Mid-summertime and the livin' is easy

Left my shoes under my desk on the last day of the school year, just found them there yesterday, and hadn't missed them for even a minute.

Thus far, with some three weeks to go, summer has been just what I needed it to be: the opposite of work, filled with good rides with good friends, time spent together as a family, visits each week from faraway friends and family passing through town, and ample quantities of cheap hot grilled food and cheaper cold Tecates consumed in good company, and a bit of new ink for good measure.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As spring turns to summer, my father, dead now for a full year, continues to occupy my thoughts almost daily.

Not because I am sad that he is gone, though I am.
Not because I am unmoored without him, though I might be.
He is with me, in the center of my mind, because I cannot seek his wise counsel, his particularly prescient insights, in the midst of these trying times.

Our culture stands on the sharp precipice of history.  We have been here before, surely, though perhaps never before like this.  Yet my father, regardless of circumstance, always seemed to know what was going on.  Would that he could tell me of such things now.

The many trials of M. Vandeman

I dredged up one of my old signature files from the 1990s recently, while searching through archived alt.mountain-bike Usenet threads. Always liked this one, felt it was worth preservation:

Looking around this old online group, I was fascinated to find Mike Vandeman still posting daily vitriol to the forum about the dangers and destructiveness of mountain biking. After all these years, alt.mountain-bike looks to have become his solitary domain, a forgotten corner of the Internet that he's somehow become entrapped within, a kind of cartoon criminal imprisoned within the Phantom Zone, which has become nothing more than his very own bleak solitary repository of hate going on for page after page, amounting to literally hundreds of posts bearing his now-infamous name and a simple note: 0 views.

Overwinter

Fall was nice.  Winter was great.  Spring has been amazing.

Life is good. #BLE

Equinoctes

I walked to school as a child, it was the simple and sensible thing to do, a few blocks north from our house in Scottsdale's Arcadia neighborhood, to Kaibab Elementary School. Now razed to the ground, the school was shuttered long ago due to declining enrollment which naturally occurred when the children of the breeders in the neighborhood grew up and moved away, leaving their aging parents behind, well-rooted in their mid-century ranch-style homes, safely ensconced beneath a canopy of big old and forevermore unclimbed grapefruit trees.

The pool in our backyard

Like all public schools, despite the extent to which the neighborhoods that surround them might be more or less gentrified, Kaibab was a mixed bag of students.  Admittedly, in my case, all of us were white, all of us were by all appearances able-bodied, and all of us were the offspring of privileged parents to one degree or another. And yet some of us quite obviously were nevertheless battling the largely undiagnosed demons of OCD, ADD, ADHD, depression, suicidal ideation, and a host of other social, emotional and learning disorders, just like any other school.

Our homes were all built on large well-shaded lots, carved out of what had once been a massive citrus orchard. Each had ample square footage to house nuclear-sized families of five or six members and, without exception, each had a swimming pool.  Moms rarely worked.  Dads were gone long hours doing whatever they were called to do: lawyering, engineering, doctoring, professional things like that.  And we had lots of friends, for blocks and blocks in every direction, most of whom were pretty normal.  I had many an outdoor birthday party, all of which ended in a brawl or fight, or an overt theft of candy or party favors, or with one of the guests dropping trou and pissing into the oleander hedges, or worse, dropping a big stinky brown turd to the ground while perched, ass hanging out into space, from high above on one of the upper levels of my treefort.