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I lack confidence in my knee, but maybe confidence isn’t the right word.

From the moment we’re born, flailing and unable, we begin to learn how our bodies behave. Coordinating intended movements with the physical responses of limbs in space we map out our bodily capacities. Through the statistically valid lens of experiences we can make fairly accurate predictions about how we might behave in hypothetical situations.

That doesn’t look very painful. I could probably jump from here. I can make it to the top of this hill. If I don’t turn back soon I won’t be able to get home.

Now, with pins removed, I can begin the process of returning flexibility to my knee. Essentially, I need to stretch my knee painfully and repeatedly until my range of motion returns to what it was. The tendons and ligaments in my leg have become tight and stubborn over the past few months and I need to persuade them to open up.

The second time I injured my knee it was by suddenly putting all of my weight onto my leg in a bent position. Instead of stretching to accommodate this motion, the fibers of flesh within my leg snapped inelastic and pulled my knee cap apart. In order to avoid the possibility of such a break occurring again, I need to slowly and carefully stretch my leg, over the course of several weeks, to regain as much flexibility as I can. But I can’t help but worry while I do so.

Laying on my back I lift my leg and let the weight of my foot and calf bend the knee slightly downward, causing mild discomfort in an around my knee. I worry. Instead of being able to look to reliable data and experiences of how much stress my body can tolerate, I am forcefully plotting the border between the regions of mild discomfort and catastrophic material failure. It wouldn’t take much to overshoot the strengths of my knee in its current condition, but it won’t improve unless I vigorously press it to do so.

The transplant was a success. Last night was the first I spent sleeping in my new apartment, which has thus far proven to be un-haunted.

After work yesterday Brad generously spent about an hour helping me move my limited possessions from storage into my vacant single bedroom apartment. I spent the rest of last night re-assembling furniture while trying to decide where everything belongs. I gave up on searching for ultimate bachelor feng shui around one in the morning and went to bed.

Work was wild today. As school resumes Chico’s population swells and all those students need bikes. Today was the kind of day where you promise same-day service to more early customers than you probably should, sweat through the hours as more walk-ins pile up and basic repairs turn into necessary overhauls, and your lunch break is bitten into at both ends by waves of bargain hunting parents. And yet somehow by the time five thirty rolls around everything seems to get done; loose ends are tied, a root beer gets cracked, and the register is very happy. I could go for gold in some kind of bike shop world championship.

I walked home with a bag full of groceries from the co-op across the street. Apparently during my three week homeless interim I’ve forgotten how to shop for groceries. I bought eggs, but have no butter to fry in them nor spices to add flavor. Peanut butter and raspberry jam but no bread to spread it on, pasta and sauce, but I am without pot or colander. In time I’m sure I’ll get my kitchen together, or starve.

Tonight more progress was made toward a pleasing geometry of living space. I want this place to feel like someone lives here, and I guess the only way to achieve that effect is to do it. Following my brother’s advice I’m only unpacking boxes as their contents become necessary, and the rest serve as place holders for imaginary couches, tables, and chairs.

You ought to send me things to decorate these blank walls.

Now that the sun has gone down, with a mason jar full of water experiencing all kinds of phase shifts in my hand and a strong wi-fi signal, I feel pretty good.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle at work today. Usually it’s a rather peaceable environment, but today there was some tension over a customer who’s been a really good friend of mine since before I started working at the shop, but who has been ‘blacklisted’ from doing business with us for a few reasons. I’m in the fortunate position of being wedged between my friend and my job, and I try to steer clear of the issue when I can. From my point of view there has been a whole lot of miscommunication between parties who seem to have immutable unfavorable opinions of one another, and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to ease the situation. This afternoon I was lambasted by a coworker for saying that both sides of the argument were acting like “babies”, I guess the discussion wasn’t as lighthearted as it felt. This sent me into a pretty sour mood for the rest of the afternoon.

From work I’ve got a pretty long walk to the house of the friend I’m staying with while waiting to move into my new apartment. This gives me plenty of time to playback what happened, what went wrong, and how I behaved. Despite completely disagreeing with my coworker’s divisive and argumentative approach to the situation, I found myself apologizing to them for what I said, it being what I felt.

I’m pretty good at getting myself out of bad moods though, and I was in better shape by the time I got home, I was also much sweatier. After a cooling swim in the creek and some rest in the shade things were looking up. What does it matter if I find myself offering apologies every time I face a conflict, or alone in trying to keep things amiable? I’m almost glad to be an apologist for getting along.

Also, as far as good news goes, I got my new bike (in progress, and gloss black), I should be able to move into my new place this weekend (hopefully), I’ve been exercising my bum leg by swimming upstream which feels great, and I’ve made a new muxtape for you to listen to (but the upstream connection here is weak sauce so you’ll just have to wait).

