Biking is life

I’ve been thinking about a number of things this week. One of the advantages that attend biking is its capacity to slow your world down. In my opinion, this slower pace puts you in a positive place more conducive to thought and rumination.

About 15 years ago, I would bike to work in Brunswick. My commute was about 15 miles from home. Two days per week, I’d make the trek on my bike. It involved some effort, mainly making sure my backpack had my work clothes, a towel to shower, deodorant, and other supplies necessary to prepare for my work day. My employer had a locker room with a shower, so that was a plus. One time I forgot clean underwear, so I spent the day free and easy inside my work jeans. Other than that, I enjoyed this interlude in my life, one that was too brief.

Rather than zipping to Brunswick by car in 20 minutes, the ride took about an hour on my bike. Slowing down from 50 miles per hour to 15 helped me to notice trees, markers along the road—a stone wall erected many years ago, a small family cemetery—things that are just a blur whizzing by in your car. Instead of rock music blaring from my speakers, I was alone with the sounds of the morning—birds chirping—and my thoughts.

Over the past 15 weeks, I’ve reconnected with my physical self. I’ve come to notice how my previous neglect put me on a path that might have resulted in negative health consequences. Granted, flying over my handlebars two weeks ago left me scraped, bruised, and scabbed over in a few places, but I survived, possibly because I had been training for three months. I weathered the incident with a few Band-Aids®, and being sore for a few days. I started a soul patch on my chin that I think I’ll keep. It covers up some of the new pink skin that forms after an abrasion. When I shave in the spring, I’ll be none the worse for my chin plant.

I’ve been wondering what would happen if Americans adopted a lifestyle like the Danes, and other countries that choose alternatives to the automobile. What if we embraced a way of living that was actually sustainable? It’s possible if we recognize that having fewer things is preferable to having stuff, but being increasingly unhappy.

My friend Anne moved to Portland, Oregon a few months ago. She just wrote to tell me that she is heading up a cool organization called the Community Cycling Center, where they dedicated to bikes as tools of empowerment. She’s in a great city that has worked diligently to make the bicycle an important part of their overall transportation policy.

In Maine, despite efforts by groups like the Bicycle Coalition of Maine, resistance to bikes is widespread, with many drivers viewing us bicyclists as adversaries, standing in their way. Rather than slowing down, and waiting, or deferring to bicyclists, these idiots swerve into the path of oncoming cars, drive too close to cyclists (Maine law requires three feet clearance between cars and a cyclist at the edge of the roadway, btw), and generally exhibit the mindset of a 10-year-old, while yielding an instrument of death that is in excess of 3,000 pounds, and an SUV might exceed 4,000. My bike and I weight about 250, so there’s not much competition should the driver clip me—I’m dead, or seriously injured.

Still, every night, at least one driver insists on boorish behavior, all because they’re too selfish to tack on a potential 15 seconds to their commute by courteously sharing the road with me. I’m sure it’s even worse in Maine’s larger communities, like Portland.

All in all, it’s been a great 15 weeks, and as the days grow shorter and darkness descends earlier and earlier on the roads I’ve grown fond of during summer’s longer days, I know this portends that my biking season is coming to a close sooner than I would like.

It looks like a membership at a local gym is in order for me to maintain my progress. My hours on the Lifecycle® and Stairmaster® all winter will be tolerated, only because I know I’ll be hopping back on my Diamondback as soon as the roads are cleared come springtime.

Ken Burns-Race and space in America

Noted documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, is on C-SPAN's Book TV talking about The National Parks: America's Best Idea, with best friend and collaborator, Dayton Duncan, discussing the new documentary.

On how he and Duncan came to take on this project, which took 10 years to complete:

It's right in our wheelhouse, and I want to stress "our." In the formal sense, [writer and longtime collaborator Duncan] came to me 10 years ago and said, "Let's do the national parks," and it took me a nanosecond to say, "Of course." About that same time, 10 years ago, we were in the middle of producing our film together on Mark Twain, and we were talking to the novelist Russell Banks about Huckleberry Finn. Banks was saying—and we certainly agreed ourselves—that this was Twain's greatest work. And then he said, "It's our Illiad and our Odyssey." He went on, "Though most of us share a common European ancestry with those who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, we Americans were grappling with two new themes that Twain alone, among writers—but also among politicians and philosophers and artists of the 19th century—was willing to deal with honestly and openly. And those twin themes were race and space." Those are all I've been focused on for the last 30-plus years.

The six part series begins today on local PBS stations and will continue for five additional nights. Don't miss it!

