IRL

smithereens

Posted on by metaphlame

I’m just coming back to Utopia Avenue after a bit of a hiatus, because it got lost in our moving boxes which [masked] relatives helped us pack. And I have to say, trapped in a kaleidoscope of bad family relationship displays, this sudden bit of warmth was more moving than I think it was meant to be:

Also I think I am just more alert to it because I spent all yesterday as a miserable sorrowful witness to our neighbor’s grief. We don’t know them at all, we just moved here, and at first we thought the screams — there were police — were domestic violence. But it was grief. A car accident, a woman’s son dead in his twenties. They had a big family; the street filled with cars, people helped his mother to a seat as she sobbed and sobbed. I had hoped it was her husband, because no one should have to outlive their child. It would still be terrible but at least it wouldn’t be that. But no. It was her son. And she screamed, and I listened. And I worry that some stupid part of me hopes that by acknowledging others’ loss and not trying to ignore it, I’ll pay loss enough obeisance to avoid it myself. And that’s stupid, because loss doesn’t work like that.

Looking at their house today was so fucked up, because it looked like any other day. Sunlight, cicadas, someone mowing somewhere. To wake up and have your son not wake up into that too would be just…fuck. I don’t want to imagine it, but I am trying, again as though enough vicarious sorrow will help me avoid it myself, and it’s not a skill you get to improve with practice, like a piano or interviewing.

Anyway, I loved that warm moment in Griff’s first chapter. Some gentleness in a world frequently portrayed as having been shaped, largely, by artistry born of hardship and lack of care. “You don’t have to be unloved to make something lovely” is not a message that gets trotted out enough.

Edit: Goddammit I shouid have finished the chapter before I opened my damn mouth.

things have been falling apart our entire lives

Posted on by metaphlame

My father, whose grim glee in broadcasting the socio-political end times of the United States has only increased since his retirement from its affairs exacerbated his conviction that the state could not be saved (because he could no longer save it), suffers the myopic vision of many of his generation, for all his erudition. Namely, he and the other boomers fail to recognize that for their children, for us millennials, the world order has been collapsing for our entire lives. We don’t have solid ground to look back to and mourn.

We are technically old enough, of course, to remember times of greater stability. But we were not political participants at the time. I remember the Berlin Wall falling—but I was three years old, told to watch and remember an image on a screen as important. Most of our memories of the 90s—that decade to which it is becoming fashionable to look back on with such longing, especially for aging Gen Xers—are colored by the pastel accoutrements of childhood, not the informed realities of participation in the greater world. By the time we were taking civics classes, the towers were already falling. Literally.

By the time we hit puberty, the stability that our parents no doubt liked to imagine they were raising us into was already revealing itself to be a ruse. I spent most of a day locked down in my hated biology teacher’s classroom, entombed with her bitterness and (we later learned) her fear, because a couple kids a few years older than us shot up their school in Colorado. And despite decades of repeat incidents, no one in this country has deemed our lives valuable enough to try and save us, or any of the kids who came after us. Guns remain everywhere. The American commitment to instability has rent the fabric of our lives since we were first able to recognize ourselves as threads in a pattern.

This strikes me as I watch my son crawl around under maple trees, collecting the helicopter seed pods that fall. Discussing him and the future with my father is always a fraught process, because even as my father speculates on his grandson’s education with the weight it deserves and the generosity for which I am grateful, he can’t help but expostulate on the doomedness of our country, as though asking why are you even bothering? He never comes out and says it, of course, and he may even be unaware of the epistemological endpoint of his ranting. But implied in his bleak assessment of our national future—one which, I hasten to add, is in no way unrealistic—is the waste of time that is spent on hope. Implicit then, too, time spent on the future—in the belief that it might change, and be changed, for the better, by people like my baby who must still grow into it—is also a waste. Why are you even bothering?

I and the handful of millennials like me—there are not many of us—who are financially secure enough to have families are bothering, Dad, because none of this is new for us. Things have always been falling apart. The descent—moral, economic, and political—of the United States as a nation isn’t some sudden collapse that fills us with shock and chagrin. How successful do you think we thought our country, when our elected officials couldn’t even keep kids like us from being shot—all to feed the inferiority complexes of a festering mob of hate-mongering bigots?

