Broken Chain

I spend a little time each day looking for, I call it “hunting for”, metaphors. Metaphor is the stuff humans use to build god(s), and so it is infinite, terrible, and resonates with the human condition. Taking down a trophy metaphor can be like bagging a god. Writing about it is a taxidermy of the atheist experience.

Broken Chain

“Broken chain” is a great name for a metaphor. By itself it conjures twangy country songs about “unbroken chains”. One can picture chains binding a slave, and the broken chain showing that slave their path to freedom. I, of course, mean a bicycle chain; the bicycle chain delivers power from the action of the cyclist (pedals) to the desired impact on the world (bike moving forward), and so is a great species of chain metaphor. However, the title of a metaphor is not where the process starts for the hunter.

The hunt begins with experience. Fertile hunting ground can be found in events that impact the hunter in emotional ways, but where there is a respite of contemplation afterwards for the details of the event to become mixed with whatever else the hunter is contemplating.

I recently went on a short ride. Before the ride I had replaced the chain on my Kestrel as it had stretched to the point that it was interfering with shifting. I put a new SRAM 1051 chain, and used the powerlock™ to complete it. After twisting a few adjuster barrels the Kestrel shifted like new. My head was full of unfinished emotions and so I was raring to go out and take both my head and the bike for a spin. Although the day’s weather report featured constant waves of drizzle and rain there was a momentary letup, and I leapt out the door. I shot downhill for the first mile as gravity nudged me out of my sedentary thoughts. I took a right and headed up a canyon that mercilessly winds for miles uphill before it crosses a steep mountain pass and lands in the Salt Lake Valley. I only ground up the grade part way before turning back into a light sprinkle and pedaling in pursuit of the speed gravity promised. It was a left, and then a left again before I hit a short 12% grade section of the ride home. A car ahead of me turned so slowly right onto the grade that I had to stop and lose any momentum my excitement had gifted me. I shifted, and then stood on the pedals to gain leverage, and … then …. SNAP. The powerlock™ had uncoupled. The chain flew into the spokes of the rear wheel, and I was given the contemplative time needed to capture a metaphor in the form of a long walk home in clicky-clacky bike shoes.

Two very good potential metaphors pop out of this event. I chose the “broken chain” since it allows me to infer the second “weak link”, and is almost a two-in-one metaphor.

Literally I was pedaling to move the bike forward, but I was moving the bike forward to get out of some thoughts in my head. The new chain was put on to make that process operate more smoothly. The break occurred when the chain reached maximum stress, and could not take it anymore. The break was independent of my efforts; an externality that halted the planned excursion. Each of these observations can be used to map the chain breaking onto other events. I can describe what is really going on in my head with what really went on in my world. Once that is done the metaphor is captured.

Did I kill god with this metaphor? No.

There were many aspects of a trophy metaphor here, but what was lacking was the perspective of the hunter. I was caught up in some less universally interesting mental ping-pong. If I had opened my mind to the nature of life, or the universe, or everything, then I may have bagged a trophy worthy of at least a minor deity.

Instead I found out a new way of saying something important to myself. I have that metaphor hanging on the wall of my mind. It will get dusty in time, but I think it is a nice enough one to clean off and admire for a long time to come.

Hope won't leave

Illnesses are defined by cause and symptoms. Those with just symptoms are often called syndromes. On the other hand “unspecified” is sometimes a good enough cause to turn a potential syndrome into an illness.

Over the past week I’ve been suffering from what should be called an illness since the cause remains unspecified in discussions about it like this one. I’ve been unable to sleep for going on five days, and I can only take in a few mouthfuls of food every once in a while. On the plus side I’ve lost 10 pounds, and I can imagine getting into some of my old jeans in a few more weeks. I don’t know where the sleep has gone since I just feel a little loopy instead of severely exhausted. If this keeps up I will learn to be productive at night instead of just lying in bed waiting for sleep till dawn. This could be the best thing to happen to me ever!

The big problem is hope. Seeing hope in patterns of the random backdrop of life is easy. There isn’t any for those things I wish for so there is an infinite assemblage of patterned hints to rely on instead.  I've had extended internal conversations about just letting go my handhold on the fantastic so I could fall ... fall.. fall into sleep.

