Bicycling season for me starts with a vengeance this coming weekend. In the early spring of Utah’s low desert my first organized century of the season takes place. Like all season starters I am markedly undertrained for this effort.
To call this event a race would be incorrect. Everyone gets a number, but there are no timers, or judges, or even recognition for who comes in first. However, one should recognize the fact that anytime you place numbers on everyone’s back all the middle aged men are racing.
I firmly deny any intentions to race. I have been told that racing in charity and fun events is immature and frowned upon by most rational people. I, always wishing to appear as rational as possible, would never race during a recreational event. If somebody should be seen with an extra burst of energy in the last few miles, or even sprinting to the finish line, it most assuredly would not be me.
The last time I rode this event I was given the number 333. That is half the mark of the beast.
This post is about a traumatic and stinky love topic. This post is about VDay.
Yesterday I went into a Bath Shoppe with my daughters. The place smelled like an organic chemistry lab on a good day. There was an incredible amount of pink in the shoppe. Signs declared that this potion was “sexy”, this other one was “romantic”. A pyramid of romantically scented hand sanitizers caught my eye.
An attractive young saleswoman offered me a valentine. I opened it only to find a coupon for some percent off of a purchase and the (in big curly script) deceleration that I had just gotten “lucky”. I found it odd being informed that I had just “gotten lucky” by an attractive young woman since I felt so exceedingly unstimulated. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Valentine's day ignites an explosion of pink with red undertones. There are associated scents and tastes. There is also a profusion of fluffy and soft things. It is as if there is a subset of the spectrum of perception that must be assaulted to best target at a particular response. That response has something to do with love.
I have repeatedly identified learning processes which require practice and repetition. Valentine's day type love is often described in acute catastrophic terms rather than chronic. One is supposed to be able to "fall" in love. Valentines day would be different if love were described as a creeping affliction.
It would be strange to see a valentine that said something like: "I'm about 20% in love with you right now. It is particularly apparent between my toes, and it is almost 100% in my left ear.".
If the valentine's day love were a chronic and progressive condition we might expect the decorations to tend to the higher frequency portion of the visible spectrum. Instead of infra-red decorating there would be more yellows and greens. Instead of so much fluffy there would be more warm and squishy. Perhaps wet and sticky also...
Love ingrains sensory stimuli into the long-term memory. One significant reason why scents are so big on VDay is that olfactory stimuli are processed in the limbic system of the brain. Thus the processing of these stimuli is performed in the neural neighborhood where emotions and long-term memory are processed. Scent stimuli responses are already in the right place for incorporation into the long term memory. Since emotions are processed in the limbic system the long term memories are just as emotional as they are smelly.
The limbic system is also called the paleomammalian brain. This is an old (evolutionarily speaking) portion of the brain that interacts less efficiently (though much better than the reptilian cerebellum) with the reasoning lobes that make up so much of the brain's mass. Direct responses by this portion of the brain are more reactionary than measured. For this reason love can sometimes feel traumatic.
In fact the limbic system also regulates response to more classically defined traumatic stimuli. In PTSD (it is mostly theorized) the limbic system's response to trauma is a release of hormones that causes widespread permanent "wiring" changes in the brain. The universally anecdotal evidence is that love can also trigger the same traumatic stimulus response hormones and cause permanent "wiring" changes in the brain. Some of these changes are the development of long-term memories. Others will modulate behavior, perception, and even future limbic-mediated traumatic stimulus responses.
There is, with VDay type love, a potential way to quickly and permanently affect the brain. Being able to apply this tool might be exciting and very worthwhile.
So at least VDay-type love can be described as traumatic and smelly (in a good way).
During the post-race nap several things happened: 1) The world became colder and grayer. 2) Someone snuck into my tent and surgically replaced my legs with wooden replicas. 3) All of the other campers on my side of the tent loop had packed up and left. 4) I became incredibly hungry 5) My MP3 player lost all charge.
There was also a lot more mud. It was impossible to avoid the mud, and it stuck to everything it touched.
Behind the campsite there was a large open area. By large I mean a hundred or so square miles. The visible portion was an irregular beige surface devoid of vegetation. The low irregularities were filling with water. The low spots were puddles, but they threatened to fuse together and form a shallow inland sea.
The sky had fallen partway. There was an impenetrable mass of white suspended about 250 feet off the desert floor. Beneath the ceiling it was clear enough to see 50 miles.
I stood in a band of clarity between the encroaching dissolution of reality. The ground was melting into liquid; the sky was solidifying into white goo. The sun was also setting. Actually I only imagined it was setting as I could not tell where it was. For all I knew someone had found the cosmic dimmer switch and was slowly turning out the lights.
I hopped in the car and drove to Badwater. I had never seen Badwater in the rain. Now I have. It looked like rain falling on a puddle.
There was something about the sound of the raindrops plopping into the hypersaline pool that was hypnotic. I could theorize that the unique auditory effect was due to the difference in density of the water and the drops. Perhaps it was the density of the 284 foot below sealevel air that caused the phenomenon. Most likely it was the combined effects of my being tired, well fed (I had been eating since I woke up), wet, alone, and in a place of rapidly dissolving immeasurable vastness. I was soaked when I noticed the ranger and his small knot of interpretive program audience.
