D&F 5/07/23

Good morning from a breezy and wet pre-race day in Oregon. I drove up to the coast on Friday, arriving deep in the night and settling in with a little whiskey and a hot shower. Saturday I did some course recon, and ate an outstanding fish and chips meal of halibut before taking a long bath in my room’s hot tub (finally!).

As this sends, I should be an hour or two into a race that will likely take me 4-5 hours of pretty hard riding. I’m excited to see the coastal range of mountains in Oregon and especially excited to finish and enjoy the type-2 fun aspects. There’s a meditative aspect to cycling whereby I practice being present with the discomfort and the challenge without dwelling on it or judging it, and it’s likely I’m grinning and enjoying the ride.

Links

• I hope you like social media pontification, because I have not just one, but two links this week in conversation with each other about the nature of Mastodon, BlueSky, and what online community and commodification look like. My feeling is that actual community takes work, time, good faith, and strong accountability. I also don’t think it’s feasible for communities to grow into the thousands, with even a few hundred becoming quickly unmanageable. My favorite places online are under 100 active users on a Slack or Discord, chatting about bikes, cars, and weird memes. Sure, I’ll never go viral for saying anything there, but fame is a void I have no interest in gazing into.

In the autumn, make the bedroom cooler, not warmer. In winter, keep it slightly chilly, so that there is pleasure in that tingle of cold before you leap into bed with a hot water bottle, a good book and a glass of whisky.

• Speaking of voids, look deep into the night sky tonight. What do you see? What do you hear and feel? In this piece Jeanette Winterson invites us to turn off the electric lights and enjoy a good candle, and an evening of deep thought and joy.[^1 Look, Winterson may be a little weird about trans stuff, but her novels have also given me a lot of joy and lesbian happiness over the years so I dunno, baby with the bathwater, and that.]

Closing

Sorry for the short newsletter today, I’ve got a lot of prep to do still! Smell the ocean air, and look out over the misty peaks, space cowgirls~