Gelid Mane

To commute by bike in below freezing dark one must be demented, desperate or devoted. Expect fingers and toes to be painfully stung along with any exposed spot. Deadly cold feels almost as if being branded by a red hot poker from hell. Easy to add a wool base layer beneath neoprene bib tights, tunic and windbreaker for arms, legs and torso, but what about fingers, head and toes? A slew of websites offer partial advice. Always asked to explain further, even though covered in book.

Head may be swaddled in a balaclava, plus a wool skull cap to ease brain freeze as long as helmet still fits, but prepare for helmet hair, an unmanageable mane of flattened straw and stubborn cowlicks, yet it’s wool you can grow and trim. However, doesn’t protect face. Wrap around safety glasses, clear or yellow for low visibility, at least hold heat and shield eyes. For ears, mouth, neck and nose, a foot wide fleece tube can be pulled up around cheeks; one guarantees it will become drenched with gelid exhale, wet freeze, but can be peeled and shifted however you please. By pursing lips you can redirect breath to avoid fogging lenses and momentarily blinding you, why you never use goggles unless easy to quickly remove. Sequence of donning correctly can confuse and consume time better spent dodging potholes on longer than normal trips.

Full fingered pittard gloves with leather palms that cyclists wear come Autumn and Spring don’t meet demand below 40°F, when insulated gloves must take over. Below 30°F, one might combine them or try a glove liner. Built-in wrist cinches on tunic wrap around gloves to keep cold from running up sleeves to which bicyclists are particularly vulnerable with hands ahead draped on handlebars. Whatever you do, avoid flat tires, misery for frozen fingers. Wheel set rigged for winter should include heavy tubes, Kevlar belted tires, and tire liners properly installed and pumped to normal pressure to prevent both pinch and puncture flats and provide extra traction. Some cyclists simply store equipment as soon as thermometer reading in Fahrenheit equals age in years, so deny self of all these trying travails. After a few miles body generates enough BTUs anyway to make bone-chilling rides tolerable.

At same temperature points, feet need similar protection. Calientoes, spandex cones, cover toes of cleats, thus a wind pierce preventative you can leave in place all winter, or you could slip into complete shoe covers each time you suit up. Below 30°F, neoprene booties insulate beyond. Likewise, socks go from flimsy polyester to heavy wool, some times both, wool over liners, whatever cleats will allow. Mountain bikers opt for heavy boots and ski paraphernalia. Since safety becomes priority over speed, they sacrifice streamlined for practicality. Only the best prepared or totally foolhardy venture out below 0°F, when breath turns instantly to ice, cable shifts balk, and chain grease freezes.

Depending upon gages, sensors and yardsticks at your disposal, you can collect all sorts of data, but is raw information always relevant? One cyclometer says both speed and temperature, but not whether frostbite will claim body parts or wind chill is too biting to bear. Know-how and logic preempt forecasts and reports. Microscopes reveal bacteria but don't segregate beneficial from harmful. Gyms are heated but harbor germs. Experts rather sell opinions or shut up. Wintery outdoors has wholesome fresh air to spare, better than rest of year. Scientists deny facts based upon whoever pays best. Denialists exist in cycling, who trade hyperbole and hysteria for sensible arguments from 7 decades of experience and research. Every activity possesses downsides and upsides, minuses and pluses, pain and pleasure, yang and yin. One has to question why anyone would expend a quarter century building a case for bicycling culture when most would rather risk their lives on tenuous technologies. Upon onset of winter every year you see scads of ads and articles explaining why motoring is as dangerous as mixing antimatter particles. Have biked through snow to bail out stranded drivers.

Michael Carabetta, Words to Ride By: Thoughts on Bicycling (Chronicle Books, 2017, 112 pp). Critics deride Carabetta’s compulsion to cite only the famous in this slim compilation of images and quotes. Out on a spin inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle? Maintaining balance as cautioned by Einstein? Blues beset best of bicyclists despite whatever incompatibility James Starrs expressed, especially in dead of winter with seasonal depression. Labann published 500,000 quotable words on bicycling, entirely original and open source, which with zero risk of plagiarism Carabetta never once cited.

