To Live and Train in L.A. #2

When life gives you lemons?

My immediate goal in life – and this is a serious-shit situation – is to eliminate my natural cyclist’s tendency to complain about my fitness, my weight, my equipment, my available training roads and trails, my time available for training, my basically everything. True enough, before I got into cycling as a way of life, I used to be naturally grumpy, naturally prone to finding the worst in everything, but once I started hanging around with dedicated cyclists, my bitch-about-shit qualities matured into an Olympic-level activity. Much of the bitching in cycling stems from people making excuses for not performing well in a race: I’ve had a cold all week, I had to work extra hours and couldn’t train the way I normally would, I was having problems with my shifters, the cleat on my left shoe is coming loose. That sort of thing. I’ve never actually heard anybody say, “You know what? I’m a total pussy and I just didn’t feel like trying very hard on the racecourse today.” Then again, I guess I have heard that. I have said that, in fact, on a number of occasions, because I guess, deep down, when it comes to bike racing, I’m a pussy. You’ll still be my Facebook friend anyway?

Shitfire.

So yeah, I don’t think L.A. is a perfect place to ride bikes, but I don’t have any alternative, so I’m going to get it done in the space I can find. Funny item: A few weeks ago, I posted some nonsense on Mag’s Sentence about how I was going to race in the Tour de France this summer. Honest to God, somebody read that and got in touch with me and said, “Mag, you’ve got an awful lot on your plate professionally this spring. You honestly think you have time to prepare for the Tour de France?” Obviously, this sweet person is not a cycling fan. The Tour de France? I fucking wish. Then again, I don’t really wish. The Tour de France would hurt more than this old boy wants to hurt. I still want a little hurt in my life, though, and I’ve got this crazy dream of racing cyclocross every weekend next fall, from mid-September till Christmas. I don’t want to race to win, because I couldn’t win anyway. I want to race because this would be an entertaining pasttime and also a terrific excuse to avoid eating cheese and drinking heavily and watching the NFL every Sunday in the fall.

But cross season is a long time away. This means I can wait a few months before getting serious, right? Wrong. I’ve dialed in a couple of excellent bike-path routes, places where a person can spin in the little ring for a couple of hours a day, and for the next six weeks, that’s all I’m going to do on the bike: flat paths, little ring, high rpm spinning, no aggression, two hours a day, six days a week. If you think about a plan like that, you will know that if I actually follow through with it for the full six weeks, I will likely end up babbling and in need of a drool cup. But I don’t give a shit: Maybe I’ll get my spin back and by April be ready to go on the Tuesday/Thursday morning group racer ride that meets near my house and the racers won’t laugh at me when I pedal up to the parking lot.

Meantime, I’m gone spinning, and I’m not bitching about a goddam thing.

Weekender: Wayne Krantz Documentary Part 3

Hope you enjoy the third part of this. For whatever it's worth, the tune they play here, in my opinion, is one of the most thoughtful, joyful pieces of improvisational music ever recorded. When I grow up, I would like have my art be as joyful and smart as this. And did mention Wayne is from Oregon? That's a fine, fine state.

Enjoy the game today. I'll be back tomorrow with a regular, weekday-style irregular post. - mag

Weekender: Wayne Krantz Documentary Parts 1 and 2

Have fun watching this if you have time. I'll post the third part tomorrow and Monday, I'll be back with the usual unhingements. - mag

Life Sentences #7 SUPERBOWL EDITION

Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. James Ensor.

Superbowl weekend always opens my Miller High Life memory can and releases a rather unhappy, rather rank-tasting foam from Superbowls past, maybe because I’ve been at too many Superbowl parties with too many drunk people. Don’t get me wrong: I love the game, except maybe when the Packers lost in 1998 or last year, when I had the winning numbers for the final square with a few seconds to go and was about to win something like 750 bucks and the goddam Steelers scored and sure, sure, they were happy, the city of fucking Pittsburgh was happy, but what about me? On the threshold of winning 750 bucks? Grim, grim situation. I keep thinking if only I had gotten up from my chair and been standing behind the bowl of cheese doodles at the snack table, if I hadn’t been sitting where I was sitting when the Steelers connected for the final victorious score, the universe would have been different, the alignments would have changed, and that 750 bucks would have been mine.

