jan 29 bike - PV more PV

    And then there are days with no wind at all.....literally nothing....not a breeze not a gust....like riding in the doldrums, that section of the Equitorial ocean where sailing ships could be becalmed for weeks...floating in the middle of nowhere under the sun.
    Speaking of nowhere I rode past the Trump National Golf Course down toward San Pedro, condos unbuilt 5 years ago still unbuilt but I'm sure somehow "financed".  Somebody bold had tagged the big stone sign out front, red paint over the gold letters, "puto" over "Trump". Ah well. When you get the big prize you gain some enemies.
   Climbed with my skinny little 50 year old legs. Fun trying to keep a cadence rather than a speed. Strange to watch yourself age. To notice there isnt any new muscle coming along even with all the work. Just maintenencing the old stuff. Seeing the skin on my arms crinkle closer to the tendons and the bones. The veins in the hands emerging bolder each year like they're worried this body's gonna shut down soon and they better figure out an exit strategy. Lines and the creases like sculpture. One truly does carve out a life.
   Took the hands off the brakes on some downhill corners: I thought, I know I can make these, so just trust it and lean, and how stupidly easy it all was, the bike designed to heel like that the tires designed to hang on long as your weight's in the right place. The things we're taught when we're young so many of them simple truths.
   I remember reading a David Mamet article in a mag one year, way back when it was odd that a playwright would write an "article" for a commercial magazine and he was describing a lesson he took in car racing. How to handle a performance vehicle on a track. The advice from his instructor he liked the most was, "Look where you want to go."  Look where you want to go.
   So whenever I get a little freaked about the angle of a turn coming down off a Cali hill I don't look at the yellow line Im terrified of crossing into an oncoming truck I look at the shoulder. And usually things work out.
  The larger ramifications of the metaphor ...I cant think that far.
  I've been reading a book about the first centuries of the Christian church - Syrians, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Armenians....almost all of them communicating in Greek, and a word they liked to use was "kenosis" which loosely translates as the emptying of the self. The hollowing out of the ego to make way for a divine will. Self become part of a Life.
  I like the emptying. I guess I should work on the belief. In something...faith needs some sort of ritual. Devotion requires some kind of labor.
  Funny,  sometimes when I'm climbing I think about pedaling like I do about a prayer wheel, those fabulous Buddhist tools the Tibetans use, mantras in the holy gear box spun round and around. The more you spin the greater the dharma. A music to it in the wind.