Isaac Potter, The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer (League of American Wheelmen, 1891), cajoles with common sense, dazzles with statistics, pressures agribusiness to invest, promotes sympathetic political candidates, and reaps benefits for bicyclists by piggybacking scot free on costs to commerce. And what an impact it had! From it flowed pavement from local roads to national highways. Potter was merely a paid spokesperson for the well healed, Hannity of his day. Anthropologist Margaret Mead may have circuitously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has,” but should doubt she meant allowing the already affluent to steal from public for personal gain under a guise of common good.

The Good Roads Movement ended officially in 1925 when the Interstate Highway Program began to ensure state roads aligned at state borders. In the last decade alone costs to nation totalled $10 trillion, at least triple that in last century. With every mile of highway now carrying an average $10 million price tag, expenditure can only rise to an unsustainable stratosphere. Meanwhile, local roads declined, railroad and tow canal rights-of-way were abandoned, and stone bridges crumbled under relentless freezing/thawing and rumbling commerce. States have begun to revive them for bicycling, mostly because it demonstrates legal compliance.

Federal laws since 1990 require bridges, highways and interstates to provide reasonable alternatives for cycling and walking. By law, lightly trafficked neighborhood streets need no further accommodation, unless less than one lane wide in each direction, when a low cost bikeway can alleviate bike and pedestrian safety issues. Roads that connect housing tracks can be paralleled by bike lanes that also serve as sidewalks with bus stops. Imagine getting stranded in a vehicle and wondering how you’d safely exit highway on foot? Instead, planners specifically restrict, falsely assuming motorists never need to, though many of the nation’s annual 10,000 pedestrian fatalities are directly due to this negligence.

With bike lanes taking up space on avenues and boulevards, controversies crop up. Motorists, who can never be relied upon to obey rules, drive and park in them, figure they’re entitled to all pavement, since they pay nearly $9,000/year for this privilege, and resent sharing. It becomes a constant battle to convince them otherwise, especially when bikeways and sidewalks, pavement not meant for motoring, don’t get plowed, so traffic lanes are all that’s left for cyclists and walkers to use, often until April. Winter impedes basic mobility for all alike, so motorists must adapt, be patient, expect the unexpected, slow by half, and wake up earlier to make up time needed to escape gridlock and scrape ice. Forced into closer proximity, frigid starts and fogged windshields threaten everyone’s passage. Bicyclists ought to dress bright and use a light both back and front; cute units can be recharged during work shift for home commute. Beware, because sensible advice nobody’s obliged to bear will never ensure anyone will care that you get there.

Cross of Lorraine

Just as you must exert yourself or lose muscles mass, you must exercise freedom or invite tyranny. Many don’t appreciate what blessings liberty brings, consider how hard won it was, or know what to do with talents over time, other than feed face and get off. Some figure entitlement entails Christmas stalkings, that is, menacingly following footsore shoppers to find sole parking spot during busiest buying, and New Year’s rituals involving lemony risotto and lucky lentils, which allegedly evoke pennies from heaven, plus making resolutions they never plan to keep. One could instead campaign for civility, comment upon what authors post on line, read or write a book about cadence and shackles, or simply bike aimlessly or for charity. B&C was open to discussion for a decade, but so few did blog got suspended. Was that what this web of 8 billion wanted? Hard to believe. Or maybe silence implies, “No objections; press onwards, limitless. Nihil obstat, imprimi potest.”

Freedom will always be measured by how much responsibility one assumes. Government does anything it wants because of dominance it presumes. Individuals seldom feel so empowered. Authority begs abuse, bitterness, challenge, dismissal, hate, jealousy, and resentment, so tends to be avoided by everyone but the brave or invincible. It’s easier to do nothing, or whatever you’re told, until you start counting what you’ve forfeited or sacrificed, or suddenly drop dead. In short term, some rather go rogue, jump bail if ever caught, migrate to countries without extradition, settle for stupidity instead of community. Freud spoke of Civilization and Its Discontents, problems of perpetually stifling pleasure principle, and suffering that living among others causes. Isn’t society the primary source of pleasures: Entertainment, food, interaction, necessities? Living alone would be unbearable.