Something terrific has happened to rangers of late. They all appear to be reasonably talented showpeople. Everything is a performance, and the performances are given with such enthusiasm that I swear the NPS has stopped random drug testing. In asking about the weather I was treated to dramatic readings of computer printouts. These new rangers are seriously good at outreach, and not just one ranger, but almost every ranger I spoke with.
There appears to be a steady decline in the lifeforce of the park-going population. I swear the ratio of RV slots to tent slots has doubled. Much of the campground was an RV parking lot. Little paved pullouts all in a row. Each RV seemed to have its own generator and satellite TV. The shapes of the occupants were a likely as not to be sexually amorphic due to obesity.
I would later momentarily regret having not pitched my tent on a paved RV berth.
I decided against walking out onto the salt flats with the ranger’s group. I’m sure that it would have been entertaining, perhaps he would have done an interpretive dance to demonstrate mineral cycling?
For me the salt path from Badwater was just too white. It looked like a bit of the sky had already fallen there. A braver man might have attempted to stop the ranger’s tour:
“STOP, LOOK WHAT THE WHITE GOO HAS DONE TO THE MOUNTAINS! IT DISOLVES ALL IT TOUCHES! DO NOT STEP OUT ONTO THE WHITE GOO!”
When I returned to furnace creek I had a few hours in the dark to walk around before I wanted to sleep. It drizzled and drizzled. I was soaked.
When I returned to the campsite the mud was bad. Several of the campsites were completely flooded. There was a huddle of road cyclists who took up connected campsites on the far end of the tent loop. They had a lake between their tents and their cars.
It rained through the night. The puddle that formed inside my tent was warm. The hard ground underneath the tent became soft and comfortable. I was sleeping on a highly viscous leaky waterbed. I slept very well.
The morning’s world was six inches deep in creamy peanut butter. Every step threatened to steal a shoe. I picked up the tent whole and moved it to the parking lot to disassemble it. I rinsed the mud from the groundtarp and my shoes in the asphalt parking lot’s puddles. I felt like I was retreating from an unspeakable defeat. I left the campground as soon as I could and drove halfway to daylight pass before stopping.
It was dawn. Firstlight had yielded to the disk of the sun peaking over the Funeral Mountains. The white goo had gone and wisps of fog retreated before the intense light. Everything was shiny.
I was changing out of my wet clothing into dry duds for the long drive home. I stood for a second in my birthday suit and shoes to look out over the valley. It did not look wet; it looked like it had been pimped with chrome bling. I do not think it would have looked the same had I been fully clothed.
I personally cannot stand for long in the middle of a two-lane road without being clothed. The moment passed. As I rearranged the car for the trip home (getting fresh caffeinated beverages and snacks handy) I thought about how often I let my attitudes interfere with more complete enjoyment of the opportunities that present themselves in my life.
I had just escaped from the mud hell that was my campsite. Why did I not pause to enjoy it? That ground is only mud like that once a year at best. I could have stripped down to my skivvies and jumped in. Instead of dreading the stickyness I could have used that property to cover myself head-to-foot in the mud. Instead of plodding around the deeper puddles hoping not to lose a shoe I could have slithered snakelike and shoeless through the middle of them. Instead of defeated and low I could have been exhausted.
I do not think that it requires a belief in some kind of invisible friend to alter one’s attitude. I doubt many of the god-fearing RV inhabitants would be wallowing in that exquisite mud. I am interested in how I can see opportunity in the world and respond to it with a more inviting attitude.
I think that if I had a travel partner with me, who had offered to clean the mud off of me enough for the trip home, that I would have returned right then to the mud and wallowed in it. Part of the ability to change one’s attitude must depend on preparation.
I would say that the drive home was uneventful, but I would only do that because this post is too long already. Since my MP3 player was dead I sang to myself. I had been listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” album before the MP3 died and the songs were fresh in my head, so I sang them:
They saaat togeether in the paaark As the evening sky greww daaaark She looked at heeeem and heee felllt a spaaark Teeengle to his bone ‘Twas then he fellt alooone And weeshed that heee’d gone straaaaight
I howled like a tone deaf coyote whenever I thought it appropriate.
There was snow on the roads.
In Beatty there was a man in an electric wheelchair tooling along in the center of the right-hand lane. He had two small American flags taped to the back of his seat. The flags fluttered and gave him the illusion of a speed greater than that he could have achieved with the chair alone.
I am an adult onset atheist. I cannot blame parents, society, or an unhappy childhood on my decision to abandon all things theist. I clung for a while to a deist god, but it too was eventually thrown onto the trash-heap. Why insist that I am believing in a “god” when “gravity” or “electromagnetic radiation” are better names? I finally found that I was clinging to the weakest shadow of a deist god because I connected the belief in this imaginary entity with so many good things in the world. One day I realized that those good things would be better without the residue of a belief in god contaminating them.
