Bike. jan 27 - Santa Ana

   I knew something was wrong.
I took the right onto PCH and it was like catching a wave in Maui. (Something I've also done and barely lived to regret. "Will the white guy body surfing with the kids please get out before we have to retrieve his body.")
  Another story.
  The prevailing winds in LA usually blow in off the water. In the Santa Monica bay that means if you're going North or North west you're getting hit in the face by them and if you're going South or  South East you've got a tail wind. It's a iron rule.
   Except.
   When the Santa Anas come in. It all spins around. Everything feels bizarre. You don't notice at first, but as the day goes by things get wider, looser, pulled apart. It's hard to explain but it's like the roof's come off the LA basin and all that's keeping anything down, all that's keeping the tenuous tissue of SoCal together is....will. It's just us and the stratosphere, way way up there.
    When the winds turn around they come all the way in from the high interior deserts that front the Sierra range and Death Valley and ...there's nothing out there but what Cormac McCarthy called our blood rite. You can't sugar coat shit in the unicorporated zones outside of 29 Palms even if you have a fortune. It's brutal country, waterless, sere, cruel, militant. And for a week or so every year its indifferent Calvinist soul breathes down upon us.
   It's a documented truth crime goes up during the Santa Anas. People stab their spouses, run the red light, throw the sucker punch, take the final step... when the winds arrive from the desert.
   I think it's all part of our manifest destiny. We built this terrible miracle that is California on the bones of the Indians and the Mexicans and the Chinese and then finally our own brutalized selves crawling in from the Dustbowl....we made a civilization sparkle, but its morality its humanity is thinly spread. The winds take that spiritual topsoil and spin it into the sea.
 
   Winds in the mts and the canyons of LA will reach 60 MPH this weekend. If a fire starts it'll spread faster than a landslide. Whole neighborhoods can go in an afternoon if the two coincide.
    One of LAs little secrets.
    And on a bike you'll go as fast a professional racer in one direction.
    In the other you'll be pedaling in your climbing gears to keep from falling as you go downhill.
    I nearly came off the thing 4 times. Nuts. Madness.
    Zuma Beach. 45 miles.
    On a lighter note: this is a detail of the bike that Felice Gimondi road to victory in the '65 Tour De France. Poor guy- how great he woulda been....but he had to be the same age as Merckx.
It's so beautiful I wanna lick it.
   I'm gonna sell my carbon and titanium bikes and buy some old steel frame Derosas or a Bianchi like this. Who needs to pretend they can go faster when no matter what they'll never go fast enough? Ride something you love that's gorgeous. Basta.

 
 

Jan 25 Ride. Malibu again.....Why why why....

   There's a guy named Giles Coren who writes the best restaurant reviews I've ever read. Not that I read that many. But what's great about Giles is he sometimes barely mentions the restaurant or often doesn't get to it until he's half a column in.
   Like Anthony Bourdain with his Parts Unknown Coren makes us remember that when we go out to eat we aren't just trying to get the best scallopini or the finest sushi roll or a souffle to die for.
  We're going out. In groups. To see other groups, and gather around the fires and let our hair down and tell stories. We're searching. And more often than not the food's mostly an excuse to do so.
   Coren will tell stories about his father or being Jewish in England or his wife's reminders that he better get his ass in gear and type or he'll talk about the writing itself and then smoothly let you know you've been listening to him inside one of London's kabillion restaurants and how the subject he was going on about links up with some small one door shop's Kebab or a five star bowl of soup that smells like something that wafted up into his room at Oxford and he never found out why.
   What I'm trying to say is ....describing the geographic highlights of a bike ride in correct chronology is probably going to bore everyone to death so Im gonna try and avoid it. Or mix it up. From day to day. Depending.
   Headwinds. Back pain. The same old RPM drop at the same old corner on PCH that Ive been cursing for 20 years. The gravel. The glare. The exhaust. All to get to a hill by Pepperdine that cant be that hard to climb and yet every time I climb it I want to scream. It doesn't add up. I don't to anymore than the same sum I've seen for decades.
   So...why? Why do people sit on bikes for 3 hours at a shot?
   Well, to quote Mel Gibson...."Freedom!!"
   Not democratic freedom -which as we are so often told isn't free- not the freedom to be you and me, actually quite the opposite. The freedom to be not me. To forget me, dull the voices in my head that I call my personality.
  Biking hurts. Way down deep.
  I like the saying, On a bike you can die many deaths. What it means is more than in a pool or running on a road, when you're cycling you can hit the wall really really hard and be quite sure that you are done, cooked, fit for the uber pick up to take you home in a bag....and then...you drift over the top of a hill, you hit a climb that's got just that canter you like, someone rips by you with a wicked smile and you find, you're back at it, you've got another life to burn.
  But eventually, cycling wears them all down. It kind of erases you. At the end of a hard ride you are boiled down to fewer of your essentials, and what a joy...to lay on the ground or melt into a chair at an outdoor cafe or watch the tide come in while your normally nagging self, ego, ID, and fears are shutting the fuck up.
   That's why I do it.
   That and the beauty of the machine. A trim bridge most bikes are, that suspension between two wheels. The simplest truss which balances only when in motion, and us perched in the middle. Get one humming and it's a perfect thing. You're a mechanical centaur. That desire wired in all of us since the first Mongol got up on a horse and held on. To be one with something faster. To get back down on all fours and ...fly. No engine. No fuel but you. Sailing but by land, not sea.
   LA's been lousy with landslides recently. Four years of water fell in the last couple months and PCH is an ever evolving mud puddle that the nice folks from CalTrans keep open. Topanga Canyon is closed which strikes an almost laughable blow at many commuter hopes and dreams. But ...it also means we the bikers can ride up and down Topanga....alone.
   Heaven.
   I'm still too old. Knees going, thighs not rippling anymore, frickin back a mess....but WTF, onward.
    65 miles.

