Friday, September 16, 2011

A Post for Me That I Won't Keep for Me: It ain't always all about bikes...

Before I chicken out and send this to the saved-but-never-posted pile, I'm going to hit "post" and dedicate this one to all the posts I've kept to myself that maybe didn't deserve it.

It kind of bums me out that I don't write as much as I'd like to.  I clearly remember when I fell in love with writing.  In grade school (I think it must have been 4th grade) we had a creative writing assignment where we had to take a number of classmates and put them into a story that had a particular beginning scenario (I vaguely remember its having something to do with getting lost in a cave).  I became completely engrossed in my story and enjoyed the first experience (of many) of having my brain surge ahead of the words making it onto the page.  By the time my cramping little fingers made the pencil catch up with my racing mind I was light-headed and hyperventilating.  True story.

From that time on I didn't really need school assignments to make me put words on paper.  As I grew older it included WAY too much sappy poetry (although I eventually did get a kind of clever little allegory about a girl who trusted her parachute more than me published in the college "black book." *)

When I met Kris I was doing some writing.  It was actually a pretty creative period of my life fueled by an abundance of free time (remember free time? no?).  I would work hard, ride my bike hard and spend my lonely evenings working out guitar parts or tapping away on my computer.  I kept starting stories but not finishing them.  I even outlined a novel and wrote a few character-defining sections of it.  And I kept wanting to take some writing courses but didn't have the enterprise to get  it done.  Like my writing at the time, I was dangerously close to stalling out in my life and not getting to where I wanted to be.  Luckily Kris and I were flung toward each other like two lumps of clay at high speed squished into each other so thoroughly no one will ever know ever again where one part begins and the other ends.

Then, like most people who collide with the soul they were destined to meld with, life got really busy and writing became a forgotten pleasure.  And along with all the wonderful pleasures all that busyness brings, I came off the rails a little and things got a little dark.  I started writing as a way to vent and I really didn't like where it was going and what I was reading from myself.  But those never-to-see-the-light-of-day bitter ramblings kind of helped me to work out many things that put me back on the beautiful charmed joyous path I'm on now.  Thank fate for putting me with Kris and her being so supportive of the second most important thing that came out of that time, falling back in love with being a cyclist -and returning to the world of a racing cyclist at that.  But with all that bike riding, writing has taken a back seat again only to surface with race reports and the occasional guilty, "I really should write something" blather.

So here it is almost midnight on a Thursday night and I just felt the need to write an essay about, well, anything.  Hell I'm writing an essay about writing for cripe's sake!  I guess it's just a part of who I am that I can no more shut off than this damn love of murdering myself over my handlebars or thinking about my son and Kris and having a warm rush of love fill me up.  And that, you dark mother fucker, is the hole you were so desperate to fill up.



* It went...
*Parachute You*
If I were a parachute,
then I think you'd jump.
And I'd set you down to earth,
In a gentle lump.

But... and I can't remember the rest of it but the gist was "If you pack me wrong then I'm just some pathetic sap you won't fall for..."  Get it?  Fall for.  Fucking clever shit right there.  And it wasn't even remotely subtle since my muse was very heavily into sky diving...  I think I caught her doing about-faces and walking swiftly in the opposite direction from me for quite awhile after that.