And then you do get your life back and suddenly you have vast swathes of time and no idea how to fill them.  Or you allow them to fill up automatically with the usual inconsequential crap that characterizes the everyday aimless drift of our lives.  Television.  Celebitchy.  It isn’t just that an Ironman provides your life with a powerful sense of direction for a year but that humans are creatures of habit, routine, and ritual and all of those things are powerfully present all the time when you are training for a big event.  It isn’t just that you are suddenly missing a purpose but that your life is missing rhythm and pattern directed toward a purpose.  I’m reminded of this when I haven’t been on a long ride for a while: the ritual of getting my gear together the night before, making up the drinks, assembling the right clothes, charging my Garmin, etc.

When you finish an Ironman you are powerfully exhausted both physically and mentally.  In fact, your body is exhausted in ways that aren’t even perceptible to most people.  I’ve found that many people massively under-estimate the time it takes to recover physically from an Ironman.  Muscularly, you start feeling better pretty quick.  After all, in order to do an Ironman in the first place you typically have to be in some of the best shape of your life.  You’ll be tempted to enter another race. . .and the wonder why you are sucking wind halfway through, or why you feel like complete arse the day after a mere 10K.

Yet, to go the other way, to obey what seems the eminently sensible demand from both your body and your mind (after all, isn’t that the training mantra?  Listen to your body?) that you “rest,” that you “take time off,” that you “relax and recover” is a recipe for disaster.  Going cold turkey on anything is incredibly difficult.  From my experience, that of my partner, and the experiences of many friends who have completed an Ironman, taking time off after an Ironman stages a hefty frontal attack on your motivation.  Many people experience this as primarily a lack of motivation to exercise.  They stop working out, they think the should maybe sorta oughta sign up for events but they never do.  The worst case scenario is that this lack of motivation can start to bleed over into other realms of your life.  After all, most people are trapped in jobs that seemed shallow and meaningless and inconsequential before they completed an Ironman.  They are not going to look significantly better after such a major life-event.

The Plan
Having experienced this after my first Ironman I’m trying to be a bit smarter and learn from that experience this time around.  So I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few weeks thinking not about the event coming up in September but about what will happen after that.   What is my post-game plan?

Yes, you could say that I am, as the old saw has it, putting the cart before the horse.  But I’ve been stuck behind this particular horse before and man, if it doesn’t generate a copious and almost continuous output of crap.  So anything that puts me out in front of it can only be a good thing.

Things began to come together for me over the weekend when I took the new bike out for her second ride (the first was a 20 mile shakedown cruise through the rolling terrain of Barcroft the day before to make sure nothing obvious fell off either me or the bike), a 40 mile loop starting from Glen Echo.  I rode neither smartly nor well, spending a lot more time out of zone than I would ordinarily have liked.  But the lightness of the bike made charging up the hills too tempting.    And I had fun.  (BTW, the bike now officially has a name: Ginger.  After Ginger Rogers because she dances across the road.  Also because she is zippy and peppy.  Also because ginger is one of the things on our list of “magic ingredients,” those items that when added to a dish automatically make it better.)

Maybe it was because I was having such fun that this idea began to form.  Maybe it was the clarity-inducing near-death experience of narrowly missing being hit by a car (someone screaming down a side street and trying to turn onto a main road without looking; I was saved only by my friend Rich’s tree-shattering bellow which she heard inside the car and which also gave me just enough time to twitch the bike out of the way of the front bumper.  Is the bike maneuverable?  Check).

At any rate, I was thinking about how much I love cycling and about the post-Ironman problem.  I wanted something that would provide me with a goal, would keep me active, wouldn’t completely take over my life but still push me and would still allow me to participate in the social element of training with the team that I’ve come to value.

So here’s my plan.  I am going to ride one century every month for an entire year.  And I’m going to do each one in a different State.

This is going to involve some interesting opportunities.  It will undoubtedly take me to places I haven’t been before and force me to do things as a rider and a person I haven’t done before.  There will be a plethora of new sights and sounds (as Mary pointed out, lots of good blogging material there!) and undoubtedly more than a few hellacious experiences in waiting.  There will also be more than a few challenges apart from the obvious physical ones.  It is going to be tough to find centuries during the winter months.  They seem to be nonexistent locally (for mostly obvious reasons, although the bizarre stretch of warm weather we’ve been having can make you wonder) so I’m going to have to travel.  In practice, this may mean that in some months I’ll be doing more than one century; I’ll try and support Mary on a couple of her Wanaka training rides, and there are also the by now traditional rides such as Mountains of Misery which I’ll need to decide whether or not to count as my “official” Virginia century or merely a supplement).  I’d also like to do as many as possible of these rides with friends.  So yes, I’ll be trying to suck other people into my madness although I don’t expect anyone else to try and go the whole nine yards.

