Infospigot: The Chronicles

Now and then, I just lose the thread. Why am I doing this again?

Yes, some reasons are close to the surface: There’s a certain amount of fun in it. It’s satisfying to have my small but faithful audience. I tell myself that there’s a certain value to the practice in it: putting the words together, thinking a little about what’s going on out there outside the room, finding ways to distill what I stumble across into a coherent couple of paragraphs.

Yet sometimes that all seems pretty insubstantial. On one level, the world is full of people holding forth on the state of the world and everything happening in it. I don’t kid myself: There’s not much new I have to add to the general deliberations. On another level, any work benefits from a sense of purpose or direction. That’s what is occasionally lacking for me here, and is lackinng now: That sense of north and south, up, down, forwards, and backwards.

Of course, there’s a larger context for this: figuring out what the next step in my work life is. My journalism career has undergone a major change if it’s not in fact over. So what’s the next act: Well, maybe getting my B.A. so I can teach history to the hungry minds in a community college class somewhere — a natural place, maybe, for all that stuff kicking around in my head.

Today: A 106-mile or so ride with 10 others from the Grizzly Peak Cyclists, from Livermore (about 40 miles southeast of Berkeley), across the last range of hills (near Altamont Pass) into the Central Valley (more exactly, the San Joaquin Valley), then south to a town called Patterson, then a long and mostly very gradual climb to the into the isolated ranch country between San Jose and Livermore, then back to Livermore.

No matter how you cut it, 106 miles is a long way and means you have to spend a long time on the bike. I didn’t suffer much, except on the steepest part of the climb back west from the Valley (about a 9 percent grade that last for maybe a mile and a half; enough to make you work in any circumstances, and more painfully so when you’re not really fit and carrying more weight than you maybe ideally should. Ah, but that’s another story.

We started out just after 8. By Chicago standards, the weather was balmy; about 40. By Bay Area standards this was akin to setting out to the South Pole a la Robert Falcon Scott. But the day was mostly bright and sunny and there were even points headed up the long canyon into the hills that it felt too warm to be wearing all the cool-weather gear I had on.

I’m not really great at taking pictures of bike rides. Mostly I tend to look at landscape, and it’s almost impossible to meaningfully reproduce with my level of skill and the little camera I generally have at hand. If I had brought my camera, I would have tried to capture something of the brilliance of the day, the long visibilities, and the striking way the coastal hills front the edge of the valley. Coming from a place, Illinois, where landscape transitions are gradual and subtle when you can detect any at all, the sharp division between hills and valley always fascinates me.

Late. Tired. Bed. More on the trip, maybe, tomorrow.

The things I do instead of Big Work That Matters often involve focusing on small details that I’ve been slow to learn the world at large cares much about. A case in point:

In the course of my freelance toils for the high-end household goods retailer that shall remain nameless, I came across this phrase, and variations thereon, used to describe a line of outdoor furniture: “rustproof aluminum.” I pointed out to the catalog editor that since aluminum doesn’t rust, and since most of the upper-income people expected to buy the furniture probably know that, it actually sounds kind of dumb to say “rustproof aluminum.” But it was explained to me that being rustproof is a selling point; thus it’s not enough to say something is aluminum — you need to say rustproof, too.

Another case: Asked to do a little historical research on the design antecedents for a reproduction lamp carried “exclusively” by the company in question, I quickly discovered at least a half-dozen other places carrying a lamp of identical design and so close in execution to the “exclusive” one that you’d almost need a forensic scientist to tell the difference. I wondered aloud whether, since so many examples of the lamp were so readily discoverable whether it really qualified as an exclusive. The answer, in a nutshell, is that the product is exclusive if the company says it is.

No lesson or moral, I guess. Just watching more words go the way of “new” and “improved” and “97.4 percent pure.”