Numbness, Numb Nuts

Cure Not Found

I’m developing a split personality on my bike. One side of me is honestly the finest, most courteous citizen ever to have a steel cyclocross frame between his legs. The other side is the rankest, most irascible jackass in the history of recreational cycling.

Let me explain: I’m moving soon, heading east out of San Fernando Valley and closer to downtown Los Angeles (how’s that for failing for reveal my precise location?), and I’ve been taking my last few rides on the regular routes I’ve developed over the previous six months. This has given me occasion, predictably enough, to take stock. For one thing, in the last half a year, I have not ridden a road bike once, except for on the indoor trainer (sometimes the air quality is so horseshit in Southern California that you have no choice but to ride inside), because I have chosen instead to roll around my environs exclusively on my cyclocross bike. In theory, a person who rides a cyclocross bike should be mellow, quiet, friendly, a sort of St. Francis of Assisi on two wheels. But in actual practice things don’t work out that way. Some rides, I’ve been on the mountain bike trails Topanga State Park, in the Santa Monica Mountains, and while a cyclocross bike can indeed handle some amazingly technical trails (especially when there’s a better rider than me handling these trails), a real mountain bike with suspension is far superior on the trails than a cross bike. Hence, when I’m carefully descending a steep trail and three sixty-five-year-old ladies in T-shirts and khaki shorts come bombing past me at twice my rate of speed, something of the St. Francis in me feels like shooting a song bird with a deer rifle. Similarly, when I’ve been riding my cross bike on asphalt, in Encino’s lovely Balboa Park, I frequently have been dropped (well, put into momentary difficulty) by little old men on road bikes. I guess you get what you pay for, right? And I should accept the drawbacks of my cyclocross-bike lifestyle and not be grumpy about it. Instead, I have ended up duking it out with any number of little old men and little old ladies, catching their wheel, attacking them, making myself feel like the king. However, when I’m riding all alone and not under threat of any other cyclist, I wave at people, smile at babies, and say hello to small dogs of the sort that I deep down would like to take to the ocean, put hooks on them, and see if I could catch a shark.

Maybe it’s all over, that kind of behavior. I’ll be riding in Griffith Park and around the Rose Bowl and so on next. Maybe I’ll finally quit taking the bait when it’s set out in front of me and become the calm, saintly, smiling dude on a cyclocross bike I’ve always wanted to be.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Not Too Old Yet

What writers want is piles of books, stacks of manuscripts with handwritten notes on them, cheap TV equipment on which we can view the Godfather for the 300^th time in case we’re uninspired or in case we just can’t live one more minute without watching Sonny getting shot to pieces on the causeway. “Look,” the Godfather says, “how they massacred my boy.” Ah! We want our lives to be a huge body of work in progress, and if correlative wastes stem from this pursuit, isn’t this all a lovely form of messy, energetic, creative fun?

In the fizzling, fetid wastelands of my middle-aged heart, I still believe in that. I want my life to be a bustling manifestation of creativity and art, and I want the sloppy, Beethoven-like hair and wild-eyed look to go along with it. To a certain extent, I have achieved this: I am broke, I look crazy, I feel like shit physically, but by God I’m having the greatest creative run of my life. For years and years, I would tell people I had ten projects going at once and the truth was that these ten projects amounted to ten ongoing email exchanges with ten of my old friends. But these days, I really do have ten projects going at once (some have to do with writing; some don’t) and I’m more often than not weeks behind on emails with old friends because I’m devoting so much time to creating instead of avoiding creating. Moreover (I love that word, by the way: it’s easily the most entertaining adverb in the pseudo-intellectual word-choice toolbox), I feel for the first time in years that I am free to express myself however the fuck I want and I can do this without fear of snide recrimination from insecure professorial assholes who are more worried about maintaining a positive image than they are about producing useful, truthful art. Am I bitching about university life again? Fuck yes!

