You awake early, with help from neither cats nor birds. The sun is shining and the sky is clear and the temperature is 42 degrees. Your bike's tires are full and your gear is in order and so what do you do?

You renice the fitness thread to a higher priority, get in the saddle, ride to work. Not the 5.3 mile route, not the 5.8 mile route, but the longer 8.5 mile route.

You had forgotten things.

You had forgotten that just because it's warm while standing outside in the sun on a 42 degree morning, it does not follow that it will be equally warm while pedaling a bicycle at fifteen miles per hour under the same conditions.

You had forgotten that under such conditions biking gloves (which have no fingers) are inadequate. Your fingers and thumbs are in pain from the cold before you’ve gone a quarter of a mile. That's the reason you bought those thick, padded gloves three years ago.

You had forgotten that the cold seeps into every uncovered body surface. Your thighs, for example. If you choose, as you have this morning, to protect your legs with only biking shorts, your legs become thick, heavy lumps of meat three miles into the ride. That's the reason you bought that polyurethane gear two years ago. (You're wearing the jacket from the set on this ride! Why not the pants, too?)

You had forgotten that hills, even small ones, are difficult to climb when your legs have become thick, heavy lumps of meat.

You had forgotten the sun. The sun, when not obstructed by trees or buildings, is bright and warm, shining in a cloudless blue sky. The birds are chirtweeting. The dogs are awake and alert, ready to chase any bicyclist foolish enough to pass.

You had forgotten the odors, sharper and stronger on cold spring mornings. When you pass Lone Elder Store you smell the deep-fried foods, cooking already at 6:30 a.m., you smell burritos and jo-jos and chicken strips. You smell Stutzman Farms, which processes fertilizer, a half-mile before you reach the plant, and a half-mile past. The little chicken farm and the little dairy farm are pockets of pungency, a shock to your cold-numbed nose. Grassland Farms, a larger dairy, smells sweetly of grass and cows and manure.

You had forgotten all of the shit by the side of the road: broken glass, plastic bottles, fast food bags and wrappers. You see garbage sacks filled with trash which have been surreptitiously slung from a passing vehicle, likely under the cover of darkness. You see three tires. No, not tires. Wheels. You see three wheels with tires in a neat line in the ditch. Are they there for a purpose? You see a bath towel, a nice one, forest green. You'd stop to pick it up but your bag is full. You see a watch and you do stop to pick this up. It's a fine watch, perfectly serviceable. Brown band, both analog and digital displays. You see more broken glass, always so much broken glass. You see small toys and a shirt and a deflated basketball and several corrugated boxes. You realize that the roadsides, even here rural Oregon, are thick with trash. Thick with it.

As you near your destination, you are surrounded by a cacophony of sound, the honking of hundreds of geese taking flight. You stop and you try to count them. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. You reach fifty before realizing there are too many and that they are flying too quickly; they will soon be too distant too count. You estimate: this fifty is about one-sixth of the flock. There are three hundred geese there. And behind you, to the south, that flock is smaller, perhaps two-thirds the size of the flock to the north. Five hundred geese then. For thirty seconds you are bombarded by the honking of geese, the honking of five hundred geese, and you are counting them, and while you are counting them you are watching patterns form and dissolve, Vs appearing and disappearing, merging with larger Vs, you are watching individual geese while watching the entire flock while counting the five hundred birds while surrounded by the tumultuous noise of five hundred geese while you are standing in the middle of the road, alone on your bike, hands numb, legs thick heavy lumps of meat.

You had forgotten that when you pull into the driveway after biking to work you feel awake, alert, alive. Most days you tumble out of bed, doze in the shower, drive to work, are groggy all morning. The bike ride is long and cold, but you are awake at its end, you feel good, and this feeling remains throughout the day.

Why is it you don't do this every day?

Because you are fat and lazy.

A person can change, can't he?

On this day at foldedspace.org

2003 — Crouching Tiger [part two]   Continuing the tale of what came before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the film): the death of Grand Yu, Shu Lien's arranged marriage, Li Mu Bai's journey to Beijing.