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When I say, “me,” I mean my brain
And when I say, “Give me the cure,” I mean to kill the pain
And when I say, “Kill the pain,” I mean to get the devil out
And when I say, “Devil,” I mean all manifestation of doubt

– Ted Leo

It’s amazing how much better I feel after I ride my bike. Even on days when I’m totally worn out from working on the computer all day. Or horribly hormonally depressed from PMS. If I can get out for 30-60 minutes on my bike, everything’s good.

I think maybe the days when I ride and work up a bit of a sweat are the best days, though. I mentioned this to Daniel and he said, “Oh yeah, you’ve gotta sweat. It gets the demons out.”

I ride really lazily. If I work up a sweat, it’s not because I’m riding really hard. It’s because it’s hot out. That’s what’s nice about a beach cruiser—you just cruise.

I have to laugh every time some really old person passes me on their bike, though.

One thing that surprised me about my bike rides is how completely empty my brain seems. I mean, if I were to go for a walk, I’d be thinking and pondering all kinds of things. I guess riding a bike takes too much of my attention (maneuvering around stuff, looking out for cars that might kill me), because my thoughts during a bike ride are completely scattered. Often I find myself with just a lyric from a song I’d been listening to running through my brain over and over.

One day it’s Sam Cooke, “You Were Made For Me.”

The next day, Ted Leo.

Anyway, here are a couple videos from my bike ride today with Nathaniel. I purposely waited till late in the day to film so we’d have long shadows. The first is of us starting at a small park near the kids’ high school and going down McFadden St:

Soundtrack: Admantium “Electric Chill”

In the second, I turned the camera towards the street, so you could see my shadow as I rode. It came out kinda cool:

Soundtrack: RJD2 - “Ghostwriter”

Dang, the youtube compression looks horrible!

Daniel conked out early and I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the living room and kicked Elijah off the XBox to watch TV. After watching Project Runway, Elijah and I stayed up for another hour talking. Here’s some of what we covered:

• Why people want to talk about and remember 9/11, when more people died in World War II
• Why we invaded Iraq
• Why the Black Plague was called the Black Plague
• Has any disease ever been cured, or just eradicated and prevented via vaccinations?
• What exactly is a virus, anyway?
• Why the world will end in 2012

I know there was more than that, but my brain is fuzzy today. I’m sure metal or music came up in there at some point. It always does.

–

For instance, the next day, I was giving Elijah a ride to band practice. (His friend has a drum kit in their garage and some amps, they have a band going.) I asked him how school was. He’s just started high school and has met some new friends, a group of metalheads.

He said, “I found out one of the people I’ve been hanging out with had never heard Iron Maiden before.”

Me: “How does that happen?!”

Elijah: “I don’t know!”

Me: “So what’d you do?”

Elijah: “I had him listen to two songs. Can you guess which two? And they’re NOT going to be the ones you think.”

Me: “The one about the execution?”

Elijah: “Yeah.”

Hallowed Be Thy Name. The other song? Phantom of the Opera.

–

Here’s Friday’s bike ride:

Soundtrack: Brant Bjork - “Defender of the Oleander”

Extra points if you can spot:

1. The LDS church
2. The old guy with his butt sticking up in the air in his driveway
3. The stop light I miss when it changes green because I was spacing out
4. Me going to the ATM
5. The flock of school kids that pass by me

And don’t miss the surprise ending.

There was someone driving by when I was stopped on the corner who totally gave me a big smile like she recognized me. She did look sorta like someone I know, but I couldn’t see her clearly. I felt kinda stupid. Is she smiling at me because I look like a dork on a bike on a street corner, or because she knows me? Or is she listening to something funny on the radio? How to react? I just curved my mouth and left it at that.

My first attempt at videotaping a bike ride. It starts in Central Park (in Huntington Beach) and ends a about a block away from my apartments. (My memory card ran out of room, which is why it stops so abruptly.)

The original video was about 30 minutes long but I sped it up and shrunk it down to 3.

Any guesses as to the soundtrack?

There was this photographer in the 1850’s who took photographs during a war in Europe. There was a spot on a road the Russians were bombing with cannonballs. They bombed it so heavily that it was referred to as the Valley of the Shadow of Death. This photographer took two photographs of this road.

In one photograph, there are cannonballs all over the place, littered all over the road. In the other photograph, the road is clear, and all the cannonballs are lying in a ditch alongside the road.

So the question becomes, which photo was taken first? Most people assume the photo of the cleared road was done first, but the photographer didn’t think it was dramatic enough, so he scattered the cannonballs over the road to make it more dramatic, and took the other picture.

There’s a really interesting article about it here. You can view the photographs there as well.

I’ve been riding my bike around and stopping to take pictures if I see anything interesting. There’s really not too much that is interesting about the sidewalks of Huntington Beach. There are a lot of abandoned shopping carts on sidewalks, though. Sometimes they’re in a position that makes me think of them as having some sort of attitude or behavior. Like these two, they look like they’re racing each other around the bend:

Often, though, the shopping carts are just in a bad position for me to get a good picture of them. Either the lighting is wrong (they’re in the shade next to a sunny area), or they’re just in a boring spot. It occurred to me as I rode past one the other day that I could always move them into a more interesting position. But the whole idea of it seemed wrong. I don’t like posing shots. Which is one reason I don’t like photographing people unless they’re already doing something interesting (ie, performing on a stage).

So my inclination is to believe that the cannonball photographer didn’t set up the photo of the scattered cannonballs. It makes just as much sense to me that when he got there, the cannonballs were all over the road, and after taking a picture of it, he moved them off the road and took another. Because you know, he had to use the road.

Oh, and the author of that article about the photographer? It’s Errol Morris, a guy who’s made some great documentaries, including one I need to do a post about called Gates of Heaven.

I developed a roll of film the other day and discovered it had pictures from our dirtbiking camping trip this summer. Some of them had accidental overlapping exposures, too, which turned out pretty cool.

Left to right, above: Elijah, our friends’ son Justin, our friends’ sandrail, and Nathaniel.

Our friends getting their sandrail ready to ride.

King of the Hill (Daniel)

That’s Daniel on the bike, and I think Nathaniel off to the right. This was taken while I was a passenger in the sandrail and my friend Debbie was driving. The second exposure is the shadow cast by the sand rail. (The sun was going down.)

The place we camped is called Superstition because the mountains have weird eerie noises sometimes. I didn’t hear anything, though.

I picked up a cheap beach cruiser a couple weeks ago and I’ve been riding just about everyday. It’s so fun. I feel so much better if I do it. And when I don’t, I totally miss it. And crave it. Some days even after riding I still crave another bike ride.

What’s funny is pink is sooooo not my color. But it was all they had.

I love my bike.

I’ve been taking a camera along whenever I go riding and snapping pictures of anything interesting. Which mostly means shopping carts abandoned on the sidewalks in various places. But here are a few non-shopping cart pictures.

This was taken in a neighborhood known as Huntington Harbor. There are little islands in the Harbor with houses built on all of them, and everyone’s backyard has a dock and a boat. The islands are connected by little bridges. I’m thinking the islands are all manmade, since they’re all so close together and perfectly fit in all the waterways, but I don’t really know. You can see what I mean here.

This was taken in a strip mall on a bike ride with Nathaniel. He stopped at Petco to get a job application.

I took this one yesterday. I got ambitious and decided to try doing some TTVs (Through the Viewfinder). I took it on the street I live on, which is a seven-lane, super busy street. I’m sure I looked like an idiot to all the many people driving by, sitting on the sidewalk to get this shot. I’m just waiting until someone I know says to me, “I saw you the other day with a bike and a camera…”