But I do not mean to bitch, mellow reader. I mean to say something incredibly corny. I am forty-six years old – too old to be making a creative run, at least according to the nonsense I hear in Los Angeles – and everything that possibly could have gone wrong for me in the last few years has gone wrong. My mind and spirit should be toast. But despite the odds, despite how much I should feel beat down, I’ve got more gas in my tank (more gas in my ass, too!) than ever. Fuckin-A!

Where am I going with this? I forgot.

Oh, I remembered. You’re never too old to make your run.

Ass In Translation

Rules Nobody Can Live By #1

Rule: Don’t whine.

This rule is probably the cornerstone to being a cool person. If the chips are down, you goddam had better smile. If your ass hurts, don’t tell anybody about it. And apparently, if you’re Jesus, and somebody slaps You upside Your head, You’re supposed to turn the other cheek. I can dig this approach. Keep the vibe positive. Keep everything chill, no matter how close to the top of your life’s toilet rim the water is rising. Make sure to remain as mellow at all times as Cheech was in the van after he smoked the giant doobie of Labrador with Chong.

Obviously, the reason to refrain from whining is everybody’s life is a disaster in one way or another, and if we’re all complaining at once, what’s to stop humanity from finally realizing life is a pain in the wazoo and consequently forming into mass lemming/Jonestown/Heaven’s Gate groups and vacating the planet on one designated sunny Sunday afternoon? The Happy Person you’ve read about in magazines and in self-help books? Total myth. Being human means you’re miserable. Me, I’m as miserable as shit. I’m getting old, my body hurts everywhere, my teeth are falling out of my head, my eyesight and hearing are dimming, I don’t have any money, I hate what I’m supposed to do for a living, almost everybody in my profession drives me crazy, and nobody cares about me! Fuck! Now, what’s your reaction to that kind of talk? You have either clicked away from Mag’s Sentence and returned to the porno page from whence you came or you have returned to clicking LIKE on everybody’s Facebook bullshit. Side note: You don’t really LIKE that your friend Martha is making a frozen pizza for lunch and is going to Target after that. In any case, you don’t want to hear my troubles. You want me to say something like, “I’m going to work at my desk for most of the day and I feel blessed about that, and when I’m done writing, I’m going to go for an excellent bike ride, and when I get home from biking, I’m going to eat homemade pasta and watch Julia & Julia with my dog….”

Oh well. My resolution for today: I’m not going to whine about a goddam thing.

Um, maybe I can just take this one minute at a time?

She Secretly Loves It

Ain't No Resolving This

From the Truth Hurts Department, I present an old musician’s saying about New Year’s Eve: If you don’t have a gig on New Year’s Eve, you’re not a very good musician, but if you’re a bass player and don’t have a gig on New Year’s Eve, you suck. The good news, I guess, is I’m not a bass player. Other than that, I can’t think of much to celebrate tonight. I don’t have a gig and it’s been a horseshit year, not just for me but for lots of people. Fuck 2009.

Anyway, all whining aside, New Year’s Eve is Party Amateur Night, much in the same way that St. Patrick’s Day is, and as all of us former professionals know, Party Amateur Night is always ugly. So I’m staying home tonight and kicking back and ignoring the world and perhaps spending a few hours playing piano for my dog. She’s a kind, sober, thoughtful listener. Or something like that.

On a brighter note – at least in my view – Mag’s Sentence has been miraculously updating on a daily basis for more than a month now. This will be the 33^rd post, a number that has a nifty ring to it, and the plan is to continue with daily updates till my fingers fall off or till I finally convince myself nobody will ever give a shit about either what I have to say or how I choose to say it. Meantime, I make no promises about what direction I’m going to take with this, other than that I don’t want it to keep moving in any one direction for too long. For instance, how can this thing be called Mag’s Sentence and we haven’t heard one mention of sentences yet? And what’s the deal with Barbies? About the only thing I’m pretty sure will remain a steady component of Mag’s Sentence is cycling, because I expect I’m going to keep on pedaling. I make no other predictions.

Oh well. Have a nice time tonight, my friends. Here’s wishing you a great 2010.