The Plea
So I’d like to hear from as many of you as possible.  What centuries have you heard about that might make for a fitting addition to this list?  In particular, I’d be interested in more obscure century efforts during the winter months so that I don’t face the soul-sapping prospect of visiting and riding around Florida.  I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who might be interested in joining me on one or more of these endeavours.

But Mary has a good road bike, one that has already proved itself in an Ironman, so a new bike would probably have remained in the realm of theory if not for Cervelo’s recent marketing gimmick.  Buy two bikes and get a whopping $2,000 off.  Now Cervelo has some pretty expensive bikes but they also have some more than reasonably priced ones (especially if you are looking at leftover bikes from the previous season).  How they are making any money on this is beyond me, and it must be killing the retailers given the relatively slim margins on bikes that already exist.  However, I’m not one to look a gift horse; there’s certainly been more than one Cervelo that I’ve had my eye on for a while, so Mary and I trotted down to our local LBS to do some test-riding.  Test-riding gave way to speccing which gave way to haggling which gave way to a large sucking sound as money disappeared from our collective wallet.

In the end, Mary ended up with a mostly stock P2C; the only substitution was to replace the stock FSA Gossamer crank (which I’ve never trusted since I saw so many examples of it creating chain suck problems for even experienced cyclists on our team who bought bikes so-equipped while I was training for IM MOO) with an Ultegra crank.  I ended up with a 2011 RS, the last one in the shop and miraculously in my size (do you believe in fate?).  It seemed to have been specced out for someone else because it had an all Ultegra build and we couldn’t really swing that extra cash.  So I asked them to put the stock SRAM Rival build back on with only two exceptions: again, get rid of the Gossamer crank and put a Rival one on, and replace the standard cassette with a 12/32.  Yes, you heard me right.  A 32.  With a compact crank that is almost a 1/1 ratio on the back, which tells you my intentions for this bike. Climbs, climbs, and more climbs.

So Mary got a very good, race proven, flexible triathlon bike with some excellent componentry throughout.  I have some OK components but this was my chance to get what I really wanted which was the frame.  I first rode this bike a couple of years ago when Cervelo was doing their travelling demo show where you could ride any bike in their line-up all kitted out with top-end components.  I took it on what is ordinarily a tooth-rattling jaunt down Columbia pike and barely felt a thing.  I was concerned, however, that I might have been misled by the high end wheels, etc.  This time I took it out for a jaunt up and down Military Road.  But it was the same thing.  This is easily the most comfortable bike I have ever ridden.  It floats over the everyday rubble on the road.  Yet it remains incredibly responsive (without even having to think about it I could twitch my way around sudden potholes and the bike instantly straightened without any lag) and climbs well.  There will be some upgrading in the future, no doubt (although everyone seems to praise the solidity and reliability of the Rival components; there is some clear trickle-down happening in this group so who knows?).  So this year I’ll be mixing up some the normal training on Mabel with some hillier efforts on the as-yet-unnamed RS.

The Point
But that is all background (indicated by the subtle way in which I titled that section “Background”).  The thing that really struck me about this bike purchase was the reaction of other people.  I’ve lost track of the number of people who have come up to me over the last few days and said “Hey, congratulations on the new bike!”  That seems pretty innocuous but think about it for a minute.  In my experience, when you buy most other consumer goods (a new car, a new lounge suite, a new flat screen TV) people don’t typically use the word “congratulations.”  You get that word in completely different contexts: announcement of a marriage or pregnancy, graduation, birth of a child–life-changing events.

It is no accident that most of the people who have congratulated me have been cyclists, because one of the things that defines you as a cyclist rather than a person who straddles a bike on a regular basis is the understanding that buying a bike is a life-changing event.  Why?  Because buying a bike takes you places (in both the physical and metaphysical senses).  A nice flat-screen (and who doesn’t want one of those?) is a beautiful window on the world, but just as that metaphor implies, you are on the inside, looking out, fixed in place.  Doesn’t a new car take you places?  Well, yes, in the physical sense.  But the modern car is designed to be a self-capsule that will insulate you from all that dangerous reality out there (bluetooth this, DVD entertainment system that).  It may take you places physically, but metaphysically it is designed to take your regular place (and all the crap that fills it) with you.