That reminds me of another unhappy Superbowl memory. Years ago, I had the same theory about space and time and alignments and such – to wit, any change in game-viewing location may alter the outcome of the game, just because the universe is undeniably different if you move from one spot to the next. Also years ago, I had a girlfriend who would hear me discuss my theory and she would tell me, “Mag, you have a huge Christ complex.” I would be like “What the fuck?” She would say, “You really believe one little thing you do can change the entire universe?” The correct answer, in her opinion, involved me admitting I’m a childlike idiot and that I’ve always watched football the wrong way, at least till she set me straight on the essential arrogance of my change-location theory, and once I had admitted as much, that she knew her shit and that I didn’t even know what shit was, then we could go on enjoying the ballgame. The relationship technique she was using – and you’re familiar with this, I’m sure – is known as ‘whittling down.’ I guess it’s a tried and true way to come out on top when time runs out on the swampy, cowshit-strewn gridiron of love. And you know what I told that woman when she said things like that to me, when she tried to make me feel small?

Nothing. I took it. Most people do.

Okay then. Today’s sentence is an example of not only what I wish I could truthfully write in response to the question above but also of the time-honored tradition of using an infinitive phrase as a direct object in a sentence. An infinitive phrase, as we know, is a phrase that begins with a root form of a verb. In this case, our infinitive will be the classic ‘to blow.’

Sentence of the day:

I told her to blow it out her ass.

Analysis:

I (subject, and what a fucking fantastic subject it is) told (transitive verb) her (indirect object) to blow it out her ass (infinitive phrase as direct object).

Further analysis:

Thanks to the late James Ensor for, um, donating the painting used to illustrate this discussion. The painting most definitely corresponds to my change-location theory, don’t you think? In any case, this painting hangs at the Getty in Los Angeles. Go there. See it.

Technical Failures, Whining As A Way Of Life

You may well ask what the hell happened to the random picture that bears no relation to the text that appears underneath it? You may say, “Mag, have you really gotten so goddam lazy in your forty-sixth year that you can’t step outside and take a stupid, probably blurry snapshot and go back inside, download the picture on to your laptop and upload it to Mag’s Sentence?” I may respond with some friendly, loving remarks of this nature: “If you’re so great, why don’t you try it?” You obviously are trying it – most everybody these days is – and the chances of you living a more efficient and artworthy life than me are vast indeed.

That reminds me of something that’s occurring to me a lot lately. Hey, if you’re better than me, I think that’s great. I admire whatever you’re up to. You know what I’m talking about? We spend too much time on a who’s-better-than-somebody-else level. Like I’ve actually heard this question: Who’s a better guitarist? Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix? The only correct answer: Who fucking cares?

So wait: where's the useless, artless picture to go along with this post?

Okay, I had meant, first, to post a remix of one of my original Xtranormal videos today and then make a few announcements about several neato upcoming programming changes here at Mag’s Sentence. But wouldn’t you know it: Xtranormal has been puking the last few days, and I can’t access my account to access the remix. I had a long talk with myself and decided that this was going to be difficult, but I was going to proceed today without a visual aid.

Anyway, announcements.

Xtranormal videos. I’ve made something in the range of twenty-five of those things, and I’ve had way too much fun in the process, but for the time being – a few weeks, maybe a month, maybe two months – I’m going to set them aside and wander in some other crazy creative directions.

Posting schedule. I’ve been doing my best to post seven days a week since Mag’s Sentence started. I’m not sure why the daily format, except for I’m a freak, I guess. For purposes, therefore, of getting my freak under control, I’m going to back off to five posts a week. On weekends, if you still feel like dropping by, I’ll be linking to interesting videos, blogs, and news items produced by people with much more intelligent points of view than me. As always, I appreciate that you visit this place. And I owe you bigtime.

Ass problems. A number of you have written me wondering what’s up with my celiac-ravaged gastric system. I’m feeling much better now, thank you very much, because I’m flat-out banning gluten from my life. The last few days, I’ve been able to ride my bike without difficultly, and just last evening, I ate three bowels of some killer chicken chili at my buddy Seth’s house – lots of beans in there – and I am pleased to report that my system absorbed this and has produced nary a toot. Can I get an Amen on this?

All right then. Come back tomorrow for a spectacular Superbowl edition of Life Sentences. I’m like totally sure you can’t wait.

Happy riding and writing.

