Twelve and a Half Per Cent

Three hours is about the average duration of my pastoral excursions inlucing getting the train to wherever I'm going. Normally, I'm on the bicycle or on foot for between an hour and two hours, not much more. So, today, I was out the door for 10.30am and back for 1.15pm. Less than three hours. And yet, in those three hours, I managed to get up into the desolate moors behind Barrhead, Johnstone and Howwood and enjoy (and be en-joyed) by all that space, silence, solitude, and a flying locomoting-localizing body. In those three hours I traversed the universe, or equally universed the traverse. This is the beauty of cycling/walking in  these spaces: the Trinity (self-locomoting, self-localizing, self-locating) unites, and one becomes (truly) One. This is what we have lost as a people, as an aboriginal animal navigating its way through the planet: this Oneness that arises spontaneously out of the naturally-abiding. When you escape the noise and the ferrying devices, and start doing things on your own, primal things like moving and 'bodying forth' in primal spaces, strange things start happening to the body-mind. It begins receiving a power that appears to come straight out of the earth itself, and that clarifies. This 'power' helps us to see Reality as it is, and tap in, now rooted as we are through locomoting in space, to the one underlying phenomenon. It is a power that we all should have, and yet do not, for our infantile fascination with the car destroys it. If we can't devote a mere three hours a day (that's 12.5%) to our own body's galvanizing system then you don't deserve a body. It's like buying a lamp and then never plugging it in. What's the point in having the lamp in the first place?

Even an agent gets twelve and a half per cent. Indeed, this is what 'agent' means: 'one who acts,' from Latin agentem (nominative agens) "effective, powerful," present participle of agere "to set in motion, drive forward; to do, perform; keep in movement".

The real 'driver' drives his own body, not some machine that pollutes his environment and dismisses his body.

Triple Fresh: Cycling in the Rain

Cycling in the rain is not just refreshing, it's double refreshing (or perhaps even refreshing squared). Not only do you get the freshness of a light rain cooling you as you go, but you have the freshness of your own cardiovascular system arising in the form of endorphins and the like. This was the case this morning. It hadn't rained all spring and then on the first day of summer, yep, you guessed it, torrential downpours all over. Ah, the Glasgow patter...! At any rate, it's not just the freshness that I enjoy (and am en-joyed by), but the fact that when it rains in Glasgow, everyone stays indoors. So, point two of cycling in the rain: no people, and no five metre leashes cordoning off the paths. Then  we discover that when it rains there is more oxygen in the air. Each time a raindrop hits you, you are pumped with a shot of O2, which for a cyclist is like smack to a junky. Not only this, but you have the concomittant effect of being wetted and not sweating and thus not losing fluids as might be the case on a warm sunny day. All these things, combined with the emptiness of paths and country roads, and the freshness attained from the rained upon locomotive body, gives us our triple fresh status (or perhaps even fresh cubed).

Unstoppable

It occurred to me this morning when cycling that I was in the flow, the flow being that of never stopping and of being that is unstoppable. Of course, at certain points during my pastoral excursions, I pause and stop, dismounting from my metal pegasus to walk alongside her, or sit by a verge. But even during these pauses there is no stopping. This reminded me of an epiphany I had when I was a child gazing out of a stationary bus window. I must've been about twelve or so, but I clearly remember the moment when I realised that nothing actually stopped, that everything even those stationary vehicles sat at the red lights opposite were moving if only at an infinitesimal speed. Indeed, the very act of coming to a halt and of denying the great cosmic flow I realised was a veritable sign of stupidity like denying the presence of the sun. So, it came as no surprise to learn that the word 'stop' and the word 'stupid' were not so far removed etymologically. Stop derives from Vulgar Latin stuppare 'to stop or stuff with tow or oakum' as in to plug and stop something flowing, but the very act of attempting to stop the flow is a sign of stupidity, is it not, for the flow, no matter how hard you try will always keep flowing. This leads me to the conclusion that all car drivers (as opposed to cyclists) are necessarily stupid because of all the 'stopping' they have to conform to in the shape of red lights, people crossing roads etc. etc. Cyclists by contrast never stop, because they are always in the flow - the flow being being that is open that is 'flowing and flowering' because of its openness and its self-propulsion. Car drivers, conversely, are closed; they neither flow nor flower because they are propelled passively by a pollutant that destroys their own bodies and their land. Their brains suffer too as a fucntion of their bodies since all brainpower - all cognition - is a function of locomotion and of self-propulsion. So, as far as this is concerned, car drivers are not just stupid and stupefied through the act of being carried and prammed, they are exponentially stupid for being closed off, removed from their own cardiovascular and respitory systems, and for destroying their matricial land that feeds and shelters them. Stupidity cubed in other words which amounts to severe brain damage. This is all because of man's capacity to stop.