Thanks A Lot

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She blamed her father. He used to tell her happiness was the ability to ignore the score. You’re behind your whole life, he would say, but in the end you’ll win. He lost. He died early. Heart attack. Playing softball. She was in high school, sixteen years old, and somehow took the long view of this. She kept smiling. She moved forward. She worked two years checking at Target then two years waitressing at Ruby Tuesday’s then went to a Super Bowl party at Buffalo Wild Wings and met a guy fresh out of law school. He was into golf and sports on TV and liked pina coladas, he said, and winked, but couldn’t give a shit about walks in the rain. He smiled a lot too. He was a nice guy. She married him a year later, on Super Bowl Sunday, because that felt right, because the championship game meant so much to him.

One summer Sunday night, she was forty years old and her husband was forty-four and their son was sixteen and upstairs in his room. She was either downstairs in the kitchen putting things away or bringing things outside to the patio where her guests were relaxing with drinks and snacks. It was a lot of work but she was happy to do it. She liked having company. So did her husband. She stepped behind the garage to sneak a cigarette and saw her husband leaning against the wall with his blue, St. John’s Bay golf slacks at his ankles and with his golf buddy’s wife squatting in front of him and taking a careful look at his personality. Her husband ran his hands through the woman’s hair and closed his eyes as if he were discovering, after a lifetime search, the last unknown quantity in the universe.

On the patio, her guests in their department store clothing matched the patio furniture she bought a month ago at Home Depot. One guest, the man whose wife was behind the garage, chuckled absently and drained the rest of his Bud-light and crumpled the can and looked around not for his wife, not for anything human. She looked in the upstairs window, into her son’s room, and saw him shirtless, standing in a purple, fluctuating light. He was moving. She could not see his hands. She had a long way yet to go. She hoped she had endurance enough to get there. She smiled at her guest and asked if he would like another beer. He did. He handed her the empty can and an empty plastic plate and a plastic fork and a crumpled paper napkin and she took these things inside.

Bike Maintenance Tip

Whatever Turns Your Crank

This dirty cyclocross crank has nothing to do with what I have to say today, other than, like everybody else, I enjoy doing whatever turns my crack and I’m not ashamed to look at my crank for long periods of time – without touching it even!

A few years ago, I was wandering around the internets in search of the aforementioned and I found a blog – on MySpace, I think – written by a cookie-cutter-style literary asshole who teaches creative writing at a university and has published a couple of books that nobody’s ever read and whose reputation as a writer and a teacher exists solely on the tremendously positive, encouraging force of his personality. He’s the kind of guy who may hear the name Linda Letterwriter in conversation and he’ll say, “She’s a wonderful human being. Truly special.” Or you could mention the new collection of short stories by E. Masculated Weenie and he’ll say, even if he hasn't read it, which he probably hasn’t, “Certainly, that’s the strongest work E has produced to date.” This guy is a frequent visiting writer (on the one-night/1500-dollar plan) at universities all around the country, and never a summer passes when this guy doesn’t attend at least one weeklong writers-colony event, where he is paid well, fed well, and is well liked for his calm conversation, his appreciation for all points of view, and his selfless determination to promote literature and to foster a friendly, helpful creative-writing environment in which everyone can have their say and nobody will bristle at it. Sure enough, everybody loves the fuck out of this guy.

So when I found this blog of his, I was not surprised that he began his daily encouraging words something like this: “A number of people have been asking me to blog on the subject of narrative in the modern novel.” Now, if a person wants to blog on whatever subject, that’s great; have at it; whatever turns your crank. What rankled me then and now is that he included the number-of-people-asking part. 1) How many people were in that number? 2) Why would they ask this guy in the first place? Because he’s kissed everybody’s ass in the American college creative-writing circuit? Because he’s always pleasant? Or because he really knows something? I will allow that he might. Lots of folks know something. But he doesn’t know more than anybody else. The respect he is accorded has nothing to do with his knowledge but instead it has to do with his demeanor, which is as pleasant and unflappable as a McDonald’s vanilla shake.

