Monthly Archives: September 2005
BRC Staff Meeting in Progress
We have to put the clowns in rehab, things have gone too far this time. Please check back later for our regular afternoon performance featuring, “Great Enemies of Moderation”, or possibly a new inductee into the “Clydesdale Hall of Fame”. Please send nominees for either category to john.phantom309@gmail.com
Now get to work.
Juancho
Far and Away
Football Weather. You don’t have to be a fan to know what it means.
If it happened in a movie I would be rolling my eyes, but, as if on cue the wet, moldy summer air was pushed away by a dry, cool breeze on the opening night of the FSU football season.
Yes, we kicked their obnoxious south Florida asses.
What this really means though, is that the off season is coming to a close and it is time to pull out the longbow and stroke for the far and distant corners of the land. No more time trialing around the hamster wheel. S’quatch and I left a couple of the fellas standing at the 10 mile mark and rode off into the Sunday morning sun. 5 hours in the saddle. 35ish miles of trail, field, road, and catwalks.
We baptized ourselves in the well of a Cypress tree, on hands and knees in a honey-colored stream. We learned that banana spiders are not poisonous.
Although cramped and exhausted, it was back in the saddle yesterday for another 18 miles of crosstown, traffic dodging, singletrack fun.
It is just too pretty. Ride every day, sleep when you’re dead.
Longbow
Easy like Sunday Morning
7:30 A:M
It’s on. As my bro would say, “It’s on like King Kong, smokin’ on a water bong, talking on a cell phone, playin Donkey Kong”. The air is slightly cool, since it is basically the middle of the night as far as I’m concerned. S’quatch and I are hooking up with the crew on the Fern trail, then hitting Tom Brown Park, Cadillac, Pedrick Greenway, and hopefully Miccosukee, then back home. It is shaping up to be my first 30+ (offroad + connector miles) since May. The plan is to go until everyone else cries uncle and falls away, leaving the two lumbering Clydesdales clip-clopping alone under the noonday sun.
The morning devotional? Bad Religion, Public Enemy, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Dropkick Murphy’s.
The fuel? Black beans and brown rice.
Pass the turpentine baby, Daddy’s thirsty.
Longbow
Global Local
I wanted to make a song about where I’m from You know?
Big up my home town, my territory, my state
But, I couldn’t figure out much to brag about- Prince lives here, we got 10,000 lakes.
But wait, the women are beautiful, to me they are
And we’re not infested with pretentious movie stars, And it hit me,
Minnesota is dope, If only simply for not what we have, but what we don’t.
lyrics from Ssh! Written by Atmosphere. Minnesota rapper. That’s right. Minnesota rapper.
This whole conversation on place and purpose interests me to no end. If you will notice the shape of the world we live in, there is no top, bottom, high or low point other than the arbitrary way in which we choose to desribe it. It’s a ball. All points are equal.
Does the globetrotting trust funder have a deeper understanding of the world than the bosnian village woman who has never gone over the mountain? Absolutely not.
You grow where you’re planted, and sometimes those roots go deep in one spot and other times they spread like spanish moss crawling through the trees.
Detroit? Queens? Twin cities? Tallahassee? All trees full of ripe fruit waiting to be plucked and eaten. If you’ve had your fill, move to a different tree, otherwise enjoy your feast.
-Juancho- sated at the table.
Southern folks live cleverer
“IfIhadabike” wrote the following the other day…
Being a nature boy at heart I must admit to strong daydreams of breathless single-track riding on a sweet bike, sitting in a wet, sandy bathing suit on the leading edge of the gulf tide at St. George Island in the late afternoon when everything slowly turns blue and gold as the sun that warms your legs and back starts to dip and the moon starts to slowly rise in the sky with the sound of the surf filling your ears.
I think of laying on my back looking up at trees and the way when the wind is just right in their leaves it almost sounds like they may be trying to tell you something secret and divine if you just listen closer to them for a while longer and be still.
Actually seeing stars at night, ambitions of having a garden – tomatoes, root vegetables and maybe even some orchids.
Get a dog!
I think of the good feeling of standing barefoot in grass with a cold beer in hand and old friends laughing close by. I think of a relatively laid back life style in a southern city, where a job is something you do to pursue your lifestyle and not where your lifestyle is a job.
This ain’t false advertsing people, although most of you know this to be true. Beer should have been mentioned much sooner, but other than that I think he captures our virtues pretty well. I don’t know about the rest of you but I very clearly hear what the wind in the trees is saying…
“Juuuuaaaancho, you are so damn handsome.”
“Juuuaaaancho, wait up for the other guys.”
“Juuuuancho, are you going to eat the rest of that?”
I thought everybody knew that’s what they were saying.
Speaking of trees,
S’quatch needs to come on and tell us all about the addition to his pool. He is really working on that natural, grotto-like environment. I, for one, am very impressed with his commitment to xeriscaping, which as you know, is a word that begins with the letter X.
Xuancho