The Search For an Enema

After last Thursday’s rainy hike, I was in the shop on Friday. Then on Saturday B’s team had their first State Cup match of 2019 winning by a score of 2-1 (yeah!).

Easter Sunday was filled with slack and little to do with Easter. I’m not so religious (12 years of Catholic school riddled guilt, and a nation of right-wing religious nut bags and their vile hypocrisy leaves me with a low tolerance for it), so I basked in the glow of laziness, the bright spring sunshine, beer, and footy on TV.

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Monday was littered with appointments and some catching up on a flyer that needed to be updated for the shop, but I managed to squeeze in a 22.5 mile Better Than The Trainer ride in. Which I guess is sort of my standard dirt road ride these days; not too long, not too hard, but enough to feel like I did something.

Considering all the rain we had last week, the roads were amazingly dry and packed down hard. That made for some fast (for me) rolling before I turned south into the headwind that was gifting us temps in the mid-70s. While I would love to complain about the headwind, knowing that it was bringing warmer temps prevents me from doing so.

Monday was my first day back on the bike after two weeks off. The weather played a major part in that time off, but my attitude also played a huge role. Even yesterday under brilliant sunshine and blue skies, I found myself thinking “this must be the dumbest thing ever.” 25+ years of semi-serious cycling, combined with crap racing, publishing a bike magazine for 5 years and working in a bike shop off and on again and I now find myself in dark place in regards to riding my bike and cycling in general. One minute I love it, the next I’d rather do, see, or talk about just about anything else in the world other than bikes. I need a mental enema of the highest grade.

Until that high-grade mental enema comes along, I will just keep doing what I do. Some days that includes things like walking in the woods snapping photos.

Between staring off into the vast nothingness of existential ennui and getting shit done, I took a walk at the Audubon Woods Preserve. The warm temps of Sunday and Monday have now been replaced by dark skies and cool temps in the low 50s, but the woods are starting to come alive regardless and at times took on almost alien-like forms.

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Flowers are popping up, and trees are budding. Through the thick blanket of dead leaves on the forest floor, small hints of green are peeking out. It took everything I had to fight off the urge to lay down in the wet leaves and just lay back and listened to the birds chirping, the wind blowing through the tall trees, and the drops of water falling to the ground after last night’s rain as the woods come to life. I can’t say for how much longer I’ll be able to fight that urge, so someday if you happen upon a beer-bloated fat man laying in the woods staring up at the sky, It’s probably me, and I’m probably not dead.

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Heading to the shop on Wednesday, so I probably won’t be back in the saddle until at least Thursday. Then again, I might be flat on my back in the woods with a smile of my face.

Later.

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