Bicyclists vs. Motorists

I read this essay in The Encyclopedia Show on November 13th at the Red Stag Supperclub in Minneapolis. The theme of the show was Bicycles.

Over the past century, our culture has exalted the automobile high above the humble bicycle, with grave consequences for our national character. I quite enjoy riding bicycles, but it’s something I don’t do nearly enough. Far more often, I’m behind the wheel of a large automobile, and the difference between these experiences, I believe, provides insight into the decline of America.

When I am riding a bike, my mind is full of peace and joy, beauty and the laughter of children, all that is good and right in the world. My being is suffused with serenity. I become a fast friend to animals, children and the elderly. I love all of God’s creatures. My heart is full of light and love.

But when I’m behind the wheel, my mood quickly sours. Storm clouds gather. My mind turns to thoughts of revenge and murder most foul. Every perceived slight becomes an excuse for furious anger. The wellspring of hate deep within me erupts volcanically at the slightest provocation. My brain becomes clouded with paranoia. The sky turns dark and every other driver takes on the sinister sneer of an enemy.

The problem is that driving puts one in a far more murderous state of mind, while also putting one in a position to effectively act on this impulse. When you are operating a large automobile, you have both the means and often the mindset to commit homicide. And who is most often the target of this murderous rage? Why, the bicyclist, of course!

When I’m biking, I can appreciate the difficulty of navigating vehicular traffic on the city streets. That is when I am snapped out of my reverie and put on the back foot. I am the prey in this field, merely trying to survive the ordeal.

Behind the wheel, I forget all about the bicyclist’s fears and lose all patience with their slowness, uncertainty and imprecision. They are now my enemy, and, therefore, must be crushed. If they are an impediment to my progress, they must be dealt with – harshly.

It would not be going too far to say that driving puts me in a Capitalist frame of mind, while biking endows me with a Socialist outlook. I hate to get all political (Bernie 2020), but that is how it seems to me.

Driving, like Capitalism, is a zero-sum game. There’s no such thing as sharing the road. It’s every car for itself. Every car I let go ahead of me takes a second off my score, I mean, adds another second to my time in that infernal contraption.

But, when I’m biking, time is of no consequence. The journey is all. The destination is irrelevant. I’m living in the moment. I am at peace with Creation. I’m achieving Zen, experiencing ego death, becoming one with the universe and all that jazz.

If I dig deeper, I begin to see the source of this animosity. There’s an unconscious envy of bicyclists lurking in the heart of every motorist. They know that the bicyclists are living their best lives, while the motorists are not. In this formulation, the bicyclists comprise the elite, and the motorists are the unwashed masses.

But I know that I often earn this resentment through my elitism. When I am riding a bicycle, it endows me with a sense of superiority on many levels: morally, physically, psychologically, spiritually. I am literally above the motorists, over most of whom I tower on my bike. I can’t help but look down on them in their exhaust-spewing, mind-warping, climate-changing death machines. Who in their right mind would subject themselves and the environment to that kind of degradation? (other than myself for at least an hour a day)

During a briefly glorious stretch, I actually biked to work, and neither the exercise nor the wind in my hair could match the sense of moral superiority I felt in the knowledge that I was a bike commuter, one of God’s elect. Of course, the physical benefits were quickly squandered by the sedentary nature of the job, and any psychological benefits were squashed by the job’s soul-crushing nature.

So now you see how the bicyclist vs. motorist divide is the perfect allegory for our country’s deep political division. Clearly, we must address this gulf before America is cleft in twain. The bicyclists must get off their high horse, and the motorists must get over their homicidal fury. Only then can we do what needs to be done and elect Bernie Sanders President of the United States of America.

Prayers for the Revolutionaries

This was inspired by my time on a Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective delegation to Honduras in late March and early April.

1.

If you’re listening, O Lord, hear my prayer:

Let them fail.

Let them fall on their faces and be humiliated.

Let them disappoint us and fill us with anger.

Let them root around in the mud of politics.

Let them be embroiled in scandal.