This is probably nothing new in the world. You kiss ass; you get ahead. You bitch a lot; you turn people off, unless you find a number of people who agree with what you’re bitching about (this method works well on Fox News, I guess). In creative writing, the university form of it, probably because literature itself is dying in the face of new technologies, dissent is not allowed. You must say, “Everyone’s shit is wonderful. I love all books. I want everybody to take creative writing classes.” The consequence of this is that dissent itself may well vanish from the literature and without dissent, is there a literature?

Or maybe not. Maybe what pissed me off about the guy’s blog is just that he’s arrogant enough to preface his remarks by mentioning how many people wanted to read what he had to write. I want to tell him, "Dude, if you have to suck your own dick, do I gotta watch? I’m trying to eat a sandwich over here."

Fuck it. I should quit pondering this nonsense and go for a bike ride.

By the way, I think you’re wonderful.

Steel Dogs and Real Ones

This, friends and brethren, is my cyclocross bike. A true classic. Wisconsin steel. Mismatched wheels. Worn cranks. Dirty chain. Disintegrating handlebar tape. And check out the broken saddle! A disgrace. But the bike still runs just fine, or at least fine enough for my purposes, and I am amused and occasionally honored to be its owner. Besides, it’s the only functioning bike I own right now, which means, according to pure-cyclist logic, I’ve got to call it my honey or my baby and tell it don’t put my love on no shelf, et cetera. Christmas Day, I took it out for a monster dirt ride in the Santa Monica mountains – one of the coolest rides I’ve ever taken, with the sad exception of I was riding alone and when I’d meet hikers on the trails and say Merry Christmas, the hikers would glare me like I had said something wrong, which maybe I had. And a week from today, I’m going to race it at Hansen Dam Park in Los Angeles. Woohoo, no? Well, maybe yes, maybe no.

Lately, I’m attempting to develop a new theory of cycling, one where cycling is a value in the equation and not the solution set of the equation. The best cyclists I’ve ever known – and by ‘best’ I don’t necessarily mean fastest, I mean ‘purest’ - are like heroin addicts on two wheels: their life sucks without cycling. If they have to work in the afternoon instead of ride, they say they’re fucked. If they have to hang out with their families all day, both days of the weekend, they say they’re totally fucked. If they have to do anything that doesn’t involve cycling, they sulk and whine and piss and moan and make everybody’s lives miserable. You know what? That’s a bullshit way to live. Then again, the alternative, living without cycling, which is a lifestyle I tried adopting for almost a year recently, that’s bullshit, too. So I don’t know the answer. If a person can only ride eight to ten hours a week (tops), and if in this week a person wants to live like regular people do – consuming cheese and other joyously bad-for-cycling foods and drinks – this person is going to be on the receiving end of an ass-whipping on race day. And of course if a person trains twenty-five hours a week and counts calories and focuses completely on the sport of cycling, then this person will face an ass-whipping in one’s personal and professional life. Maybe this pertains just to me, but somehow I doubt it.

For the moment, I only know one thing about cycling for sure: My cross bike sure is sweet.

This is my dog Rocks. She’s pretty sweet, too.

My 2578 Facebook Friends

Merry Mag's Sentence Christmas

Keep It Simple, Stupid

One thing I admire about cyclocross is that it’s contested between endless lines of caution tape, ten feet apart. Even if you don’t exercise caution during the race, you know damn well you have to throttle it back in the sharp corners so you avoid crashing into the tape. The caution tape sets limits. The tape shows us the way to go, and we can determine for ourselves how quickly or slowly we move within that tape. But life outside the tape?

