Feb 17 Exhaustion before the storm

  5 1/2 hours....where did it all go?
  How the hell was I in a saddle for 5 1/2 hours?
  Toward the end I started to get glimmers, the beginnings of hallucination.
  You always talk to yourself, but it's when you start to answer back that issues come up.
  You stop wanting to figure out simple problems.
  If I don't put my foot down at this light I'll fall over - so what.
  I've got 5 more miles to go in the dark on a commuter road the width of a donkey trail- whatever, bikes can use the whole lane in LA.
   I need to eat- nah, you're not hungry.
   Bizarre. Kind of cool. Like going to the museum when you're starved, all the colors seemed brighter.
   Palos Verdes again. Up down around, loop in and among the hills....perfect light and wind. Cruising down the coast road descent everything sparkled in front of me with that blue you see in a Hockney painting.
   Crystalline, mineral, granular. Desert light. By a sea. Salt and millions of bits of stone and glass. So strange for a guy who grew up in the muddy East where mist and wash and water rule the air. The landscape touches you back home. It's on you. It adheres. You can run your finger through it.
   Out here in LA the world is Out There. It's a view or a vista. It's light itself. The West. Something to be gotten to rather than something you're in.
   I always notice.. when the winter weather kicks in here, or it's sundown by the ocean and the fog rises, when a breeze smells sweet or has some rain in and flits across my face I jump around, like a ghost went by- something living in the air touched me. It's rare. Strange. Twenty years on and off and it still feels uncanny.
  And now outside the heaviest rainfall in years is pelting LA. Whole hillsides are sliding into the streets. Water is flowing in streams I didn't even know were streams. Waterfalls marked on State park sites that haven't fallen in a decade are full.
   I don't care what it takes to clean the bike or me I'm heading up into the hills tomorrow.