Let them be exposed as the human beings they are.

Let us curse their names.

Let us wish they’d never been born.

Let us wonder what the point of all of it was.

Let them apologize and prevaricate.

Let them grow fat and corrupt.

Let them become what they fought against.

Just let them live.

2.

God, let them live on the muddy banks of Reality

And not in the hallowed halls of Memory.

Give them feet of clay to step awkwardly on

And not wings to fly above it all.

To you who would be immortalized:

Don’t you dare become a statue!

Don’t you dare join the pantheon of martyrs!

Valhalla has no room for you.

How could you leave us here alone?

How could you be so selfish?

And to you, the troubadours:

Don’t write songs about them as if they were already dead!

You stalk the living like a vulture.

Go back to your hiding place to compose more dirges.

And to us, the spectators:

Don’t you dare immortalize them!

Don’t you dare let them die!

Don’t pretend that you’re helpless!

Your power shames you.

Don’t let it go to waste.

Wandering the Wasteland

I’ve made a conscious effort to cut back on my electronic media consumption. It makes me feel like a little kid, the fact that I’m trying to limit my own “screen time,” but I do think it’s become necessary for my mental health. My social isolation seems to make me particularly susceptible to the influence of the “flickering Cyclops,” as Sideshow Bob once called television (and, by extension, computer screens).

I think it warps my perception, and that has already been seriously warped by loneliness, anxiety and LSD (j/k). Years ago, I stopped wearing ear buds while working out at the gym. I noticed that listening to music or podcasts took me “out of the moment.” I wasn’t as “present.” (Sorry about the quotes. I’m still not totally comfortable using that terminology. It feels like New Age crap.)

It makes for a boring workout, but I quickly realized the real reason I’d been using the ear buds. They were a distraction from my loneliness. But the loneliness got too strong, no matter how much I repressed it. Using the ear buds started to make my head hurt, albeit only slightly, like mild sinus pressure. It’s a feeling of fullness, like I’m trying to stuff too much stimulation into my brain.

Gradually, I abandoned the ear buds almost completely, even when working monotonous temp jobs. I realized that facing my loneliness has become less painful than repressing it. I’ve also mostly switched from watching TV to listening to podcasts, and since then I’ve cut back on the podcasts in favor of going out.

I had to face the existential terror of wandering the Wasteland alone. (The Wasteland is my name for public space, which has been abandoned to fear, paranoia and anxiety, a silent stretch of barren desert devoid of meaningful socialization or personal interaction and other building blocks of a healthy society. But, then again, my perspective might be a bit slanted.)

I also opt for outdoor exercise like biking more often now. Being outside in the sweet sunshine is better for me than being in the gym with today’s biggest hits blaring and people generally ignoring each other. There’s some stress involved in biking on the city streets around Uptown, dodging cars and whatnot, but I’ve learned that stress can be beneficial. Most of it arises from my social anxiety. I’m less worried about getting run over and more worried about pissing off drivers.

My self-consciousness is coming back, which is actually more good than bad. I think I was just repressing it anyway. I don’t think I’d actually overcome it.

The self-consciousness is what kept me from taking more risks, being more social or going out in public more often. I felt like people were always watching and judging me. This is probably why getting on stage is relatively easy for me. At least on stage I know people are watching me, and I actually have a pretty good idea of what I’m supposed to do to gain their approval. Off stage, it’s anybody’s guess.

So now I’m more anxious in public again, but being out and about has also become more beneficial. There’s real risk in it now, which means the possibility of connection as well as rejection. Before, my heart was shut to everything, the good and the bad. Now I actually feel some hope of making friends and dating again.

It feels like I’m experiencing things firsthand rather than just watching them through someone else’s eyes, à la Being John Malkovich. It was especially gratifying biking along the Greenway last week. My eyes/brain/heart could finally take in the joy of the sunlight and the awe of the tall buildings towering over me. I was back in the Real World.