This all sounds a tad overblown, I know–unless you are one of the countless people who have had their life changed for the better, in ways small or great, by a bike (and I count myself in that category).  The interesting question, of course, is why a bike is able to take you places in ways that other devices can’t.  A couple of days ago I was looking at reviews of the 2011 RS.  Yes, that is right, I read reviews after I buy the bike.  (When the bike first came out years ago I read reviews then, and then I rode it for myself, and that was all the reviewing I needed).  I was looking chiefly for information about about strengths and weaknesses of the stock build.  In the course of my search I came across an excellent, typically thoughtful, review by Tom Demerly.  Demerly admits that his previous reviews of the RS were a little off-base because he didn’t really get the idea of the bike, which meant that he didn’t really understand the kind of rider for whom it was designed.  What was surprising–and also a little unnerving–was to find myself described pretty accurately:

What I didn’t understand about the Cervelo RS is that it’s aimed at an expanding group of performance riders who are pragmatic about what they need- and don’t need. The fifty-something engineer, the guy who raced cat 2 in college twenty years ago, the endurance rider crossing the country in a month, the emerging Brevet, audax or Randonneur cyclist. These riders are athletic, fit (or trying to get fit), understand performance and won’t settle for a “duffer” bike. In short, this rider wants long-haul performance that provides comfort so they can focus on their goals.

If I had to pick one adjective to describe my riding and racing approach it would in fact be “pragmatic.”  I try to train smart, I try to race smart, with as little drama and as few histrionics as possible even under the most extreme circumstances.  I make somewhat unorthodox choices that even my nearest and dearest don’t understand (Mary still harasses me about wearing MTB shoes and using Crank Brothers pedals; but then I’m typically not the person who ends up carrying their shoes as they run their bike out of a sea-of-mud transition area, or is cemented into my pedals at the end of the bike leg!).   I don’t have the flashy high-end gear, because even if we could afford it, my innate pragmatism tells me that there are other things I could be doing with money than buying a $6,000 dollar bike when a $3,000 one will get the job done just fine.  And then realizing that I can’t afford the $3,000 anyway and planning accordingly.  But that doesn’t mean I want to settle.  I like to get my fast on as much as the next cyclist. As Demerly notes: “The pragmatic cyclist eschews testosterone in favor of intellect and understands this category [sport touring bikes] is a better performance choice than a low-head tube, steep angle racer for a performance bike. These bikes are for any rider who has learned the path to performance is paved with comfort, especially when the path under their wheels is barely paved.”

Reading Demerly’s review made me realize something else.  All of my previous bikes that I’ve acquired have been for entirely practical reasons: I needed a form of transportation, I needed a bike that would enable me to do a lot of multisport races.  All those bikes served me well and were even pressed into roles they weren’t specifically designed for (as I’ve described elsewhere, my modified Cannondale F600 MTB has carried me through many, many bike touring miles).  I’ve owned six (now 7) bikes in my lifetime (not counting the one where I transferred componentry to an all new frame after repeatedly buckling the previous steel one by running into the back of parked vehicles).  The RS is, however, the first bike I’ve ever bought simply because I’m a guy who loves bikes and recognized a fit and a connection as soon as I hopped on the saddle.

There are all kinds of questions you can ask when buying a bike.  Will it make me faster?  Will it be reliable?  How much does it weigh?  Is it practical?  Those kinds of questions have their place.  But if all you ever do is ask those kinds of questions about your prospective bike purchases then you are missing something.  As I get older and ride more with no intention of slowing down I’m starting to realize that there are only two really good questions to be asked as you contemplate a bike purchase: what kind of person am I and what kind of person do I want to become?

I was up late last night (and in the middle of the night) checking in on friends and team-mates participating in Ironman Arizona.  Those who have done an Ironman or have supported someone who has knows that it can be an emotionally wrenching experience for all concerned.  For the athlete, obviously, but if you are part of the support crew and your athlete ends up not having a good day, it can be wrenching to watch them suffer.  So I knew that when I was hearing about people finishing, watching their online results gradually update throughout the day, seeing photos, that there would be a lot of emotions: exhilaration, sympathy, empathy, painful cringes, and so on.  What I didn’t expect was that it would lead to an overwhelming sense of loss.

Flashback for a moment to a grassy knoll.  Dallas.  November 22, 1963.

Sorry, just kidding.

