Statesboro Blues

Blind Willie McTell - Bob Dylan

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem”
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

I must confess, I am totally out of it. I know Blind Willie McTell and his work pretty well. I did not not know that Bob Dylan wrote a damned song about him. Apparently a damned famous song, judging by the number of covers on YouTube. Out of the loop again. Damn. That's the story of my life.

The Great Auk

This image is from Jon Guinea's blog, Consequences Dictate. Jon is on an epic adventure in Iceland. It's a long story, both terribly sad, yet uplifting. PLEASE go look.

Note: Do not let given names throw you. This are very own Jonny Hamachi.

1410 Garden: August 30, 2010

Summer has crested. It's still 85 and humid, but little drifts of leaves are starting to accumulate in wind protected nooks and hollows. So far it's mostly grape and bur oaks, not enough to take a rake to, but a harbinger of what's coming a page down the calendar. There are not many perennials blooming, an occasional rose or two, but the garden is overflowing with lush green growth. It's a continuing process of hacking back some plants and encouraging others. Most perennials only bloom for a couple of weeks. It has taken me most of a lifetime to see past the flashy flowers and anchor my garden with plants that have foliage that will carry them, that can justify their existence without the flowers. (There has to be some analogy about women tucked in there.) So I'm relying on the annuals, little more than so much colored hay, to carry me through until the Fall flowers - asters, sedums and mums kick in for the final show, along with a few roses that will bloom again in the coolness of autumn.

Late summer is weed time. I've spent the last week doing some serious weeding, pulling up a bumper crop of tree seedlings which have been gaining tap roots while lurking beneath the foliage. I usually put down a layer of mulch down in Fall to help control the weeds, not because it's the ideal time, but because that's when the stores look at the pallets of mulch still left and have blow out sales. It is amazing, my little postage stamp of a garden ate 22 bags of mulch and was still hungry for more. I have my eyes on some bags of river rock too. I'm waiting for them to be a little more motivated before I pull my financial trigger. When I stopped to pick up groceries a couple of days ago they were putting out buckets of Sweet Autumn Clematis. I didn't buy any ... yet, mostly because they caught me off-guard. I did plant them in my imagination later while I was sitting on the bench smoking a maduro. Maybe. A little weedy, but you can never have too many clematis. One of the local nurserys also has a weeping Siberian pea tree, Caragana arborescens pendula, that I have eyed for two years. It's grafted as a small tree so it is a little pricey. The manager says she is NOT going to overwinter it again this year and she'll give me a call with an offer I can't refuse if it's still there in a month. I'm praying for the recession to hold for one more month. Unfortunately, I think I'm safe.

The Great Minnesota Get-Together

Good God! Food on a stick! The Minnesota State Fair is on! In the next two weeks over a million and a half people will eat food on a stick until they are ill. People really know how to have a good time out here in Flyover Land. Following stolen from red Ravine who stole it from F.Scott Fitzgerald.

The two cities were separated only by a thin well-bridged river; their tails curling over the banks met and mingled, and at the juncture, under the jealous eye of each, lay, every fall, the State Fair. Because of this advantageous position, and because of the agricultural eminence of the state, the fair was one of the most magnificent in America. There were immense exhibits of grain, livestock and farming machinery; there were horse races and automobile races and, lately, aeroplanes that really left the ground; there was a tumultuous Midway with Coney Island thrillers to whirl you through space, and a whining, tinkling hoochie-coochie show. As a compromise between the serious and the trivial, a grand exhibition of fireworks, culminating in a representation of the Battle of Gettysburg, took place in the Grand Concourse every night.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald,  A Night at the Fair

N' Orleans - Change Coming

One face of New Orleans is racist and corrupt - just awful; the other is wonderful, optimistic, the best of what we are.

The Chieftans - Sting & Marianne

I give the Long Black Veil CD a rare 5 stars. A Sinead O'Connor cut of Danny Boy is also included. Also the Rollingstones, Van Morrison and a lot of other great stuff. I like the Chieftans because they all look like they could have lived in Clarks Grove in the 1950s, a great time to be a kid.

Also on the Veil:

Better World Books

Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than six million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.

I don't understand their business model, but the books are cheap, the shipping is free and the profits (?) go to a good cause. Lorna buys a lot of her book club books from them. I just bought a used hard copy of a wine book, Educating Peter, for less than $5.00 including shipping.  Better World Books                                                  
 

Horrible People

This is great stuff.  I don't want to go to the hassle, so go to the Church of the Sweet Ride and pray for us all.

Help! Quicksand!

This one is for Rev Dick. Why the Rev? I dunno, it just seems a Rev Dick thing. Ya know, a religious experience - the sort of thing he photographs on his adventures discovering the single track backwoods.