The mind works like that. If you want to do something like have a sandwich you might say to yourself: “I would like a sandwich”. The person you are talking to in your head knows you want the sandwich because they ARE you. If it is a complex enough sandwich you might even discus condiments and side drinks in your mind. Internal dialogs can be comforting. They can give the appearance of helping things fit. Ultimately, however, it makes no real sense that the thought process jumps out into speech in order to become known.

It is possible to give the voices in one’s head the personalities of people you are dealing with. In the absence of direct communication these avatars can act out the “what ifs”.

Too often the play acting in my head re-runs highlights of events. They can run a particular partially-heard word through a million variations until it may mean something with importance far outshining the original intent.

If I continue without sleep for a while longer I will be much more productive if I can figure out what to do with these conversations. I get stuck on them telling me how much of a failure I’ve been lately. They sound like my father often. Dad calling me a looser again, “yay”. I would hope that I had heard it enough growing up that I would have grown tired of it, but it is a favorite refrain for my head’s more nasty voices.

If I stayed up at night working on stuff I could potentially find other things to talk about. I am a bit too loopy right now to carry on actual conversations with actual people, but I could easily chatter on for hours about specific wiring layouts and the awesomeness of little projects. I could also garden at night by headlamp; weeds can be spoken of at length, and my garden is full of them.

Perhaps my mind is trying to destabilize itself enough to warp the fringes of reality. There are things I want so very much, but they are incompatible with physical laws, or making them manifest would require tweaking the physical constants governing forces like gravity, and the Earth would go plunging into the sun. Enough sleep deprivation might make anything possible. I need to learn how to hope rather than act on the questionable advice my mind is dredging up.

The cure to the illness is to become properly hopeless. Give up on the patterns, and embrace the random. The waning moon is supposed to be a time to rid oneself of illness or for discarding stuff that is not working in one’s life. This Friday’s new moon promises a fresh start that may find me happily without hope. Hopelessness never looked so good.

Pandora couldn’t use her box to store knick-knacks until that last remaining hope finally flew away.

The French philosopher Bruno Latour was once asked a question so profound he wrote an entire book about hope in order to address it (Pandora’s Hope IBSN: 978-0674653368). The question was: “Croyez-vous en réalité ?" ("Do you believe in Reality ?"). I suppose it is not too strange then to have the reality-altering symptoms of my illness cause me to think about hope.

The Future by Bike

There is something about a long bike ride in the wind that pulls the wonder and possibility out of some enigmatic tissue located someplace in one’s gut. Those times when the side-winds buffet vigorously enough to threaten stability, and the head-wind makes every revolution of the crank a studied event. I had such a ride last week and mine was full to bursting with the possibilities I had decided to make part of my life. I ran and re-ran film-clips of decorating happy places in some soft-focused future, and I sweated in the 40 degree wind and drooled with each breath and whiped snot from my nose each time it collected into a sizable drip.

There are breakthrough moments in a person’s life. Things that were psychologically impossible become so real that you feel like a new person. A lot of these things have to do with sharing with another person since we are social animals, but there are some that just resonate with assorted parts of the individual. I did go into the ride like a new person because I had discovered that some impossible daemon was just saying it was so.

The parts of the ride that enjoyed the 35+ MPH tailwind were sublime. Not much thinking, and a rush of superhuman speed. I wore myself down chasing after the tailwind, and would have worn myself to nubs of bone if it had gone on for long enough. A ferocious tailwind is intoxicating.

Part of my amazing plans included the announcement. Balloons and streamers to make a political convention jealous floated through my mind with the sensations of pain from my legs. Laser light shows festooned the back pain as I cramped from trying to sit in the handlebar drops for too long. Rainbow bunting for the pain in my wrists. Flags of every nation and my neck. There was going to be an announcement and the new me would slip off the old skin and become more than just the knowledge in my head.

It rained a little, but not as much as the weather report had warned. It was a shame to call it rain; perhaps “a sprinkle” would be a better fit.

