Cycle Life, A nicer community to (really) live in…
Cycle Life, A nicer community to (really) live in…
Support your local Cycling Writer
Have you heard of Second Life (www.secondlife.com)?
According to Wikipedia (my favorite place to find out about stuff, by the way, like having Cliff Claven in your PC), it’s an Internet-based virtual world in which Residents interact with each other through Avatars in a social network within a Metaverse wherein they can explore, socialize with other Residents, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another.
You might wonder “what in the heck does all that mean?” Some will surmise that people are simply playing dress-up on the internet. This would get you a passing score if there were a test to follow. Relax, there’s not.
Before we begin making this relevant to a cycling blog, let’s digress a bit further. If you’re reading this at work, you owe me for prolonging your distraction.
First, the origins of online “alternative realities” (how’s that for an oxymoron?) harken back to the book Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, who happens to be one of my favorite authors and a guy I’d really like to party with someday. He writes sci-fi thrillers that often are very futuristic, but frequently set in the past. Like, the astrological adventures of Ben Franklin. He craftily blends in huge doses of actual history with futuristic thoughts and prophecies, leaving one to ponder where real life ends and phantasy (sic) begins. That’s his stomping ground and nobody covers it better.
Anyhoo, in Snow Crash, people live and work and conduct their lives by jumping back and forth between their off-line and on-line personas, and these two halves of themselves are not entirely separate but actually influence each other in interesting ways.
So, back to Second Life, where the hubbub is that a lot of people are literally escaping to it. They’re creating a fantasy reflection of the self they wish they were, embodied in a handsome (or pretty) avatar (which means a cartoon figure, by the way), and directing their cartoon-self through this cartoonish world where they can more or less freely choose where they want to be, who they want to be with, and so on. Yes, there’s virtual love and sex and money. You buy the virtual money with real money, as I understand it; the other stuff merely exists in your mind, at least until the technology gets better.
Anyway, “players” get so caught up in this better world that they will sit placidly in their chairs, eyes glued to a PC screen for up to 15 hours a day, “living” and conversing in this escapist life while entirely neglecting the one they actually have and the people with whom they share it. If you think this sounds pathetic and sad, your test score is climbing.
Now let’s jump to the competing worlds of those of us who haven’t fallen soul-first into the black-hole of online metaverses, but something far more wholesome.
Like many people who frequent cycling-related sites, I’m certifiably one-flew-over-the-cuckoo’s-nest about the sport. I’m a frequent rider, a sometimes bike-commuter, an occasional racer, and a veritable shopaholic for cycling paraphenalia. In short, this is my alternate reality and if you’re still reading this, I’m not alone.
Like an online gamer, when I’m riding I am the same person but most definitely in a different world, thinking exclusively about different things. Also like said gamer, my team kit probably makes me look a bit cartoonish and something more like what I want to be, than what I am.
Fortunately, short of training up for RAAM, which I will never do (Are you people nuts? Attorney General Mukazey won’t talk about waterboarding except that he believes it isn’t as torturous as RAAM) — there’s little risk I’ll ever spend fifteen hours a day in my special world. That’s good, because like many people I’ve also got a day job plus the continuous duties and obligations of husbanding and parenting.
[Okay, important story segue follows, pay attention].
However, an important difference between an online escape versus an on-bike escape, is that when special moments happen on the bike, they really happen.
Anyone who hangs around their favorite corner of the cycling world inevitably accumulates a catalog of special moments, and I’ve got mine. When the next one is going to etch itself into memory is impossible to predict; you just have to be there, and things happen.
Last year, for example, I had the great fortune to share a half hour ride with a friend of mine and a couple of guys who happened to be, oh, the reigning TdF champ Alberto Contador and his sidekick Benjamin Noval. No kidding. How’d it happen? Quite accidentally, as you can read via the following link (http://www.bicycle.net/2007/tour-of-missouri-stage-3-time-trial-and-our-time-with-the-discovery-boys). Just had to be at the right place, at the right time, and you had to be on a bike — and we were. Rest assured, this memory will not diminish during my lifetime. (Once senility sets in, I’ll embellish it to have included all former Tour winners, and it was actually a race, and they all suffered, and of course I won in a sprint finish.)
Aside from this MAJOR indelible memory, over the past year I collected hundreds of other important fond memories on the bike, like riding RAGBRAI for my first time with my son along to ride portions of it and my father jockeying the RV from town to town (more stories about that for a later day); and countless training outings with the club or just with a couple of good friends to explore the boundaries of our fitness and re-establish the rightful order of things in the world; and even a few races where I finished unglamorously, but deeply enough within the pack so as not to be singularly embarrassed; and so on, and so on.
Now a new year is freshly upon us and I’m looking forward to beefing up my collection of special cycling-derived memories. So far, the year is off to a promising start.