Max Ginsburg (cover illustration) for juvenile novel by Jan O'Donnell Klaveness, Beyond the Cellar Door (Scholastic, 1991, 186 pp.), in which children imagine, magic Victorian house gradually delivers, and past influences present. In actuality can anyone ever escape origins?

During Labann’s impressionable teens someone emphasized the importance of reading and writing. Skills accordingly practiced served as a career, but stripped boyish innocence and joy. Fledglings forced to confront depressed cranks who comprise panoply of wordsmiths would be hard pressed to stress happiness over dystopian duress. Novels almost always depict protagonists in darwinian struggles against an adversary or adversity, seldom coworkers on tireless teams interacting nicely, which better represents livelihoods of majority. One deems cooperative routines and repetitive regimes too dull to divulge. But the crux of it is a cross you must bear, duties you can’t deny, ever more restrictive obligations, exact opposite of autonomy: martyrdom or self imposed slavery.

General de Gaulle chose Croix de Lorraine (originally D’Anjou) as a standard for Free French against Nazi occupation, stymie to their swastika. It became an emblem of liberation for which French forever aspire along with equality and fraternity. Croix D’Anjou traces back to crucifixion of Christ, with a high placard and longer crossbar: heaven above earth below. Joan of Arc, patron saint of France, grew up in Lorraine village of Domrémy, later under German control until reunified by WWI. She donned male armor, led France into 15th Century victory, so was burnt at stake as a lesbian teen heretic by a grateful nation with impotent patriarchs. Doesn’t inspire loyalty, not one bit. Ashes disappear; cross remains. Tour de France, which intentionally visits outlying departments, promptly passed through Lorraine in 1919 and several times since (as image shows). Resembles Labann’s latest holiday ride probing borders, ringing providence. This crucial adaptation now appears on cognac bottles, because bravest prefer brandy, yet has increasingly been embezzled by cookie cutters, dastardly evildoers, and dope smugglers who cynically pretend to be modern day rebels, while fascism stages a comeback versus a browbeaten, obese, stoned democracy.

Long ago Labann canonized the bicycle as a freedom machine, but only where state provides supportive infrastructure, where you can dodge vehicular entanglements. Instead of advocating equal accommodation, smear campaigns by Big Oil, Cripple A, and GM attempted to discredit cycling by exaggerating disadvantages without offending new customers, particularly during 1970’s bike boom, when adults began to recall a cheaper, safer, simpler alternative. They should have targeted heavy trucking; easier to pass bicyclists, often outside travel lane altogether, than tractor double tandem trailers and wide bodies that occupy entire road. Drug cartels followed automotive example: Offer affordable product until users are invested, overwhelm competition, then raise price until consumers are enslaved. Average wages can no longer afford $8.5K/year costs of ownership. Only biking and walking truly offer autonomy and mobility.

Spin spontaneity proves manumission is possible. But owners of yore freed slaves as punishment, left them to fend for themselves or starve, palliated sting of own guilt at victim’s expense. Cycling against a motorized tide connotes time alone for which you must atone. Religious scholars rate free will as innate, yet use doctrine as a stalemate. Politicians quote Bible as they legislate perks and misappropriate funds. Evil and good are supposed to be yours to choose, though hint good advice might impoverish or inconvenience and most will refuse. Consequences could leave you with nothing left to lose. Crossover will kill a rover, instill talk of a crosswalk, never limit outrageous motorist offenses, since insurances pledge all necessary defenses.

“Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free... I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday... Feelin’ good was good enough for me, good enough for Me and Bobby McGee.” Grateful Dead, The Golden Road, Warner Brothers, 1971

"Well, I sit and I pray in my broken down Chevrolet, while I'm singin' to myself, ‘There's got to be another way.’ Take away this Ball and Chain. I’m lonely and I'm tired, and I can't take any more pain... I've searched to find the perfect life: A brand new car, a brand new suit, I even got me a little wife. But wherever I have gone, I was sure to find myself there. You can run all your life but not go anywhere.” Social Distortion, Social Distortion, Sony, 1990