The obvious assumption is that the best of the boomers—the good parents—hoped that we would better the world, like I hope my son does. Viewed through that lens, my father’s bitterness becomes slightly more understandable, his questioning of me more sensible. Why are you even bothering? I am sure my childless friends have thought it, too, at one time or another, though they’ve been too polite to give it voice.

The difference, maybe, is that boomers hoped their children would perpetuate the world they lived in. Having congratulated themselves on vanquishing racism (yeah, about that…), on inventing counterculture as a style (…), and on avoiding international crisis the likes of which defined their own parents’ generation (*cough*), the world to them looked worth reproducing, ad infinitum.

To us, though, it’s not. It hasn’t been worth reproducing in this form for as long s we can remember. I don’t want my son to fight for a future where some idiot can walk into a store, out with a gun and then into his school. Or one where a white cop can choke a Black man to death for a petty grievance and get away with it, no questions asked. So many of my parents’ generation are caught up in nostalgia and bemoaning the changes in the world, but…I don’t want to recognize the world my son grows up into. It is in the hope that I don’t—that he changes it, radically, with his peers, into a safer and kinder place than the one I know—that I raise him.

help tommy rivers beat covid

Posted on by metaphlame

Hey, I’m not going to watch this because I’ve already cried but here he’s done Upward Over the Mountain, which I used to listen to crying on my floor in Japan after my mom’s diagnosis: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CC42Jbnpw3X/?igshid=1m2gb9lkk8vhb

Tommy Rivers Puzy is an athlete, both on foot and on bike. He’s done Boston. He works for IFit. He’s also trained as a linguistic anthropologist, which made his 20-day alpine ride series fascinating as he explained the evolution of the languages in the peaks we rode through.

He’s currently hooked up to a ventilator. He has three little kids. He’s been there close to a month. Please consider donating to support him. I don’t know him personally, but to see someone whose health you’ve physically experienced, pedaling after him for days and days on simulated mountain roads, reduced to this…you can see the videos he recorded from his ICU before they intubated him. Wanting to make sure he recorded how much he loved his wife while he could still speak.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Tommy-Rivers-Rest-Up?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-15953187616-198b0a741afc4e1e&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&utm_content=cta_button&utm_campaign=upd_n

Please help him. His virtual trips have helped thousands out of the narrow confines of their quarantine. Help him escape the narrow confines of his hospital bed.

Update: Well, fuck. It’s cancer. Primary Pulmonary NK/T Cell Lymphoma.

yes and

Posted on by metaphlame

This is a good essay.

“…for so long, so many of us have been pretending that we were or were about to “make it”. We had checked all or most of the boxes we were told to check in our professions, even as our lives remained in constant states of anxiety and fear. Work – the ability not only to get it and to do it but to not ever stop it – is the attribute that is perhaps flaunted and celebrated most of all. One of the reasons many of us don’t share the ways we do not have enough money is, I would argue, because we’re ashamed to say we’re struggling. We’ve internalized that our suffering is our fault – that it is because we must not be working hard enough.”

An earlier, pre-COVID edition of this column mentioned her being aware that she couldn’t afford big expenses but she decided on having these kids anyway and one of them fell and hit her head and needed a $5k MRI. She describes putting off the visit hoping the child doesn’t need it. Obviously the big problem here is the absurd cost of health care in the United States. But…

…a tiny part of me — that knows how wretched it is to think this — reading this with a baby asleep in my lap, wonders why you would make the deliberate decision (as she did; they weren’t accidents) to have kids when you know you’re in a bad place financially and unable to get out of it. Associate professorship doesn’t pay. She loves it. But if doesn’t. My job didn’t pay enough, either, to live where I wanted to live and have a baby, so we left. I miss it every day. The persistent pessimism of this part of the country is exhausting. But I can care for this baby and keep him healthy and safe — at least insofar as any parent’s efforts can affect such things. I took that loss — the job, the location, the being surrounded by people who weren’t depressed all the time — because I weighed the options and I wanted a baby more. I am not a blueprint for success by any means but… there is some serious cost analysis one should do before bringing a defenseless, dependent creature into your life.

But I mention that to say I don’t just swallow everything this writer says with amiable camaraderie. This instance of the column, about work and our insistence that it defines us and that if something is not going right with work there must therefore be something not going right inside what makes us humans worthy of compassion… that is spot on.