Let’s try Lake Placid, New York.  July 26, 2009.  Mary had just completed her first Ironman and we were sitting with my uncle and cousin on the grassy embankment above the IM USA finish line.  It was at that moment that I began to understand, to really understand, how new communications technologies were changing the way we were experiencing the world.  We each had our smart phones and were able to check our mail (ooh!).  As people crossed the finish line, the Team Z e-mail group would light up with posts from everyone who was monitoring the race via the live Ironman feed, back in the DC area.  ”I just saw X finish!”  ”According to the race tracker Y is 6 miles out and running a good pace.”  ”Does anyone have any information on Z?”  Every new post would produce a cavalcade of responses; the list was flooded with congratulations for individual athletes, comments on the event itself, etc.

I was to see this same pattern replicated in other Ironman races in next couple of years and it became one of the things I kind of looked forward to: when we couldn’t be there, we would still be there to support our team-mates and meet, albeit virtually, to share the event as a team.  The same thing happened last year for my Ironman in Wisconsin; the e-mail group was once again jumping.  I was expecting the same thing for IM Arizona.  In fact, so sure of this was I that I made sure to post a brief comment on that day’s ride well in advance of when the first results were coming in so as not to steal the thunder from any of our athletes or distract those wanting to celebrate their accomplishments.

The hours passed.  The e-mail list stayed silent.  When I went to bed around midnight, with still two hours to go, there was still virtually nothing from the e-mail group.  I put it down to yet another screw up by Yahoo mail (they have the flakiest e-mail client imaginable and sometimes it will just arbitrarily not deliver mail and then produce it hours or days later).  I got up this morning expecting a flood of mail from the list.

Nada.

Now of course all this celebrating was happening.  Over on Facebook.  All night long I was swamped by feeds related to IM Arizona: images, finishing line video, automated race-tracker updates from various athletes, and so on.  There was celebration, commiseration. . .a veritable blast from the virtual Team Z vuvuzela.

Or so it seemed.  If people were celebrating, and participating virtually in the triumphs and tragedies of their friends, what does it matter where they were doing it?

Just this: it is all dependent upon who your friends are.  People who have been following my other blog have noticed that I’ve been having more and more doubts about the way in which Facebook has (re)defined our notion of what friendship means.  In essence, it has taken what used to be a very private set of relationships–friendships–and transformed them into a kind of compulsory performance of friendship.  In the process it is gradually diminishing our sense of what private space means but also our sense of what real public space and public groupings mean.  Why bother meeting up in RL when you can FB?  All in the name of profit.  But of course there wouldn’t be any profit if a truly massive number of people (800 million) weren’t in fact voting with their IP addresses that this diminished, efficient form of friendship was what they wanted.

Blah blah blah I hear you say.  Really, what’s the harm.  The harm is the loss of a sense of Team celebration.  Sure, it is theoretically possible that someone could be friends on FB with the whole of Team Z.  But even the saddest friend collector would find that a challenge and I don’t think anyone except our coach even comes remotely close to that.  I could keep up with most of our team, but there are a few people who were racing who I don’t know on FB, or who hadn’t signed up for a race feed, or who didn’t have friends and family updating their account for them (something Mary and I have each done for the other in our respective Ironman races).  Those people were a black hole in terms of race information and results.  Not to mention the fact (shocking, I know) that there are still some people that aren’t on FB or that don’t use it at all regularly.

If you were new to our team and hadn’t yet formed many of those FB connections you would have missed much of the drama of last night (and there was drama, with some amazing, inspiring, just-under-the-wire finishes).  In previous years, I’ve heard people comment about how the flood of e-mails surrounding the Ironman events inspired them, made them feel that such a thing might just be possible one day.  Even if it merely confirmed in some people (as it would in most rational human beings) that this was an utterly insane activity in which to be engaged, the performance of team interest and commitment and support itself spoke volumes about the team and its members, its goals and methods.

What we have with FB, however, is simply a number of discrete groupings of people, some of which may temporarily overlap to form something like the impression of a team.  And it is true that you also gain an expanded public in one sense, access to friends and families who haven’t yet (or who never intend to) drink the Ironman Kool-Aid.  I tried to persuade myself this morning that that was a worthy recompense for the feeling of loss that I was experiencing.

Nevertheless, I would argue that you lose more than you gain.  FB friends who aren’t triathletes may get that you are disappointed at not finishing an Ironman.  But no one who hasn’t trained for a year for something like this can have any sense of what a DNF really means.  Moreover, to those people who aren’t doing an Ironman, who have just joined your team, seeing how you handle the devastation of that DNF can be a life lesson.