Jan 23 - Griffith Park

It's one of things they tell you when you first move here. 

The Griffith Family still owns Griffith Park.

The largest Park in any American City. 

One family- leases it to LA for a dollar a year. 

I have no idea if this is true. Are there still Griffiths? After they made Birth of A Nation is this what they bought? 

Was DW really a Griffith? 

Who knows? 

Griffith has lots of trails in it that you can't ride - you can't ride on any trails in LA City parks which seems a little extreme until you realize how little park land there is in this place and how many bikers. It would be war. Hikers and bikers and tourists colliding. Hills denuded by the million rock hopper enthusiasts...or not. Who knows? 

But you can ride on roads and Griffith has some nice steep access roads up and over it. 

Rained for days and then cleared today and I thought oh the sun's out it's not going to be that cold. Mistake. Hands freezing on descents, knees locking up, hamstrings -well the right one at least- letting me know it was only gonna put up with so much of this shit. But what fun. Up Nichols, down Mulholland, up into Lake Hollywood down past Warner Bros- caught the green this time both ways and up and over Griffith twice. Chased some senior citizen on a steel road bike up to the top - he pounded a big gear (which some people call little gears a term which makes no intuitive sense to me - IE he was pedaling slowly) I kept a respectable constant distance, but when I got to the top,  I thought oh look he's stopping to show me he beat me on his skinny tires I'll just turn right and go up the dirt road to the Hollywood sign, how's that buddy, feelin strong now?? 

Silly yes- cyclists do this dumb shit all the time, little pulls and tests and to see if the person next to you can take it.
Really stupid on my part as you can't actually get to the Hollywood sign this way and I was dying when I reached some water tank with a view of ....yahoo, the Valley. I share the bounty below. 

  But the descent down to Los Feliz was a blast and the sun came out and LA looked amazing after it's week under the pounding rain and snow, I passed two guys walking a dog that didn't look like it could have walked down the driveway but somehow got up here- determined old pooch - one of those sausage corgi type things that always seem to be smiling, like they're having a good time. 

Washes of dirt and gravel across the road, crows flipping and cruising at eye level, clucking that odd crow speech which someone told me is different in every part of the country; West Coast crows don't cluck like East Coast crows. Makes sense. 

Passed a coyote trotting the other way who pulled to the side of road but didn't give me any more deference than that. Healthy coat, intelligent eyes....probably saying to himself....."if only I were bigger..." I remembered shooting tv one night down below on the Griffith golf course late at night, ten years ago now at least. I had some time between scenes and I went for a stroll on the course under the moon. The grass looked blue. I was standing mid some fairway when I heard what sounded like little girls laughing, I turned around and 15 coyotes ran right past me, thru me really, on either side, like I wasn't there. And I suppose to them, I wasn't. Their feet a graceful drumming as they disappeared.

Just drops and climbs all day basically. And that was fine, what the hell, find the right gear and hope your back doesn't give out.

Coming back down the valley side an hour later a big fella in team gear drew up next to me, both of us splattered in LA's red mud, We'd both been cheating a little on the trails- "Definitely Mt bike weather huh? " I was sitting up blowing on my hands , "Little chilly for sure. " He laughed, "I'm from Green Bay, this is nothing." I called after him, "Then I guess we have even more in common, I'm from Pittsburgh.." And he looked back, "It's over man- the forces of evil have triumphed. No super bowls this year."  