After being told that my new apartment would be ready to move into by this past Friday, then this past monday, I’ve been informed that the previous tenant actually has until the 10th to clear out. They could be out of there sooner, but there is no guarantee. So I wait, gratefully crashing on couches in the meantime.

Sometime this week I’m also supposed to have the two metal pins extracted from my knee, thus freeing me to begin physical therapy. I told the doctor to schedule the removal for sometime this week, assuming the challenge of moving would be past by this point. They haven’t yet called to tell me when the minor operation can be done though, and so I wait impatiently.

I’m also waiting for good things. Yesterday at work I ordered a new bicycle frame, along with some components, to build up a touring/cyclocrosss/randonneuring bike. This will be the first new bike I’ve bought in years, and will allow me to pursue some styles of riding that I’ve been interested in for a while, once I regain the strength and flexibility to safely bend my knee. For those interested, I bought four and a half pounds of Tange Prestige heat-treated butted chrome-molybdenum steel in the form of a Soma Double Cross. The distributor I ordered from normally ships product to the shop in a day or two, and so I anxiously wait.

1. Had a doctor look at my knee for the first time in the nearly eight weeks since my surgery. Looks like the kneecap is stitching itself back together again, and it’s ready to have the two supporting pins removed. As soon as I get them out I can begin physical therapy again to restore flexibility and strength to my leg. If I was to try to bend my knee with the pins still in it, they would “shred the flesh”, as the doctor put it. Two little bastard steel toothpicks live in my leg, but not for long.
2. Looks like I’ve almost secured a new apartment. My current lease ends next Wednesday and I’ll be able to start moving into the new place the following Friday, so it looks like some couch crashing will be in order. Slowly my belongings are getting boxed in preparation for brief storage and eventual moving into the new digs. I am looking forward to have a gas range, a garden, and a one bedroom apartment all to myself.
3. Started listening to Andrew Jackson Jihad last night, very tasty. Kind of rude, kind of nasal and squawking, some kind of awesome. Brave As A Noun is obviously a very good song, but I think People II: The Reckoning is my favorite so far.

   So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
   People love you more, oh nevermind, oh nevermind
   In fucking fact, Mrs. Robinson
   The world won’t care whether you live or die, live or die
   In fucking fact, Mrs. Robinson,
   They probably hate to see your stupid face, your stupid face
   So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,
   You live in an unforgiving place.

4. I think bicycle frame builders who blog and/or upload photos of frames-in-progress are hot. There are plenty of them on Flickr, including but not limited to Mike of ANT, COURAGE Bicycles, Jordan Hufnagel, Ira Ryan, M.A.P. Cycles, Pereira Cycles, Signal Cycles, and especially Sweetpea Bicycles. Almost all of those builders are from Portland, hey, whadyaknow.

Tomorrow morning the Wheeled Migration takes flight. “Students, educators, innovators, activists, organizers, and entrepreneurs of the environmental justice and green economy movements” will be spend ten days riding South from Chico and other parts of the state toward San Luis Obispo and the UC/CSU/CCC Sustainability Conference.

Many of my friends are going on this tour and I wish them the best of luck. However it plays out I am sure it’ll be a great experience. All the preparation I’ve seen so far makes me hunger for my own inevitable bike touring.

At this moment, I like the idea of lightly-loaded short tours, some akin to Randonneuring. I want to ride light and fast, I want to carry the bare minimum and realize that I need even less, I want for something like this.

It’s going to be a while before I’m riding again, and even longer still until I’m riding as fast or as strong as I was. I’m imagining myself as starting from a completely blank slate, though I know this isn’t completely true. It will be through daily indoctrination that my legs return to appropriate levels of muscle tension; riding to and from work, riding in spare hours of sunlight, riding entire Sundays.

Eventually the miles will add up to something. Until then, I’ll watch my friends ride and share in the revelry that I can.

A few months ago John Pucher, professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University, gave a lecture titled Cycling for Everyone: Lessons for Vancouver from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany at a Canadian public policy conference.

Citing the personal and public benefits of increased cycling, Pucher explains why riding a bike is by far one of the most environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable forms of transportation.

The meat of his presentation lies in his exploration of cycling infrastructure in societies where trips by bicycle are much more common. In the Netherlands, for example, over a third of all local trips are made by bike, as compared to less than 1% here in the United States. The reason they are riding more is that the infrastructure in place in their cities makes cycling practical, safe, fast, and convenient.

Ezra Klein, associate editor at The American Prospect, agrees with many of Pucher’s points. In a recent post on his blog Klein suggests that these kinds of transportation issues have been recast as what he calls lifestyle issues:

In America no one cycles, and when you’re over thirty, really no one cycles. In the Netherlands, a quarter of the old make their trips by bike. Which is just to say, everyone cycles. It’s like walking, or driving: A mode of transportation that’s often the best for a given trip. Not some sort of radical lifestyle statement. Meanwhile, the problem in America is that, compared to other countries, cycling is incredibly unsafe, and we have little infrastructure dedicated to supporting it.

