red meat

For all of you avid readers out there who have been disappointed by the lack of images here at the cafe... well, you're in luck. This tasty looking arm meat looked much more knarly covered in dripping blood and dirt. This is the cleaned up, medicated version. {yawn} I know.

So there I was JRA on my bike commute. You see, there's this little piece of skinny trail that bypasses a gentle arc of a turn on the paved section and instead goes in a straight line, effectively cutting out two sides of a loosely defined triangle. It peels to the right of another turn so it's a natural route, i.e. the bike *wants* to go on it. The trail begs, "ride my dirt!"

It's totally flat and then rolls down the face of a berm. Upon first dropping into the steep downhill bermy bit, there's a soft loose bit of sand and... as I recently discovered, a partially buried stump. I've successfully navigated this section 75% of the time ( i.e. wiped out once scratch free, made it twice) until now. I'm down to 50/50 :^(

The crash was spec[tacular], complete with puff of smoke/cloud of dust and a captive audience of car commuters waiting for the metering lights to go green. I quickly remounted and rolled a few feet until ...
...ugh...

... it hurt.

I kept going but realized that real output from my right leg = pain. That's the interesting thing about bike commuting. It's not riding-as-entertainment although I certainly entertained a few people today. It's treating the body as machine, as engine. If there's a green light, lay it down (i.e. "floor it") and be on your way. So when the motor is damaged but still at say 60%, it's still time to keep creeping along. I'm commuting. I'm going home. I have a list of things I want to do, first of which is get a coffee from the Albina Press.

Not realizing that I was covered in dirt, the barista queries the reason. I thought that I had cleverly positioned my undamaged side to the counter. {embarrassing}

So here I sit, battered and limping after pulling two significant pieces of wood from the nastiest scratch and getting everything clean and medicated. Overall the ride was pretty good: I was out in the sun & hell, I had a delicious espresso. I'm thinking that i'll take the gently arcing paved bit from now on.