My Neon Yellow Cycling Jersey

"Think! Always wear a high visibility jacket."

--Top Gear, Episode 9.5

Self portrait 5-21-14

"The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up."

-- Marilyn Monroe

"It's no fun to be yellow. 

Maybe I'm not all yellow, I don't know.

I think maybe I"m just partly yellow and partly the type that

doesn't give much of a damn ..."

-- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Some road construction has shunted a bunch of traffic onto my cycling route.

I ride the same route every day, so the cars that pass me are used to seeing me, and for the most part they are all really good about giving me plenty of room.

But these new re-routed drivers seem not to know much about how to drive around a rider on a bicycle. Plus, they're driving pissed because there's a detour, also they're on unfamiliar roads and are probably staring at their phones or GPSs instead of the road ahead, so I'm not sure most of them even see me before they swerve dramatically, or sweep past dangerously close.

Also it's been raining a lot, and while I like my usual  all-black ninja-look (my friend Bob calls it my Spiderman Suit), I decided to up the safety factor and got a neon bright yellow jersey so that I can be properly seen.

I've never been a big fan of bright neon colors, in my workout gear or elsewhere. I prefer to blend in with a darker, more subtle approach. My mother often put a pair of hi-vis orange gloves or a hat in my Christmas stocking for me to wear running so I wouldn't get shot by the deer hunters. I never wore them. I also never got shot.

So anyway, I bought this bright, highlighter yellow jersey and have begun wearing it to combat this annoying new traffic situation.

Yesterday it was a good thing I was wearing it.

I was riding up behind some old fuck in a pickup truck who put on his right turn signal. He started to turn right, and then just as I entered the intersection he did a sudden U-turn and headed straight back at me. He hit the brakes. I hit the brakes. I yelled "What the fuck?" He honked -- what, to emphasize what a jackass he was?

Anyway, I escaped unscathed, and I credit my neon yellow cycling jersey for making me highly visible enough that I didn't get killed by an old fuck in a pickup truck.

Good. Fucking. Thing.

My Garden Is In

"We spend our lives hurrying away from the real,

as though it were deadly to us,

'It must be up there somewhere on the horizon,' we think.

And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet."

-- William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

Pepper plant 5-19-14

"Seeds have the power to preserve species, 

to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity,

to counter economic monopoly 

and to check the advance of conformity

on all its many fronts."

-- Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Cauliflower plant 5-19-14

"Gardening is cheaper than therapy, and you get tomatoes."

-- Unknown

My little vegetable garden is finally planted.

For the moment, it looks all neat and tidy and organized standing at attention in orderly, labeled rows in the dark, fertile, weed-free soil.

I know it's just a matter of time before the zucchini are sprawling lasciviously all over the cauliflower and I won't be able to tell where the tomatoes end and the peppers begin. Soon, weeds will sprout up and try to wreck all my hard work and I'll be back out there, ripping them out by the roots. 

But for now, everyone is behaving.

I love looking at my garden. Several times a day I find myself at the back patio door staring out at how promising and hopeful it looks. It makes me feel good. And also a little bad ass.

Pretty soon, I'll have all the free, fresh veggies I can eat. And stocking the freezer with homemade tomato sauce made with tomatoes and peppers and basil that I grew myself may sound super domestic and homey and old-timey. But it's not.

It's non-conformist. It's insurrection. It's revolution.

I feel like a little rebel every time I pick a zucchini, or a head of broccoli, and bring those little fuckers straight into the kitchen and cook that delicious, fresh shit up for my family. It's like a "fuck you" to the overpriced grocery store chains and retailers and pollution-belching trucks and canned vegetable makers. 

Fresh veggies are good for you.

Be a bad ass.

Grow some.

Crossing Off Stuff On A List

"Having come to the conclusion that there was so much to do

that she didn't know where to start,

Mrs. Fowler decided not to start at all."