This of course means that cycling ends up concentrated among the young, who tend to take more risks and feel more physically capable, and males, who tend to take even more risks and feel even more physically capable. But there’s no reason it should be that way. It’s a public policy choice, and given the energy and public health benefits of cycling, it’s an odd one.

The comments on Klein’s post make a pretty interesting read, discussing wether it’s fair to compare the US and European countries, how cycling advocacy may be indicative of a culture war, and ways in which European modeled cycling infrastructure may or may not be applicable in the United States.

One commentor, Philly, argues nicely:

All the anti-bike people here have very short-sighted sense of what it would take to make more Americans ride bikes.

It isn’t about getting a lawyer who […] lives in a Houston exurb to bike to the city wearing an expensive Italian suit in mid-July. […] It’s about first creating the infrastructure for the people live close enough to work and in appropriate climes (which is a larger number of Americans than most people here concede, but does not include, I will admit, Texan exurbans). And it’s about developing and redeveloping urban areas so that commercial and residential areas are more mixed and closer together.

I think the ideal goal is not an America that looks like 1970/80s-era China where the streets are filled with flocks of bikes, but rather a place where a respectable number of people (but realistically, probably never more than 10% of the population) bike to work and an even larger number of people (again, never a majority) use bikes to run everyday errands and on the weekend rather than using cars or buses, and that there would be a far greater number of bike lanes, bike paths, and bike racks throughout the developed landscape.

I personally need to become much more of a cycling advocate. I’ve always thought of trying to be the best bike mechanic I can be as a way of encouraging others to ride their bikes more often (since you can’t ride your bike if it’s not working), but I can and should be doing more to affect changes in my community that will cultivate more cycling.

I don’t know what I was doing on the fourth of July last year, but I can vividly remember the year before that.

I remember sitting on the lawn behind my house with friends.
We had originally gathered on Flood’s hill, a big grassy slope on which the town gathered to watch fireworks being shot off from the nearest soccer field. Afterwards we walked through the dispersing crowds and the two blocks to my house.

From my backyard we shot bottle rockets out of an empty glass bottle up into the trees, each time hoping it wouldn’t light any of the branches on fire, hoping it wouldn’t fail to take flight and set the grass ablaze.

High school was over and a lot of us were headed to different parts of the country in the next few months. Most would still have family in New Jersey to return to over each extended break between classes, but not all.

I remember a conversation between two friends about their accepting college’s drug reputations, specifically the mention of coke being popular on some North-Eastern campus. I said something admonishing about the drug, asking my friends not to mess around with it. I even told the story of the friend of a coworker who overdosed just a few weeks before.

I had only met the woman a few times in passing, but in stories she sounded rather manic. One evening she invited my coworker over to the place she was house-sitting and upon his arrival refused to let him in. After an argument through the window my coworker left, returned once more to be met by more arguing, and finally left for the night. The woman was found the next morning, apparently dead from an overdose of cocaine. My coworker indicated that he thought it was likely an intentional suicide.

After I told the story, one of my friends remarked how tragic it was, how unfortunate the woman was. Though my feelings have changed in the years since, I said then that I didn’t feel bad for the woman, implying that the situation was her own fault. I now regret having the entire conversation.

I’m writing about reading again, as I’ve been doing plenty of the latter in the past few weeks.

I don’t consider myself particularly well-read or in possession of the kind of monstrous appetite for books that expresses itself elsewhere in my family. When I do read it’s usually in fits. I’ll find something that catches my attention and sit with it for about two days or until I’ve finished it, whichever comes first. As a result I have a stack of really interesting but only half-finished books that’s half as tall as I am. I get new books much faster than I complete old ones, and I have an unjustifiable (but rationalized) preference for buying instead of borrowing. I suspect these problems aren’t so unusual.

I normally look for books on specific topics or ideas that have caught my attention. A lot of what I bring home is non-fiction and popular science. Comix aside, I don’t really invest a lot of time in books with strong narratives and characters.

Recently though, I read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Recommended by my mom and step-dad after I complained of finishing all the books I brought with me to their house, I expected nothing more from it than to pass a few hours. The story revolves around the relationship of Henry, a man cursed and blessed by involuntary time travel, and Clare, a woman living a perfectly sequential life. Their life together is passionate, painful, and often confusing to them and those around them.

I was lured into the book by the mechanics of Henry’s time traveling. Niffenegger obviously spent a lot of time considering the possible side effects of two broken and wildly intertwined timelines, while precariously avoiding an over-explanation or excuse for Henry’s condition. It wasn’t until I was about two hundred pages in that I realized I cared less about the deterministic implications of Niffenegger’s time travel mechanisms than I did about her engrossing characters.

