Author: Dan Brekke

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Tannenbaum

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We’re just getting into that part of January where you start looking at the Christmas tree and thinking that it’s overstayed its welcome. No–that you’ve let it overstay its welcome. While all the more efficient and tidy households have long since bundled their trees out to the curb for recycling–I don’t think anyone has a municipal Xmas tree bonfire anymore like our Chicago suburb did–there’s our Noble fir, still lighting up our post-holiday nights. And our tree waits to see if we’ll challenge the Brekke family record for Christmas tree longevity, which was well into February as I recall.  

Well, this one will come down, the way they all have. It’ll lie out there by the curb and get tossed in the back of a compactor truck and driven away to be ground up with all the other discarded trees. I’m starting to get teary.

Auf wiedersehen, o tannenbaum!

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Picture(s) of the Day: Showdown

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Photo: Copyright 2009, Mark Adkison/Hors Categorie Photography/All rights reserved.

I’m on the Davis Bike Club email list. Sometimes I get messages from a guy named Mark Adkison. Not sure whether photographing racing cyclists is his day job or the one he does for love in his spare time. He’s very good, and he’s got a little business going called Hors Categorie Photography. Every once in a while, he posts a message to the Davis list about some new group of photos he’s just published. I remember lots of shooting he’s done of the Tours of California.

Today he sent a note about a master’s road race up in Davis. I browsed just one of the albums, from Lap 3 of the race. I found myself captivated: First, by the pictures of the small peloton in the Central Valley winter fog. Second, because flipping through the pictures in sequence really tells a story: you see the guys trying to make their moves, and you see the ones coming through for their turns to pull (the guy above is a case in point; he he keeps reappearing in the front, then rolling off; he’s working for someone in that pack, I think, though I can’t tell who). I don’t know a single one of the racers, but the shots really put me there. Check out the full gallery.

(And thanks to Mark for permission to post the picture above.)

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Don’t

Don’t go out for your first real bike ride in months and try to go hard. Just don’t do it.

But if you do, don’t let your heart rate go into the red zone. Red zone meaning you’re not sure whether you’re heart’s really supposed to beat that fast.

But if you do find yourself looking at that high heart rate, don’t engage in hijinks like trying to show the other guys how fast you can go — even for just a couple minutes, which is really all your atrophied legs have in them.

But if you do start showing off, don’t let anyone talk you into taking the hard climb back home when there’s an easier one you know you really should take.

But if you do let reason be overruled, don’t ride out ahead of the other guys, even if you’re telling them you’re just warming up for the hard part of the climb (note: it’s all hard).

But if you do go off the front a little, don’t lose track of where your friends are. They might take a turn you weren’t expecting.

But if you do get separated, don’t waste a lot of time looking for them, and don’t hesitate to take easy bail-out route back home you had in mind instead of trying to push yourself up the wall in front of you.

But if you do look for them, and if you do try the wall, don’t get off your bike, whatever you do.

But if the damned hill is just too hard for you in your broken-down state — OK, get off. And if you do, take a look around at all the stuff you’d miss if you were just grinding your way up the grade. When you get back on your bike, and finally hit the top of the hill, you’ll be amazed that you ever thought it was hard. Don’t tell anyone it was.

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Posted on

Don’t

Don’t go out for your first real bike ride in months and try to go hard. Just don’t do it.

But if you do, don’t let your heart rate go into the red zone. Red zone meaning you’re not sure whether you’re heart’s really supposed to beat that fast.

But if you do find yourself looking at that high heart rate, don’t engage in hijinks like trying to show the other guys how fast you can go — even for just a couple minutes, which is really all your atrophied legs have in them.

But if you do start showing off, don’t let anyone talk you into taking the hard climb back home when there’s an easier one you know you really should take.

But if you do let reason be overruled, don’t ride out ahead of the other guys, even if you’re telling them you’re just warming up for the hard part of the climb (note: it’s all hard).

But if you do go off the front a little, don’t lose track of where your friends are. They might take a turn you weren’t expecting.

But if you do get separated, don’t waste a lot of time looking for them, and don’t hesitate to take easy bail-out route back home you had in mind instead of trying to push yourself up the wall in front of you.

But if you do look for them, and if you do try the wall, don’t get off your bike, whatever you do.

But if the damned hill is just too hard for you in your broken-down state — OK, get off. And if you do, take a look around at all the stuff you’d miss if you were just grinding your way up the grade. When you get back on your bike, and finally hit the top of the hill, you’ll be amazed that you ever thought it was hard. Don’t tell anyone it was.

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Guest Observation: Russell Banks

From “Cloudsplitter” (I’ve been reading this for what seems like months. Beautiful prose, and an amazing story — though it really is the first time that I’ve ever encountered the details of John Brown’s story.):

When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest instead of northeast, and Fred followed. cloudsplitter.png

For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.

“Well, to Kansas, I guess.”

A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”

“Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”

There was a long silence as he pondered this. Finally, “Why?”

“To fight slavery there.”

More silence. Then, “Doing the Lord’s work?”

“Right.”

“Good. That’s real good.”

“Yep.”

A little further down the road, he said, “But what about Father? He won’t like this, Owen.”