-- Rachel Crompton, Family Roundabout

To-do list 5-19-14

"I love lists. Always have.
When I was 14, I wrote down every dirty word I knew on file cards
and placed them in alphabetical order."

-- Adam Savage, "Step One: Make a List," 

Wired magazine (Oct. 2012)

"I love the ritual of drawing up lists,
and there's something wonderfully satisfying
about ticking tasks off."

--Shaida Kazie Ali

Yesterday was a productive day for me.

Because I made a list.

It wasn't a long list. Just three simple things. I wanted to mop the kitchen floor, plant my vegetable garden, and make a meatloaf for my guys' supper.

Even though it was a very short and unimpressive list, for me it was a lot to do in an afternoon without getting distracted by other brighter, shinier things.

I am not industrious by nature. I am more of a natural-born procrastinator. I do stuff, it's just usually stuff I feel like doing rather than stuff I should be doing. I can put off real responsibility for a long, long time.

But there's something about writing tasks down on a list that makes them more do-able, or urgent, or something. A list sort of stares me down sternly and over the top of it's glasses. 

I imagine that if my to-do lists actually had faces, they'd look a lot like this:

Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

And so crossing stuff off because I actually did it ... that feels really satisfying. 

It feels like accomplishment.

So yesterday I made a list. It was a short list. A list with too many items is too daunting and makes me feel overwhelmed and then I'm likely to ignore the whole damn thing.

But three items? I can handle a list like that. 

So after a long bike ride, a beer and a  banana, I put the baseball game on the radio and got busy. And guess what? I did all three things.

Now my kitchen floor is all sparkly and shiny.

Yay!

Now my garden is full of neat, tidy, labeled rows of baby pepper plants and tomato plants, broccoli and cauliflower plants, zucchini and basil plants, with my zombie scarecrow standing sentinel over them all. 

Yay!

And my guys had a delicious meatloaf for supper, which they'd requested, hence its presence on the list. (What is it about dudes and meatloaf?) Anyway. 

Yay!

I'm no math whiz, but according to the list, I think that makes three good things in one day. Make that four, because I didn't get spanked by the stern lady. Which (depending on who you ask) is also a pretty good thing.

The Family Glue

"That's what I meant," said Pippin. "We Hobbits ought to stick together, and we will."

--  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings

Paper dolls 5-18-14

"You are stuck with me till the world falls to pieces..."

-- Ottilie Weber, End of the Line

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Time for true confessions.

True confession #1: I am really, really, really lazy and careless when it comes to family togetherness. Aside from the three guys who live in my own house, I can be pretty damned lackadaisical and a whole lot of who-gives-a-fuck when it comes to family visits and birthday parties and holidays and events and family ties and shit.

True confession #2: I hate that about myself.

After my dad passed away almost 10 years ago, as my kids have grown older and busier, as my sisters have moved farther apart and as their kids have grown older and busier -- there's been "drift" -- it's grown harder and harder to get too jazzed about that kind of stuff.

But I have this brother in law, Russ.

Russ and my sister live in California, which is far, far away.

Unlike me, though, Russ doesn't let drift happen. Russ gets extremely jazzed about maintaining family togetherness. He is the kind of guy who'll fly to Michigan from California, then buzz down to Ohio and visit us because he happens to be in Michigan. It's not on his way. It's not convenient. But he does it anyway. It's that important to him.

He did it yesterday.

Russ set aside the better part of the day to drive all the way here so he could have a couple of hours with my sons, his nephews. And then he drove all the way back to Detroit to catch a flight home to California.

At first I was all like, "Who does that? Wouldn't it be a lot easier for him to just go to Detroit? Sit in the airport and read a book, for chrissakes." And then I answered my own question. "Russ does that." It's who he is. He's the guy who tries to hold us all together.

He's the self-appointed family glue.

So Russ drove down and we went to our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. It was nice, catching each other up on what everybody's been up to, over Kafta rolls and hummus instead of over the phone or the internet.

Left to me, we'd all just keep drifting apart and lazy-ass me would probably just let it happen.