To Live and Train in L.A. #1

It ain’t no picnic. Let me say that from the start. In my best days of cycling, back in the day, back when I was a forty-year-old Category IV Heckawee superstar in rural southern Illinois, cycling was a matter of suiting up, saddling up, rolling down the street for a couple of minutes and then pedaling along essentially empty roads for hours on end. If two or three cars would pass in a thirty-minute period, we would often complain that the road had become a bit too ‘trafficky’ for our tastes, and we would seek, and easily find, quieter roads. We were happy cyclists indeed. What an inspiring time that was! Here in Los Angeles, however, a quiet road seems to be one where you can manage to pedal thirty seconds without narrowly escaping certain death from any one of the twenty-five million automobiles and trucks that cram the Los Angeles streets at all hours of the day. Sure, the city has provided bike lanes and erected numerous signs indicating the existence of bike lanes and bike routes. Sure, huge numbers of cyclists manage to ride on a daily basis here: commuters, racers, homeless people, hipster single-speeder douchebags with skinny jeans and no helmets, et cetera. But me? The great pumpkin on a cyclocross bike? I’m scared shitless every time I roll down the street.

Go ahead. Call me a pussy. I don’t care. The L.A. roads are busy and scary and while I’ve lived a rich life and am ready to meet my maker – my maker being The Pillsbury Company, of course – I don’t want to get killed while I’m riding my bicycle. Bicycles, you see, are for improving the quality of life, not for magnifying the violence attending one’s death.

Nevertheless, I have ambitions, misplaced, petty, foolish ambitions along the lines of “Gee, it would be fun to race my bike again and not have my ass completely handed to me.” Or “Gee, I would love to hang once again with a group of friends who like to ride bikes.” And so on. Some mornings, I read Velonews or Cyclingnews or CXMagazine on the internet and start sobbing because I want to get back into racing so badly. But don’t call me a pussy in this instance. Ain’t nothing wrong with a grown man sobbing about wanting to race his bicycle again.

So what can be done? Should a person risk death, on a daily basis, just to find inner satisfaction? The answer, obviously, is fuck yes!

If this were Facebook, you would have to click that you like the living fuck out of what I just wrote.

And you know what? I’m heading out for a near-death experience right now. Should be awesome. Maybe I'll see you out there and we can tell stories.

What Color Is Your Bicycle?

Life Sentences #6

Photograph by Seth Townsend (posed)

A sweet dog. Friendly. Obedient. As pure at heart as Karen in Frosty the Snowman used to be before the big lug melted in that desolate greenhouse on that horrible Christmas Eve all those years ago. Sure, Santa reconstituted Frosty, and Frosty said, “Happy birthday,” but Karen never got over the trauma and her cheery life never regained its spring. I saw Karen a few weeks ago, predictably enough on Hollywood Boulevard, standing outside Musso and Franks. She wasn’t coming out or going in – just occupying a space on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. She looked great, for a 46-year-old woman with enough problems to fill a few dozen Greyhound busses and drive them into the desert and leave them there till the vultures pick the bodies clean.

I said, “Hey, Karen, you look great. Nice to see you.”

She said, “You look great, too.”

I’m forty-six years old, and maybe about the only leg I have up on Karen right now is that I don’t smoke cigarettes.

For example, my dog’s name is Rocks, which is derived from Rocky Road, which is the name the good people at the Southern Illinois Humane Society gave her because she’s the color of the ice cream. She’s two years old now, and until yesterday, she was the nicest dog in the entire world, never one hint of aggression, never hardly a bark out of the girl.

I’ve been taking her regularly to a dog park near the reservoir in Silver Lake. This is in a nice section of Los Angeles – healthy-looking, dressed-hip professional types who shop at Trader Joe’s and who oppose categorically the harming of any animals in the making of this film. The vibe is friendly. People say hello to strangers in this neighborhood – rare indeed here in L.A. But when one leaves the friendly streets of Silver Lake and enters the confines of the dog park, one has entered an area akin to the yard at Pelican Bay State Penitentiary during a full-scale riot. Here we see widespread rape and brutality and blood and home-made weapons, and there is nothing the guards in the tower can do to stop it. Rocks loves it. And she does well in the prison yard on account of she’s so fast that none of the marauding rapists can get behind her and make her their bitch. She laughs at those punks and makes obscene gestures at them from the other side of the yard. Till yesterday. She was engaged in some inappropriate yard behavior with a light-brown dog of about her size; the dog managed to get in a few well-placed bites to her ankles; and Rocks totally snapped. She snarled and tossed the light-brown dog to the ground and held the dog down by the neck and said, “You fuck with me one more time and I gonna tear your throat out, ese?”

