Yesterday, I got an application for Bike New York in the mail. I have no idea how they got my name - maybe from some bike junk I ordered off the web - but it was a strange coincidence, because I would love to get in shape and try the ride, but I’m completely fucked up right now. I sprained the MCL in my right knee about a month ago, and I’m just now at the point where I’m not in agonizing pain on a costant basis. Hobbling around on a cane has caused my other knee to feel a bit wonky, and I have to wear this horrible compressive brace every day, which is like having my leg in a vice while I’m at work. Then when I get home and take out my leg, it’s imprinted in a reverse-mold of the inside of the brace, like some kind of Play-Doh fun factory thing. After extrication, my knee feels really - weird - as it expands and sloshes back into its regular form. I usually take drugs by then, so I can avoid this strange feeling. Despite all of this, I am getting around better, sometimes without the cane, and maybe the brace will go away soon, too.

But I don’t think a 42-mile bike ride is in the cards, at least not on May 6th or whenever it is. I keep trying to do the math on how long it would take me to train for a 42-mile ride, and then also trying to predict how long it would be until I could ride a bike, and then add them together and see if they were less than eight weeks. While I could maybe train more in a given time period, by riding way too much, I can’t speed up the healing of the knee, so that pretty much fucks the whole thing.

Why do I want to do it? I guess just to say I’ve done it. I’ve ridden farther before, and this is not a competitive race-type event, so it isn’t harder in that sense. But the last time I did anything like this, I was 16, and I rode a 100K ride on a POS Huffy 10-speed that you get on sale for $100 at Wards, along with a rack and panniers filled with probably 30 pounds of shit I didn’t need. It poured rain the whole day and it was bone-chilling outside, with plenty of headwinds that made me wonder why the fuck I even did the event, since nobody in my entire school even knew about it and it obviously wasn’t about getting chicks, which was one of only two things I cared about back in 1987. (The other one probably involved listening to every Rush album in a row in one sitting, which I used to think would be the ultimate project, and now I realize will be my own personal hell if there is in fact a god when I die.) The New York ride would also be slightly more interesting than the Indiana one. The New York one goes through all five boroughs, which means a couple of interesting bridges, and a rare chance to ride on closed-off streets of the city. I guess the Indiana one was interesting too, and at least took you through Michigan and across some attempts at hills and twists, but unless you go south of Indy, there isn’t much beyond the one-mile grids of county roads and cornfields.

I haven’t been writing shit lately. Part of it is a lack of a routine to fall into, part of it is a lack of anything to write about. I guess I have two projects that I want to eventually finish. They are both biopic, modernist, whatever; one’s high school, the other is college. Both of them don’t have enough greatness to survive. I wonder how Summer Rain turned out as good as it did, as far as the story and length. Was it just a coincidence that everything happened in such a great story line like that, or was it just a lot of hard work that carved it into a solid line? I don’t know. Sometimes I’d like to think if I kept my nose down enough on this high school one, I’d start to get some bulk, and the pieces would become carvable and eventually fit into each other until it started to look like a book. But I don’t know, there’s a lot of pessimism here on that.

In the reading category, I just finished The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta, which was a decent read. It was close to the style that I wish I could write in, similar to Nick Hornby and High Fidelity, although not as raw or as dense as I’d like. There was also this weird twist at the end that sort of threw me, but I won’t get into it. Anyway, now I’m reading Will Leitch’s Life as a Loser, which I completely spaced and forgot I read half his shit on Blacktable.com years ago. I’m enjoying the book despite the fact that it’s a typographical disaster; it’s a weird size that it too square and too big, and the columns are way too wide with small print, so it’s impossible to track across the page, especially if you’re on a bouncing F train.

My only other complaint about Leitch’s book is that it makes me wish that either I had a better way to chop my own life into zany and compelling bite-sized 2000-word pieces on a weekly basis, or that maybe I should get some kind of life that lends itself to doing that. That Tucker Max book had the same effect on me. I read about all of this crazy shit that he did, all of these good stories, and I thought I needed to live a life like his - not necessarily HIS, but with other activities that were easily shrink-wrapped into entertaining portions. I know the stock answer is “but Jon, you can write observational pieces about ANYTHING,” and my answer is, go ahead and do it, but I need to find what works for me.