And I retreat again to anecdotes not because I’m a blueprint but because I’m only then speaking to what I do know. And that is that I have never had a job it was worth defining myself as. If I had to introduce myself, my work would never be the sum total of how I expected or wanted to present. I have been good at jobs, praised and promoted, but that has never been who I want to be. Work was how I afforded to be who I wanted to be.

We were told as millennial children to find work we were passionate about. To love your job. But that kind of got turned on its head. People tried to monetize everything they did, everything they enjoyed, in order to be able to say they were passionate about their work. To become their work and not hate themselves.

But the problem isn’t just us. It’s the idea that to be able to love yourself you should be loving your work. It’s that there aren’t enough jobs that pay enough to live safely. That don’t expect you to burn out, out of passion for the work. That don’t want to milk your supposedly (but by no means assuredly) low-medical cost youth, then toss you aside before they have to start paying a lot for your health coverage. If they even give you health coverage. Which obviously, many still don’t.

Your health coverage shouldn’t be attached to your job, it’s true. But neither should your self-worth. This idea that we could have or should have found the work by which we define ourselves by now is killing us millennials.

I know. So is the economy and COVID and climate change. And the tit-for-tat generational wars. We are in line to become like Japan’s Lost Generation. But at let’s not write ourselves off as deserving of this bullshit while it consumes us. The Lost Generation, after all, was called that because it sought fulfillment outside there bounds of its parents’ measures of success. But they had to seek beyond those measures because adhering to them, in the economic and social constraints of the society they were born into, would never result in success. Or self-worth.

You’re more than your work.

let high school the fuck go

Posted on by metaphlame

untamed

I’m reading Untamed, by Glennon Doyle, because Nicole Meline’s reading group (of which I am not a part, because it’s connected to her subscription group thing and I am not made of money) mentioned it and I liked the sample I downloaded. I was also, admittedly, elated when I realized a couple stories into the sample that the Abby that Doyle kept mentioning was Abby Wambach, the closest thing to a sports hero I have ever had.

(Quick aside: Michelle Wolf’s latest set includes a bit about social media that calls blogs “the conversation nobody wants to have with you. Even your computer is like ugh, I want to kill myself right now.” On the one hand, this is fair. No one wants to talk to me about most of the things I blog about and when I have tried they either deflect or, if pressed, default to truths handed to them by others rather than doing any deep dives themselves. And that’s totally their call because who am I, just some random peer, to do that with them? BUT. Books like these that Doyle has published, I gather, for some while, are pretty much the same thing, albeit polished by the welcome hand of an editor. So while I agree good-humoredly with Wolf on the facts of the matter…it also seems like comedians speak from a place of a certain…vintage. Talking is their job, it comes easy to them, and they may therefore be under the impression that there is more talking going on in the world around them than there in fact is. Because uh…people don’t talk. Not anymore. Not about stuff that matters. I’m 33 years old and I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve had two-sided conversations with about heavy, serious shit. Or equally heavy, this-makes-me-incandescently-happy-and-I-want-to-live-in-a-way-that-gives-me-more-of-this shit. People don’t have those conversations. Comedians might, more often, because of the nature of their work: they spend a lot of time on the road with themselves, so when they do get to talk to others, all their road thoughts spill out. But the average schmoe doesn’t get that release. We tidy that shit away behind perfunctory pleasantries, for years, waiting for someone to give a damn. Sometimes damns will not be given. Until someone writes a book and suddenly, quietly, people buy it and rejoice that damns are in fact given, somewhere else, by someone you’ll never meet. So don’t come down too hard on bloggers, folks. They’re doing the same work most nonfiction authors are, just without the polish. Or the, uh. Money.)

Doyle appears in this book (as opposed to her others, which I haven’t read) to be focusing a lot on things people do that fuck up their kids. Especially vis-a-vis gender roles. So I figured it was a good thing for me to read. And it is! But some of the stuff she describes taking in, believing, making a part of herself as a girl…it makes me seethe. Because she’s smarter than that. Most self-respecting women are smarter than that. And when we are shown people who don’t act in ways that embrace this, it’s like a bell dropping out of the tower mid-ring and banging onto the courtyard. Who the fuck thinks that way?