I wasn’t proud. She used to be a sweet dog. Now she’s a thug.

Now I’m almost too overcome with sadness to present today’s sentence, a simple transitive pattern that even the dogs in the prison yard know how to diagram.

The sentence of the day:

From now on, my dog bites dogs.

Analysis:

From now on (adverbial, expressing time), my (possessive pronoun) dog (the subject, of course) bites (monotransitive verb, meaning it only carries one object) dogs (direct object).

Further analysis:

I think maybe walking the dog is better than taking the dog to the dog park.

Following Up On The Underside

This week’s been hard for me, as you know, on account of some soft-tissue issues that are either going to sort themselves out or they aren’t. In the meantime, I’m saddling up and taking the tissues for a test ride, just to see how things are progressing, and when I get back from my ride – if I get back, that is – I’m spending the rest of the day on a super-secret and ultra-pointless writing project, which is the kind of writing project I like best.

I’ll be back with new Mag’s Sentence stuff tomorrow.

For the moment, I’ll close with a ridiculous motivational quote a number of cyclists have been passing around this week: “Success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work…concentrate on the work and allow the rewards to come, or not come.” I guess a genuine joy-bundle named S. Pressfield wrote that or said that or whatever.

Please don’t take heed to that kind of Pure-D bullshit, people. Be happy first, then worry about your work.

Happy riding and writing, everyone.

Life Sentences #5

One curious aspect of language is that even when you’re in no mood to be amused by it, even when your life is broken down and stranded along the cluttered, infomercial-lined roadside on the highway to happiness, you’ll hear a particular word, catch a particular phrase, and something about it will take the droop right out of your demeanor and you will no longer give a hootski that your circumstances aren’t perfect. When I was a boy, for instance, I was prone to feeling oppressed most of the time, which meant I was perfectly normal and perfectly inclined to sink into the mopes when I had been sentenced to a week’s solitary confinement in my room after I had committed an atrocity like shitting on a ham sandwich and placing it in my piano teacher’s mailbox or taking it upon myself to urinate on the Jane Austen section at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School Library [Ed. Note: despite psychological evidence to the contrary, Mag is not, nor has he ever been, a serial killer. Also, Mag tries to keep the scatological references to a minimum – he’s even in therapy to prevent this sort of subject from continually gurgling to the surface of his writing – but he apparently isn’t trying hard enough]. Particular offense notwithstanding, we can all remember those moments of youthful confinement, how Proustian in scope they were, alone in the early evening, gazing out the window, a few hours left of daylight, the neighborhood children frolicking hither and thither in their back yards, their world a delight, our world a wasteland of proportions as vastly desolate as the mindsets of the adults who banished us to our rooms. Then we’d hear a kid say something, maybe ‘hippopotamus,’ or ‘weiner schnitzel,’ or ‘Diaper Man,’ and we couldn’t prevent the grin from widening our lips into joy!

Hmm. I just totally forgot what I was talking about, hey. This happens once you starting advancing past a certain age, I guess. I think I was thinking about being happy. And maybe if you think about being happy long enough you can become happy? Nah. Fuck that.

Oh yeah: that’s the cliff I was driving toward: Today’s sentence.

One of the most joyful sentences in English is the implied-subject sentence, or the command sentence, or the imperative – any of these terms merit a Grade-A rating in my opinion. In the imperative, we address our subject in a complete sentence but we do not include our subject as the subject of the sentence because the subject of the sentence is implied and with luck the subject of this sentence has the wit to catch the implication.

The sentence of the day:

Fuck that.

Analysis:

(You, unstated, implied subject) fuck (transitive verb) that (direct object).

Further analysis:

Wasn’t that fun? Didn’t that make you happy?

Analysis of further analysis:

Fuck that.

What She Really Likes

A Case Of The Ass

Fellow Cyclists and Cycling Enthusiasts:

Perhaps I need a better picture than the one above to illustrate the problem I have down below, and by ‘down below,’ I mean my moral epicenter, the heart of my stern, as it were, the entrance to my Mines of Moria (and please cover your earballs if you find this line of inquiry offensive): Yes, my anus hurts. Not my ass. My anus. I do not mean this in a figurative way, either.