Rush weighs in with Leno

I missed the Rush Limbaugh interview with Leno, Thursday night. Apparently, Rush has lost a great deal of weight, 82 pounds in fact, over the past five months. He's not revealing many details, however, since he says it's much too complicated and even someone with "talent on loan from God" doesn't quite understand it.

Since I've been on my own quest for a healthier lifestyle for the past 14 weeks, having lost 39 pounds, I'm always interested in the success of others in their own journey to shed pounds and embrace a better way. Given that Limbaugh is a celebrity magnifies the effort and attention being given to it.

Being overweight is not healthy, so given that he's shed weight, I'm pleased for his own longterm health. I am concerned, however that he's not doing this by combining healthy eating with exercise and a focus on fitness.

I know that Limbaugh has an aversion to exercise. I've heard him speak about it, saying that he hates to walk from the car to enter a building. Granted, this was several years back, but I doubt that he's running, walking, or even biking as part of his new weight loss routine.

He did mention he's using Quick Weight Loss Centers to shed pounds. Limbaugh has lost large amounts of weight in the past. I remember that he mentioned he had his own personal chef preparing healthy, low-fat meals for him. I think he was married to Marta at the time, who apparently couldn't cook. This was the longest of his three marriages.

I wish him success in keeping the weight off. It is a fact (since he insists on being fact-based on his show) that losing weight and keeping it off isn't about diets, or special programs, particularly complicated programs like the one that he's not sure of the details about. It involves burning fewer calories than you consume. This requires attention to what you eat, and a regular program of exercise.

That's why I'm a proponent of the weight loss occuring with this gentleman in Texas, and continue to concentrate on my own routine of healthy eating, combined with exercise.

Losing weight is easy. There are a plethora of fad programs available, particularly if you have the money to pay for them. Success in keeping the pounds off are much harder and require daily, if not hourly vigilance.

Shuffle play Friday-Workout mixtape (or songs to shake your ass to @ 5:30 a.m.)

I’ve detailed my reconnection with the physical, completing the body, soul spirit continuum in several posts over the past 14 weeks. This isn’t yet another post about me and my new body shape. No, it’s time to rock out for this week’s Shuffle Play Friday. I am loosely tying it to working out, however. It's what I do now.

With the days growing increasingly shorter, light to bike is becoming precious. It’s hard to get a ride in each morning before work, now that the sun comes up around 6:30. As a result, I’m back on the treadmill, ramping up my minutes from 15-20, to 35 to 40 several mornings per week, spending most of the time alternating between running/walking.

I hate the treadmill, and the fact that it’s located in my dark basement doesn’t help things. What gets me through my period of torture? You guessed it—rawk!!

Here are a list of five songs that can make any workout pass by with minimal discomfort.

The Smiths-How Soon Is Now? (12-inch)/The Sound of The Smiths

The Smiths are being rediscovered by a new generation of music fans as result of the vapid summer movie hit, 500 Days of Summer. Haven’t seen it and don’t plan to.

I’ve been a Smiths fan since I scored The Queen Is Dead from Columbia (on cassette) as part of one of their “6 tapes for a penny” offer. It was just after my fundamentalist crash and burn.

This particular track’s propulsive nature and atmospheric guitar riffing by Johnny Marr makes it a good track to lock in and turn up the speed control to.


Joe Satriani-Surfing With The Alien/Surfing With The Alien

Satriani is a guitar shredder extraordinaire. This was his best selling disc, solid from start to finish. The title track, however, is a classic for those that like kick ass rock with frenetic fretwork.
I’ve had this on cassette for years, and somehow, it ended up in the bottom of a box that nearly got discarded at last Saturday’s Durham Trash Disposal Day. Fortunately for me, Miss Mary saw it before handing over the box to the guy that dumps things into the trash compactor.

Monday morning, guess who was in the tape player of my basement boom box, propelling me onward?

Stereolab-Metronomic Underground/Emperor Tomato Ketchup

This song is a departure from the other more straight-ahead rock tracks in this week’s SPF.

Stereolab is a band I first got turned onto during my ‘BOR years. Eclectic

This particular track has a hypnotic groove, locked in by synthesizer, rather than guitar and a repeating bass line. That and the lyrics sung in French by Laetitia Sadier creates an ambience where picking up and putting down my New Balance 720s sync with the beat, and running in place is no longer difficult.

Interestingly, my father’s best friend in high school knows Stereolab’s Tim Gane’s dad, Reuben, and as a result, I scored a personally signed photo courtesy of Tim.