She talks, for example, of not being one of the popular ones in school, but of being occasionally in their orbit enough to know they are not nice, nor are they bullies — that would require paying the little people enough attention to acknowledge and then bully them. So she knows these people are not good people. And yet she rigs a homecoming court election so she can be in it, so she can be one of the “Golden Ones.”

Okay. No. Why would you want that? The same goes for the girl in American Beauty: why the fuck are you a cheerleader? Or the star of Whiplash: why would you ever let yourself  be strongarmed into being part of a beauty pageant? You know this isn’t you.

If you were stupid, if you didn’t know yourself, if you were too easily distracted to pay enough attention to what you want and don’t want out of life, these would not be such jarringly discordant events. But these characters — the real people they strive to reflect — aren’t that obtuse. Nor, clearly, was Glennon Doyle as a teenager. Which begs the question: Why. Would. You. Want. That? Why would you want to be part of that group? Why would you want the fawning eyes of others on you when you know they aren’t really fawning, they don’t really love you, they’re just going through the social mechanisms of popularity, which you are smart enough to recognize and call out as such? If you see that, how in the hell does that status remain desirable?

This frightens me about being a parent. Because my mom is dead and I can’t ask her what she told me, how she raised me, in such a way that I knew better. Oh, I  believed all sorts of dumb shit and wanted attention in the wrong ways, but it was never in that way. I never needed the faux adoration of my peers to feel worthwhile. I wasn’t edgy enough feel like rejecting that adoration made me cool, either — Doyle does point out that that was also a thing.

“I think what makes this story unforgivable is the desperation. It’s the wanting — the caring so much. If one cannot be Golden, then one must pretend that one does not want to be. It’s so uncool, so terribly uncool, to want to belong so badly that you’re willing to cheat for it. But I did.”

Yes, okay, but does it have to be pretend? Can’t you just harness the knowledge you’ve acquired about the shallowness of the entire high school scene and use it to just…want something better? Strive for something after, beyond, outside of that? Be someone worth knowing outside of the locker-lined hallways. They don’t, thankfully, last forever. Or even very long.

I have the same reaction to people who want to go to their high school reunions. It doesn’t matter which year. Why in fuck would you want that? You were a child. It sucked. It’s past. Why revisit it? To rub your success in someone’s face? To chortle silently over some former angel’s fall? To “prove” something to some decades-old rival? Why would you hold onto that so long? How could you think it serves you (or anyone else)? How could you not have evolved enough since then to recognize how very little, now, that high school social scene matters? Let it go. And if you’re in it, a teenager, and you’re smart enough to see it for what it is, for godsake have the self-respect to cease wanting to make it make you shine. There are so many better and more authentic ways to matter in the world, than to be thought of as cute or hot or witty in high school. There really, really are.

Let high school the fuck go. For everyone’s sake.

phlur 2 : olmsted & vaux, hepcat, sandara, hanami, siano

Posted on by metaphlame

Note: I wrote most of this months and months ago, pre-quarantine, when I thought being saucy was a productive use of my time. Yeah. A lifetime ago. In October.

Now though, I’m just embracing scent as a way to feel a sense of otherness. So you’ll notice a change of tone.

Olmsted & Vaux: At first I was excited because this goes on smelling like that old perfume called Charlie. I found a used-up bottle in my grandparents’ basement once and kept it for years to sniff when I felt nauseous. It’s a strong scent, very traditionally “HI I’m wearing perfume!” I used it like a more pleasant version of smelling salts. I may even still have it in my garage somewhere…

Unfortunately that scent disappears pretty quickly here and you are left with a rapidly fading mall-smell. This was the quickest-fading of all the Phlur perfumes.

Hepcat: This is the first scent claiming to smell like leather that actually smells like leather. Specifically, the leather in the interior of historical forts — think Fort Ligonier, Fort William Henry, Fort Ticonderoga. Dark, low-roofed, smoky and full of leather. That’s what the insides smell like, and that’s how Hepcat starts.

This distinct scent fades quickly into generic spiciness, however, and along the way it goes through a weird cherry, almost Robitussin-esque phase that whipped my nose away from my wrist post-haste. Phew. According to the scent notes (that I belatedly discovered were printed on the back of the mood cards, necessitating a frantic search through the recycling for the other three) we are supposed to progress from vetiver and saffron through leather to “caramel smoothness and the cozy familiarity of an old record.” With all due respect I own a lot of old records. Old cardboard is not a smell to court. Nor, for me personally, is caramel — it ranks right up there with cats, cumin and cherry flavoring in the list of Things Beginning With C That I Don’t Generally Enjoy. Which is a shame, because I loved where this perfume starts! Just not so much where it goes.