“Some things are better left unsaid, if that were true, then I'd be dead. More sad nights at the hospital, fever swarming around my collarbone. Always waiting for the death of, the death of love. Get up, get up. You know it's true.” British grunge band Gallows, Cross of Lorraine, Gallows, Bridge Nine Rec., 2014

“Just remember what it was like astride that Yellow Bike: First freedom, second life. All the places I could ride, leaving early, packing light. That little ache inside. My kingdom for someone [with whom] to ride.” Pedro the Lion, Phoenix, Polyvinyl Rec., 2019

Shades of Grey Zane

Despite blindness, Slackjaw Knipfel sees perfectly and speculates on 4 plausible causes of America’s ongoing Civil War and probable affect on him personally. He speaks modestly for vast majority. Lockstep conservatives attack public with depraved arrogance and lurid disinformation, flinch only at truth, yet publish anything that might sell in an unregulated market. Liberal losers brace for battle, circle their wagons, and micromanage message, more likely to censor moderate commentators. Anyone alive should feel anxious and uncertain in this battle for one’s soul. Action and mayhem, mirroring life, have never been more popular on screens. Every American owes $150,000 in public debt; few have that much in savings, most know that they have to pay share for indigents and marginal earners, and more than not blame government recklessness and can’t envision any fix. Of course: Intentionally isolated when only collaboration stands a chance, you’re expected to endlessly pay and silently stew. Instead of dangling a destination as if a carrot on a stick, why not improve everyone’s journey?

Those who complain risk being branded as malcontents or traitors. Journalism no longer exists after Dubya retaliated against Mapes and Rather for breaking true story of his dodging military duty, thereby describing a seated POTUS as an example of undeserved privilege. Fox infotainment, finding calamities where none exist, dominate state reportage, while real news has been vilified as fake. Insiders denigrate those they deem inferior or threats, while those whose agendas they further slink about exclusive haunts like pests behind the wainscoting. When perception equals reality, professionals must feign phony guise of game show host. No champion protects folks who just scrape by and pay for everything, though plenty claim to speak for them. Capitalism crashed. Democracy died. Social justice is a sordid joke.

Last several posts In part tried to justify this blog. Cannot convince self. A later ah-ha only serves as a lesson learnt, not so a great comeback or instant reaction that vaults you over oppressors. Must diligently dance and stay sharp or suffer consequences of being own fuzzy threadbare self. After 10 YEARS, anniversary today, have to say book and blog in no way found any following, though welcomed infrequient encouragement and rave reviews from published authors. Popularity only comes into play when one expects to make a living off creative output, as did prolific western romanticist Zane Grey. Grey, a dentist, got a late start but gradually became the first millionaire author having produced nearly 100 titles including The Last Trail. No Painless Parker, frontier tooth extractor, who hired marketeers to promote his wares, Grey migrated further west and worked as a hand at Wilder Ranch (note single track mishap at 8:25) in California before settling in Oregon Wilderness. Trying to draw readers has always been like pulling teeth. The proud and rich don’t give a damn what readers think. Yet ignominious obscurity may be evidence of a self directed monologue. Can’t fault content here for quality or quantity, only failure to gain attention, something any teen who’s staged a tantrum has already seen.

Age consumes and retirement looms. Why continue any cachinnation for a nation of cretins? About time to pass baton to another bicyclist and ride off into a purple sage sunset. Not giving up altogether; assuming other projects, making self available for lectures and parties, pedaling more on own bike, and writing less. Let B&C be your open source foundation for extending investigation into bicycling culture, which, if you hadn't noticed, provides a veritable expressway towards understanding everything anyone needs to know. By comparison one culture reveals another, sort of an entrance ramp to contemporary anthropology. Question is, will bicycling culture continue to emerge in this information age? Or will virtuous pedaling revert to totally virtual indoors technologically?

"Some trails are happy ones, others are blue. It's the way you ride the trail that counts. Here's a happy one for you... Until we meet again, happy trails. Keep smiling unto then." Dale Evans, single, RCA Victor, 1952, same year Painless Parker passed away.