See, where FB has been so seductive is in its ability to, in essence, rewrite our understanding of history and culture.  Hey, it says, all your friendships are basically the same, all public spaces are essentially performing the same function, so why not pull them all under the same roof where we can all be the same together?  But we have had (and still have, just) different public spaces that serve different publics in different ways for different reasons.  The public that exists down at the grocery store is different from the public for whom I write when I blog, which is different from the kind of public that a sports team is, which is different (or should be) from the public that FB is.

As I read over this I realize that none of this is really getting at what I’m trying to explain, the feeling.  Back in July of 2009 I had the unmistakable feeling that new communications technologies and methods had changed things for the better, broadened our ability to participate and share meaningfully in events we couldn’t personally witness.  Last night, I had the sense that things had definitely changed for the worse.

This was how our coach announced the probable weather for this weekend’s long run.  And lo, it came to pass.  The entire Eastern seaboard is in the grip of an unseasonably early winter snow, which in our region at least continues this year’s weather theme of startlingly abrupt seasonal transitions which usually prove to be illusory and yield to an equally abrupt climatic reversion a few days later.  When we moved here a little over a decade ago we were charmed by the weather for a few years, with a slow, luxurious slide from summer through fall to winter, and then an easy climb back out again to (an admittedly wretched) summer.  This year?  Throw the dice and put money down on what the weather will be in a week’s time.

You could blame global warming.  Or you could blame the DC micro-climate created by all the Congressional hot air recently (much of it flatulent in origin).    Blame and complaint are both pointless, however: you still have to train through it.

The last couple of weeks have seen the real start of our training for next year’s Ironman.  Days like this remind me how much the challenges in training come in all shapes and sizes.  Most of my team-mates are just coming off the most challenging phase of their training and staggering into their taper period before Cozumel and Arizona next month: bodies are sore, energy is low, some are doubting themselves, some are over-confident.  Talking with them, I remember that period so well, the monumental challenge of every individual workout and a level of challenge in putting them together back to back so great that it was imperative not to think about it all.  Some of them were doing a 4 hour spin inside today; some will be doing an 80 mile ride tomorrow.

To get to the big challenges, however, you have to overcome numerous smaller ones first; today reminded me how many of those smaller challenges I’d forgotten.  Many of those smaller challenges are incredibly basic, but it is exactly those small challenges that deter most people from ever getting involved in multisports in the first place.   Like getting up early on a Saturday morning, after waking periodically to the sound of rain and ice spattering against your window, to go on a run that you know will be miserable.   When training for something as huge as an Ironman it is easy to toss around words like discipline, commitment, desire, and the like.  I tossed a few of them round last time myself!  But all of those grand terms are really the product of something very basic: establishing a routine and sticking to it.  Regardless.  Freezing weather in October, unfortunately, falls into the regardless category.

And yes, it was pretty foul.  The rain was not insignificant, as promised, and as I reached the turnaround point in my 9 mile run there were, indeed, a few fluffy globs of snow plummeting through the air.  There weren’t many of us out there, but we got it done.

It is for days like this that Mary and I invented the category of “virtue points.”  Unlike brownie points, which someone else has to award you, virtue points are great because you get to award them to yourself!  You get them for toughing it out and doing something challenging and/or disagreeable when the sober citizens of the world are all safe abed or firmly ensconced in their central heated/air conditioned (virtue points can be earned in any season) houses watching TV.  However earning virtue points requires not just that you show up when ordinary folks have no thought of doing so but when a significant number of people who are usually as crazy as you choose to absent themselves.  So the dozen or so Team Zers who showed up on the W&OD trail today all earned major virtue points.

I sincerely hope, however, that today wasn’t an indication that there will be abundant opportunities to earn virtue points in the near future.

Yes, that’s right, for those of you not in the US, the country is heading into the silly season.  We’re going to have to endure the painful idiocy of the Republican Primary process, and the painful idiocy of the absence of a Democratic Primary process (I can’t be the only independent re-thinking the whole Obama/Clinton thing in light of subsequent events).  So what’s the asnwer?  Simple: sign up for an Ironman.

So yesterday I made it official.  I, along with my dear partner-in-life-crime, will be racing in competing in trying to finish the Rev 3 Iron Distance even at Cedar Point Ohio, on September 9, 2012.

So far, I’m ahead of my training when compared with last year.  I haven’t been running.  Nor have I been to the pool since. . .well, let’s just drop that line of inquiry, shall we? I still have a bunch of “interesting” painful twinges from taking a hard spill off the bike last week.

I have, however, had my first Ironman (and yes, I know that I’m probably violating numerous intellectual property laws by referring to a non-branded Iron distance race as Ironman, but WTC can suck it) anxiety dream!