There are many feelings and sense-memories that have triggered pain in me for a long time, so I blocked them out. But blocking them (what one of my therapists called “avoidance”) made the world unreal. Avoiding them turned me into a hermit. Either way, it just made me more miserable. Avoidance became an extremely maladaptive coping technique, and I had to learn to confront my anxieties rather than avoid them.

Now I have to disentangle my brain to remember what behavior will make me feel better and what behavior will make me feel worse. I’ve built up so many layers of detachment between me and my experience that it can be hard to tell. The detachment is so severe that, at this point, it’s more about reducing or eliminating pain than generating joy.

My experience of joy has been much less than my experience of pain for several years now, so it’s gonna take a while to rebuild my capacity for it.

I suppose it makes sense that I’m mainly just trying to diminish the amount of pain in my life. After all, the avoidance of pain is how I got here. Rather than pursuing joy, I avoided pain and risk, so clearly I’m more responsive to negative motivation than the positive kind. I suppose my brain is just giving me the stimuli it thinks I need.

At least I’ve dropped 25 lbs. during this crucible. I was hoping for that, although it has come at a steep price. If I had it to do over again, I would’ve kept the weight over the anxiety and depression/toxic brain shit/Black Bile Flood. (I think.)

I’m putting myself back in the world mentally. I’m once again a member of the Human Race, just as significant or insignificant as anyone else. I suppose taking myself out of the world is a form of solipsism, but it feels like reducing myself to a nonentity rather than setting myself up as God. Well, they’re probably just 2 sides of the same coin anyway.

Musical Meds

I’m currently riding a rollercoaster of emotions. I’ve been playing “Musical Meds,” bouncing between medications for anxiety and depression, trying to find one that’ll work without bad side effects. It’s been rough. I stupidly decided to come off Paxil in March, because I didn’t think I needed meds anymore. It took 2 ½ months before I realized I still need meds. That’s how long it took for my anxiety to come back in full effect.

The Paxil had been very effective, obviously. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable coming off it. But I put on 20 lbs. soon after starting it, and my throat had a dry feeling that made eating or drinking anything with sugar somewhat unpleasant. I was willing to put up with those side effects for a year-and-a-half, but eventually I didn’t think it was necessary.

I knew there were risks in coming off Paxil, but what took me by surprise was the strength of the anxiety. It’s not like I was miserable when I started it. At the time, I was doing OK on Zoloft, but that didn’t seem to have much effect, so I figured coming off Paxil, at worse, would put me back in that “fair to middlin’” zone.

After I’d been off Paxil for a month or so, I felt fine and figured I was in the clear. But then the anxiety started creeping back in, until 2 days before my 2-year-old nephew Patrick (or “Paddy,” as I like to call him) came to visit, when it settled in for good. And it wasn’t that “fair to middlin’” anxiety. It was the hard stuff.

That’s just the kind of bad timing I’m known for. My parents and I would be taking care of my nephew for 10 days while my sister and brother-in-law were on vacation in Iceland. Those 10 days were pretty rough, which sucked because I took 9 days off from my temp job so I could hang out with Paddy and help my parents take care of him.

I felt like I was trapped in the house with my parents, a 2-year-old and all my issues from childhood. I got through it with the help of daily meditation and escapes to Uptown in the afternoon after putting him down for his nap.

Ya know, I may not be good at Life, but I’m good at singing my nephew to sleep, and that’s gotta count for something.

Per my sister’s instructions, I would sit down with him in my lap and tell him a story I made up. (Books had become too stimulating for him.) The story was often about a boy named Patrick who climbs a rainbow to a magical city in the clouds. That was after I decided to stop just giving him a synopsis of The Hobbit with his name in place of Bilbo’s.

I figured he deserved better than that. He deserved an original story, and, as a writer, I should be able to give him one. I doubt Patrick and the Rainbow will ever take its place alongside The Hobbit as one of the classics of children’s literature, but I think I was able to refine it with repetition.

Then I would stand up and rock him gently while singing some songs. After I’d put him to bed a few times, he said, “Sing song.” when I stood up after finishing the story. That was unbelievably cute, and I think it also showed that he was just waiting for the story to be over so I would sing to him.

