Smiler

To smile is to wonder. This is what smile means coming from the Latin mirari, to wonder. Animals perhaps do not wonder as people do (not a bad thing because it does not carry them away), and so do not smile. But maybe the smile is not a good thing. Maybe the animals do not smile because they are still in touch with their animal and healthy selves. Maybe man smiles because he thinks he knows something (or doesn't know something). Either way, the thinking is the problem. So, maybe the smile is not a good thing. Maybe, like the green light, it gives the go ahead for more 'pollution', wonder itself being a sort of polluting of the aboriginal mind. Or maybe, I'm just glad to get away from the pollution. Which is why I smile every time I'm in the hills.

A Moveable Halo

The halo confers wholeness upon the animal, or is it the other way around? At any rate, all animals have halos for they are already whole and unsplit by artifice. Animals still breathe as Nature intended, they locomote and move under their own steam. They do not emote like man does for their moving blood dispels such pathological acts as emotionality. Nor do animals ego for they already go. By contrast, Man has thrown his halo in the wheelie bin and bought a car, or a gas chamber if you prefer that has now replaced his heart, and by extension his brain. Man's spirit is thus nowhere to be found for it is buried beneath so much nonsense. The halo which is there to crown the spirit is also nowhere to be found. But for those who still breathe, like an eagle breathes, like a leopard breathes, the halo is never far away.

Improvised Cycling: Dunlop to Neilston

I'm an improvisor, a gifted creator.. all I know is that we are constantly being born. This is a line in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, spoken by an imitable John Malkovich in the movie of the same name. It's a line (and film) that has stuck with me for some of these pertinent insights. Because we are being born at evry moment, this is what Nature is, birth, birth... birth. Look the word up if you don't believe me. And so it is, that we are all improvisors and gifted creators, and if you're not then you've been barking up the wrong tree and aligned yourself with a system that does not renew you at every moment. So, when the train conductor closed the doors on me at Barrhead station yesterday I had no choice but to get off at the next station some six miles down the line at Dunlop, and improvise. Luckily, I know my routes, and there is a lovely cycle route from Dunlop to Neilston on the old drove road that Rabbie Burns et al. used to take from Ayr. It's completely car free and people free and full of widescreen views across the shires. What's more, I had the wind directly behind me and it was a gust. The route took less than an hour though it appeared timeless when I cycled it. I arrived at Neilston train station to see the train arrive and then whisk me down to Muirend via some breathtaking vistas across the strath. At Muirend, I headed thru Newlands and into Pollok Country Park. I was home before I knew it, and yet...

Beauty on the Back Roads

 

'Oh what joy it is to have leave for living,' wrote Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain. And what more living and aliveness do you need than the moving blood and the pumping heart refreshed and reinvigorated by the body's own locomotion and its entrance into the bucolic. Passing through a shower as it passes through you is an experience that brings you closer to the Earth not further away from it (as driving in a sealed up gas chamber does). Inhaling the Earth and not your pollution makes you 'hale' and whole, and healthy. This health from your moving blood flushes illness and the ego out, renders you sane and clean. While the opposite can be said for those who do not move their own blood but choose a pollutant to coagulate it. So, don't be 'mental'... be elemental! Cycle, don't drive. Those who mote do not e-mote, those who go do not e-go...

Cycle-Fu

Don't hang about to get shouted at or hit. Do your thing - roar, wing-mirror, finger - and then skidaddle. You're not here for a conversation. On a bicycle you are no longer top of the food chain if you are sharing the road with monsters. Realise this and embed it in your flesh. This is how you become a Kung Fu master on a bicycle: by embracing Cycle (or equally Cycho) Fu. Cycle Fu is about using your brain, responding in the moment, and moving on. Thankfully, as an endorphinated being (who 'moves on' as Nature intended), this is not difficult to do since 'braining' and 'moving on' are part of your original condition. It's the other guy, the unendorphinated brain-damaged having, in his big catalytic wheelchair, who wants to stay and 'discuss' matters, who gets all e-motional (because he's given up his own motion). But don't be distracted by this appeal to your ego. Be 'motional' not 'emotional'. All car drivers are monsters who want to devour you. Just do your thing and get the fuck out of there. 

Dragon Whips Its Tail (Again): The Bicycle as Social Distancing Tool

We've all been there. Waiting to get on a plane and then suddenly the rush of morons skipping in front of you. Well, today, it wasn't a plane but a train and the impatient was a well-dressed man in his sixties. In spite of me (and bicycle) standing right next to the train door as it opened, he managed to step to the side of me and attempt to get in before me. I immediately told him to get back, that there was a queue, and that patience was a virtue. He told me not to get excited. And so, when I got on the train in front of him with bicycle underarm, I whipped my tail (the rear wheel) and hit him on the leg. 'Oops, sorry', I said. 'Didn't see you there.' 

Bullet Bike

Today, another train strike compels me to bike it up to the Cathkin Braes again. It's a fine cycle uphill through many communities (that now look like car parks) and some wide car-less roads. All in all, there and back, takes less time than a shit movie (about 80 minutes). And on the way back coming down through Croftfoot I manage without even trying a 'double cruising bicycle overtake' with two cars that are at least 500m apart. This was due to the wind behind me and the fact that Castlemilk Drive is a long winding emphatically downhill traffic-calmed ski-slope. Possibly the best downhill you will ever have. And the fact that it's got speed bumps on it which the cyclist can obviously avoid (but which cars cannot, at least not at speed) means that any overtaking that is done is without consequences (car drivers do not like to get overtaken). So, for all the wild cyclists out there, who want to give car drivers some of their own nonsense back, you could do a lot worse than cycling down Castlemilk Drive.