Funny. To write what I just wrote. These days, I have no dealings – or almost no dealings –with university-affiliated writers , but I know the way their minds work when they read material that rhapsodizes about sports and draws obvious metaphors from it. I remember when I published Heft on Wheels - and people at the university where I taught were pissed at me – I got hauled down the Dean’s office to hear what a hopeless, talentless piece of human garbage I was. The dean said, “Frankly, I would expect you to produce work more commensurate with the rank of associate professor at this institution. ” What she meant, of course, is my book was shit. I’m pretty sure that the dean hadn’t published a word in the full twenty-five years before she hauled me into her office, but what the hell: I wasn’t rising to her standards. I guess my national book tour and appearances on ESPN and Public Radio, et cetera, weren’t good enough for her. The dean, incidentally, was the type of person who had a huge grand piano in her house, with a Chopin Etude on the music stand – just for show – which to me suggested she maintained a lifestyle commensurate with a dean at a university nobody’s ever heard of. Oh well. I bitch about things I shouldn’t bitch about. In retrospect, I wish I would have published Heft on Wheels under the title The Dean Can Suck My Dick. Maybe that’s what I’ll call the sequel, if I ever get around to writing one.

So yeah. I write about cycling, about the simple experiences regular people have with the sport. I don’t write about cycling clothing or bicycle parts or pro cyclists or trends in the industry because, in the end, I don’t give a shit about the cycling industry; but I do give a shit about bikes and the people who ride them; and the act of riding a bike is not the grand stuff of dense language and impenetrable metaphor. Listen to cyclists talk to each other sometime. They come from all walks of life, all different political and sexual and religious orientations, and what brings them together are simple things: air temperature, wind speed, the steepness of the hill, the condition of the road or the trail, and so on. Why obscure this with forced art?

Anyway, a writer should never say that words do no justice, but sometimes a picture says it all.

Here’s a fine picture of the Unnamed Heckawee Cyclist. It speaks volumes. Merry fucking Christmas.

Her Enthusiasms

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She drove everybody crazy. She couldn’t help it because, as if it were an affliction, she was naturally overcome with enthusiasm. She would tell people – she would apologize to people – that she had a big motor and what can a girl do with big motor but run it wide open? Why turn it off when there is so much to do in one lifetime? Sometimes, when she dealt with her children or her relatives or her friends, when she’d explain a new idea she had in the works, she would see the way they looked into her eyes, a hesitance, a nodding rejection, a patronizing lift of the brow, and she would know the truth: no matter how many parties and dress-up days and trips out of town she organized, no matter what she did to alleviate boredom in the world, she would always be the woman with the blazing letter C on her chest. Crazy.

A while back, her older sister called and asked why since the beginning, since the womb, since birth, did everything have to be a such a major production? Why not mellow out and be like everybody else? This was an unanswerable question much in the same way that life itself was an unanswerable predicament. She was either getting herself ready for the next event or cleaning up from the previous event and this would go on, without pause, till she could not go on any longer.

Friday evening, she locked herself in the bathroom, ostensibly to shave her legs, to beautify before going out with friends. She drew a hot bath, lit candles, relaxed, and drifted off to an enthusiastic, dreamy oblivion.

The next morning, she woke in the tub, in the cold water. Her legs were not as wrinkled as she thought they might be. She rose, she put on a robe, she opened the door and could hear her children in the living room watching TV, and she walked toward the sound. The kids were watching an infomercial about a miracle cream that would send acne all the way back to the stone age from whence it came. With this cream, the announcer said, you would never be unhappy again.

One of the kids asked where she’d been all night. She looked at the TV, at the kid, at her pointless life, and she said she couldn’t remember.

Thank you, Lance Armstrong

Racer # 972 Ain't Ashamed

This is what we all dream of, right? The starter’s whistle blows, we clip in, we charge off at full tilt toward cyclocross oblivion, and our lives, which had so little meaning during the week, suddenly come into focus. Some people look good in this endeavor – their uniforms match, their equipment is top-notch, and they’re fit and ready to race – and then there’s Racer # 972, me. From the bottom up, we see, first, mismatched wheels; second, under the saddle, we see that I have forgotten to remove my saddle bag (with flat-fixing stuff in it); third, we see that the Bike Surgeon bib shorts bear no relation to the old-school Heckawee Cyclocross jersey; and fourth, and most disturbing, we see that Racer # 972 is about as lean as Jack Spratt’s wife. But do these things stop Racer # 972 from racing? They should, but then again, this is cyclocross in California, on the Sunday before Christmas, and even though Racer #972 has missed two full seasons of cross, he’s gotta get back into it somewhere. The other racers certainly didn’t mind. Hell, half of these racers finished ahead of Racer # 972.