A city of ex-pats. (Decidedly different than a city of ex-Pats, someplace I never want to go) People glancing off each other and occasionally finding moments to bridge the gap. As he went by I realized he had those little testicle things hanging off his saddle that guys with big Dualies and possibly not so big other attributes hang off their tow hitch. Had to laugh. Certainly "took some.." 

maybe 30 miles. 

Ride- Jan 21 PV

   Palos Verdes fixates me. It's a pain in the ass to get to, and even more of a pain in the ass today, but once I'm there...I just wanna make the wheels spin. I wanna stay.
   I don't mean I wanna live there...what did MacArthur say "Old soldiers never die, they just...fade away." ? The PV pennisular paraphrase is "Old Republicans never die...they just... Palos Verdes."  I just like to do loops and feel the wind and the chill it often holds. A cloud hangs over it.
   The hills call me, there's a wildness still to the place, the cliffs on the near side of Portugese Bend -which if you come to LA are the one piece of nature you should see, LA Crest and the Santa Monicas be damned- the roads are always collapsing and houses shifting and people falling into sink holes (oddly enough the closer you get Trump's national golf course empire which owns the coast just above San Pedro - another little So Cal gem of town)- but you can ride around the place for hours and hardly see a soul not in a car. Its so odd: money and California. People just hole up. They stay indoors or they're in transit or shopping. Unfair of course but I've gotta have ridden thru PV 100 times and there are homes Ive never seen anyone in, around, or coming out of. They're investments.
  Which let me say when you're cruising around on a popsicle stick of a bike is just fine. Fewer surprises, free agents and fools, the better.
   So it's 15 miles to get there, well from my current pit of an apartment it's 25 but you do a flat warm up and then on mile 30 you're climbing 8,9 degrees and sometimes more and you can do that for ...however...and then a flat spin back.
   Shit roads, crap bike path, sand heaps blown into access roads, the usual mad melange of ear bud walkers, skaters, bozos on a stroll ( "hey try the pedestrian path where I'd be arrested if I rode my bike on- it's right there!") bikers with their dogs on a lease stretching across the entire path. Geniuses all. Liberty and its fallout victims. Learn to slalom.
   But run that gauntlet and you can climb a switchback as lovely as a ski slope and stand by the Pacific coast road and watch porpoises and seals gambol in the surf. You'll get headwinds on some of the descents that will scare you cold but you'll also get tailwinds that'll lift you right to the crest and push you home.
   Home....funny to use the word in LA.
   PV - A beauty of a place to ride thru. Got a soft spot for it and its El Rancho aesthetic.
   call it 65 miles.
 

Bike- Jan 20th- what you do when it's raining in the ...Southland

     I remember the first time I heard the expression. The Southland.
I must have been in "my trailer" or visiting someone's house back in the 90s and the news was on, as it so often is everywhere you go these decades.
   "Rain in the Southland and our accu weather team has it covered!!" like they were covering a natural disaster or "More Southland news than any other news channel!!" (love the repetition)....anyhow, Eastish coaster that I am, I thought, "but the Southland is ....the South, you know", like Lynyrd Skynyrd singing songs about it, below the Mason Dixon line (or in Pennsylvania anywhere within some strange invisible border where the Stars and Bars still fly) the land of Lee and Jackson, of peaches, and bad public schools and lots of college basketball, but surely NOT Southern California.
  That was before I realized that California is a nation unto itself. And that everyone who's moved here has kind of turned it into a microcosm or a substitute world for ...everywhere else.
   The most abstract and conceptual landscape Ive ever experienced is to most Californians the only reality they can work or live in. It's their safe space, where the oxygen has the right mix of fantasy and free will.
  What Im getting at is I wouldnt think twice about riding in the rain in PA or NYC or RI or anywhere else Ive lived I actually kind of enjoy the feeling, the wheels spinning up the spray and your knees hitting the chill of the top tube miles and miles in.....fewer people, cars going slower, people staring at you like you're nuts, better be smart when you use the brakes.....but back in LA.....when it rains sometimes I fall prey to the general hysteria.
    Funny, the thing this place needs the most, water, it reacts to as if a plague descended. The highways grind to a halt, the news channels embed correspondents at crucial intersections, people call off work.
  And I go to the gym.
  Or more sadly to someplace with 60 bikes crammed into an office space and the word "Soul" imprinted somewhere on the letterhead. The webberhead.
  yep....
  "Indoor cycling".
   Jesus wept. At least he might have after getting his heart rate up to 170 beats a minute in the first 4 minutes of the session as a quad mighty instructor dressed like a super hero shouted at him to find his core, it's all about you, this is YOUR choice, your life, your health, now GOOOOOOOOO!!!!and 40 some millenials rabidly bounce their way into their minds eye of what they imagine the film of their life looks like.
   But don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for it. It's a good workout. (If you dont get your heart rate that high that fast and if you stay for two sessions) and previous gyms have always had the most laughable indoor "bikes". The wide saddled torture instruments designed for Victorians.
   Thank god indoor cycling ...took off...in its stationary way.
    I used to go to one of the original joints in Venice run by a team of mean looking ladies who'd sweat their and my asses off and give me shit when I didn't do the yoga part after. Loved em and their tough lesbian love.
   But the whole...concept.....striving alone together....sitting in rows like they would at a Starbucks feeding off the wi fi, to a soundtrack, how they must have sat in elementary school when teacher taught them they were all unique....it digs at me.
   Exercise porn. The work out without the risk, the price, the personal journey.
   Take out fitness.
   The very definition of biking means getting out there, into the world, and thru it. Where someone might just flatten you or you might take your eye off the road and topple over a grate or come to a red light and ...have to wait your turn. That's kinda the deal. There are no conceptual pilgrimages.
   But hey...when you've been livin in the Southland for too long and get a little spoiled and been under the weather for three days with some odd LA bug and something's happening on the tv in DC you just can't accept.....2 hours head down in a box as The Cult screams Dionysian dreams into your soul's core....gets the job done.
   Mileage? Who the hell knows but Christ I need some water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaK81oUmbbs
Try and hear this and not spin at 160 rpms!!!!!
  especially the fake ending...gets me every time....
   Guns and Roses? Eat shit and die. This is the great 80s glam band.

