more normal than not

I talked with a woman out on the route yesterday who’d had, what sounded like, a pretty horrific bicycling accident a while back.

She was limping pretty badly and her wrist was torqued in a weird way, and when I asked how she was, she told me that she’d been going down the watershed and there was a tractor in her lane, and when she went to pass him at speed, he turned left, and she hit him.

I guess that the real “salt on the wound” was that the cops ticketed her for passing on a yellow line.

Wow.

This is the kind of stuff she’d have been riding through.

I guess that she had to throw away her helmet.

It got crushed in the accident.

It’s not all that safe to ride a bike with any cars around.

It’s not safe to ride a bike with any tractors around.

Who would have thought that a tractor would take you down?

Out of Michigan came the story of a group of cyclists who called themselves “the Chain Gang” who were in a pretty bad accident, too.

They were riding up in Michigan when a guy in a pickup truck plowed into them.

The accident killed 5 and injured 4.

I guess that if you ride a bike you know what the potential for injury is.

It’s a risk worth taking….it’s pretty great to ride.

And, you know, the way the folks on our road drive, sometimes it feels risky to even stand at your mailbox and check your mail.

Life is risky.

OK.

If things start to seem like they’re falling apart on the potty side of your life….let’s say, you stop somewhere to use the facilities and it seems like there might be an issue, that something isn’t quite up to snuff…..that it’s not going to work out long term…..that the flusher just won’t flush correctly….well, if that happens and you’re living in something as quickly mobile as a van, you could just tell yourself, “wellllllllll……that’s unpleasant. GOTTA GO!!!!”

Man.

That’s a cool possibility.

Of course, when you live in something that’s anchored in place, like a home on a foundation, you can’t just ignore the problem and move along to another potty.

You have to fix the issue.

Putting some gas in the van and driving somewhere else does sound appealing, though.

This is a short video about a couple who spends a good bit of their lives on the road.

They work for 6 months on a holiday work visa, spend a year travelling, and then sell their van at the end of their trip and recoup a large part of their expenses.

What a plan!

I’m just excited about the option of ignoring a problem.

We’ll get our septic situation back in line and I’ll stop thinking about living in a van and travelling.

(Probably not. I want to see the video of a couple travelling in a van with 4 children and a Great Pyrenees. That’s the one that I want to see. Show me how to do that. Show me….because if I go, they go.)

Anyway, just because you’re moving doesn’t mean that you can outrun your problems.

Sometimes, you have to dig some new holes and figure out what to do when your potty doesn’t work right.

That’s what being an adult is all about.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee……”being an adult”.

Watched a documentary about Jaco Pastorius last night.

Man.

What a musician.

What a tragic story.

Check out Netflix…it’s streaming now.

This is so beautiful to see this.

My daughter is going to be an engineer….and to see another young woman actively pursuing something like this is a lot of fun.

We don’t push our limits….and we limit the range of our interests.

That this young lady is pursuing this is really pretty cool.

We’d be a lot better off if this was the way we all got our first cars.

To get a wreck that we had to resurrect would be a real education.

Watch this video…it’s a good one.

All these words, like so many seemingly directionless birds, filling the air, flying home.

I worked as a DJ for a while, mostly, I think, because the station I worked at needed someone to fill a slot in time, and I was a warm body who liked to talk sometimes.

We had a term that we used when something happened and there was a moment of silence that traveled out over the radio waves.

We called that “dead air”.

Dead air.

That’s kind of strange.

Silence doesn’t make me uncomfortable, usually, but “dead air” wasn’t something that we liked to hear.

We didn’t want to hear the silence when we were working at the radio station.

That’s a funny thing when silence is the aberration.

I was thinking about conversation, and how I must sometimes think that it’s a strange kindness to fill in the holes and pauses with some kind of noise, maybe only to avoid the “dead air”.

I’ll run over the next thought that a person is going to express if the words don’t come fast enough.

Sometimes, I’m not a good listener.

All for the sake of avoiding “dead air”.

I stood in a canyon once with Jenny and some of her family, on a high desert plateau, ringed by mountains, and the silence there was so profound that it made me dizzy.

I thought that I would fall down.

I felt like crying.

It was so beautiful.

Maybe, Heaven is a place where you never feel like you have to fill in the holes, where you are content and never worried, where you are embraced by….and embrace….the silence?

I don’t know what Heaven is, but I think that part of it must be the quiet.

The sky is cloudless and the stars are where they always are….and it’s quiet here when I tilt my head to look up at them, standing on our front lawn.

It’s a good place to be….listening on the dark side of this big spinning ball….looking at these stars.

Plains (Eastern Montana Blues)   -George Winston