Don's Writing Reboot

 I loaded up my bike with all the bags that I will be using for bikepacking and went for a training spin on the cold wet roads.I found the loaded bike rode very comfortably and was surprised that there wasn’t more sluggishness. Maybe when I add water bottles and food and a few other odds and ends I’ll find that it’s a little bit more cumbersome but so far it rides like a charm. Well almost like a charm. This morning I went for a ride and before I even got out of Gearhard there was a traffic jam on the highway. I slow down and rode beside the cars on the generous bike path trying to pass them. When I got to the front car that seem to be stalled in the in the traffic lane, I discovered the reason for the slow down.  Standing in front of me was an elk. When I say standing in front of me I mean literally standing in front of me, about 6 feet away. I stopped and stared him in the eye he looked skittish but was not interested in my bicycle and was not interested in the bright green ...

 I have been getting ready for the Trans American bike race (TABR) for the past two years no make that four years. At first it was laziness and busyness and too many things going on in life and not wanting to ride my bicycle all that far, but then when I decided I really wanted to do the ride it was Covid and the pandemic that stopped me. Once I had decided that I was really going to do TABR once and for all, I found that I was living in limbo and I didn’t want to train I just wanted to ride. I finally settled on training in the northwest at the site of the start of TABR. My friend Pat lives in Gearhart  and she invited me to stay at her house while I was getting ready. So I find myself in Gearhart  getting in shape by riding  every day and fiddling with my bike to get it tuned so that it feels road ready and I can chase the pack (the lead pack) on the 2022 Transamerica bike race. In two weeks we will be starting from the Maritime Museum in Astoria. I am looking forw...

During my senior year of high school, our school band filled a school bus and headed to Grand Junction, in western Colorado, for a band tournament. Professional judges graded us based on a piece of music we had rehearsed, then gave us a musical score that was unknown to us, and we had to play it sight unseen. Basalt High School was a very small school. Although they had been consolidated with Carbondale, the two schools had just separated. In my senior class, seven students had started together in kindergarten. One student joined in first grade, and I joined in my junior year while the school was consolidated. By the time we got to the band tournament, there were a grand total of 51 students in grades nine through 12. Of those 51, two of us had any musical training … me on the clarinet, and my freshman brother on tuba, French horn, and sometimes trumpet. There were perhaps fifteen of us in the school band. Our prepared piece was probably out of tune and pretty elementary. Whatever it...

Comics and classics alike portray somnambulists (sleep walkers, for the uninitiated) doing all sorts of bizarre things. Lady Macbeth walks the castle parapets washing blood off her hands and manifesting daggers. Stage hypnotists make volunteers walk like a duck and quack like a duck. Orpheus travels through the underworld searching for his lost love Euridice and almost coaxes her back to the sunlight before he succumbs to curiosity, to the need to know that Euridice is still there, and turns to take a forbidden look before she evaporates like a dream that can no longer be grasped once the eyes are opened. Each of these examples shares something … they tantalize with the possibility that reality can cross the boundary between the physical world and the subconscious. There is something else in common with these references. Each of them occurs in a safe environment. When you watch Macbeth or Orpheus, you are either sitting in a live theater, watching on TV, or at a movie theater. The ac...

  "pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond)   plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself.                           A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh   and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical   ultraomnipotence. We doctors know   a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go  " e. e. cummings   Just because. I happen to think of e.e. cummings as one of the world's greatest sonneteers.   Yes, sonnets. Those fourteen line poems Shakespeare wrote. How can I count the lines? ...

  I hesitate to post a war story, but I wanted to personally thank a young man whose name was lost to me until a recent fortuitous communication from John Mayer, someone I served with in Vietnam. John was just reaching out to see if anyone else from his company happened to be out there in the world. Somehow, he tracked me down and we've exchanged a few e-mails. While it's fresh in my mind, I want to tell the story of a mutual friend who changed both of our lives. I will back up a bit first to give some of the atmosphere in which this story takes place. In fact, I will go back to my communication with the draft board in Pitkin County. Every 18-year-old was required to register for the draft but based on my personal beliefs, hinted in an earlier post about killing a deer, I wanted status as a conscientious objector. I was of course intending to do a couple of years of alternative service rather than going into the army, where I was sure both the army and I would be unhappy. The...