Prisonshake-Bedtime Beats You Senseless/I’m Really Fucked Now

I drove to Princeton in 1994, to catch Guided by Voices. That’s the kind of thing I once was willing to do in order to connect with music that had meaning for me. Label mates at the time, Prisonshake were on tour with GbV, and I met Robert Griffen, guitar player, and Scat Records maestro.

The show was at one of the houses (think frats) on the Princeton campus. I was early and Prisonshake was loading in their gear before playing. I introduced myself. I learned later that Griffen could be a tough guy to get next to, but he was great to me. I guess he figured that if I was crazy enough to drive six hours to catch a show, he could at least be cordial. We had a beer.

The Shake have always done things their own way. Scat was based in Cleveland before Griffen, tired of the post-industrial dreariness, drunks, and crack whores for neighbors, relocated to St. Louis, where the label is now based.

I just found out this weekend, listening to Mike Lupica’s show via the archives on WFMU that Prisonshake has just released a new album, a double one at that, their first one in eons. If its as good as any of the old stuff (which Lupica say that it is), then it should be one hell of an album (it’s available in vinyl only).

Caspian-Moksha (track 1)/The Four Trees

In my day job with the workforce investment board, I meet new people all the time. Much of my work involves putting together partnerships, leveraging resources, and piecing together a variety of funding sources to offer training programs, primarily to help job seekers gain new skills, upgrade their skills (if they've been laid off), and on a personal level, possibly help some find the path to do what they were meant to do with their lives.

In the course of my efforts, occasionally, I connect on a more personal level with individuals doing similar work in the community. I happened to have a chance to have lunch a year ago with a young man involved with the Caleb Foundation. Caleb is an interfaith organization that develops, preserves and manages rental communities so as to provide safe, decent housing to low and moderate income residents.

We got talking about books, writing, and ultimately music. Long story short, he gave me a CD of a band that his girlfriend's brother plays in. The CD I have was an original, but the jewel case was a generic Maxell one, sans song titles, and without band name, with just the disc title, "The Four Trees." I just knew the songs as track 1, track 2, etc.

The band is Caspian, from Beverly, Mass. They might be characterized as post-rock, and their music is instrumental. Think church of sound, with waves ebbing and flowing in intensity, inducing a sort of spiritual state.

Track 1, which I learned is titled "Moksha." Most of this CD, including this track is loud, angular, with anthemic dual guitar structures, and mostly muscular drumming. As a band, Caspian doesn't create mere sounds, they create sonic landscapes that you get lost in.

Well, please forgive me, but I've got to wrap this up as I'm due for my morning appointment with Mr. Treadmill.

Heroes are hard to come by

My fitness focus continues. I’m entering the 14th week since June, when after being disenchanted with my excess weight, and deteriorating physical state, decided to do something about it. I’m now down 39 pounds. Even better, I think I’m in the best shape I’ve been since high school. This new me, committed to riding my bike, lifting weights, and on off days, hitting the treadmill hard is scaring me. I’ve been taken over by the spirit of Jack Lalanne!

Shortly after deciding to shed excess pounds, I was at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Auburn when The Dempsey Challenge was mentioned, and registration packets handed out. Not giving much thought to it at the time, I stuck this in with the assortment of other materials they bombard you with at these kinds of events. Later, going through these at the kitchen table, I mentioned it in passing to Mary. She seemed much more interested in it than I was. She actually when online to the site and got the idea that we should form a team and participate. Since we were already both biking, I figured I could do the 25-mile ride slated for October 4, and even mix in some fundraising.

Since June, I’ve sent out appeals to friends, family, and a handful of business associates, and other colleagues. My fundraising has been a fraction of Mary’s. While I’ve raised slightly more than $250, she’s near $1,000, and I have no doubt she’ll surpass that total.

I’m participating in this ride for The Patrick Dempsey (yes the actor) Center for Cancer Hope & Healing at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. The Dempsey Center provides free support, education and wellness services to cancer patients, families and caregivers.

I’ll be participating as part of Team Tarazzmatazz, in memory of my late father-in-law, Joe Tarazewich, who lost his battle with cancer, 10 years ago this summer.

My father-in-law was a heroic individual. Our team name is one part his last name, and also part “razzmatazz,” which indicates a play to confuse, or dazzle an opponent. Joe was a former football player at Drake University , and he loved to compete, and in particular, demolish an opponent.

[Joe T. at a Drake practice, 1949]

When I first started dating Mary, and visiting her house, Joe intimidated the shit out of me, and I’ve never been easily intimated, probably less so then, when I was full of blather, and not much else. Maybe that’s why he seemed so imposing.

It wasn’t just his physical presence, which filled the room. It was his penetrating blue eyes, and his questioning nature that always managed to get at the crux of any matter.