Since I was a boy I’ve had periodic bouts with a disease called celiac, which is an intolerance to gluten, the symptoms of which are lovely things like long-term depression, unpredictable weight gain and weight loss, and, most severely in me, painful digestive troubles. True enough, I could eliminate all these problems entirely by being smart – something rather alien to me – and dispensing with gluten in my life: no more bread, pasta, bagels, schnitzel, pancakes, Tombstone Pizza, and so on. I have eliminated the most profound source of gluten from my diet, Miller High Life, the absence of which has created a sort of long-term depression of its own. But I haven’t eliminated the other fun forms of gluten, namely pasta and bread, my two favorite foods in the world besides nachos (gluten-free!).

What does celiac have to do with my current anus woes? Some forms of gluten fuck me up more than others – oddly enough, cheap, low-quality, processed-flour products don’t faze me one iota – but this last week, owing to a spirited stock-up session at Costco, I have found myself in possession of numerous loaves of excellent, high-quality La Brea bread. First, it tastes great. Second, it really tastes great. Third, I’ve been eating La Brea toast breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Happy times, right? I don’t know the exactly chemical formulation of La Brea bread, but there is clearly some significant, possibly world-threatening quantities of gluten in that stuff. I would count myself lucky if I had simply gotten a bout of good old explosive diarrhea from this bread. Instead – and I apologize for being clinical – I can’t seem to get a clean pinch. That’s right. I can’t finish the job! And I’m feeling rather raw, shall we say. Now, this would be horrible enough for a person whose chief recreational activity is playing bridge with little old ladies in Massachusetts, but for a cyclist on a nine-month epic quest to return to regular cyclocross racing, for a man who needs to place his anus on a thin strip of Italian saddle leather for a minimum of two hours a day? To have Unclean Pinch Syndrome?

Needless to say, I went out for a ride yesterday afternoon on the L.A. River Trail, heading west along the 5 toward Griffith Park, and the anus pain and misery were so horrific, so searingly unbearable, that I literally rolled my bike down the embankment to the raging river and placed my ass in the water for relief.

I was not relieved.

A homeless guy saw me in the water and said, “Something wrong?"

He was shell-shocked-looking after being outside all last week in the El Nino rains, and if anybody were expert in things going wrong, it had to have been him. But he kept his distance from me and waited for my response.

I said, “My anus hurts.”

He stared downriver and shook his head.

“Whose doesn’t?” he said. And he walked away.

I called after him: “You want six loaves of La Brea bread? Come on over to my place.” But he didn’t hear me.

The moral of this story is simple.

Oatmeal.

Ponder that.

And have a nice ride today.

Respectfully submitted,

Mike ‘Raw Anus” Magnuson

Rules Nobody Can Live By #3

Rule: Don’t be a Kissass.

Used to be if you were cool, if you maintained the appropriate level of dignity, you would never, under any circumstances, brown-nose or ass-kiss or bend over backwards to light the boss’s cigarette or send flowers to anyone for any purposes other than acknowledging a death in the family or establishing the proper preconditions for a weekend of wild, semi-committal sex in, say, Wisconsin Dells, because is there a better place in the world for semi-committal sex than Wisconsin Dells? I think not. Asskissing, in any case, simply was not done. Ever. If it were done, if one of your coworkers were to be seen near the tool crib, with the foreman, cutting up and laughing at shit that clearly had no possibility of being funny, people would say, “Look at Kissass over there. Another minute and he’ll be unzipping the foreman’s pants.” Minutes later, when this coworker had reassumed the position at his machine, everybody would make simulated-oral-sex gestures at this person, and after work, this person would have to buy beers for everybody and promise never to brown-nose the foreman again or else face the very real possibility of death by muck-muck in the tavern’s parking lot.

Of course, we were factory workers in Wisconsin, functioning in a professional environment where advancement up the ladder, at best, meant you could move from second shift to first shift or maybe you could finally take your one-week vacation on the dates you requested. Still, the standard was solid: If you wanted something from somebody, you asked for it. If they said no, they said no and that was that.

I’m trying very hard to avoid picking on university English professors again here, as you might guess, and dammit, I’m going to fail to avoid it.

You should see these motherfuckers on Facebook!

Whew, that felt good to write. If I still were a smoker, I would definitely torch up a ciggie butt right now.