So, what did this dream look like?  Well, there was the disturbing fact that the almost completely flat course at Cedar Point had been replaced by one in the middle of the Canadian Rockies.  (Why the Canadian Rockies?  Because those socialist Rockies are obviously much more anxiety-inducing for anyone in the US than good ol’ American Rockies).  But that was OK, because at least I had my mountain bike.  Of course, the thick layer of rust on the chain was a bit of a concern. . .  As was the fact that every man and woman around me seemed to have achieved a negative body fat percentage.  That was when I saw the sign:

World Championships.

It is going to be a long year.  But then isn’t it always?

bells, rarely used
cannot help but sound—
portentous, muffled,
crêped still in city roar
you can almost hear the listening,
strung thin in solution
waiting for the crystal of shared experience
as memory works its mystification
channels its falsehoods deeper
stumbles on new truths unrecognized

and we kept moving

marching forward into the future,
feeding ravenously on our past
we build a kind of grim commerce
with the dead
the flag for sale everywhere
baseball caps, formfit
cut-off Ts—DKNY/FDNY—
its hard to know where remembrance
ends and fashion begins

detained, awaiting proof
that everything changed
that for one moment we felt
strongly outside ourselves,
fading into business,
as usual

the markets close up
rebounding in sagged relief
on news of another day
without an obvious terror

late afternoon—strong winds
and trees, feeling the change
shedding deadwood in a steady hail
against the cold to come

we’ve become so adept at describing
holes in the ground, holes in the sky
hallowing ground and sky
talking of heroes and sacrifice
only to stumble and stutter
faced with a single human gap
in the groundmelt of our permafrost soul

Antick Key Bridge lamp posts sway
menacingly above a clothesline of joggers
pinched and dripping,
the Potomac’s shit-brown joining regulation
governmental earthtones, hesitating
toward beauty, tautening into late summer clarity

remembering to stop
is not in our nature

and there is teaching and learning
to be done, or at least classes to take

But the other photo that struck me was a much smaller image of Berliners, over 200,000 of them, gathering at the Brandenburg gate and observing a moment of silence for all who had died on September 11. And I was struck by the power of these narratives of suffering and horror. We’ve grown immune to “natural” disasters, precisely because we think they are out of our control (and it’s true that we can’t control whether or not an earthquake strikes Turkey, although it is somewhat in our power to control how many people die because of inadequate building design, insufficient emergency services, etc). Things like this, however, can move 200,000 people (think about that number for a second) to come together, in another country, and be silent for a moment.

And I’m thinking about this all day, trying to get a handle on that strange power, that sudden ability, normally so dormant and, indeed, rigidly supressed, to feel that we are all connected. Then Parag comes from next door and tells us that we’ve begun bombing Afghanistan. And so it begins. In this “new kind of war” it’s back to business as usual: talk of precision-guided munitions, neutralizing command and control, suppressing air defense capability. . .it could be Iraq, Kosovo. . . And yet not quite the same, for the administration and the military can’t quite bring themselves to treat this devastated nation, pulverized physically and emotionally by decades of invasion, civil war, and doctrinal dogmatism, in the same way of those other nations. So, in a gesture that may well seem almost incomprehensible to those in the future, we are dropping food as well as bombs. I can’t bring those two things together in my head. The vaunted “precision” of our weapons (a precision that is moral rather than technological, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand fooling us into thinking that they only kill the deserving) set against the fact that we are flinging packets of food out the back of planes, hoping that they land near hungry people below; the almost unbelievable cost of a single Tomahawk mission set against the paltry sum set aside for “relief.” But some things haven’t changed. No reliable military information of any kind, a tight-lipped administration, a wall of silence against which the media produces the usual sound and fury.

Monday, October 8.
Listening to NPR this morning, and I heard a defense spokesman referring to those briefing films and stills of damaged targets as “bomb damage assessment products.” Sometimes, in spite of itself, military language carries the truth at the heart of the matter: in this case, that those images are a product we are being offereed and are expected to buy; something manufactured, to make someone else a quick buck.

Wednesday, October 9
And suddenly I’m crying in front of my computer. It’s as sudden as that these days. Trite on one level, and yet deeply affecting on another. I was listening to Randy Newman’s Faust and it came to the song “Little Island,” a beautiful piece with a nice brass arrangement that is one of the songs that doesn’t really fit with the rest of the musical. As a lament for the lost generations of World War II, it works pretty well, as a vague description of a generic evil that now besets the world, it’s less successful, an awkward compromise in specificity in order to fit in with the show’s storyline.