A man that was fully engaged in his world, Joe might reference Emerson or Thoreau, while commenting on an article on business from the Wall Street Journal. This would be while he had one eye on "All Creatures Great and Small," on PBS, simultaneously working on the crossword puzzle from the Portland Press Herald, a daily ritual of his. He was the first intellectual I’d encountered that wasn’t an academic egghead.

Not only was he erudite on most subjects, he also managed to maintain his 100 acre property, work on a dry stone wall from rocks lying around his property, run his own business, and also find time to do accounting work on the side.

I was stricken by his daughter, so I continued to come back and endure his questions, and began coming back with a few answers. One time he sent me home with a book of Emerson’s essays. When I came back and could hold a semi-literate discussion with him, I thought I caught a twinkle in those deep blue Polish eyes that may even have contained a trace of respect for something he saw in me.

Years later, while in my mid-20s and now married to his daughter, and the father of his grandson, he offered to support our young family if I thought I wanted to pursue a professional baseball career. He had read about an independent league in the Midwest and thought I had the talent to see if I could reconnect with a baseball career derailed by injuries initially, at the University of Maine, and then sidetracked by fundamentalist religion.

He had seen me pitch in a league now long defunct, and dominate hitters with a combination of fastballs, guile, and feistiness that has never desserted me.

At that stage of my life, I knew that baseball was a pipe dream, but I’ve never forgotten that offer, or the fact that he may have been the first person to see my potential, fifteen years before I began to finally harness it, as I approached the age of 40. By that time, Joe had passed away, and it’s one of the regrets of my life that he never saw me publish my first book, or get to see the work I’m currently doing helping people find their own pathways to success in the workplace.

I often think of Joe, as I continue to learn new things, have several books going at once, and never tire of increasing my intellectual capacity.

There is the tendency to romanticize individuals after they pass away. Death can make us overlook people’s shortcomings, and airbrush away their defects. Like any other human being, Joe had his flaws. He could be cantankerous (particularly when he knew he was right), overly opinionated, and even downright difficult to tolerate, especially when we were living with Joe and Joan for 14 months, while beginning construction on our own house. Possibly the reason Joe and I butted heads as often as we did was that in many ways, we had similarities in that we both held on vigorously to our opinions.

Family gatherings have never been the same for me since Joe passed away. Oh did he and I love to argue on any subject—religion, politics, sports—it didn’t matter. We’d get into very heated debates, causing the rest of the family to move outside of our sphere of argument. We both loved it, however, and rarely missed an opportunity to verbally spar and parry.

The measure of a man’s life is often summed up by what others say or write about you after you die. This is particularly telling when it comes from people with no vested interest in enhancing your legacy.

Rex Rhoades has been the executive editor for the Lewiston Sun Journal for well over a decade. On the morning of July 18, 1999, he penned a fitting tribute to my late father-in-law, a man he had never met, until reading his obituary.

Rhoades was struck by all the things Joe had done in his life, and I think by those rare qualities of a true renaissance man.

He wrote,

Roll the highlight film. A boy, born to immigrant parents in Saco, Maine, in 1925, industrious and studious, he learns English and begs to go to school. Service in World War II aboard a submarine, the USS Piper, in the Pacific. Returns, attends Drake University where he quarterback the football team. Wins the “Salad Bowl” against Arizona in 1950.

Graduates with a business degree, majoring in accounting and economics. Teaches and coaches at St. Louis High School and Thornton Academy (his alma mater). Works as an accountant and controller for several businesses, and is president of Building Materials, Inc. in Lisbon Falls.

Town manager in Greene and Wayne, he eventually becomes administrative assistant to the Durham selectmen—plus plumbing inspector, assessor, and code enforcement officer as well.

Built his home, enjoyed building stone walls and using computers (before they became the norm), and the study of philosophy. He stood up for things that he believed in, like education.

“He will be remembered for standing up at the 1998 Durham town meeting and declaring, ‘I’m through being a cheapskate,’ and leading a vote to pass a school music program,” said his obituary.

Rhoades went on with his touching tribute to Joe, which captured the man so well.

My father-in-law was a hero and he is an inspiration to me today to keep doing what I do, not always receiving accolades and the spotlight, but working diligently for what is right and good.

I’m honored to be riding in his memory, October 4. There may be readers that aren't already supporting a rider, walker, or cyclist that would like to support my efforts and help support a great cause. If so, you can make a donation by following this link to my online fundraising page.

[Drake football, circa 1950, Veterans Stadium, Wichita, KS; Joe is #36. All-American, Johnny Bright, is directly behind Joe.]