“Maybe not, at least at first. But don’t worry, he’ll come along soon to Kansas himself. He won’t let you and me and the boys do the Lord’s work, while he stays out east … . Anyhow, John says there”s going to be shooting in Kansas before long. That’ll bring the Old Man on. He hates it when he can’t give us the order to fire,” I said, and laughed, and he laughed with me.

So on we went, walking and sometimes hitching rides on wagons, barges, canal boats, moving slowly west and south into the territory of Kansas–a one-armed man and a gelded man, two wounded, penniless, motherless brothers marching off to do the Lord’s work in the war against slavery. In this wide world there was nothing better for us to do, except to stay home and to take care of the place and the women, which neither of us wanted to do and neither could do properly, either. We had to be good for something, though: we were sons of John Brown, and we had learned early in our lives that we did not deserve to live otherwise. So we were going off to Kansas to be good at killing. Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men.

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Highly Sensitive

As I got on the BART car, she was sitting on one of the side-facing bench seats, reading a book. Her bike was blocking a second seat. I asked if she’d mind moving the bicycle so I could sit down. She gave me a blank stare and moved the bike about four inches so I could squeeze past. Another passenger eyed the seat next to me, which the bike still blocked. He didn’t say anything, just gave her a look. She answered with the blank stare and moved the bike a few inches so he could sit. When the train left the station, the bike slid back into my seatmate’s legs. Bike-woman didn’t notice–she was alternately reading her book and fumbling with a pack of Kleenex and blowing her nose and stowing the used snot-wipes in a little basket on the bike. Then she noticed her bike was gouging into her fellow passenger’s shins. She pulled it back toward her so that now it was partially blocking the door.

When she went back to her book, I saw the title: “The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.”

(Oh, and it turns out the highly sensitive thing is a pop-psych franchise. Here’s a self-test if you’re wondering if you have what it takes to be a potential bicycle-toting BART blockhead: Are you highly highly sensitive?)

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Berkeley Frost

Oh, sure: You, wherever you are to the north or east of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, you have your cold snaps, your big old snowstorms, and your drifts. All that’s enough to make you forget how the cold season started some frosty morning a few months ago. Here on the Bay, frost happens every so often in the dead of winter, on some clear morning after a storm has passed. This morning was one of those frosty mornings for us to come out of our uninsulated bungalows and think that we’re in some kind of wintry solidarity with folks on the Columbia, near the East River, or on the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.

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If I Were to Get Peevish, This Is What It Would Look Like

In the newsroom, I don’t
believe in pet peeves. Way too many things nettle me to name just one as a
favorite. And face it: most pet peeves, including the ones I don't have, arise from some point of arbitrary wisdom elevated to a principle that's really just an excuse to vent about how no one does things the right way anymore.


But if I ever let myself indulge in the pet peeve thing, one of mine would be the use
of murder rate when one means murder toll. This is of particular concern now when cities are toting up the body count for the past year and feeding it to reporters who repeat the numbers (without thinking much about what they may or may not mean; most of thinking isn't a part of the exercise). The murder toll is the simple count
of murders in a particular place in a particular year. The rate is
typically an assessment of the number of homicides per capita (typically
expressed as the number of killings per 100,000 population). That way you can
compare places like Richmond, East Palo Alto and Oakland with Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

 

It’s OK but contrived
to use rate as a way of extrapolating or equating the number of murders in one
period of time to another period – “Pleasantville police say there have been
100 murders in the first six months of 2008; at that rate, the city will break
its yearly record of 190, set in 2007.” Personally, I’d stay away from this use
of rate because in the Bay Area, anyway, the ebb and flow of murder stats do
not seem to follow any rhyme or reason summed up by such simple arithmetic. Better
to apply this sense of rate in retrospect: “Police say 130 people were murdered
in Pleasantville in 2008. That’s one of the highest tolls on record, but police
note that the rate of killings dropped markedly after the bloody first six
months of the year, when 100 homicides were reported.”

Like I said: If I were to have a pet peeve, I could get some mileage out of this one.

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Post-Holiday Drip

The first of January has always felt to me more like the end of something than a beginning. From childhood, I have always had the feeling that New Year marked the close of everything I looked forward to at Christmas. New Year’s Day meant it was almost time to go back to school. It began a bleak stretch of winter with only the weak promise of Lincoln’s Birthday (this was an Illinois upbringing, after all, and Presidents Day came along after I was done with school) to get me out of class. The all-day football was a diversion, but hardly satisfying except that as long as that last game was still on — and it would be the Orange Bowl, playing long into the Central Time night — the holidays weren’t really over. Then time would finally run out, and you’d be facing January with nothing to take the edge off the fact the season had turned to cold, hard winter. Holiday lights and Christmas trees? They stayed up for a while, sometimes for weeks, but overnight turned into a reminder of the last pang-inducing and overdue holiday chore.

The first of the year? I’ll take the second, when I feel like I’m already sledding down the course of something new.

(And not — not! — that this is a comment on this year’s New Year’s Day, which was marked by taking down the luminaria this morning; seeing the wonderful documentary “Man on Wire” over in San Francisco with Kate, Eamon, and Sakura; having a repast of pizza and beer over at Lanesplitter, the Oakland restaurant where Thom works, and then going over to Thom and Elle’s place to check out some new electronics and the beginning, anyway, of “Iron Man.” It was a great day. But as a holiday, I’m not sure that I get it.)