Now I have been having a pretty bad couple of months. Disappointment has outstayed its welcome. I have been reduced at times to trying to just keep moving forward. I think the practice at that helped me to discover the chinks in the armor of the impossible daemons of my mind. I was more than ready to turn things around.

Many of the problems with the week have to do with my screwing up. I have disappointed people and myself. I did not think it was terrible though. Perhaps everyone downplays their own involvement in the off-key notes in the songs they play? I needed to move through some mistakes in order to put the wonderful new me in place. I kept telling myself that everything was almost just about right.

After the ride I went about trying to get some stuff in place. There were still the nagging disappointments, but I felt they were so close to dissolving. Unfortunately it was the focusing on the forward progress with the obvious problems that distracted me from examining the foundation the announcement was built on. Reality can be much less solid than imagination; especially imagination fueled by endorphins.

Needless to say the announcement aborted, and left the familiar taste of failure in my mouth. It is just the time for failure I guess. This one was so profound I developed very real gastric distress. Sitting on the toilet experiencing a week imitation of Cholera is as conducive to amplifying negative feelings as sitting on the bike’s seat is to creating fantastic futures. I minted new film-strips each capturing the moment of my failure in exciting new angles. My heart raced faster with each running; I dicroverd myself abandoning the attempt at sleep with the dawn instead of waking up.

When a failure is profound enough to make you physically ill it is time to leave the playing field to those better able to play. Retreats are generally disorganized though. I multiplied the issues by trying to solve them, but eventually I got to someplace safe.

When I am feeling wretched I like to take opportunities to help people who should be more wretched than me. In this instance I had the opportunity to bring some distraction and snackage to a friend who had a hysterectomy a day or so earlier. She was supposed to be loopy from pain and narcotics, and prone from the effort of doing nothing at all. Instead she was appreciative and cordial. We sat to watch one of the movies I brought, but I started to fall asleep having been awake for 40 hours.

So I decided to do what had put me in the happiest mood I could remember. I took my bike out for a ride. The hysterectomy friend lived near a path I knew of that wound beside a river up through many miles. I took it as far as I could.

The ride was great. Just enough wind to get me there, but not enough to shorten the ride. I pushed as hard as my sleep-deprived body could go. Instead of getting new films running through my mind I kept on seeing places along the trail that reminded me of lost loves and treasured moments I had shared there. The perspiration hid the tears, and the snot looked the same. I was much less relieved than I should have been when I was done. “Maybe a little bit of peace” I convinced myself; there is nothing psychological that a good bike ride cannot make a little bit better.

Reality had different plans. Someone had broken the car window of my parked Corolla. I had parked in the middle of a well-used, but not full, parking lot. But someone had managed to break the window and steal my wallet without being noticed. Since I was already in a state of mind where every step forward required detailed planning and focus I was not swamped by yet more crap, but I’ve had enough crap for a while; really I have.

The thieves had begun charging up stuff at big box retailers while I was waiting for the police. Luckily I had spare underwear and a shirt in the trunk I had picked up that morning as my other ones were covered in glass. I had a pair of pants too thin for the weather in the trunk as well.

When I got enough glass off the seat to sit without lacerations I set about looking around for my pants. Hopefully the thieves had discarded my driver’s license and pants in order to make keeping the credit cards less bulky. I drove around looking in trash cans and other bins. I discovered that I was in the neighborhood of a friend’s relative who had died of cancer a couple years previously. It only took a few blocks out of the way to see the condo of the dead woman. I think I wanted to see if it could make me feel worse; as if not having previously feelt as bad as possible would put things into a cheerier perspective. Her condo was just as uninteresting from the outside as it had always been. A dead old woman’s former undecorated white condo; the main feature was the garage door that mirrored all her neighbors’ in appearance. “Yes” I discovered, I could feel a little more wretched.

Today’s ride was better. Tomorrow’s may be on a trainer, but I will watch a video of France in the summer. The next day I may get outside for a ride, and maybe the day after that. If I just keep moving forward I will get someplace. There is always an event horizon in the future where feelings and temperament are unknown. I think I can get to it faster by bike.