The Seaside

This morning on the train a mother and her child going to the seaside. And it is the seaside down here at Cardross, Craigendoran, and Helensburgh. All it takes is thirty minutes on the train to get to Cardross from Partick. And the view from the window is spectacular: the hills, the ever-widening estuary, the massive Erskine suspension bridge, Bowling harbour with its sunken ships, the sands, etc etc. And then, in no time at all, you are at Cardross station which is practically on the beach. The smell alone of seaweed and sea should remind you of holidays as a child. It is a spectacular moment getting off the train at Cardross and cycling up to the main road. Turning right and heading past the golf club and the bombed out church we turn left into Carman Road, a beautiful moor road that takes us up through some wonderful sun-dapple and some wonderful trees. At the top, Carman Hill is waiting for us, so I tie the hoss up and set off on foot for the humble summit. And then there is the way back, down the road to Renton and along the wonderful sustrans path to Dumbarton and its seagulls. Here you can see some sights or just continue along the path towards Bowling, Kilpatrick, Dalmuir... and eventually Partick (where we started). Or you can just jump a train at any one of these stations along the way harvesting those endorphins that you have just 'grown'. No year should ever be complete without a trip to the seaside. 

Catcalling Car Drivers

Whilst on my bicycle I have never been shouted at for looking beautiful. Sure, I have been shouted at, but not for that. So, I don't really understand what it must be like to be a woman (a beautiful woman no less) on a bicycle being harrassed by ogling car drivers. But I have a good imagination so I can imagine. And it would irritate me, (this is not a one off event sadly), to the point where I might have to catch up with said car driver and give them a piece of my mind. Which is what one woman did the other day when a passing landrover driver made some crude remark about her cycling. She caught up with the corpulent oaf, took her camera out, and gave him a piece of her mind. Yet, when asked to repeat the remark he did so quite the thing from the safety of his carapace. Which is why when I give car drivers a piece of my mind, it usually involves a detached wing mirror. Don't lower yourself to their level. Never stop. Just keep on moving. Just keep on breathing. And while you're at it, take that wing mirror with you.

The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was On A Bicycle

I've seen a lot of things from the seat of my bicycle. This is the beauty of cycling: seeing and hearing, and being out in the open. It makes people who are not out in the open, who are not seeing and hearing (anything except their own noise and pollution), extremely jealous. This is the real reason why car drivers and their ilk get irritated at cyclists. Because they realise if only subconsciously, in the face of the freedom a cyclist demonstrates, that they are slaves to a filth and unfreedom that puts them in a gas chamber that then carries them across the now paved and vivisectioned land. They also realise, car-drivers, confronted by the fluency of the cyclist, that they are slaves to stopping (and thus stupidity) and the dreaded red light. This is because they have divested their selves of their heart and body, and allowed a pollutant to stretcher it as if it were dead. And of course when you welcome the attributes of death into your bodymind you welcome death itself. Which is why they have to follow the rules so strictly. Because they are not really alive (awake or aware), and this lack of aliveness confers a blindness upon the bodymind. Which is why they have to stop all the time: to get their bearings like a blind person. And this annoys them. So much so that in certain cases, like the McGill's 21 bus to Erskine the other day, the driver decides to take off when the light is still red, simply to prevent me (whom he has caught sight of in his rear view mirror) from overtaking his stationary vehicle and propping myself, as the cycle stencil at the traffic lights indicates, at the head of the queue. This is a dangerous thing to do when you're on a main road in an articulated bus with passengers in your care. You are not a bicycle with all the sensory openness and lack of baggage that cycling entails. But maybe, this bus driver has spent too long in his toxic cockpit, abandoning his heart to a filthy machine, slowly falling asleep cognitively as well as physically and spiritually. All the more reason perhaps to dream of being a bicycle.

