» Inspiration Mile42

No one will ever know

April 3, 2008 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Inspiration, Introspection

I may choose to reach for the life I want, or I may pass each day in melancholy deference to the comfort or judgement of others, and leave my dreams untried. A hundred years from now, no one will care – or even know – about my decision.

8 years old and ready to roll!

There will be no golden statue erected in the park with my face and the inscription, “he didn’t cause a fuss.”

No crowds of people gathering in banquet halls to raise a glass and say, “thank goodness he didn’t try anything weird.”

No hall of heroes with my portrait and a little card below that reads, “Distinguished performance, early 21st century: Conscientiously 100 percent second-guessed himself.”

If you stood fast at the wheel of your little community ship, steering straight along the plotted route as a generous guide to others, pretending not to notice the uncharted islands passing on the right or left with their intriguing flashes of green and gold, each one sending a surge of desire up your spine which you dutifully fought back down, and at the end of your shift you didn’t twitch the wheel even once, making an easy handoff to the next captain stepping in beside you… Well, the most anyone will assume is that the sea was calm, and there were no islands at all, and after you made a satisfactory run you were buried at sea with no regrets.

Then they will forget you entirely, and assume the ship steered itself.

First post!

January 19, 2008 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Amused, Inspiration

Let there be light! Kablaaam!

Welcome to Mile42, a ridiculous personal blog I’ve cobbled together with hacksaws and bandages, and bits of fluff, and those little iron nails that cobblers always use for cobbling things.

I’m a pretty technical guy, but getting everything to work was still much harder than I expected. This is what setting up a blog is like:

Order a printing press in the mail. Set it up in your front yard.
Go to a farmyard and steal a tractor. Drive it home, then rip all the controls off. Weld them onto the printing press.
Borrow a moving van. Wait until nightfall, then detach all the mailboxes from the houses on your street. Throw them in the van.
Rent a flatbed trailer and a winch. Haul the printing press up onto the trailer and attach it to the moving van.
Acquire a used houseboat. Knock down some of the rooms, then drive the van onto the boat.
If the whole thing doesn’t sink, cast off and float around.
Fire up the printing press and stamp out 50,000 copies of the first thing that pops into your head.
Cram 1000 copies into each mailbox.
Drive the van off the houseboat, into the water.
Congratulations, you have just blogged.

That’s what it’s like. Except it’s even more complicated, time-consuming, and ridiculous. … And of course, that hasn’t stopped me. So here is where I shall document the riding my bicycle between various things.

I’ll be posting here using an iPhone or a laptop, whatever’s appropriate, depending mostly on whether I’m pedaling the bike, or stopped somewhere, poking something with a stick.