And is it not a matter of truth that man's environment has been destroyed because man has managed to learn via science (and the concommitant absence of con-science) how to 'stop the flow' and 'dam' Nature up, not realising that Nature cannot be dammed and that she will always find another way? As far as this is concerned, man's learning to stop is also man's learning of stupidity. And this has caused him to stop his self and plug up the flow that energizes that self. The human stops flowering and becomes man, a fetid stagnant entity that feeds off its host plant like a parasite. This is why man, under the remit of science and not conscience, in the undertow of the pollutant pram and not his own universally flowing body, is dammed.

TOTO: The Old-Timer Over-Take

Today, on the day that I'm supposed to be fifty, I perform a bicycle manoeuvre for the scond time in as many weeks that I have called TOTO (just like the wily little canine out of The Wizard of Oz). The first time I didn't think much about it, the second time however I realized it as a psycho-behavioural tick that some cyclists (not necessarily older) have: that of proving to themselves that they've 'still got it'. The manoeuvre is simple: a cyclist overtakes you (in these two cases an older cyclist in his fifties, ahem...) and proceeds not to pull away as you would expect but to slow down from the speed that they overtook you at. They thus occupy a space in front of you, in this case about twenty metres or so in front. And so, I realise that they simply wanted to prove something to themselves. Clearly, they are going at the same speed as me (about 15mph) as they are not pulling away any further, and so after the push of the overtake they start flagging. This is the bit I like, especially since in this latter case, the chap had his ears plugged in with the rattle, crawling up behind them into their slipstream and letting them do all the work. This is the danger of TOTO: that in overtaking you are also taking that headwind all for yourself which in your latter position (behind me) you perhaps didn't feel that acutely. Now, you have to work twice as hard and I, having done what all birds do and save my energy by falling into formation, half as hard. The beauty of this is that the chap in front gets his ego-boost (for the moment) and I get a little rest while he takes the lead, and all this whilst the chap in front thinks he's way ahead of me. This is the great danger of sealing your major sense organ - the ears - up whilst cycling. You cannot see behind you. And so when it came for me to enlighten this chap and pop out from his slipstream and overtake him, he was so surprised to see me overtake him that he almost came off his bike. Indeed, in this case he was so perturbed by TOTO sneaking up and around him that he muttered something (in Hungarian I think) to which I simply responded by pointing at my ear.

Two lessons are to be learnt here in the wild cycling game: number one: never overtake someone who is going faster than you, and number two: never ever seal your ears up (and thus your eyes too since the ears direct the eyes where to look) when you're out and about trying to navigate the land. Did this chap learn these lessons I ask you. Probably not. Which is why I'm writing this.

The Retard Cyclist

The retard cyclist is that cyclist who thinks they can cycle the wrong way down a road as if it were normal. I've seen a few RCs in my time but usually there is a good excuse like they are African and this is how they cycle in Africa. But when you see your own kind doing it, in your own city, you start wondering if stupidity is now an institution.

With the coronavirus encouraging people to get on their bikes some cities like Glasgow have marked out cycle lanes on roads to accommodate the increase in self-propelled traffic. These cycle lanes naturally follow the same direction as the road (duh) and have, just in case morons are about, huge painted markings at their entrances stating in block capitals three feet high: NO ENTRY.

Does this stop the RC,  and the cyclist so enmeshed in his own echo chamber (headphones in, dog running by his side, staring into phone...)? No, it does not. Which convinces me at times (and this is the danger of the echo chamber accessories) that they still think they are on a treadmill in their local gym.

Yet, it is not all bad. For the RC convinces the driver of cars that danger is afoot. The RC, even though a bane on all our lives,  helps to convince car drivers that cyclists are more retarded than they are. So, as studies have shown, the more freaky a cyclist behaves and looks to a car driver the more room the car driver will give them. Logical, no? Conversely, the safer a cyclist looks (helmet, hi-viz, all the bells and whistles) and behaves the less room a car driver will give them. So, in a perverse sort of way, the RC does us all a favour by inputting the random factor and causing cars to give way.

God bless the retard cyclist!