the Crepuscular Condition

Date: Nov 9 Sun
Weather: 38F, windy and cold
Mileage: 16
November mileage: 192
Year to date: 2665

As a bitter, biting wind seeps its way into that small space between the damp blue plastic weave of the polypro head liner and the even more damp, tacky, pink skin of the back of my tingling neck, I see before me rose pinks, gun metal and charcoal greys and the faint color of a pink baby blanket, but one seen at a distance, barely visible behind a thick fog or a shower curtain heavy with mist. My vision is limited to these two colors, grey and pink. Although I perceive only two colors, I also note an almost endless number of gradations of these two. It's like ants. An ant is an ant, but how many different types are there? (Wiki says 12-14,000)

My focused is heightened by the lack of color, the preponderance of gradation, the limit of my own human sight and that other-worldly ability to see without defining. The road under my wheels a flat chrome, the nickel of the musical staff kitchen lighting feature, heavy with solidity of the earth. Metal. Resource. Ore. Rushing in the periphery, Willie Wonka, Gene Wilder, "higher and higher" the trees, no, not black but black with the effects of street lights, the moon, rods and cones, and the distant light cast by lightning bugs in heat in the antipodean arboreal space. Remember, light cannot be destroyed. The trees cast their shadows in my periphery. I'm glad they're not Ents. Pink is the hue as each leaf of the dying carcass of their master stands still for one last bit of sugar, one last cling to mama's breast before the descent. The leafs cry out most of all. Amidst the greys and greys and greys and greys, each leaf is a small pink diamond, no, hint of light cast from the diamond of a newly engaged young woman. Each sparkles in its own muted final hurrah. Each sings a small song of light amidst the creeping darkness. And what of the sky overhead? It is a carpet, laying low, smothering the air with the color of sodium vapor. What the hell is sodium vapor? It's the color of the sky; that is what it is.

All this, this perspective of a two-toned world is make simple by an even simpler focus, a focus of one comprised of ones and twos, a binary world: two wheels, one gear, two eyes, one darkness, two cold feet, one coldness, two pedals, one velocity. The journey creates a paradigm, that of the endeavour, the chase, the singularity of battle. If vision can be encapsulated in two colors, grey and pink, then the battle lies between two opposing forces, those in concert colluding to defeat the other force, that which dwells within. And both these forces are found within, through the lens, the gauze of perception. Cold whips and snaps, freezing foot, face, and finger. Its cohort wind pummels. At their service a passive land rising upwards, the acclivity in its own ballet with the preternatural being is Yoda's "jones". These form a gauntlet, the chasm through which I, in my state must pass. These forces join in unison to confront my own limits, but more so, my own doubts. It they are obstacles of perception, then my own opposing force may, in fact, be working in their stead. My own mind. My own weakness. My own fear. My own mistrust. Am I a quitter? Can I overcome and win this tete-a-tete?

All the while, enveloped in darkness, in the swirling wind that marks another season on this orb, I am comforted and guided by words of another. They, words, are meant to give pause. Their charge is that of Confidence, or lest we open up that Pandora's box, Faith. Faith and Confidence in yourself, in the processes that comprise your condition, unconditional acceptance.

You ride because you ride. You are cold because you are cold. You hurt because you hurt. You are because you were born. You ride because you can, through seas of grey, pink and the black that is the absence of seeing the vengeful teeth of the Cold. You accept it all because it is what you are. You are life, as is it as well. That's all, nothing more, nothing less.


(an attempt at something different. It may be absolute shit, but, hey, it ain't hurtin' nobody. Peace and bundle up. :-)