So we already know about the writer/professor game. You’re a minor writer at a minor university (or even a major university: why not?), and you have 2000+ Facebook friends, and you say nice things to everybody, even to the people you hate, and it’s possible, after years of saying so many nice things to so many people, you may have completely lost the capacity to hate, which means, not surprisingly, that when people in a room shout out “Jesus fucking Christ!” you turn your head to see what they want from you. It goes without saying, if you have networked to this extent and have become this endlessly friendly, that you have absolutely no edge to a word you write, because I’m sorry, friends and brethren, significant art cannot be generated from the moral equivalent of a bowl of cream of wheat! Yet this guy, because he’s nice to everybody, because he sends people little thank you cards and writes on their Facebook walls shit like “I really appreciate you and everything you do,” ends up publishing his benign material in every wonderful little low-paying venue available.

I hereby, and for all time, make simulated-oral-sex gestures at this person and at the system of literature he represents.

I guess I’m not gonna publish my angry tripe anytime soon.

I’m happy, though.

Say, can I get you anything? I really enjoyed that essay on Artistic Satisfaction you wrote in the latest Shriveled Nut Review.

Waiting For The Bicycles

Consistency

When you get right down to it – and why in the fuck should we not get right down to it? – the corporate types who are motivated by pictures and slogans and so forth are probably more busy kissing ass and giving the appearance of being motivated than they are actually being motivated by the posters in their office halls. My view: nobody is stupid enough to look at a picture of a bald eagle paired with the word STRENGTH and then decide to have a great day on the telephones at work. Or a picture of a tall tree paired with the word POWER. Or a picture of a mouse ass-reaming a dead mouse in a trap paired with the word WEALTH. Or maybe this has nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe we’re looking at a different-strokes-for-different folks situation. Maybe a certain type of person needs a simple word, something on which to focus, in order find courage to suffer through yet another long day endeavoring to make somebody else rich. I don’t know. One word never motivates me. One word means too many things.

CHICKEN, for instance.

Think about it.

See what I mean? Maybe you don’t. Sorry.

Today, CONSISTENCY rankles me in some way – in the as-a-concept way, of course. When I started Mag’s Sentence, I did so by establishing a couple of parameters, chief of which was that I would avoid confining myself within parameters, which meant that I would steadfastly refuse to confine myself within one identity, one area of interest. Most blogs by writers are in some way centered around selling the books of the writer or, worse, they are exclusively about writing, and if you’re not a writer, writerly matters are as boring as attending three straight performances of Madame Butterfly by the University of Northern Northwest North Dakota Amateur Opera Society. And cycling blogs? You’d think the authors of these things really do have nothing on their minds but things with two wheels, which is capital-B Boring. Odd note: The other day, Lance Armstrong said in an interview that all Alberto Contador thinks about, from the moment he wakes till the moment he falls asleep, is cycling, and when I read that I couldn’t help thinking that Contador must easily be the dullest person in the entire world, even duller than the 18^th Century British Literature Faculty at UNNND. Who cares if Contador is fast? We’ve got life to live over here!

Oh yeah. CONSISTENCY. Fuck it. I don’t want to fall into that shithole of the mind.

Speaking of which, look at that beautiful terrain in the picture above. Is that occasion for poetry or for cycling or for maybe cracking a bottle of wine and contemplating the meaning of things?

Life Sentences #4

Okay, check this out for grammatical material you can stuff in your pipes and smoke it. Now, it’s true that the written form of the English language is not all that difficult to master, at least in terms of spelling the words correctly and placing nifty punctuation marks correctly between phrases and clauses and items in a series and all that happy horseshit. Studies by prominent scholars have in fact demonstrated that even at the University of Northern Northwest North Dakota, one of the roughest collegiate environments in the entire world, students can learn how to write error-free sentences. Here in Southern California, however, where Harvard-educated people write TV and movie scripts and earn enough money from these scripts to buy fancy houses on hillsides in the sun, overlooking the ocean – ah, forget it. Someday, O ye citizens who appreciate a comma placed in a correct place, take the time to find some professional movie scripts online and see if you’re not reduced to tears at the slop. Oh well, I guess audiences don’t go to the movies to read – that would be like going to the bookstore to play football.

A week or so ago, I heard a writer (non-Hollywood) telling other writers never ever to write “But I digress.” Sage advice, no doubt. But I have to ignore it. For I have digressed. And I must write it. But I digress.

Back to pipes and smoking them:

Here is one of the coolest forms of sentences in the English language, something called the “Matrix Sentence,” which doesn’t have squat to do with the movie franchise. A matrix sentence is a sentence with one sentence imbedded inside another sentence. The embedded sentence often appears in the form of a restricted relative clause for which we have deleted the restrictive pronoun.