The Stupidity Olympics

Panta Rhei You really have to make an effort to be this stupid, to be this stupefied. I am of course talking about the plague of phone-starers I encounter whilst out cycling. It seems that people just cannot leave this thing alone, that they are indeed addicted to this device and what it does to their brains. And this may well be the crux of the matter: that phone-staring as a form of stupefaction and thus stopping (of the natural flow of brain) is actually a pernicious and extremely addictive drug. Indeed, the whole point of a drug is to mesmerize and 'stop' that which has been causing you pain or anguish. As far as this is concerned the modern internetted phone is to the mind what the car is to the body. Where the car prevents the heart from engaging and the body from bodying, the phone prevents the mind from engaging (as undistracted conscious awareness) and from minding. The mind, like the stretchered body, thus deteriorates as it is mesmerized and carried by others. It is like this that mindlessness and dementia soon become par for the course. Phone-staring however is not the only stopping-stupefying device around. Society, under capitalism, is replete with stopping devices and behaviours that halt your conscious awareness and thus mesmerize. Sitting in front of a TV for example is a great example of stopping and being stupefied simultaneously. Car-drivers need only look at a red-light to realise how much they have compromised the natural flow of things. Meat-eaters, similarly, are stopped through indulgence (and the mesmerism of 'taste') if not the actual meat itself which plays havoc with the brain, the digestive system and the body in general. Then we have the mesmerism of fashion and its ability to stop the aboriginal self in its tracks, not to mention the mesmerism of adverts, movies, music, and western culture in general. So, we're up against it in a society and economic model that seeks to get you to consume (the non-essential) through mesmerising you first. This is what mesmerism is, essentially: a form of stopping (of the flow of conscious awareness) by highlighting a peculiar and particular 'object', and thus the stupefaction of mind. It is here, in this gap between Being, where stupidity manifests itself.

Life & Death

Life is spontaneity and response. It is self-renewal and self-cleansing. Life serves Nature and Nature serves Life. If you do not serve Nature, if you do not submit to Nature's imperatives, then you are a servant not of Nature (and thus your Self) but a slave to the anti-natural, the industrial, and the filthy. That means you are not spontaneous or responsive, that you are neither self-renewing or self-cleansing. Which means you're getting old (and dying), not living.

Dying for a Living

It pains me to see the bomb-suited and helmetted on a beautifully warm spring day like this. Construction workers have a hard time of it dressed in all that gear driving their little tonka trucks. I say this as I cycle past the idyllic little village of Brookfield where they are finally tearing down a dilapidated old garage. I see fat men in orange jump suits, fat men in helmets, fat men in tonka trucks. Fat men, moreover, whose almost blue skin suggests they have been raised in a dungeon and have never actually seen the light of day except through the filter of the bombsuit, the helmet, and the truck windscreen. I think to myself if that's what their bodies look like God help their minds. As I cycle onwards into the fresh bucolic countryside, I am aware that I am working too, pumping these pedals, propelling forwards under my own steam. Yet, my work and their work could not be more different. On the one hand you have the self-renewing self-cleansing power of the natural and aboriginal - the locomotive kinetic body - whilst on the other you have the self-depleting power of the outsourced body relying on power tools (that defile the environment) and a spurious 'technology' that weakens the body and renders it progressively unclean. So, whilst both activities may be seen as work, only one of them really is. Work, that is, as a natural self-cleansing activity that edifies and grows, and demands your attention, your muscles, and your presence. In the natural indigenous locomotive realm, it is better to work naturally and aboriginally for nothing than to toil at a task that depletes you, for millions.

The Myth of Sisyphus

The myth of Sisyphus was that he pushed a 'boulder' to the top of that hill when all along it was just his bicycle.

The Haircut & The Convertible

I recall many moons ago reading (and chortling at) the tales of a Glaswegian bus driver in The Blood Bus, about the various encounters he had with Glasgow's bus-riding brigade. Well, just call me The Blood Bike not just because it's the best way to get your blood moving but also because like the blood bus driver anyone that behaves like a moron on my watch woe betide them. Like the haircut driving his fancy black convertible at top speed through the pastoral country lanes of East Renfrewshire this morning. The wild cyclist does not tolerate such behaviour especially when they refuse to slow down when they see you approaching. These roads up here are unmarked for the most part and not much bigger than a single track road so when I see muppets hairing it towards me I do something that only a dedicated wild cyclist practitioner should do, that is, pull out into the middle of the road, preventing him from passing you and thereby forcing him to slow down. Call it my pastoral duty. So when I did today, this particular haircut (he looked like a football star out for his morning coiffeure) presumably thought I wanted his autograph or something because he slowed down with a smile. Maybe he thought I recognised the car. But when the penny dropped (I never stopped but continued onwards past his haircut and, by now, almost stationary vehicle) and he realised I was simply forcing him to slow down, it was too late. The wide awake cyclist had put the half-witted car driver in his place once again. And for that, he claimed twenty five points in the wild cycling game, (and another ten for getting the haircut to holler what cannot be printed here).