What's your story?

Location: Houston, TX
Ride Day

Houston gets an F for drivers. Is there an F-? Give it to them. Horrible. Unkind, erratic, angry. Could be because there are fifteen lanes in each direction and no one is happy with the lane they are in. It's a salmon rush.

I'm on my way to a ride that I downloaded. I modified it a bit so I can start from a house that two people live in that are friends of my parents that I saw last, maybe, 30 years ago.

And as I get closer to the house, I realize that I am on one of the roads that I mapped out for a ride, and that there is no way in hell that I would on this road. No, there is no street in Houston to ride a bike on, and Houstinites: don't even begin a debate on this.

So when I get there, we say our hellos and of course I look just like my father and I remember them vaguely, I mean I would recognize maybe the guy if I saw him out of context, but maybe not her.

And we discuss that Houston will kill me if I bike from there so I regretabbly conclude that I must drive to the park section that I have mapped, which will cut out 10 miles of the ride.

And here's a funny thing about people a couple of generations above me, they will tell you how to get to places. I take for granted that I have two forms of GPS in my vehicle and if you wanted to find a bowling ball I could get you to the closest place in about 10 seconds without knowing a damn thing about anything.

So I'm riding on a path. Faaaaan-tastic. What happened the last time I rode on a path? Like a runner, jogger, blader, rider, baby stroller path? Yeah, I got hosed head on by the dude on a fixie.

And I almost, I almost didn’t get on the bike at all, but to be honest, I needed the rush. I rode completely and utterly against my will. And I wanted it to be over at mile 5.

I changed the Pandora station five times, I tried to look around and enjoy the scenery but the path was too windy and bumpy and cracky and full of sticks. And when I got to George Bush Park, I thought, ok, something good has to be coming soon.

But the park was barren, the path was linear, there were no elevation changes, there was just a long barren path. Are you wondering why this was called the George Bush park? I wasn’t. Great name for this place.

And when I got onto a section of road with some traffic and got two fly by’s in a row I said fuck it, and u-turned. And that’s just the worst. Try and watch a streaming movie and have it buffer every ten seconds.

Ready…..go. Good thing happen….now. Winds change…..now. Good smooth pavement coming……now. And it doesn’t.

And I know you're saying what I was saying. Dude, its 86 degrees out, the sun is shining, you're in Texas and not behind a desk, or your not in a wheelchair, or you don’t have cats. I know, I get all that. But it still sucked. Doesn’t affect my feeling of Houston, but it rules it out as a place that I would ever live as a bike rider.

When I get back to the house, I shower real quick and they invite me to dinner. I accept.

But as we wait for another guest, the guy takes me upstairs to show me his office, not because he is showing off, not that kind of guy, but we get to talking about where I would like to go and he asks me if Africa has been considered. And no, it hasn’t.

Follow me, he says. And up we go to his office which is kind of like walking into a time capsule, no, exactly like that.

There are antelope heads on the wall and a zebra skin on the floor and pictures of him killing all of them on the wall. There are medals from his tour in Korea from 50-51 in the army. There is the rifle that he carried on his sailboat for the five years that he and his wife spent sailing around the world. There is a picture of the King of Denmark, dedicated to him.

And there is just a lot of cool shit there and instead of going to Carrabas and eating I just want to sit up there in that office with him and open a bottle of wine and hear his stories. But there isn’t enough time for that.

And this leaves me feeling sad, I realize, as dinner is over and I am driving back to downtown. This guy, well he's maybe 80 now, maybe a little more, and he’s got these stories and maybe it might take about a week or two to get them all out but Carrabas gets busy and we should probably make way.

It makes me sadder when he doesn’t say anything at dinner at all, because it's pretty loud, but he just eats his lasagna and looks around and I can tell he cant hear so well anymore.

I think that's why I have an aversion to older people and hospitals. Why I don’t want to ever be old and alive. Why I'd rather be dead then not be able to take part.

Maybe its different when you get to that place, maybe it's ok to live with the silence, the lips moving around you but nothing coming in, just with your own rich memories.

Maybe there is a silence and peace to that that I am missing or cant see from where I stand.

But it makes me want to write it all down and write every detail too, because I want a story, I want someone to hear my story now, uninterrupted and pure and honest and not cut short by the popularity of a restaurant on a Wednesday.