But luckily, we have Russ. He's like the skewer in the Kafta kebab.

Without him the whole thing might fall apart.

So it's a good thing we have him to hold that shit together.

Tiger Balm

"Take a look at my stripes, chest looks like a tiger arm

And I'm hot as Tiger Balm, fire like a five-alarm

And it's set onto ya barn, get ya fire-fighter on."

-- Lupe Fiasco, "All The Way Turnt Up"

Tiger Balm jar with letter beads 5-17-14

"Tiger Balm aims to deliver health and well being through proven oriental wisdom.

Our belief is that no one should be constrained from leading a full and active life

because of aches, pains and everyday discomforts."

-- Tiger Balm philosophy,  TigerBalm.com

Tiger Balm advertisement

Two days ago I strained a muscle in my calf. It hurt. That's a bad thing.

So I put Tiger Balm on it.

Now my calf doesn't hurt. That's a good thing.

Besides, why wouldn't you want to use something with "more striking power than a flying tiger?"

It just makes good sense.

Use Tiger Balm.

The shit works.

One Good Enough Thing

"Don't think that you are not good enough;

others will think that for you."

-- Vikrant Parsai

Red-winged blackbirds 5-16-14

Someone was telling me about these eleven bald eagles that circle the sky around sunset over a nature preserve near my house.

So last night, around sunset, I packed up my camera stuff and headed over there. I hadn't recorded a "good thing" for the day yet, and I figured a sky full of bald eagles at sunset would do the trick.

Guess what? No eagles.

I saw a bunny. I saw a deer. I saw some geese. And I saw lots and lots of red-winged blackbirds.

These blackbirds were particularly noisy and vocal -- as if they were squawking "Hey, look at us! Up here! We're birds too, you know. So what if we're not fancy schmancy bald eagles. They're overrated anyway. What, aren't we good enough for you? At least we had the decency to show up, for chrissakes. How's about snapping a picture of us guys?"

And so I did.

Sure, bald eagles are majestic and regal and impressive and all that shit. But so are red-winged blackbirds in their own way, with their bright red and gold epaulets, like they're wearing little military dress uniforms. It was almost dark, too dark to see much color or detail, but the twilight was just good enough to capture their silhouettes against the darkening sky.

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

And for today, that's a good enough thing.

Silent Films

"Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo."

-- Mary Pickford

Self portrait 5-15-14

"The silent film has a lot of meanings.

The first part of the film is comic. 

It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films.

But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion."

-- Pedro Almodovar

I have this yellow Post It on my desk that says, simply, "Blancanieves -- watch this movie."

My friend Jill wrote it and stuck it there months ago.

When Netflix finally got their shit together and offered the film, I downloaded it, and then it sat there in my queue, unwatched, for weeks and weeks. Yesterday, when nobody else was home and I had an afternoon all to myself, I finally watched it.

It's a silent film, black and white with music, set in 1920s Seville, and is the story of a girl named Carmen, who happens to be the daughter of  the once great matador Antonia Villalta. The film is essentially a retelling of the Snow White tale, complete with evil stepmother, poison apple, and a merry band of bullfighting dwarfs who find the girl nearly drowned -- and amnesic -- by a riverside after a failed attempt on her life engineered by the stepmother. The dwarfs name her Blancanieves, or "Snow White", after the famed fairy tale, and she joins their bullfighting act. And the girl's got skillz, which she learned from her father, even though she doesn't really remember it.

This movie was thoroughly imaginative and captivating and charming but also haunting and tragic. And there's this rooster that is pretty fucking terrific.

Don't be dissuaded by the fact that this film is silent, and black and white, and foreign. You won't miss the talking, I promise. Plus, all of the inter-titles are in English, so it's OK if you don't know Spanish.

I don't want to say a whole lot more about the film, because I don't want to spoil it for you.

All I have to say is that it's such a good thing and I am so glad Jill told me about it. 

Oh, and this --

"Blancanieves -- watch this movie."