid of me to offset my sleeping cycle. I'll try falling back asleep now. Wish me luck.


Photo from http://gretchenjonesnyc.tumblr.com/