“He will pay for what was done / To those of us, who died so young.” And there I am with tears streaming improbably down my face. What makes pop music work, I’m starting to realize, is the ultimate detachability of reference. It spits chunks of affect out into the void, we grasp at them like falling snow. And I’m thinking of the dead in the WTC, as I have been avoiding doing for the last week, the lives unfulfilled. And the “He” in the back of my head is unmistakably Bid Laden. But at the same time, I’m thinking of the lines preceding these: “And now, the years have passed / The foe has risen up. / He stands, astride the world / His dreams of conquest all fulfilled.” And I know also that that generic evil, is US, America, the Colossus, that our standing astride the world, a vague evil if we think of it as evil at all, inevitably begets the more specific evil. Flip this around, and it could be “their” song. Tears of sympathy and shame.

I’m sure that for many people life is returning to normal. Most people get through their lives without feeling or thinking anything too much. But I suspect that I’m not alone in experiencing moments like this, as the shadow hanging over us briefly cuts across our peripheral vision.

These past few days, I’ve had reason to think about the First Amendment. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects our rights of free speech, the press and assembly. There is ongoing controversy over what speech should be protected and in fact speech that incites – hate speech, yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre – is not protected. Your speech is protected – the results of your speech are not.

On Saturday morning, as we ate our cornies and toast, we listened to the radio. The NPR radio hosts don’t often make commentary – they simply interview and report. But on Saturdays, Scott Simon does make a small commentary on the weeks events. This morning he played the words of two very powerful and very conservative televangelists who, a few days before, had said “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”" (For those outside of the States, the ACLU is the American Civil Liberties Union which vigorously defends free speech, including the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to rally. They’re extremely valuable in American society, we think.) I had read that Falwell had said this, and that Robertson had concurred, but I hadn’t heard the comments myself.

We were shocked to the core that someone – an American – could blame anyone except the terrorists for this action. Then Scott Simon pointed out gently that one of the passengers on the Pittsburgh plane that took action against the hijackers was a gay man. He asked who we would rather be sitting next to on a plane – Falwell or the gay rugby player – and who was closer to God? Scott Simon’s words made me cry into my cornies even more than I had been at Falwell’s words.

What’s the difference between Osama bin Laden’s words of anti-American hatred and Falwell’s? I can’t find any.

Yesterday was “Bike DC” where thousands of cyclists bike around DC on a 32 mile route. Unfortunately the route had to be severely reduced to avoid the white house and major routes. But Mark felt that it was important to join together in a community of cyclists, so we picked up two friends and headed into town. I dropped them off and drove to the mall to wait for them a couple of hours later.

And so, at 8 am I found myself having a wee chat with Abe. You’ve probably all seen the Lincoln Memorial – a great Grecian marble structure with a huge stature of the man himself sitting on a chair draped with the American flag,looking stern and wise. I hadn’t noticed his hands until yesterday – one is clenched tightly, the other caught in the middle of restrained action – as if frustrated at having to sit still. On the wall is carved the words of the Gettysburg Address which he gave at the opening of the national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania during the Civil War.

It’s incredibly short and funnily enough, of it, he says “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here” – for it has become one of the most famous speeches in history. Partly because it was so unusually short and is incredibly eloquent.

Most of the words struck me as eerily relevant today.

But one phrase stood out for me as a fitting eulogy for the people on the plane that overpowered the hijackers and so saved thousands of lives, and the rescue workers who rushed into the World Trade Center.

President Lincoln had this to say about the Gettysburg battlefield:

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”

The final section reads thus:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

I hope that we heed him well.

Above Abe’s head are carved these words “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined.”

It does feel like a temple, and it felt like I was speaking to some kind of god when I asked Abe for his help in the days ahead.

Back to the first amendment – on the steps of the memorial, I sat and tried to read my newspaper as I watched a photoshoot for Jockey and Hanes underwear.

Strangely incongruous, but the thing that got me was that they were using an American Flag as a prop – holding it up like a cape, wrapping it around the models between shoots. I’m a strong supporter of the first ammendment, including the right to burn the flag. But I will not defend bad taste or supreme insensitivity. Sunday our flags all returned to full mast. A company should not be using the flag for commercial purposes – not that day, not under these circumstances, not on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and not with such disgregard for what it means to people. They seek to exploit our patriotism for profit. Shame on them.

