“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
~ Falsely yours”“• Charles Bukowski
It’s Guy Fawkes night tonight. Outside my window, the sky is lit not only by the usual flickering streetlights and myriad houses dotting the hill opposite, but with spiralling, falling colours accompanied by whistles, cracks and bangs. I feel only a slight compulsion to do more than look out the window every now and then, to pay more than idle attention to the kaleidoscopic pageant, to garner the same joy I felt as a child when that one night of the year came around, when we’d build a giant bonfire behind the back fence and let off a big bag of fireworks. Somewhere along the way, ‘crackers’ were banned, and they haven’t really been missed since. In this country though, it’s still possible to walk into the corner store and purchase your own personal pyrotechnics display. I’m not sure how I feel about that, maybe if I was 15, or 25, I’d be exploding things with the youthful enthusiasm of the best of them, but now it just doesn’t register on the scale of cool shit to do for fun.
Riding a bike still registers, mostly. It comes and goes, but because it’s been a constant for a lifetime, it will always be welcome. And because of its constance, I’ve retained at least some sense of what it’s like to feel 13 again. Even though I ache like a 50 year old, and get frustrated and agitated by the sheer fuckedness of the world presented to me, riding a bike seems to extinguish any negativity. Today, as I lay on some sort of padded rack contraption, contrast dye coursing through my veins, while I was inserted lengthwise into a giant tube that took photos of my insides, thoughts of death, or more so the mechanics of trying to prevent it, were running through my mind at breakneck speed. I don’t know if it’s increased since I’ve knocked up my half ton of years or not, but I’m noticing that I think about mortality a lot (more) these days.
Strangely though, there’s little concern that the thing that makes me happiest also has the most potential to take my life. Or, more accurately, the potential for my life to be taken whilst I’m doing the thing I love most. It never really clouds a ride with thoughts that at any given moment I am mere centimetres or seconds from death, yet my instincts are no doubt doing their best to subconsciously keep me one step ahead of peril. The bike and the act of riding it has kept me alive while simultaneously putting me in grave danger. Bandaging up my wounds, giving me CPR then pushing me back out onto the frontline.
There is a kind of melancholy, muted relief now I have been given a warrant of fitness; the warm liquid that made me feel like I’d had lukewarm coffee pumped directly into my blood showing that, despite years of extraneous abuse, things are still in good working fettle. Thoughts of an impending expiry failed to foment any real fear, just a realisation that we’re not able to live forever after all, and that’s not a bad thing in any sense.
That one constant, the bike and the act of riding it, has probably staved off a fate far worse than death; being alive but not living. And death, to me, is not being able to ride a bike.
Ride to live, live to ride.
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View Comments
@Barracuda
Love it. Dolphining. The 13 year old Brett, and all the rest of us, flying on our bikes, fluidly cresting hills to dive down again, to spin and turn and jump with a pod of friends or just solo because it brings such joy will be an image to keep.
One of the best things to do in NZ has to be a whale watching trip at Kaikoura. After seeing obligatory whale surface, breathe, dive we went inshore and got surrounded by a pod of dolphins as they herded a school of fish into the coast by jumping, somersaulting & splashing. Tremendous.
It must now be time to go for a ride, and smile.
@Barracuda
My VMH detects same, usually only after two or three days off the bike but she's not so polite about it. All I get is "Go for a bloody ride will you! You're getting cranky again!"
@Chris Frank will taunt Brett sooner or later. It's the Keepers' Way.
Can we all just agree that the POC helmets are absolutely hideous?
@Puffy
@Puffy
^^ this, if you happen to be reading wifey, see I'm not weird.
Great article, captures it all for me - moreso as another cyclist lies in critical condition in a local hospital and the media are currently targetting cyclists for being irresponsible road users.
(oh wow dropped to "4")
50? You're still a baby! The world fuckedness increases as the years go by, sadly, but so long as you can swing a leg over the crossbar there's a way to escape it all.
http://www.bikeexchange.com.au/blog/rule-47-beer
@brett
Tough love. Best kind.
@Gianni
Family and friends give me this kind of craven nonsense daily. They then get in their cars and commute to work at 85mph while gabbing on their phones. Mental.
I live with the full expectation that one day, I'll get my ticket punched while I'm on the bike. Hopefully it'll happen when I'm old. The ultimate would be having a coronary while crossing the finish line at Paris Brest Paris circa 2054 or so - what could be a better death? I'm obliged to die anyway, so fuck it. No fear.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing....only I will remain.
Many thanks to @frankherbert for that gem.
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Jim Morrison.
Crikey this is all getting a bit high brow. So I'll add.......
What does not kill me, makes me stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888