Sandara: The woodsy one! Not northwoods in this case — more like southern seaside forests hung with Spanish moss. At least that’s what it starts out as. Then it gets bigger and woodier. A favorite after working out and yoga, when my body is warm enough to send the scent throughout the house. This one was only ok to me for awhile, but once the bitter frozen slush of winter really started to wear on me I kept trotting this out.

Hanami: Fresh, floral, but doesn’t stick around for long. The best part of this scent was watching my husband inadvertently learn Japanese. “Hana…mi? It’s mi?”

“Yeah, hanami. Flower-viewing.”

“But isn’t Hanabi that Takeshi Kitano film?”

“It is. Bi is fire — boom. Fire flowers. That’s fireworks.”

“And mi is viewing?”

“Looking, viewing, sight, yeah.”

“Whoa.”

He doesn’t know the kanji (despite being drafted for years into holding up flash cards for me) but he did parse the words out based on the little he knew, which was cool. The scent is cool too, more pleasant than I imagined given its advertisement as minimalist, but it’s too fleeting to invest big money in. And uh. All perfume is big money, it seems like. Unless you want to go around smelling like a high school kid trying to drown his self-consciousness in chemicals.

Siano: Oh man, this is why this was the sold-out one the first two times I tried to sample it. This smells…oh it is so frustrating when you know you’ve smelled a thing before and cannot place it…it smells like somewhere you’ve been allowed that you didn’t think you’d be allowed. Your friend’s mom’s room, as she shows you pictures of her wild college days. A store full of cut blue glass and crystal dolphins when you’re young enough to think them magical. They advertise it like it’s for all-nighters spent drinking and clubbing, but I never smelled something half this good on any dance floor (and I do love dancing).

The problem is…it doesn’t go away. It’s too strong. That place it takes you that you thought you weren’t allowed to go to? Now you want to leave and you can’t. Your friend’s mom has started to cry about her lost youth. The shopkeeper won’t stop pestering you to buy a damn dolphin. I like strong scents, and have little interest in delicate, ephemeral ones, but Siano just won’t go away. Not even hours and hours later.

hunkering

Posted on by metaphlame

dock

My husband did not have coronavirus. He had the flu. I know this because I didn’t catch it (and I already had the flu last fall).

What I did catch was a shitty, noncommunicable infection that rushed me into urgent care on Sunday. I did not want to be there and arguably…should not have been? My healthcare system has the capacity for telemedicine. They advertise it! Yet when I called in saying “hi yeah I know you probably don’t want me in there because I have a fever and chills and muscle aches,” they said I was fine. Because I hadn’t been to China, Italy or Iran.

THIS WAS SUNDAY. SIX DAYS AGO.

If you wondered how hogtied health systems were by slow-to-evolve government guidelines, this is it. They knew we had community spread at the time. They KNEW it. But they could not act on it. So — and I actually tried two health systems, because mine didn’t do urgent care on weekends so they sent me elsewhere — two different health systems had to give me the same line. As I sat there wobbling in my seat, pale as a sheet and in a great deal of pain and with a fever that jumped from 96 to 101 in four hours (do not recommend!) I asked if they wanted me to at least wear a mask.

“Up to you, really,” said the woman behind the desk. “You won’t be waiting long, if that helps.”

Yeah, well. I didn’t take a mask because I  was the only person in the waiting room, my [assumed!] disease wasn’t communicable, and because I didn’t want to be robbing them of a mask they might seriously need later. But it still seemed kind of…shitty? I had a lot of problematic symptoms from the COVID-19 list and if they believed so much that mastitis was what I had, why couldn’t they goddamn videocall me to confirm it, rather than making me come in? If they had to SEE me to confirm it, shouldn’t they have made me, with my fever, chills and muscle aches, take a few more precautions? But nope, they were still operating tethered to the travel advisory warning, which meant that as a non-traveler I was not a risk.

Kiiiiind of bullshit.