Then I made my way back to the Washington Monument to await Mark, walking via the Vietnam memorial inscribed with 58,226 names of the dead. I hope we don’t build another wall like it some day. As I passed the beautiful pond which is home to the memorial to the signers of the declaration of independence, I wished a good morning to two homeless men. The first had a youthful face and startling blue eyes, reminding me, with his long beard, of our friend Adam. The second had taken off his shoes and placed his feet on a piece of cardboard to keep his white socks clean. I hope that in the midst of their day to day despair that they were able to find a measure of peace in the mall as I had.

MMARDS

However, I still fear retaliation on a local level, and if we actually do go to war, the hysteria generated could well precipitate a wave of local and individual actions directed against “the enemy within” as well as those opposed to the war.

[There was so much strange stuff circulating on the Net in that first couple of weeks after the 9/11 attacks.  Much of it was predictably racist and stupidly patriotic.  I wish I'd saved more of it, but I did save this one very odd piece, a strange blend of Hallmark and Rumsfeld.]

Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 9:34 AM
Subject: FW: Fw: The Binch – Dr Suess – with a patriotic twist

> > Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot,
> > But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not.
> > The Binch hated U.S! the whole U.S. way!
> > Now don’t ask me why, for nobody can say,
> > It could be his turban was screwed on too tight.
> > Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright

> > But I think that the most likely reason of all
> > May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
> > But, Whatever the reason, his heart or his turban,
> > He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban.

> > “They’re doing their business,” he snarled from his perch.
> > “They’re going to temple! They’re going to church!
> > They’re leading the world, and their empire is thriving,
> > I MUST keep the S’s and U’s from surviving!”

> > Tomorrow, he knew, all the U’s and the S’s,
> > Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses,
> > They’d go to their offices, playgrounds and schools,
> > And abide by their U and S values and rules,

> > And then they’d do something he liked least of all,
> > Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
> > Would stand all united, each U and each S,
> > And they’d sing Uville’s anthem, “God bless us! God bless!”

> > All around their Twin Towers of Uville, they’d stand,
> > and their voices would drown every sound in the land.
> > “I must stop that singing,” Binch said with a smirk,
> > And he had an idea–an idea that might work!

> > The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours,
> > And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers.
> > “They’ll wake to disaster!” he snickered, so sour,
> > “And how can they sing when they can’t find a tower?”

> > The Binch cocked his ear as they woke from their sleeping,
> > All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping,
> > Instead he heard something that started quite low,
> > And it built up quite slow, but it started to grow–

> > And the Binch heard the most unpredictable thing…
> > And he couldn’t believe it–they started to sing!
> > He stared down at U-ville, not trusting his eyes,
> > What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise!
> > Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
> > Was singing! Without any towers at all!

> > He HADN’T stopped U-Ville from singing! It sung!
> > For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
> > Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride,
> > And you can’t smash the towers we hold deep inside.

> > So we circle the sites where our heroes did fall,
> > With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small,
> > And we mourn for our losses while knowing we’ll cope,
> > For we still have inside that U-Pride and U-Hope.

> > For America means a bit more than tall towers,
> > It means more than wealth or political powers,
> > It’s more than our enemies ever could guess,
> > So may God bless America! Bless us! God bless!

The news is almost too much to bear. Bush invokes that good old American standby in times of crisis: the frontier, drawing a comparison between the government’s desire to get Bin Laden and the old “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters. I wait for him to declare a bounty on the head of this rascally varmint. But he doesn’t have to. In another news item a White House spokesman assures us that the self-imposed government ban against assassinating foreign leaders probably doesn’t apply in this case, since it’s a case of self-defense. Suddenly, I see whole new vistas opening up before us. Given what a stalwart justification for homicide the whole idea of self-defense has proved in the courts, I imagine it can prove similarly flexible in the international arena. Indeed, given the many and varied definitions of “threats to our national interest” that have justified US intervention all over the world, the possibilities are endless. Tony Blair just better not piss us off `s all.

Another government official (Powell? May even have been Bush again) declares that we need to stop terrorism “at any cost.” Any citizen of a free democracy needs to get very worried when they hear those words. And today, we also began to get an inkling of what that cost might be, as Ashcroft announces his intention to enhance the already considerable powers of the government agencies conducting surveillance operations.

But most disturbing of all, perhaps, a wave of retaliatory attacks against Arab-Americans, Muslims, or anyone who even looks vaguely Middle Eastern, is today described by a news commentator as a series of “bias” crimes. What is this? The right wing responding to its own self-created myth of political correctness with its own sanitizing of language? I think we can very definitely at this particular time refer to these as hate crimes.