Happiness

Things things don't always happen when we think they should. Sometimes they happen in their own time. Sometimes they seem impossible.

special edition of Friday writing for randos: His place will never be with those cold and timid souls

  {First Friday Writings for Randos - A monthly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This month it's an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt)

Speech at the Sorbonne
Paris, France
April 23, 1910

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust sweat and blood; who strives valiantly,  who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;  who knows great enthusiasms; the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;  who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of  high achievement and, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.

Answer the alarm

Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years. He awoke one day, his beard now gray, to find himself a strange man in a changed land. A war was won, a nation begun, his children grown, his friends unknown. And he had slept through all the throes. Or so the story goes. 

Three Questions for the writers of RIDE 2

The editor, publisher and contributor of Ride 2, Keith Snyder, described it as "The second collection of short fiction about bicycles." And it is that. It is also a varied, diverse entertaining assortment of stories which include bicycles but may not be about bicycles.

The website for Ride 2 also offers readers and potential readers a chance to look behind the curtain and hear from the writers who contributed to the collection. It's called the The RIDE 2 “Three Questions” Game (click for a link) and it goes like this:

Friday writings for Randos - The Life of a Day

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's . . .  

 The Life of a Day

by Tom Hennen

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. 

Friday Writings for Randos - "Of Two Wheelers and One Lesson"

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from:

A Man Called Daddy

by Hugh O'Neill

Josh was just six years old. We were at the park, late on one of those golden, New York October afternoons. Strangers were playing basketball together. Tape players dueled – salsa and Debussy – as old men played chess in the falling light. And in one corner of the sweet tumult, Josh and I were going one-on-one with a two-wheeler. The training wheels had been taken off. A rite of passage was in the air.

Friday Writings for Randos - Who's with me?

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from: 

MOMENTUM IS YOUR FRIEND 

by Joe Kurmaskie

Climbing a healthy series of switchbacks through the chill of a Colorado dawn, I don't feel tired, I don't feel the miles I pedaled yesterday or the weight I'm carrying now. Pockets of warm air hug the corners of the road. I spot wildflowers, rebels against the altitude, clinging to washes as I clear the treeline. When I look over my shoulder there's another cyclist, some industrious insomniac out for an early morning ride. He's determined to catch me before the top but it doesn't happen. We rest beside a sign marking Cottonwood pass, at more than 12,000 feet above sea level.

Friday Writings for Randos - Be here now.

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's an excerpt from:

The Way of the Mountain Turtle
Single-speeding the Great Divide Mountain Bike Race
By Kent Peterson*

July 6th PM

Buddhists advocate the wisdom of “be here now” and that advice is easy to follow when here is somewhere ruggedly beautiful like Zuni Canyon or the Chain of Craters Byway. But when the day grows long and the trail is a hot, windswept washboard ranch road leading to a place called “Pietown” then it is easy to forget the sage advice and build Pietown into an oasis of earthly delights, a place of air-conditioned comfort, cool drinks and a smorgasbord of pies.

Friday Writings for Randos- Long Journeys

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:.....

An excerpt from 

"Off the Map - Bicycling across Siberia" 

By Mark Jenkins

There is something about long journeys. 
You're lucky if you manage one in a lifetime, and by the time you are done you're swearing by God never I'll never do it again. 

Friday Writings for Randos - Where is man's truth to be found?

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from: 

WIND, SAND AND STARS

 By  Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(1939)

Everything about mankind is paradox. He who strives and conquers grows soft. The magnanimous man grown rich becomes mean. The creative artist for whom everything is made easy nods. Every doctrine swears that it can breed men, but none can tell us in advance what sort of men it will breed. Men are not cattle to be fattened for market. In the scales of life an indigent Newton weighs more than a parcel of prosperous nonentities. All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness. All of us, on seeing old friends again, have remembered with happiness the trials we lived through with those friends. Of what can we be certain except this - that we are fertilized by mysterious circumstances? Where is man's truth to be found?

Friday Writings for Randos - Breath and Spirit

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from: 

Running after Antelope

by Scott Carrier

In the beginning God inhaled and created all life. This is the Hindu creation myth. They have the same word for breath and spirit, as did the ancient Greeks. 

Friday Writings for Randos - nineteen-twenties feeling

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from: 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -

An inquiry into values

by Robert M. Pirsig

We travel down the eastern shore of Klamath lake on a three-lane highway that contains a lot of nineteen-twenties feeling. That's when these three-laners were all made. We pull in for lunch at a roadhouse which belongs to this era too. Wooden frame badly in need of paint, neon beer signs in the window, gravel and engine drippings for a front lawn.

Friday writings for Randos - The Moon and the Mountain

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's an excerpt from a blog post titled:

 The Moon and the Mountain

 

by Mark Thomas* 

Not my finest hour (or two, or three, or maybe more). By turns walking, riding, throwing up, and sitting on the guardrail trying to settle my stomach, I was making poor progress up White Pass on our 600k brevet Saturday night. Last or near last among the riders on the course, I began to lose confidence that I could finish the ride. Of course, that confidence was at best a thin veneer from the start. "Petrified" was apparently the word I had used earlier in the week to describe to Robert Higdon my state of mind about the 600k. . .

Friday Writings for Randos - Rule 9

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:

Rule #9

Friday Writings for Randos: The Old Man and the Sea

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:.

An excerpt from 

The Old Man and the Sea 

by Ernest Hemingway

But four hours later the fish was still swimming steadily out to sea, towing the skiff, and the old man was still braced solidly with the line across his back. 

Friday writings for Randos - For one boundless summer

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:.....

 

An excerpt from "Off the Map - Bicycling across Siberia" 

By Mark Jenkins

Then one day I went beyond our backyard. Beyond all that I knew down the sidewalk past where we would turn to give old Mr. Schicksal a casserole. I had been planning it in bed or maybe dreaming it. I knew I wasn't supposed to but I just had to see. I went fast in a blur, my great little rabbit heart rejoicing in my throat. I was liquid, hurling my red bike. I didn't know how I could go so fast. I didn't know how I could go so far so fast. I saw giant foreign houses and giant foreign fences all so near I could have touched them. I smelled new things and heard strange dogs. I saw foreign kids and foreign moms all up close as if they could have lived where I lived. I went to the edge of the earth. To where looking back I could just make out the trees in our front yard. Then I almost ran into a car. I stomped backward on the pedals and squealed and skidded.

Friday writings for Randos - Rain Travel

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's . . .

Rain Travel

by W.S. Merwin