Took from AIN

“Summertime and the living’s easy...” May be somewhere for someone. Nowadays, it’s when insurance premiums and property taxes come due, property maintenance and vacation spending occur, and utility and water bills peak. Must make hay and work overtime to cover savings hit. You save not for rainy but sunny days. In dead of winter where would anyone be without a warm memory of some primetime odyssey?

Anyone who's the least bit aware of current events already has PTSD. Systems based on humans suffer fatal flaws. From daily interactions one derives many a small insight, might even flesh it out with facts, form paragraphs, pen essays. Fakes scholarship truly but sounds pretty good to those desperate for certainty or security. Who's fooled? Change, violent at times, has always ruled. Agents of chaos and mayhem constantly surround. You only navigate around potholes, never fully alleviate anxiety’s tolls.

Free and wild, aboriginal people fulfilled every necessity themselves, didn’t take survival for granted, moved inland during summer to gather and hunt, shoreline in winter to harvest shellfish that cold kept from spoiling. Refrigeration reversed this perennial migration. A 1971 anti-litter campaign depicted a native chief shedding a tear for what motorists had done, though it was all a ploy aimed at a public shamed for imprudent habits so corporations wouldn’t be blamed. For a while some states did demand bottle and can recovery, pennies and nickels upon return. It didn’t keep America clean, only made a tiny opportunity for homeless trash pickers.

Money grubbers find gobs of drudgery; those who can rather pay someone else to do onerous chores in sweltering heat. Glorious explorers got bankrolled up front upon lure of riches, which resulted in Columbian Exchange that nearly wiped out AIN (American Indian Native) nations through disease, genocide and habitat destruction, though since last ice age they had thrived against animal predators using stone tools under harsh conditions. Americans today squirm in desperation; most scramble to make ends meet. Few care that Le Tour de France has begun. Science and technology over centuries improved quality of life, yet they demand constant renewal and surveillance lest they become a nuisance. Who more exemplified independence or merited a holiday?

Why not do projects for neither compensation nor credit, just because they’re interesting? Later, when others reap rewards, underpaid contributors resent them, too stressful and unsettling for many including millennials. Internships and volunteerism slyly renew slavery. Stubborn souls do just do stuff, pursue as if a hobby, shut up about it, then turn professional due to experience. In collaborative teams, writers used to produce reams being hopefully speculative, it seems. But times have radically changed. You can’t live well scraping up pittances, only by scoring on successive pay days. Patience gets you nowhere; you’ll die before patrons notice or reward your initiative. Does that matter? Getting by will always be a basic goal.

Independently wealthy? You’re free to do whatever pleases your fancy, reciprocate kindness per noblesse oblige, spend a decade updating an unread blog, or such. Even then, situations can quickly complicate, serve nobody’s needs. There’s no idling at an island timeshare for very long. Pleasurable excess catches up and creates a mess, one would guess, steam hissing off your trauma express. Anyway, chasing lifestyles of the rich puts you in opposition’s crosshairs. Must choose among bravery, drudgery, misery or skullduggery, life’s only options. With a right to pursue happiness, you’re offered no guarantee of achieving it.

When you enter “bicycling culture” into any internet browser, you’d think this 10-year blog would come up immediately. No, you get Bicycling Magazine’s Culture tab, Biking USA/EU from Reliance Foundry (bike locker/rack manufacturer), and other commercial references. Eventually you stumble across video Veer (Greg Fredette, dir., 2009), which documents five individuals involved in Portlandia’s hilarious bicycling culture, narrated by actor Matthew Modine, famed for role in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and resident of New York who chooses to commute around city by bike. You might never discover that Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, dir., 2018), the Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) origin adventure, explains she was an East London bike courier before declaring dad dead and inheriting his millions. What better way to toughen up for nonstop action?

B&C hasn’t undergone search engine optimization and never carried advertising, so garners no notice despite its main focus. Has always avoided being characterized, pinned down, or readily dismissed. Going by bicycle means being immersed in everything, sights, sounds, vegetative life exuding fragrances. Pass a cemetery or church, religion begs attention, or spirituality sticks. See others on streets, clad in bikinis or skintight spandex, politics intervene and sex smolders. Whatever you do requires cash and duty. Big 3 taboos - money, politics, religion - appear integral and ubiquitous. When does freedom occur?

