Too crunchy for fiction, flash or otherwise.
When I was a kid I was really into touring bikes, I mean long distance bicycles; my friends and I built them, not from raw material but from components. The one kid’s dad had a shop in his basement. He was the kind of guy a kid, like, say, me, thinks is really cool; he built bikes and read comics and had a house and stuff. I’m not sure his own kid thought he was very cool.
Anyhow the guy was trying to explain the difference between double butting on the joints and different alloys and stuff; the stiffness and lightness of things and a need for balance, and though not completely accurate, he did pretty good explaining this; Some metal is designed for constant stress and if you slowly add weight to it it can withstand a lot, but it shatters on impact. Other metals will bend with weight but barely dent on impact.
It comes to mind because of my weekend which I had anticipated as something else. People, unlike metal, change. I don’t mean in the after-school special kind of way or the way a character has to change for a novel to work; I mean their properties as a bike frame metal change. I used to operate best with a steady crush of immeasurable weight of the world on my shoulders and had no idea what to do with the moments when I was unburdened. I don’t do so well with the slow steady crush any longer. And, apparently, I’m bitching about it as if to drive the point home.
I know I’ve been cryptic about things and stuff. My plans didn’t fall through for mysterious or cryptic reasons, it’s just that I really liked my plans, I really need out. Yesterday I felt every second of every minute and their endless nuances. Every heavy gray piece of the sky was close enough to touché and like some grand gray ink tainted everything it touched.
My mom’s cataract surgery went well, a day of chasing phantom hairs out of her eye and being a bit stoned and then the patch removed. Other shit happened, petty things. My little sister orchestrated most of all of it. Um, misdirection in that sentence. My little sister was not attached to petty annoyances, or not as their cause. Her plan was that she’d do all this so I could get away for a few.
End of the month I take my mom back in and I’m sure we will schedule the other eye. Perhaps the doctor will see what, I’m sure, he has seen often enough; a patient wavering on whether she wants to go through all that happy horseshit again.
An irresistible force meeting an immovable object is more like the bike metals; it’s a lot harder to pin down a movable object, a marshmallow or a feather than it is a heavy stone. Just sayin’.
As all you fine anti-social personality disorders out there know, passive aggressive is a lot harder to get around than plain old aggressive. How do I know all of y’all are anti-social personality disorders? For one thing most people are, it would be fascinating to meet someone who isn’t, though the person themselves would bore the pants off you (not a horrible strategy, but, if it were the intent it’d be anti-social). If you needed to flat line an MMPI to get into a journaling site there’s be three people on here and two of them would have cheated on the test.
I don’t know. Melancholia is too archaic and victim like of a word for my mood. A caged animal is perhaps a little too much the exaggeration. Perhaps I’m like a caged animal with melancholia. I really wanted to go somewhere this weekend.
For all we learned about bike components, from alloy stress to truing a new wheel by tightening and loosening certain spokes, ultimately it was all for the long haul; wind in the hair, the sort of lung air you get when breathing for endurance, the pistoning of the legs, the joy of being out and alive balanced on two thin ropes of silk and flying past cornflowers and into the deeper blue of the sky. My profound point is the antithesis of a profound point; it’s a completely different world in motion. I need to be in motion. I need to exert how alive I am; it’s not much use if you ain’t doing nothing with it.
Fuck it. I’m spent.
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