My normal lullaby repertoire was the first few tracks from the Flaming Lips’ 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That usually did the trick, although sometimes I had to venture into Side B or whatever. (I have the CD, so I don’t know where Side B begins. I feel like it begins with track #5, “In the Morning of the Magicians.” That song definitely represents a shift in the album’s mood.)

I switched it up a few times with selections from the Flaming Lips’ 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin (generally considered to be their best), but they didn’t seem to have a soporific effect. I was probably too dependent on the Flaming Lips’ catalog, but those just happened to be the only songs whose lyrics I could remember that felt like they could work as lullabies.

It felt good to be the Designated Lullaby Guy, but, the more I did it, the more anxiety crept into it. It was like every time I was putting him down, I had to convince myself that there was hope for the world so I wouldn’t be overcome by despair. It became a very emotional task for me.

I had to believe that everything would be alright in the end. I still may not believe that, but I had to convince myself that it was true, if only for a few minutes. The more relaxed I was, the easier it was to get him to fall asleep. But, even when I was relaxed, there was an undercurrent of anxiety, and I wondered if he felt that as I held him.

So, every time I put him down for his nap or for the night, I had to face my fear of the future. For me, that’s a daunting task. I don’t know if things are gonna be alright for us or me or Paddy. I worry so much about where things are heading, and that was before Trump became president. But I really wanted to come through as the Designed Lullaby Guy and defeat those fears, if only for Paddy’s sake and only for a little while.

My sister returned and spent 4 days with us, which was a huge relief. It took a lot of the child-rearing pressure off, allowing me to enjoy their company. And I didn’t have to go straight from high stress and stimulation to no stress or stimulation, which I think would’ve been a big comedown. My temp job as a mail clerk was not providing me much of either of those.

Unfortunately, my nephew’s behavior seemed to worsen with his mother’s return. “Now” suddenly entered his lexicon, as in “I want this thing NOW!” That was an unwelcome development, but it shouldn’t have been unexpected for a 2-year-old.

Since Theresa and Paddy returned to South Bend 4 weeks ago, I’ve been waiting for my new medication, Prozac, to kick in. I passed the one-month mark of taking it a week ago, but my anxiety seemed to be getting worse. I emailed the psychiatrist, and she switched me to Lexapro. Now I’m playing the waiting game with that one. It should take effect in the next few weeks and, God willing, it will ease my anxiety.

I took the unusual step of telling a barista at my favorite coffee shop (Bob’s Java Hut in Uptown) about my game of Musical Meds. I don’t usually open up that much to casual acquaintances. To my great consolation, he said he’d been on some of the same meds. It felt really good to find someone who could relate.

I’ve been employing a few different techniques to help my mental state: therapy, talking with my parents, exercise, being outside, going to Uptown, going to plays and movies, going to stand-up open mic’s, hanging out with friends. I’m quite lean in the friends department, so that last one has been the least-used technique in my arsenal, which is too bad, because it’s probably the most effective.

I got a chance to hang out my friend Tim and his co-worker last night. We were in downtown St. Paul and saw the play Baskerville at the Park Square Theater. (I highly recommend it.) That was really cool, but I was up late and didn’t get enough sleep. As a result, exercise didn’t seem like an option for me today. That’s why I’m writing.

It’s one of the techniques I hadn’t yet tried, but it seems to be working. I’ve spent all afternoon on our deck on this fine day, first writing in my notebook and now typing on my laptop. I’m better off not looking at a screen, but I Iove crafting a piece on the computer. You can really sculpt your writing on a digital format.

Lately, however, I feel my soul getting dragged down whenever I look at my phone, laptop or the TV. Just looking away from the screen can immediately lift my spirits and allow my soul to take wing. (Well, that second part is a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit.) I’ve cut back on my screen time lately with that in mind.

I’m basically trying to write myself out of this rut, and, for now, I’ve succeeded. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed the ride too.