Danny Boy

In early 2006 Dan Ulwelling died. This was the last song sung at his funeral. 

Bicycle Crashes

On the risky "Coffee Shop Run" a couple of days ago, Jack Gabus had an accident with his old Gary Fisher. The pavement won. He was skinned up, a broken rib or two and a badly bruised hip, but the Fisher came away unscathed. 

Everyone who rides for any length of time has had these falls. Fortunately I have never had an altercation with a car. My worst was a fall I had ten or fifteen years ago. I left Lanesboro, Minnesota on the Root River Trail in the morning on my old Colnago Super, headed the thirty miles to the end of the trail in Houston. As the trail nears Houston it climbs out of the river valley up to the high ground. Apparently the state had issues acquiring the right of way because the trail is silly steep with a couple of switchbacks to gain the elevation. It's one of those hills that has you looking back between your legs at the freewheel, praying there is just one more big cog left. I am not a good climber. I won't say I conquered it; I survived it. I did not become a pedestrian. 

After the hill it's more or less flat running for a couple of miles into town where I rested and had a snack under a tree in the park. As I was coming back I was thinking about the pros screaming down those twisting alpine roads. By the time I crested the hill I had convinced myself that I could do that too, and I let 'er roll. This was a terrible mistake. I don't know what I was thinking. The pros are riding down automobile roads with wide, sweeping curves. I wasn't. By the time I realized my folly the vintage Campagnolo brakes were not up to the task. I hung on the outside lip of the trail through the first curve, went into the second curve all jacked out of shape and shot off the road. The trail is steep enough that they were having erosion issues and had orange plastic erosion fence strung up on steel fence posts across the ditches. I hit the fence sliding broadside in the weeds. The bike and I somersaulted over the fence. I instinctively threw the Colnago up to protect it. Unfortunately, in the process, I impaled my guts on the top of one of the posts. I lay in the weeds for a quite a while holding my stomach, afraid to look. My shorts were ripped, my skin torn, bleeding and bruised, but I was okay. I felt like I had been gored by a runaway bull, but I was okay. The bike didn't have a scratch.

I think it was the longest thirty miles of my life. I had no juice left. By the time I got to Rushford I had bonked completely. I had no money on me, but I was desperate. I stopped at a cafe and threw myself on their mercy. I must have looked pretty bad. They didn't hesitate. They gave me a chocolate malt and a banana and I was able to ride the twenty miles back to my truck and the trip back home. 

Belgium. BELGIUM, Belgium, Belgium!

Review from Competitive Cyclist:

"To a bike-mad American daydreamer, that utterance, Belgium, it arouses skin-tingling romantic visions: Shit-streaked cobbles, machete-like crosswinds, ceaseless overcast and wet and a hundred riders surrounding you who'd sooner stiff-arm you into the gutter than give up their spot in the echelon: Belgium is the muse that motivates everyone we know (or at least everyone we like) on those days when the cold and the rainshowers make training seem like a longshot.

Belgium is mecca. We made our pilgrimage once and experienced such a totalizing harshness that, in retrospect, it bore no resemblance to our Belgium daydreams. And that's where Joe Parkin's life took a different tack from ours. At the behest of an in-his-prime-with-7-Eleven Bob Roll, Joe left the soft world of California road racing in the late 80's to see if he could stick in Europe's ultimate proving ground. Joe's experience in Belgium is the basis for the astonishing book, A Dog in a Hat.

Joe spent one year tearing it up in the amateur scene in Belgium, before turning pro for 5 years and traveling Europe trying to make his mark. A Dog in a Hat is outstanding for many reasons, perhaps none so important as the fact that Joe didn't have a superstar's engine. Breaking through to become a Tour de France KOM or a Classics winner wasn't an option for him. The very fact that he was a 2nd-tier quality pro makes the substance of this book eye-opening. You'll be fascinated by his humility, his determination, and by the warped way domestiques set their goals and weigh success.

Is A Dog in a Hat the best book we've ever read about bike racing? Undeniably yes. The essential truths you'll learn about Belgian bike racing are timeless. And the self-effacing (and often hilarious) way Joe narrates the absurdity of these traditions will make you laugh out loud. Of everything written about bike racing throughout the history of mankind, Chapter 3, "Kermis Don't Play Fair," is the most important 20 pages ever penned. No one should be permitted to own a USA Cycling license without being able to recite this chapter from heart. If you have the least bit of interest in Belgian bike culture, you owe it to yourself to read A Dog in a Hat. And if you don't, then you need to trade in your bike for golf clubs."

Amazon $15, pick up The Rider, by Tim Krabbe on the way by for only another $10.