Anyway that was days ago. Now everyone is (understandably) panicking. Husband still sounds like a chainsaw in his post-flu coughing, which does not bode well for a potential NEW respiratory infection. Fuck. And as we discovered earlier this week, two sick people trying to care for an infant fucking sucks. At least we already stocked up on supplies two weeks ago, before everything sold out. So while grocery stores were full of endless lines yesterday and everything from toilet paper to poultry vanished off the shelves, we were already hunkered down with our combined bodyweight in beans, rice, oats, lentils and canned vegetables, plus a month’s worth of baby food so the little guy doesn’t lose his exposure to (and thus, gastrointestinal tolerance of??) solid food during this debacle.

Every so often — so, several times a day — it will feel familiar to me, and not scary, all this prepping. It will feel like prepping for so many hurricanes as a child. Filling the tub, buying the food, stocking the batteries, then walking across the street to the dock and watching the water rise higher and higher, up through the wooden slats to lick your feet. Dad always had to take the ships away to safety in the Gulf of Mexico when that happened, so it was always just Mom and us and I can’t imagine, now, how she didn’t project fear onto us. It always seemed so controlled — exciting, especially at the thought of having to (I childishly imagined) bundle everyone into the car and drive inland to some bed and breakfast in the hills where we could become farmers if the hurricane took away our house and all our stuff — but never scary.

It’ll feel familiar like that, and then the vastness of the thing will hit me — the fact that schools are closing all over the country, that people who have no connection to each other are doing the same panicky things, sharing the same panicky advice; people around me are getting tested and so are relatives on the other side of the country — and none of it feels liked charted waters anymore. And I mean it isn’t, I know that.

I am relieved — obviously first and foremost — that it doesn’t hit kids too badly. But I am also relieved my son is so young I don’t have to explain any of this to him. Or reassure him. Or hide my own concerns from him at length. I was always afraid of that part of parenting — of having to bury your worries and frustrations so that they don’t harm your kid. Obviously sensible explanations and discussions of fears are called for, but I mean…no child of mine should feel the way I do when I sit there scrolling through pandemic preparedness articles, or those noting how ill-prepared we all are. You have to suppress that. I’ll take up that burden of parenthood when I get to it, but at the moment, I’m glad I don’t have to. He doesn’t understand any of this, and so his delight over blocks or new food flavors or birds hopping around outside is untainted by fear. And we never go anywhere anyway, so he’s not about to feel constrained within our four walls or — thank god — our fenced yard. His world continues on as usual, albeit with his dad more visible for awhile.

Hopefully that is all he takes away from this.

one of those weeks

Posted on by metaphlame

In the past week:

  • both dogs almost died
  • one of those almost-deaths was my fault
  • my father fell for an obvious social engineering scam, such that
  • my son’s information went for sale on the dark web
  • I obsessively read about COVID-19 with all the fervor I used to reserve for natural disasters as a child
  • I congratulated myself on already living a life of such comparative isolation that two weeks of quarantine didn’t sound that different than usual
  • I stocked up on mountains of dry goods, canned goods, and disinfectant

And today, my husband sent me a text of his fever temperature from a Walgreens parking lot where he’d stopped to (out of character enough to be cause for concern in itself) check on his way home.

Now I am buried in a pile of dogs next to a crib in a house where every doorknob, handle, flat surface has been gone over with disinfectant wipes, and where I have left food on disposable plates from our wedding (still!) in a lockdown zone outside husband’s door. I hope bone broth is as magical as they say it is because I have lots. This one in particular got rave (texted) reviews from my patient. It smelled like Thanksgiving.

milk demons

Posted on by metaphlame

I never had those dreams you hear about pregnant people having, where the baby is a monster and rips their way out of you alien-style. No nightmares on that front. But I woke soaked in sweat this morning from a nightmare about milk demons. They disguised themselves in human clothing, with hoods or hats to obscure their telltale faces. But if you met their eyes there would be a spatter of white ink across a black background — like a video game jump scare encounter — and they’d know you were a breastfeeding mother producing milk, and they’d be on you to steal it.

In the dream, I was in a Lyft, waiting at a red light. I was twiddling on my phone. But then I glanced out the window, spacing out, and watched a group cross the street in the crosswalk, and noticed one person in a geeenish hoodie kind of hunching a lot, and I looked too long; they sensed me looking and turned…

And there was that frizzle of ink, complete with a jump scare sound effect, and suddenly I was screaming at the Lyft driver to please run the light, please, they were coming, and suddenly the milk demons, faces devoid of features except long tubes sort of like those muppets with the bike horn noses, were clawing at the windows, yanking at the door handles, trying to bash their way into the car. Their voices silent, their only sounds the scrabbling of their hands and the thump of their limbs on the metal.