Okay. Got your pipes out?

The sentence of the day:

I am tired of hearing Tommy was the guy called in sick yesterday.

Analysis:

First, we have to isolate the independent clauses.

1) I am tired.

2) Tommy was the guy.

3) Tommy called in sick yesterday.

Then we have to recognize that we have omitted the restrictive pronoun ‘that’ after ‘Tommy’ and that we have omitted the restrictive pronoun ‘who’ before ‘called.’ The omissions are common in speech and not always so common in writing.

You still with me?

I (subject) am (verb) tired (subject complement) of hearing (adverbial modifying ‘hearing) Tommy (subject of second independent clause: clause in restriction to the first clause) was (verb) the guy (subject complement) called (intransitive verb, forming the predicate for ‘Tommy’; also, verb in restrictive clause with omitted ‘who’) in sick yesterday (adverbial modifying ‘called’).

Further analysis:

They ain’t making a movie out of that.

Additional comment:

Have you lost your mind, Magnuson?

Inside the Writer's Mind

Rain Nontraining

Dammit! I should be racing at the Tour Down Under right now, spanking the collective tails of the pro peloton, accepting accolades in Adelaide, et cetera, and at the conclusion of the race, I should spend a week wrestling with crocodiles – to improve my scant upper-body strength, of course. But I’ve been spending the week training in Los Angeles instead, which has been brutal indeed, since LA is experiencing its biggest weeklong rain event since Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo discovered California in 1542. My way of dealing with the rain: watch the Food Network and ride the trainer. This may sound like a pussy’s way out of a manly, ride-in-the-rain world, but you wouldn’t believe the wonderful new recipe ideas I’ve gotten this week, not to mention various really smart ways to decorate the table before plating dinner for my guests because you know what? Cooking for other people is all about improving life for your friends, or at least that’s what the cooking-show ladies have been saying all week, and why not believe them? I’m sitting for a couple of hours indoors, on a trainer, in Southern California, hiding from the rain when the temperature is 55 degrees; it doesn’t take much to imagine a better life under these circumstances. Probably this very second, as the legend goes, there are people out motorpacing in Northern Wisconsin, in a windchill of 25 degrees below zero, and I guess when we hit the first cobbled stretch at the Tour of Flanders in April, those people are going to drop me. That’s cool with me, I guess: I’m setting my sights on races farther along in the calendar.

On the cross-training front, however, everything’s right on track. My new neighborhood is famous for its incredibly steep streets and for its amazingly long staircases that rise up and over the sharp hills. The dog and I have been taking forced daily, hourlong forced marches in the rain, and while I have found the 20 flights of stairs near Earl Street to be rather painful taking them two at a time, the dog has said to me, “Them stairs ain’t nothing the way you’re runnin em.” She’s right. I have to pick it up.

Anyway, the weather’s clearing tomorrow, and I’m riding outside. Thinking about dusting off the road bike and seeing what life is like on 23 cc tires: I’ve forgotten.

I’m thinking about lamb chops with a rosemary lemon sauce, too.

Happy riding.

Rules Nobody Can Live By #2

Rule: Don’t Boast

If whining tops the list of verboten behaviors in the cool-person code of ethics, bragging has definitely got to be second in line. Nobody wants to listen to some asshole say how great he is or how great she is (many assholes are shes, of course), and there’s nothing that ruins a fine afternoon more thoroughly than standing in line at the grocery store behind two 25-year-old NASCAR fans bragging about how expertly they service the ladies in their lives, which of course begs the question how the hell could dicks like that have ladies in their lives? Let us not ponder the answer.

It’s a fact, in any case, that when anybody announces to a group of people that they’re great at something, they in fact aren’t great at that something or they need attention because their mothers didn’t give them enough with they were little (attention, that is). It’s also a fact that the humble, self-effacing, aw-shucks type of person is the person we all like best.

I must mention Facebook. I enjoy it, I guess, especially the keeping-up-with-old-friends aspect, but then again, because I’m a writer, I seem to have a number of writer Facebook friends, most of whom asked me to be friends because they are trying to be Facebook friends with as many writers as possible, because if you’re a writer on Facebook, your objective must be to network, to be connected, to be recognized, to be revered, and consequently you can either sell pre-existing published books to a hungry Facebook reading audience or you can make connections with other writers who can help you get something published or maybe, if things work out perfectly, the other Facebook writers might invite you to give a reading of your work at a university or a fancy summer writing conference. The writers with this mindset, with the Facebook-as-tool-to-get-ahead-and-get-some-head modus operandi, will almost constantly find a way to promote themselves in their status updates.