A List of Mystery Book Titles

I temped at Barnes and Noble this week, scanning books on the shelf to see which needed to be taken down. The second section I scanned was Mystery, which provided me with a bevy of hilarious titles of food-, animal- and even holiday-related mysteries. I wrote down dozens of the titles and offer them here for your consideration:

Food-related Mysteries

Truffled to Death

The Long Quiche Goodbye

Behind Chocolate Bars

Assaulted Caramel (Yes. I say “yes” to this.)

Another One Bites the Crust

Til Death Do Us Tart

Fudge and Jury (I would’ve gone all the way with this one: Fudge, Jury and Confectioner.)

Crust No One

Live and Let Chai (my personal motto)

Arsenic and Old Cake (I’m building to something here.)

A Sheetcake Named Desire (A mere appetizer before the main course.)

Survival of the Fritters (Wait for it.)

The Silence of the Flans (Voila! I’m pretty sure “flan” is pronounced with a long “a,” so it doesn’t really rhyme with “lamb,” but you’ve gotta admire the effort, the sheer chutzpah of this title.)

Pies and Prejudice

Meet Your Baker

A Crime of Passion Fruit

A Roux of Revenge

Dial M for Mousse

Éclair and Present Danger

Pudding Up with Murder (Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!)

Cheddar Off Dead

Butter Off Dead (the inferior version of the previous pun)

Topped Chef (I’ve never seen Top Chef, but I’m glad it exists just for enabling this pun to exist.)

Bewitched, Bothered and Biscotti (A strange Venn diagram of fans of food-related mysteries and classic musical theater. Well, maybe not that strange.)

Scam Chowder

The Tell-Tale Tarte

A Brew to a Kill (easily the worst James Bond film)

The Wurst is Yet to Come

Clam Wake

Biscuits and Slashed Browns (This is a reach.)

Lethal Licorice

Death is Like a Box of Chocolates (I can just hear Forrest Gump saying that, and it feels me with great mirth.)

Book-related Mysteries

Bookmarked for Death

Book Clubbed

Chapter and Hearse

Animal-related Mysteries

Gone Gull (A take-off on Gone Girl, I assume.)

Die Like An Eagle (The Steve Miller Band parody no one dared imagine.)

A Hiss Before Dying (about cats, natch)

Holiday-related Mysteries

Cinco de Murder (Just beautiful on so many levels.)

Rest Ye Murdered Gentlemen

Hark the Herald Angels Slay

Miscellaneous Pun Mysteries

Dead, Bath and Beyond

This Old Homicide (for fans of classic PBS home renovation show-related murder)

Cancelled by Murder (I don’t know what this is related to. Parties, maybe? I just thought it was absurdly limp. Ya couldn’t even go with Cancelled Due to Murder?)

Then there’s Joanne Fluke. She just uses desserts for her book titles and adds “murder.” So, at this point, she has associated pretty much every dessert in the Western canon with murder. It’s pretty lazy compared to the authors who bothered to come up with puns, but I found the sheer volume hilarious. I had no idea desserts could be so deadly (Death by Chocolate notwithstanding). To wit: 

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

Blueberry Muffin Murder

Cinnamon Roll Murder

Apple Turnover Murder

Peach Cobbler Murder

Strawberry Shortcake Murder

Cream Puff Murder

Raspberry Danish Murder

Banana Cream Pie Murder

Lemon Meringue Pie Murder

Key Lime Pie Murder

Blackberry Pie Murder

Carrot Cake Murder

Devil’s Food Cake Murder

Cherry Cheesecake Murder

Fudge Cupcake Murder

Red Velvet Cupcake Murder

Double Fudge Brownie Murder

Gingerbread Cookie Murder

Christmas Caramel Murder

Candy Cane Murder

Wedding Cake Murder

Not surprisingly, she also has a cookbook, which I assume only has dessert recipes based on her book titles. There were a few books at the end of her section with more conventional mystery titles, which were just as funny to me. They included Deadly Memories, Vengeance is Mine and Fatal Identity.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of the Har Mar Barnes and Noble Mystery section as much as I did.