I mention it because the whole setup sounds familiar. Is this from a game? A comic? I doubt a movie because I hate horror movies so how could I have seen something like this? But it was terrifying. They moved fast, not at all like shuffling zombies. Like vipers. I leapt two feet in the air when my blearily loyal dog padded silently into view behind me after I got up with shaking hands at 1AM.

The last time I was in serious airplane turbulence I was trying to distract myself by remembering, or trying to, the last time I had felt in mortal peril like I did then. Terror felt so familiar yet I led a soft life. Why did fear sweat seem so recognizable?

Dreams, man. Dreams. Fuck.

athletic pvp

Posted on by metaphlame

You’ll have heard of Peloton, and their admittedly disastrous ad campaign (as well as Ryan Reynolds’ gin campaign afterward, that plucked the unfortunate actress for an oblique reference to the Peloton fiasco while selling what is apparently very smooth gin).

Well I wanted a Peloton ever since leaving California and its much more health-encouraging climate and culture. I wanted one right up until an article just before the commercial debuted (given all the thinkpieces thrown around about that ad, I’m not even going to try to find the article that predated it) pointed out, in a comparison of home cycle options, that it did not bode well that Peloton as a start-up was still unable to turn a profit despite charging over two grand just for the hardware, not even counting the subscription fees to their studio classes.

The studio classes which were — again, if you’re at all familiar with the Peloton ad debacle, you’re probably aware of all this, so forgive me for glossing over it — the entire point of Peloton. The classes themselves had zero appeal to me: I don’t like exercising in groups; I hated group sports in high school; CrossFit and the idea of someone bellowing at me to try harder does not attract me. What did was the leaderboard. The live-time scroll of stats on the screen that told where you placed in relation to other people around the world also competing on that same ride.

peloton

I wanted that. Specifically, I wanted targets to chase down mercilessly. I make no bones about this being a healthy competitive mindset, either — that’s why I prefer exercising alone. Because since all of my group exercising has been so disastrous (spoilers: women are vicious to each other, especially when herded into gender-based competition where their bodies are the instruments by which they compete), when forced into competition I do it with a snarl on my face.

But I also, uh. Perform really well.

In my last job, for example, I noticed one day that an older, if admittedly absurdly fit, guy was in my college rival’s t-shirt. I made note of this. I didn’t have any of my college’s shirts on me — I ordered one — but then when it arrived I showed up and delibately trotted over to every machine he touched and did it harder, longer and faster. If he was on a machine there were multiple copies of — a treadmill, say — I made sure to outpace him there, too. I never said a word. I never met his eyes. This was not, I should hope would be obvious, some sort of flirting situation. I wanted him to know that despite his probably fad-dieted 40-something pack of abs, and his damn shirt from that damn school, my soft-bodied self could still outpace him.

A month or two later I mentioned my one-woman death slog to my friend as he passed across the way, and she choked. It turned out he was, uh. The vice president of the company.

Oh. Welp.

Anyway, Peloton quickly faded from my wantlist as Black Friday deals loomed, because the studio classes are all they offer. And as the weather turned to garbage it became clear that more than no-holds-barred competition, what I needed was nature. The kind of nature that, you know, is everywhere in California. Hence the NordicTrack.

This is what I came for. This is the last of a 12-ride Switzerland series. While the bike also offers draw-it-yourself maps courtesy of Google Street View, such that for a while I really was able to bike my old routes in California, they’re limited by the still images by which Google Street View is made — so you’re left with a staccato cascade of still images rather than a smooth video.

That’s where these pre-recorded videos come in, though. Led by fitness gurus who are no doubt internet influencers in their fields (I assume), you take the spot behind them, as recorded by a silent cameraman with, to judge by their occasionally visible shadows, something like a GoPro affixed to their helmets. You can bike through Chile, Turkey, France, New Zealand…there are road bike rides and mountain bike rides (my god, New Zealand mountain bikers don’t fuck around) and even rides that trace the routes of actual races.