Jan 17 Santa Monica fire road

Pretty much my favorite ride in LA. The standby. The steady. The one and done. 
You weave thru Santa Monica and Rustic Canyon, that magic patch of streets below the Palisades that no one seems to know about still with its old ranch sites and community tennis courts and gazillion dollar cottage and craftsmen homes riffing off old designs into the stratosphere of domestic comfort. 
And a nice loud stream which runs more often than most in So Cal. Climb up out of that and somehow you get right to Sunset. Where if you want you do a quick 8th of a mile zig zag and at your pedals is suddenly 40,000 acres of bike riding. 
Boom. Like that. One minute you're crossing in front of a bar and an italian restaurant, next minute your climbing past Steven Spielbergs pad and then poof you disappear into miles of mountain nothinness. 
It's about two hours my favorite ride. Straight up from sea level to the fire lanes of Dirt Mulholland, I dont know...six mile climb?? Couple pitches are the steepest things I've ever consistently ridden up, views to both sides of a massive ravine and walking park. 
On and on, granny gear hell, sun on you face if you climb before noon at the worst parts. It can be brutal. Or it can be more often, magic. The sun setting as you reach the ranger station and WATER! at the top. There's the Pacific one way. There's the valley and the San Gabriel mts in the other. I've gotten to the top and the winds been blowing so hard the power lines moan like a rigged ship. 
Strange place. The worst and the best. Pain and joy. The mountains and the over built valley below. 
Then you take a couple rights and plunge for even more miles than the climb all the way back down to Sunset where it scrapes thru Santa Monica's northern canyons. 
Ain't a car that can keep up with you once you start the descent. A blast....and this is a bobcat I saw on the way up in a yard not a mile from Sunset Blvd. 
Gotta love the southland.

LONNNNNGGGGG Bike RIde for a BiiiiiG Cause

   Hey folks out there in internet land- friends I've already pestered from three different platforms, pals, distant relatives, ethernet brethren.......
   I'm gonna ride my bike from San Fran to LA in June to raise money for HIV/ AIDS research.
   Check out their website aidslifecycle.org
   You can pull up the main page, tap donate up above, type in my name, the rest
is simple. Please help at any level if you can.
   I'm also gonna put together a blog update thing on that site - I'll have a "personal page" - and basically I'll be writing something about each training ride I do and adding silly pictures and video. Had some laughable rides already. Lotta rain in LA right now and boy that can wreak havoc in the mountains. My landlord almost had to hose me down before she'd let me in the apt.
   Anyhow....if you would, if anyone you know has been hit by this worldwide epidemic....so much has been done, stunning progress has been made to retard and reduce the impact of HIV on a person but for the poor, for the inner city working class the presence of HIV is full on to this day.
   I worked with children last year, a story telling class in a small town near Pittsburgh with the largest unemployment rate in Pennsylvania and there isn't one of them unaffected by HIV. An uncle, a cousin, an aunt, a brother.
  Please help.

  'Cause all during this ride I'll be feeling the "good pain."

   yours
    David