chew on this

my day at the tour of california prologue

I'm a cyclist and cycling fan, so naturally I spent four hours behind a metal barrier at the top of Telegraph Hill yesterday to get a good look at the finish of the 1.9 mile prologue to the race. In only its second year, the Tour of California (or more romantic Tour DE California) is already the most prestigious American road race, so some heavy hitters from across the pond come over for the event. I mean, that guy just a few feet from me, that's Thor Hushovd!

I'm a planner, so an hour before the first rider departed, I parked myself about 100 meters from the finish line, Sunday crossword and race roster in hand. Lovely day, incredible athletes, beautiful Specialized Angel nearby. Started crossword puzzle, struggled, but gradually teased out some answers. Prologue begins. Cowbells, annoying inflatable plastic bang sticks, riders flashing by at 20+ mph despite a serious gradient. The area starts to crowd up with fans climbing the Filbert steps, the parrots fly in formation overhead. ("Did you see the movie?" "No, did you?") .

My roster tells me which rider will be next up the hill. A few others around me have rosters too, so someone usually announces to the crowd the name and the team of the next guy coming. Problem for me is that I have a couple of real wags to the right and to the rear of me who can't resist attempting a witticism with every rider announced. Examples follow:

Idiot Right: "Next up is Kyle Gritters from Health Net."
Idiot Rear: "Nitter Gritters!"

Idiot Rear: "Josep Jufre Pou? He must get hassled a lot with a name like that..."
Idiot Right: "When he goes by, let's shout 'You're number two, you're number two!"

These are some of the more painfully memorable comments - most were just ill informed speculations about nationality - there was a long discussion about whether the designation AUS meant Australia or Austria, despite the fact that the rider's name was Rory Sutherland. I was torn between keeping mum and turning to point out that "Rory" and "Sutherland" would seem to indicate one of those countries over the other, but I opted for keeping mum.

I'm still having a good time - I can see, I have the crossword for the interstices in the action, the weather is fine. Then, midway through the event as the finish gets more and more crowded, a spectator decides that the 7 or 8 centimeters between my back and the rock wall behind me are ample space for him to squeeze into. Idiot Right and Idiot Rear are also affected by this, and an exchange ensues about squatter's rights and selfishness. Asshole Latecomer (AL) has the name "Maureen" tattooed on his right calf surrounded by bright red and orange flames. He tells them that he "got past" his selfishness a long time ago and that maybe they ought to do the same - this while his kneecap is repeatedly digging into my shoulder blade (I'm sitting on the ground).

Rather than point out the irony in his statement, I keep mum. Keeping mum is often my way of approaching conflict, much to the dissatisfaction of a goodly number of my intimates. I'm close to finishing the crossword and some of the bigger names are coming up the hill, so I'm trying to focus on the good parts of the experience. Then AL starts pulling out a bulky and quite sophisticated camera with a pole thing he attaches to the camera. I tune out until he extends the pole thing so that the camera is directly in my line of sight of the roadway, the line of sight I had husbanded so carefully for over three hours.

When you are a big guy, you have to be extremely cautious about how you respond to indignities, because there are lots of people out there who will view conflict with big guys as potentially physical. In this instance, I figured sarcasm was the best way to go, so I turned and looked back at AL and simply said, "You have GOT to be kidding me..." His response: "What? You're just sitting there doing your crossword puzzle!" Yes AL, I have ventured to the most congested place I could find in San Francisco, found a spot on the pavement that for some reason is coveted by many other people, and it has nothing to do with seeing the cyclists at all! You are a selfless genius! (Actually, I just stared at him incredulously for a long enough time that he left only a minute or two later.)

Idiot Right and Rear then rhapsodized about what a jerk AL was as they made up more bon mots about the riders - guess what brilliant onomatopoeia they came up with when Alexandre Moos rode by? When Levi Leipheimer finally passed by (he is pictured above after the race - thanks for looking down Levi), I realized that my afternoon of sincere fandom had been seriously undercut by my fellow fans. The peril of public fandom is that you often come face to face with people like you who are simultaneously very much not like you.

I am trying to follow the first stage of the tour on www.amgentourofcalifornia.com, but for some reason their site makes no sense at all. Ah well, there are always shots of the Specialized Angel to soothe me:


If you care, my favorite team this year has got to be Team Slipstream, both for their aggressive stance on clean riders and their really cool argyle pattern jerseys. One of their unknown riders, Jason Donald, came second in the prologue. He was working as a garbageman in Colorado last year, imagine that! Will garbage pickup become the next health craze, the Pilates of tomorrow? Great workout and simultaneous benefit to society!

will you be mine (for one night only)?

Cue Up Frankie Laine's "Jezebel". Hit play. Begin reading:

Dear Ms. Rice: No doubt volumes will be written about your policies, your cronies, your academic career and your skills as an international power broker, but what of your book of love? Let's pretend for a moment, you and I. Say there could be a book that no one would ever see save you and me, a book of surrender and conquest, of peaks and valleys, of full-throated cries and barely audible whispers - a slender, tender volume of one night we alone shared?