Blacksmith Pierre Michaux just up and put pedals on a velocipede in late 1860’s. A century later relative and world traveller Henri Michaux won a French National Literary award, which he didn’t accept. Private and reclusive, Henri’s notoriety came from asemic writings that mimic oriental calligraphy, represent nothing, yet suggest semantic meaning. His nonfigurative abstractions resemble cave paintings, Pollock canvases, Rorschach inkblots, tipi symbols, visual vocalise, or wallpaper patterns. You sense a struggle between being lost in noise and expressing self aloud. This “bigly” reverberates with Labann, who began devoted to vocabulary’s soundscape and wonders whether B&C was worth all its effort. One must satisfy self or nobody.

If artists create crevices into which audiences can plug themselves, they garner a following. Impenetrability repulses everyone, but then hardly anyone bothers you. You never know beforehand what’s manifest in you will blossom into, reason enough to stay on course. Your ancestral tribe may be extinct, yet your totemic spirit pedals you onward beyond troubles and worries.

Had enough of being serious. Top things to enjoy include familiar moments, great meals, live concerts, lush poetry, recorded films and songs, sexual relations, smart art, and sporting events. Besides bicycling and creativity, anything else constitutes a mundane chore you might abhor, crawls out of darkness into crepuscular light of dawn, and wastes too much of your limited lifetime. Regret 16 years of school, which shunted into 45 of desk jockeying and personally finishing tens of thousands of projects, up to a dozen a day. Education should enrich, not enslave. Might have been better off collecting welfare, doing nothing, entertaining self, going fishing, growing produce, leaving projects to some sucker interested in such nonsense, reading more and sleepwalking. Only favored groups can claim such a status. Yet industrious folks do make for warm memories.

Fondly recall a holiday town with building facades next to a rideable small scale train. Fun for kids! Construction crews would restore for a few months each Fall to everyone's delight. Under your Christmas tree might be gifts of cowboy duds, feather war bonnet, and 2 cap six-shooters, presumably to replay tragic hostilities. Authors recreate mirth to raise hope that such attractions will recur, but failures to repeat, lack of skills, or lapses in funding typically disappoint. Only the alert or lucky get to savor solo ephemera and transitory thrills. Partially explains why TV networks revisit Christmas every July, propaganda to urge later spending upon which they rely.

Best of Bourdain

"What have you got to lose?" is a rhetorical question advisors ask of those chewing over change that recommends leaping before looking. Change is inevitable, necessary even. Decay feeds plants; their growth feeds humans and livestock. Days divide nights; seasons become years; centuries, eons. An incredible amount of transactions occur while one civilization after another coalesces then crumbles. Casino owners, insurers and tax revenuers size up what you have to lose and take from you whatever they can just shy of you organizing revolt. Swank restaurants charge a week’s salary for a single meal after which you’re still hungry, but at least they decorate place with a poster of a bygone track cyclist on a fixie. Life somehow perseveres despite stress.

Imagine how different society must have been several centuries ago, before education was free and opportunities abounded. Monarchs undermined education, which furnished students with tools to teach and think for themselves. Made them too clever to subjugate. Nowadays, practically no one obeys traffic laws; wonder what other covenants they break and transgressions they make while you politely stay right within limits. Some only occupy left lane and proceed slowly because it leaves space ahead, so they can react timely while savoring distractions.

What of texting? Where's the harm? How is it unlike listening to radio? Indeed. Talk radio totally transports listener into a tiny sphere alone on road with a rabid copilot urging driver to fixate on his disembodied hypnotic voice, ignore all else as if in a psychotic break, Son of Sam territory. Should instead be dancing courteously, paying close attention, and reacting defensively. Social media and traffic snarl leave participants frustrated and vulnerable, wear patience thin.

One could directly link a lot of crime to birth defects: Bad nutrition or crack addiction while pregnant, FAS, interbreeding. Leads to brain insufficiency, inability to learn, insanity that sooner lash out against complex demands than apply reason. Later they’ll snort up nose, stick in arms, and stuff faces with harmful substances. Food gets abused most. Yet fat is where flavor’s at, dissolved by beer and wine into a triglyceride stew and vascular menace. Putting bullies on a short leash makes sense, though shouldn’t lower expectations for their achievements. Focus can easily be disrupted by social fears. Restrict sources, and some who would've sunk can now swim. A forgiving and trusting nature invites assault and theft, as Labann has too often personally undergone.