Let’s invent a phony male writer to illustrate. Call him Dick Head. Here are few of his recent status updates:

Dick Head is printing out his new novel.

Dick Head just got two flash fictions accepted at the Bearded Clam Bake Quarterly.

Dick Head spent five hours rewriting a short story this morning, and he thinks he nailed it this time.

Dick Head has won the Northern Northwest North Dakota Council for the Arts Grand Prize for Small Fiction.

Dick Head has figured out how to blow himself and write a magazine article and a screenplay and a novel at the same time.

Obviously, whenever Dick posts these things, his thousand-plus friends will click the Like button, and Dick’s life will be validated for at least a few more hours, and he will be one self-actualized Dick.

I’m coming down hard on Dick [Ed. Note: Holy Shit!] and I shouldn’t. See, Dick is responding to the basic human need to feel appreciated, to feel like he’s not wasting his life, and if the son of a bitch has won the Grand Prize for Small Fiction, what’s the harm in him telling the world about it? Probably nothing.

You know what’s funny? I spend countless hours of my life in a not-good-tasting stew over this stuff. I have to let it go one of these years. So hey, if you want to brag about your accomplishments great and small, what the hell: go ahead. But maybe consider not doing it in line at the grocery store.

Drive

Something’s gone all corporate and motivationally haywire in me today. I loathe the idea of resorting to slogans, to power words, to pictures with profound metaphorical weight in order to get my butt squared in the writing chair and to get my mind organized enough to put words down and try forcing them into coherence. But today, I look at this picture of the waves in Oregon and think of a word to keep me going: Drive.

Ultimately, for me, writing isn’t a very joyful act. Riding bicycles: fun. Cooking and eating and shooting the shit with my friends: fun. Watching sports on TV: fun. Playing fetch with my dog (she tosses the ball and I run for it): fun. But writing? Seriously? True enough, I’ve heard writers going on about how much joy they take in their work, how they can’t wait for their time alone with words each day, but usually, I dismiss that kind of talk as either 1) lies spoken by writing teachers who think they have to be superpositive about writing in order to be good writing teachers; 2) truths spoken by loser-ass humans who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t immersed in the desk-bound, dust-covered life in the arts; or 3) a combination of the aforementioned. I admit to feeling occasional joy spending time alone with another writer’s words – Dostoyevsky comes to mind, or Sylvia Plath, or Elmore Leonard – and this joy owes probably to the work already being done for me. I relax in my chair, open the book, and it’s that simple: the words are great. But to sit at the desk and contrive new words, of my own, words that have to measure up in some way with the masters throughout the ages? Fuck that. It can’t be done.

So the answer is to quit writing altogether, right?

Obviously, that’s the wrong answer. I reminded, incidentally, of an arrogant colleague in lifetimes past who believed exactly that: a new short story must be conceived and executed with the idea of entering the pantheon of all great short stories. I believe it’s wrong to think that way. I believe it’s the height of egomania to think that way. I know, for an absolute fact – and you certainly will agree with me – that I am never going to produce something on the level of the great literary masters: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Mann, Grass, Bolano, et al. Even if could, even if my brain and talent could combine to pull off such a feat, I would never achieve that if I believed I could achieve that, because to believe such a thing is to put the ego before the work, and when the ego controls the work, the work is about the person who made it, not about the broader humanity that makes the work art in the first place.

Holy shit. Did I just get lost in space, or what? Sorry. I had a really bad acid trip twenty years ago, and sometimes my brain can’t pull out of a dive.

Still, there’s the dilemma all writers face: You can’t measure up to Shakespeare. He’ll kick your ass up and down the block every goddam time. Guaranteed. In fact, you really can’t measure up to anybody, simply because other people aren’t you.

So why write? It’s not because you have to; it’s because you want to use your way of channeling experience into words to form an organized, calculated record of your brain’s activity on earth. Maybe it doesn’t mean much in the long run, the work, the unhappy hours trying to wring metaphorical blood from the metaphorical rock of the language. By the same token, the waves don’t mean to destroy the beach they slam into, but they keep coming nonetheless. The sand grains become smaller and smaller.