Bikes: May 2010 Archives

He: It's clear that you like men. But you never keep any of them for very long.
She: Men make women messy.
He: Here's to the fear of being trapped.
(from The Thomas Crown Affair)

She: It's too bad you couldn't have avoided this.
Me: What? Not get involved after he warned me?
She: Yes.
Me: He was just what I wanted.

Sensing a pattern?

Yeah, sure. That don't make it resistible or even something I much want to change at the moment. It serves its purpose. That being to keep me at arms' length. I have my reasons.

But it hurts, you say?

Well, you are talking to a woman whose legs are permanently bruised, scraped, skinned, and sometimes even rug-burned (yes, for that reason).

I have a certain tolerance. Make that resilience. I may not like pain all that much, but I sure do bounce back from it like a Weeble on steroids.

So I'm in that state where I'm drinking espresso at 8:41 pm and stopping in the midst of my 40-mile jaunt to visit a handsome fellow of my previous acquaintance (yes, like that) for a little free-form flirting, just to juice me up again, and then I get back on the bike and ride the rest of the way home dartin' and a swoopin'.

Finish up some work, have a brief bossy little meeting (I was the one being bossy, which is odd for me, but I was still in traffic mode), eat a clementine, blah blah blah. This is how we get on with life, folks, we just get on.

We move, we fly, we get pissed off and decide we deserve better; we recognize that we don't actually want to get too much closer than that and so we scan the horizon for another (un)suitable boy, and there aren't any, so we learn to play bocce ball and win our first-ever game, because, well, we are really quite deft at certain things. Rolling balls in uncertain directions over chalk apparently being one of them.

I rode for miles and miles last night, and instead of getting tired or sore, my legs got stronger and happier. Okay, I felt a little stiffness in the muscles on the way back, but only because I'd stopped for a little while and sat down.

Today it is 85 degrees, perfect beach weather, and I am contemplating whether I can get back on the bike and ride there. I am totally jonesing for it, as we used to say in the bad old days. It's not just that I'd like to be at the beach - in fact, it's hardly that at all.

When I woke up my very first thought (other than Shut That Kid Up! to the parents of the child whose piping-high screams had woken me up from outside) was, oh I want to get on my bike right NOW!

I have work to do, and I am feeling surprisingly motivated to do it today rather than put it off till tomorrow (which will be thunderstormy), and I keep thinking, what if my legs blow up on the way there (or back). That would be bad.

But it's funny that not only do I still want to ride, I want to ride immediately. I don't even want to give them (legs) a few hours to recuperate. I only slept for four hours. I have no one to ride there with. I don't even care. It makes me think I should plan a big bicycle tour sooner rather than later. It makes me think I can totally ride across the country if I want to. It makes me think that maybe my love of laps is not primarily about the boys, but about the bike. About what I have jokingly described as my one true love, and my boyfriend, and -well- I'm not going to tell you his name, but he does have one.

He's certainly a lot more consistent than the human kind.