I stayed up until dawn finishing the story. I laughed, I cried, I made strong connections with fictional characters. Doctor help, I am sensitive to this new medicine.

I’ve been really out of it this week, or at least it seems I’ve been feeling strange now that I’m becoming a bit more normalized. One of the characteristic difficulties of determining one’s own health, physical or mental, is that we can’t quite seem to find a window to peer out of that will give us a complete view of the building we’re in.

My brother Zack was driving through the valley, up from the Bay Area to Portland, and spent the stayed at my apartment overnight. After graduating from University in Connecticut and completing his second cross-country drive, he’s spending the summer in the Pacific NW with some friends.

As always, my brother proved to be an invaluable sounding board and yardstick for ideas and mental conditions, and spending time with him always leaves me feeling much more grounded, confident, and concrete. I don’t think anybody else can do that for me the way he does. He’s my best brother for sure.

In trying to pin down what’s gotten me so befuddled these past few days, I couldn’t tell whether it was my body’s reaction to the stress of injury and surgery, the effects of narcotic opioid painkillers, too much or too little sleep at irregular intervals, not eating enough or the right things, the onset of mild lethargic depression, or some combination of all of the above.

After getting breakfast with Zack at Cafe Coda though, I think I’ve determined that what I eat (or haven’t been eating) may have the largest effect on my stamina. A big tasty breakfast this morning has already improved my condition considerably, and chances are I might actually accomplish something akin to being productive today.

One of the side effects of the much less active lifestyle that goes along with a broken leg is a reduction of appetite. If I’m not commuting by bicycle, working on my feet for nearly nine hours a day, and then spending my free time riding through the foothills, my body is consuming vastly fewer calories. Yet somehow I’ve lost about twenty pounds in the ten weeks since I originally fractured my knee. That’s a full ninth of my previous weight.

I tried to give my brother a little bit of advice, since he’s becoming more conscientious about what and how much he eats and drinks (a shift I earnestly endorse). To be frank, the majority of the substantive waste that comes out of our bodies (yeah, shit) isn’t just chewed up food, It’s discarded flesh. What this means is that what we eat, for the most part, becomes us in one way or another. Food that we burn for energy is what allows for us to take action and thought, to survive. We are what we eat in a very literal sense.

So it’s no surprise to me that by returning to wholesome and substantial meals I begin to feel both more corporeal and clearheaded.

I went for a bike ride this past Sunday, it was my first real ride with the gang since I got my cast off, and it was set to be a great day. We met up at a coffee shop around 9 or so, and headed South-East out of town along the bike paths, riding up into the foothills towards Honey Run Road, the very road I crashed coming down on ten weeks ago.

My leg was feeling pretty good. I’d spent a large portion of my morning preparing, stretching and massaging my knee, and it wasn’t that stiff once I got on the saddle. Though I was trailing a bit behind the pack as we made our way through the gentle foothills, it was still fantastic to be back on the road together.

Feeling perhaps a bit overconfident, I decided to try heading up Centerville Road, a milder climb that begins just as Honey Run Road starts to get steep. It was slow going climbing with such a weakened leg, but it felt good. I felt like what I was doing was within my abilities, and was just another part of increasing the flexibility and strength of my knee.

What I didn’t anticipate was my right cleat suddenly detaching from the pedal in mid-stroke, suddenly placing all of my weight and momentum onto my bent left leg. Not having the strength to hold myself up on the injured leg alone, it bent beneath my much further than I had yet been able to achieve through physical therapy. I remember hearing a noise, something like a snap and a pop, and then the pain began. I don’t think I have ever felt anything so painful before.

It was laying on the road, screaming obscenities into the sky, biting hard into the leather palms of my gloves, wiping tears from my face, and screaming some more, that I realized I had done something enormously regrettable. An X-ray taken this morning confirmed that I had split my kneecap open again, worse than the original fracture I had inflicted little over two months before.

So I’m back to square one, a bit worse off this time around. It would have been nice if just letting the bone stitch itself back together had been enough, but the fact that I could split the bone simply by bending my knee proves that it was insufficient, and that more invasive measures are necessary. I’m going to have knee surgery sometime this week, in which they will either pin my kneecap back together with small metal rods, wrap the bone in thin metal wires to hold the pieces together, or some combination thereof.

This operation will be followed by another eight to ten weeks in a cast, after which I will begin some much more challenging physical therapy. I’ve got a long way to go before I’ll be riding again, let alone walking.

I had planned to spend this summer working, riding, and generally recovering from the mild depression that seven weeks in a cast had brought upon me. It now looks like I may have to push that process a bit further down the calendar.