Okay, enough babbling for tonight.

I think the best way I could describe outside right now is “fucked.” It’s 30 and raining, basically, which means sort of snow but sort of not, very dark out, and the ground resembles a spilled Slurpee, but everywhere and not Coke-flavored. The intersection outside of my office is being devastated by a crew of phone company people. They’re jackhammering and scraping out a trench in the middle of the intersection, and it’s filling up with this slush, and traffic in every direction is fucked. The jackhammering and pounding sounds like the block is being shelled. A Verizon truck hit a guy in the face with their rear-view mirror in front of the Wendy’s, so there’s an ambulance blocking even more traffic as he holds a dozen yellow and crimson Wendy’s paper napkins to his face to stop the bleeding. A dozen people try to watch what’s happening, but everyone else pushes past them to go inside and get their Chicken Strips Tenders meals and Biggie sized fries.

This is New York at its finest. Every time someone tells me “I think it would be so neat to move to New York!” I want to make them endure an hour of this, and then send them back to Iowa or whatever.

As an experiment, I came to work without a cane today. Probably not the best day to do it, but it’s been working out okay. Of course, in about five hours, I will be screaming bloody murder about this brace on my leg, which usually starts constricting me too much after about eight hours. I have been able to find Vault everywhere, luckily, but I have been drinking so much of it that I think the caffeine is freaking me out. I drank 4x20oz bottles yesterday, plus a regular Coke, which is about a months’ worth of caffeine. I should stop that. I’m drinking a Dr. Pepper now, which is my favorite occasional drink. A strange thing is that maybe six years ago, I was taking some medicine for panic attacks, and I only took it for like a week, because it made me really sick to my stomach. But for some reason, it totally fucked up my sense of taste or smell for Dr. Pepper, maybe something about the vanilla taste in it. And I couldn’t even walk by a thing of Dr. Pepper in a grocery store without retching. I stopped taking the medicine, and then I was fine. It was pretty weird. I’m wondering why one of Dr. P’s competitors haven’t isolated this drug and put it in their drinks as a way to cut out the competition.

Lots of things are going on, and it will be very busy for a few days. It was Sarah’s birthday on Monday, which went well. And then her mom is coming in tonight for a long weekend. We are having an Oscars party on Sunday, and I don’t even know what is involved in that as far as planning or whatever, but I’m assuming it is taken care of. We’re also going upstate to Guy and Scott’s place on Saturday, which should be fun, but that’s just for a day. And add in a bunch of other dinners and seeing friends and soforth.

On top of that, we are catsitting for a friend and have her two cats for a week, because her place is being exterminated. The cats are mostly hiding right now. One is extremely skittish and we will probably not even see her for the week, unless treats are involved. The other one is a little more playful and okay with humans, and she was running around a bit. I’m still not sleeping through the night and wake up every few hours, and it was funny to wake up at like 4

and see both of them tearing around the house and playing.

I’ve been vaguely thinking about changes to this page, because I’ve been reading a lot of web design propaganda lately. I’m trying to think of some CSS changes to make to the site, which is not a big deal. The one thing I wish I could easily hook up are buttons for Back and Next at the bottom of each entry. There’s no easy way for me to do this. (Yes, I could hard-code the links in each time I update, but life is too short.) I wanted to do some PHP trickery in which each time a page is drawn, it takes a peek at the directory of HTML, and gets the two entries before and after the current one. The problem is knowing in the script what is “the current one,” because each of these pages imports headers and footers and there are symlinks and all other sorts of things that make the usual way of determining the current page to totally fuck up. I think I could do it if I passed the PHP the page’s ID, like I do with haloscan comments. But then I’d have to go back and edit all of my old pages, which might be a huge pain in the ass. I’ll probably do the CSS first.

Google ads are gone. Not really worth it for this kind of site. I think I made less than a dollar a month, and given that I make about a dollar a minute at my day job, it’s hard to get excited about that.

I have been doing a ton of reading, and at some point, you will get to read another huge list of what I’ve been consuming. But now, lunch is over.