My wife is perfectly fine with it, I wouldn't speak to the media or your boss - no one need know that for one night of your life you made yourself vulnerable to passion. You could get up the next morning and pretend that it never happened if you wanted to - just step back into your sensible underwear, slip and navy blue two-piece uniform, and off you go to your conferences and power lunches.

Where's the harm? Probably nothing will change - probably. You might feel a couple of strange new sensations as you work your diplomacy magic - we call these feelings 'empathy' and 'warmth'. Don't be frightened - most of us get these feelings from time to time.

Also, should you take me up on my offer, I promise to be completely respectful - the evening will be about you, not me. All precautions concerning birth control and STD's will be my responsibility, and trust me, I take those responsibilities very seriously. I also know how to whip up a tasty and rejuvenating smoothie to get your morning started right.

Statecraft requires deep insight into the nature of all facets of humanity, from the dark recesses of our subconscious selves to the bright horizons of what Lincoln called "the angels of our better nature." In this regard, my invitation, should you accept, can only add to your prodigious skills in divining the intentions of both evildoers and allies. It might also clear up some of that stuff you didn't grasp in those required literature courses in college.

Condoleeza, I eagerly await your response. Know that I am prepared to travel anywhere at a moment's notice, although I would appreciate a Kevlar vest if our assignation were to take place anywhere southeast of the Mediterranean. Again, discretion is my watchword, and, just so you know, I find that gap between your front teeth damn sexy. If it seals the deal for you to know, I have a gap there too. If you're reading this, you know how to reach me.

remember when we worried about this guy?

I edited my high school yearbook, which gave me the opportunity to say whatever I wanted on the last page, in print, for all posterity to enjoy. I was a serious 18 year old, particularly about politics, so I never thought of doing anything but a BIG MESSAGE. I was fairly convinced that the overarching issue that would cut short our lives was the Bomb. "Yes, the bomb Dmitri," as Peter Sellars' Merkin Muffly says to his Russian counterpart over the phone in Dr. Strangelove, "the atomic bomb." So there on the final page of the 1983 Woodside Wildcats Yearbook, under a mushroom cloud cut from Time magazine are the words, "There is no such thing as winnability."

Dark to be sure, but back then, if you were looking for a specter to justify your fatalism or your liberal arts degree, the USSR was your ticket. Stoked by our own politicians, we clutched to a a historical trope; we are united by what we fear. Not only did I use nuclear winter and old "duck and cover" drills to justify my conscious lack of ambition, I also used the Bomb as the underpinning of my attitudes toward sex, drugs, drinking and physical exercise.

When the Wall came down in the early nineties, my reaction was mixed. Sure, oppressed peoples were suddenly free to express themselves and purchase American products, but what was going to replace my justification for not making something of myself in a world snapped into clear-eyed optimism? China? Not likely. They were already lowering their barriers like a sorority girl on South Padre Island. AIDS? I had too much faith in the inexorable march of science. While the nineties chugged along and many of my peers made small or big fortunes just by showing up at jobs long enough to get their options vested, I started teaching English while impatiently waiting for some new cosmic shoe to drop.

And drop it did, some ten years later. And the thing is, as monolithic as the Cold War seemed to me in my teens, I don't think it holds a candle to what we have today. My newfound sense of impending doom is no longer based on what I guessed to be the mindset of a handful of septuagenarians on the Politburo - now, it's based on what everyone seems to think about just about everything. I was behind a car today that had a bumper sticker that said "Come to Christ or go to Hell" and I realized that sentiments like that are just as venal as the values of those we are supposedly at war against in foreign fields. Everyone seems so certain of their viewpoints that simple skepticism is now the enemy. I'm starting to wonder if the guy pictured above had at least one thing right - the submission to the guiding principle of faith external to human experience is the thing that will extinguish human experience.

But the other thing that happened to me in that decade is I no longer feel the need to justify much of anything to myself anymore. If most people have adopted beliefs that I think are inimical to human progress, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing what I think is best for me and my fellow man. Spending time fearing specters is spending time in their world, not your own. I'm starting to think there might be more than a few others who are seeing this as well - Sam Harris' The End of Faith is popular (at least in this town) and the religious right is starting to look winded after so many years of vigorous hypocrisy.

The stereotype of the liberal male, the effete, ectomorphic, pot-smoking Vegan, is something I'm looking to update. How about the no bullshit, ass-kicking liberal who occasionally stoops to the tactics of the other side when the volume gets turn up too far? The models are out there, particularly if you ignore the last 30 years of popular and political history. If there were an Abraham Lincoln Brigade still in existence, I'd be game for a tour of duty - for first action, I suggest Washington D.C.

You may be on the ash-heap of history Vladimir, but I've still got a few things to learn from you.