I just finished the Swiss ride series and adored it. A few days of experimenting with different series after I got the bike made clear that a.) there are few male bike leaders that I can stand, as their vocabularies of encouragement are pretty limited and very he-man, b.) I am a sap for maternal cheering-on, and c.) yep, I still hate deserts. So much orange. Ugh.

When I found the Swiss series led by Ashley Paulson, who fills you in on historical tidbits about the area as you whizz through (of note, all the female iFit trainers do this; only one of the men whose rides I tried told you anything about the country you were riding through) I was enchanted. She’s like the cycling form of Molly Yeh — pink-haired, bubbly, full of energy and a hopelessly positive attitude. Sprinkles on a bike. Plus, she has four little kids, so my post-pregnant body didn’t feel like it was trying to limp along behind some 20-something goddess whose greatest bodily hardship was a spring break binge in college.

But when I crowed about this bike and specifically the outdoor riding recordings (as opposed to the studio sessions, which exist in all their heavily-produced glory, to compete with Peloton, but which feel oily and contrived) to, well, basically anyone who would listen, no one cared. Even physically fit people. Even cyclists!

Which led me to hazard a couple of guesses. One, of course, people who actually bike (should I say cycle? in my bike search pre-Black Friday, Google actually corrected my use of the verb “bike” to “cycle,” which seems absurdly pretentious until I remember how prickly runners are about “running” versus “jogging”) on real roads or trails have the predictable disdain for those who do it indoors. I get that. My preferred sport is running, after all (I decided to go the route of an indoor bike over a treadmill early on, because the latter is the number one piece of home gym equipment to break down, and there isn’t a damn thing you can fix yourself: you need a tech every time). I know how much I used to hate the idea of a treadmill, until I lived in an apartment complex that was basically a resort, with the most beautiful goddamn treadmills on the planet only two floors away every day. That cured me of my real-road-or-bust snobbery, but not many people are going to have that experience. I get that. My father-in-law, who has done RAGBRAI, for example, can be excused his lack of enthusiasm for the bike.

But everyone else — especially Gen-Xers and boomers — couldn’t understand how I could sit in front of a video recording of someone else riding a bike outdoors and feel anything approaching the level of awe I ought to feel if I were there myself. (“Oh, well I guess it’ll give you ideas of where to travel, huh?”) Which leads me to my second hypothesis: people who play video games are more willing to suspend their disbelief and accept the artificiality of the recorded rides, and to participate in them as “actual cyclists,” than those who do not game and have no experience willing themselves into another space as an active participant.

Consider the RingFit speedrunners, for example. This looks ludicrous to two groups of people: those who play games all the time but who have no interest in physical fitness, and their opposites, those who pursue physical fitness all the time but have zero interest in video games. But for people who sit in the middle doing both, that looks like a damn good time. Dangerous, sure. But — if your body can handle it — a damn good time. This is the same attraction marathons have for me, and for so many others. But if your only idea of working your body requires the outdoors (shitty at this time of year) or classes with someone yelling at you (expensive and demoralizing), you are repelled.

Well, the other day NordicTrack finally rolled out their Leaderboard functionality. You can indeed see yourself ranked against other people around the world, cycling that same route. It doesn’t appear to be real-time, but that’s okay: you can filter on gender, on real-vs.-adjusted difficulty (like hell am I pitting myself against those who notched the incline or resistance down), on age. Unsurprisingly, I don’t rank too well at the moment. I was pregnant for nine months and recovering from a giant hole cut in my body for four months afterward. I sit a solid 20 RPMs lower than any of the speeds Paulson calls for in her rides (on the flat-out stretches I mean; for whatever reason I’m more capable of matching her on the inclines than the faster parts), and even filtering out those who’ve adjusted their rides I’m surrounded mostly by those whose avatars report them being in their 40s and 50s (of course, these bikes are expensive, so there probably aren’t that many people my age who own them? but still). Of some 300 people biking that route, I sat at around 120 for most of the ride. Behind a guy in his 50s. At the end, though, I dragged my ass past him, finally breaking through the top 100 to sit in, uh, 98th place. Only for a few seconds, but still.

It’s something to work towards. And given that I’m already acclimated to that kind of competition from games, competing in the virtual Alps, or the virtual Appalachians or virtual Utah (except not there because ugh, deserts, no!), all has equal appeal for me. Even if I never get to feel the real wind on my face there.