A master wordsmith concocts stories seemingly out of thin air; whence they come include inner dialogue, input responses, personal experiences, stuff that might percolate over a lifetime. Not every act in which one engages is worth repeating; not every thought imagined bears expressing. Certainly some mustn’t be stifled lest individual or society suffer. Takes copious attempts and enormous effort to master the craft. Humanity has arrived at juncture Douglas Adams joked about, where an innocuous statement reverberates across universe and starts an intergalactic war. What one mostly hears are ads for crap you don't need, come-ons for charities that only pad directors’ pockets, and propaganda aimed at intimidating you into political submission, seldom thoughtful analyses meant to inform you what's at stake, sometimes life itself.

While immersed in meaningful projects, who has time for despair? Challenges demand completion, yet suicides have risen to an epidemic proportion among middle-aged men. While clinicians search for answers, causes couldn’t be more obvious. To avoid operating expenses, insurers recommend replacing them with healthier youth, ripping rug from under their sense of purpose, tossing them onto an ash heap of uselessness. Plus they regret in silence being complicit with what ruthless executives in male-dominated industry did to consumers, employees, and stakeholders. Drugs and liquor goggles overcome disgust of a date with a gun to head or rope around neck. Who can afford food, never mind therapists once health coverage lapses? Government policies also pave way for hostile takeovers and resultant downsizing. Being displaced doesn’t exempt an individual from having to earn, eat, survive; those ineligible for Social Security or Welfare have few alternatives. Severance, unemployment, and workmen compensation only fulfill short term needs. States do almost nothing to get displaced workers back into saddle before retirement savings run out and true desperation sets in. Back in FDR’s day, there were CCC, PWA and WPA, though gap from poor to rich is bigger today.

Can’t reverently lay Anthony Bourdain’s roasted ashes to rest without saying what about him you should admire best. He was no snob. Broke bread with both celebrities and nobodies, particularly in nations where USA ran rampant leaving them in shambles. Seemed to accept role as ugly American abroad, only transformed it by being genuinely caring and warmly sociable. May have appeared an elitist globe trekker, but began humbly as a dishwasher and performed backbreaking KP on brink of bankruptcy until well after 40, when he began to write and got a break. An admitted crime buff, published stories about underworld in Manhattan’s Little Italy. But his exposé of nauseating restaurant practices brought notoriety. Expert chef, the real deal, middle-aged Tony acted out other people’s perception of a bad-boy hipster and provocateur, vilified for his addictions and candor. Apparent sympathy for sin attracts fans, but bravery was what he was all about, not anger, gluttony, greed, or pride. Passionately against food waste, Hollywood rape, and policy tyranny, he was recognized as an authentic voice for the downtrodden everywhere. This put him at odds with powerful enemies, whose spooks know how to stage a scene to look like suicide.

Do bipolar personalities fail to thrive on cycling? Long bike trips mess up hormones, elating many, leaving others in funks. Biking helps assess your vitality. Doctors even measure health by putting patients on stationary bikes. Tony spent his last day stoking a tandem through gorgeous Alsatian countryside of which one can only dream. If you must go, what better way? He once quipped, “Life’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride,” echoes of Hunter Thompson, “Buy the ticket, take the ride,” both firmly in charge of their independence, not the bad examples snide commentators make them out to be. What have you done with your hard won freedom? Many sell it for a transitory sense of security, trade a reliable cow for a handful of fascist beans. In the end, what you choose decides your fate. Do you really know what’s on someone else’s plate?

Feeding strangers implies behaving responsibly. Quoting self, “Instead of squabbling, learn to bake cookies and brew 2 cups.” To be magnanimous, one must immerse oneself among recipients willing to reciprocate. Americans have long since ceased to match mercies, respond in kind, and transcend Darwinian imperative to eat or be eaten. Can you blame anyone for selfish motivations given mainstream opinions?