In addition to one or maybe two outside training rides (Midwest weather hasn’t been so cooperative thus far), I’ve been adequately disciplined about getting on the spin bike in my basement that last year’s end-of-season form hasn’t been lost, notwithstanding that I’m old enough my wife long ago stopped putting a candle for each year on the birthday cake; so anything you keep from atrophying from one year to the next is a victory in its own right.
I’ve also completed a side-project I got underway last summer, which was to pen a manuscript (aka – a novel nobody has paid you for yet) about professional cycling and the doping underworld. It is fiction, meaning that the huge number of nefarious things in the book that resemble reality, aren’t exactly literal. As in the aforementioned works of Mr. Stephenson, the line between history and phantasy is left for the reader to determine; enabling me to skirt responsibility for any libel or slander someone might accuse me of if I said the facts in the book were factual. For the record, I’m not exactly saying that.
A couple weeks ago, I finished the first draft and the precious baby weighed in a hundred and four thousand words, and had gone over it once from front to back to catch any obvious bloopers and brain-farts, and was wondering what to do with it next: Hire a professional editor to work it into something better; file it away and go on to the next project, like installing all those energy-saving light bulbs I bought; or perhaps send it off to a self-publishing shop where they would put a colorful wrapper on it and list it on Amazon with my earlier one (http://www.amazon.com/Las-Cruces-J-T-Fisher/dp/1413761542/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201804040&sr=1-2) that’s presently on track to make me a more successful writer posthumously (with the upside that I’ll probably be in a lower tax bracket then). Seems the world’s my oyster, doesn’t it?
Instead, I decided to do something audacious and as unlikely as getting a Tour champ to follow you around town: Unrequested, I sent a sample of it off to a highly respected writer who knows a tremendous amount about our beloved sport, and probably is the most prolific cycling writer in the business today — and asked him for his thoughts or impressions.
I expected nothing. Or less.
What you have to know, is that writers are often quite different that riders. Even though they sound similar. Ask most riders anything about any type of cycling done by anyone anywhere, and you’ve sown the seeds for a spirited conversation that will fill all the available, plus ten minutes. If you ask a writer about anything related to writing, there are a lot of responses you might get that are not so welcoming and engaging. Writers can be quirky; let’s leave it at that.
So, I “cold call” Dave Shields (Tour de Life: From Coma to Competition, The Race: A Novel of Grit, Tactics, and the Tour de France, The Tour, The Pendulum’s Path, etc.) via the even colder media of email, no less, and by the way, I manage to send my email to an address that serves as the equivalent of his trashbucket, I find out later, and he stumbles across it, fishes it out and sends me a note back. The note did not say that he confused me with Hemingway at first read, and would forever more be my number one fan, nor did he send me a form letter or a terse “buzz off.”
What he did was tell me that he took the time to look over what I’d sent to him, and thought I might want to look into an editing/critiquing group that he belongs to and absolutely thinks the world of.
So this is what I mean about the people I meet in this community I would call, in contrast to Second Life, “Cycling Life.” Before I started this article, I tried to think if I’d ever met anyone involved in Cycling whom I didn’t like. I couldn’t come up with a single one; even the naughty ones are good entertainment.
My impression is that people in our world have more than merely a common interest; there’s something special in your nature or spirit that either has always been there, or that has flourished because of the sport. And you’re a literary bunch, all in all, traipsing about the internet for books, blogs and e-zines to augment the ProCycling, Velonews, Bicycling, and other magazines you devour.
But back to the manuscript; my intention is to continue working on it, and see where it goes. I’ve already joined the suggested editing/critiquing group and am very excited they would have me; certainly it will be an invaluable experience.
In the meantime, I’ve discussed with the “suits” upstairs at Bicycle.Net that I’d like to preview the story online to get your feedback – good, bad, or otherwise. So in coming weeks, we’ll be posting portions of the work in its admittedly first-draft state, and you can make ready with the roses and tomatoes, and throw whichever you feel is most deserved. Or if you are genuinely moved to tears or happen to be drunk, keep in mind I accept Paypal.
Now it’s time for you (and I) to get back to work before the boss comes by, so let’s wrap it up for today. However, before I do, I feel compelled to point you toward Dave Shields’ offerings with links his books on Amazon, with the hope that you’ll support your local cycling writer.
The Race: A Novel of Grit, Tactics, and the Tour de France by Dave Shields (Paperback - May 1, 2004)
Buy new: $10.17 60 Used & new from $0.61
Get it by Friday, Feb 1 if you order in the next 4 hours and choose one-day shipping.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.
Buy new: $19.77 35 Used & new from $13.77
Get it by Friday, Feb 1 if you order in the next 4 hours and choose one-day shipping.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.
The Pendulum’s Path by Dave Shields (Paperback - Dec 5, 2001)
Buy new: $18.99 22 Used & new from $0.60
Get it by Friday, Feb 1 if you order in the next 3 hours and choose one-day shipping.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.
Buy new: $10.17 41 Used & new from $7.84
Get it by Friday, Feb 1 if you order in the next 3 hours and choose one-day shipping.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.
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