*

I will say, incidentally, that it’s difficult to put together words about a cyclocross race without becoming sappy. Cross hurts like the proverbial motherfucker and all that, but then again, no matter how stupidly hard it may be, you can’t help looking back at a race and saying, “Damn, that was amazing.” Yesterday’s racecourse - at Pierce College in Woodland Hills – was definitely all that. There were four brutally tough climbs – one of which you had to run – and above we see Racer #972 looking like he’s about to die on the first of these. Actually, this was about halfway through the race and Racer #972 was catching and passing the two guys in black.

*

Oh well. In our continuing efforts to conceal Mag’s ass from the public, here’s a close view of these shorts. Not quite as revealing as the worn-out black bib shorts, but folks at the race are lucky the conditions are dry. A wet white rear bib short panel is invisible - completely invisible. Hence, The Bike Surgeon race team used to be known, affectionately, as Team AssCrack. Race note: See that racer in the red? I caught that guy.

*

I don’t care what you’re thinking: There’s NOTHING wrong with this picture. It’s great to be racing cross again, even if I suck at it! I hear tell there’s another cross race hereabouts on January 3. This old boy’s gonna be there.

*

Last, is that guy in the hat peeing on the Socal Prestige Series #15 results? I sure hope not.

Gone Crossin'

I'm off to the races for the day. Should be a classic and stupid example of sporting failure, et cetera. Pictures will be up tomorrow.

Meantime, thanks to everyone who's been reading and watching the weirdness here. More of the same - and the unsame - is coming up this week. Tell your friends about it!

Happy 12/20!

mag

By All Means

A Window Into Mag's Soul

That’s me, obviously, in my Heckawee Cyclocross jersey, slumped in triumph-slash-failure at the finish line of the Urban Cyclocross race on December 6. It’s quite an inspiring image. But that highly visible ass crack in the picture? Truly horrifying. If you stare at the picture long enough – which I’m not really recommending that you do – you can see into the darkest, rankest parts of my soul. You can see that I love kalamata olives and gorgonzola cheese and that I’ve watched The Dirty Dozen at least one hundred times on TNT and that when the chips are down, I’m the kind of fellow who likes to make black-bean nachos out of them.

I’m surprised I didn’t get arrested at the race.

Now, in the old days, in my previous life as a cyclist, this horrendous breech of public decency simply would never have occurred because I never used to ride alone. As all experienced bib-short-wearing cyclists know, the fabric on the shorts gradually deteriorates over periods of extended use. This is of course a wonderful thing: if you’re wearing out your shorts, that means you’re riding a lot. However, if you go on a six-hour group paceline ride in the rain with your ass visible through your shorts, your fellow cyclists are going to mention it, and probably not too politely. They’ll say, “Holy shit, Magnuson. You gotta throw out those shorts. I can see every hair on your ass.” Or they may work together to drop you so they don't have to stare at your ass for the rest of the ride.

But these days, I ride alone, and I’ve been wearing those bib shorts a lot, which certainly explains why nobody wants to trade pulls with me in the park where I do laps or why cars often ride slowly behind me or why groups of small children point at me and laugh when I roll past their school. I have been under the impression that I'm being persecuted for some fault in my cycling character, but no: My ass has been hanging out!

Anyway, I’ve been reading on the internets lately about some famous bicycle blogger who raised a shit-ton of money so he could ride with Lance Armstrong at a Team Radio Shack training camp. You know what? Fuck that guy. I need new bib shorts way more than that blogger needs to ride with Lance fucking Armstrong. I should start a campaign. Protect the Innocent Children: Buy Mag New Bib Shorts.

We’ll have to see how this sorts out. [Ed. note: Mag's size (for shorts) is large.] Meanwhile, on Sunday, I’ll be racing here - Santa Cross - if you want to see my ass in person.