Reaching Nirvana

nirvana

There’s a great place on one of my favorite mountain bike trails called Nirvana. Someone set up a pole with ropes coming off of it and they attached about one hundred flags with Tibetan writing on the flags. Many of the flags are worn from the wind at the top of the bare mountain. There are trees, but not many. No tree there is big enough to block the wind.

To reach Nirvana, you don’t transcend, you ascend.

And it doesn’t take a lifetime; it takes less than an hour. Of course, how long it takes, depends on how many of the nearby trails you ride first.

The guys I was with this time were super fast and ready to go everywhere. We hit at least five of the trails, making our total trip around sixteen miles. Each trail seems to define a whole mountain. It was fun, but by the end I was not so much hitting the trail as hitting the wall. I only had a bit of granola for brekkie, so I was all out of energy by the end. In other words, I wasn’t in Nirvana any more.

From one vantage point we could see Old Lonely Mountain. It was still covered with snow. When it’s like that, it stays lonely.

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We won’t be going up there for a couple of months.

No flags at the top of that one, believe me.

Someone used the word forlorn, and I thought that fit Old Lonely really well. It looks that way in this photo, for sure. On the plus side, all that snow is going to keep people quenched for a long time. A little taste of Nirvana-like water from the higher reaches.

Anyway, to wrap up the trip report: No one got injured, but one guy did have his brake sticking the whole time we were riding, so he basically did twice the exercise the rest of us did. I’d hate to see how fast he could go with the brakes unstuck. He’d probably set something on fire. And I did have a universal vision while I was meditating at the top of Nirvana, but it’s too long. I’ll have to tell you about it next time.

 

Skate Park Etiquette

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The first rule, the ultimate rule, is if you get injured you don’t report it to anyone…we don’t want the skate park closed down. Better to live your whole life with a broken wrist than to tell some overzealous adult that you damaged your wrist at the skate park, because then they might put a bunch of fences around it and “investigate” our playground for safety issues. The problem with adults investigating is this: they don’t skate. They don’t understand the difference between a skate-able feature and a hazard. The biggest hazard is a skate park with fences around it. Believe it.

Second rule, much like the first, is if you really can’t stand the pain, tell someone you broke your wrist playing football. They’ll totally buy that. Football is dangerous. Plus, if they close down the stadium to “investigate” or something like that, no one will care.

Third rule, of course, is never invite your parents to the skate park. One of them will see a sick trick and think it looks “life-threatening”. Then they’ll get all protective about their children and you end up getting the skate park closed down again. Don’t do it.

Aside from those three major rules, there are the other rules. Like, if there’s a little kid on a scooter, be careful around him. Don’t run him over. He’s a future skater. Make sure he knows the rule about wearing a helmet.

Elbow pads are required until you’re eight, and then you gotta take those goofy things off.

Knee pads are cool no matter what your age. There are a couple of rules about knee pads. One is that whenever you take your knee pads off, you ask someone nearby to smell them. The other rule is to never smell someone else’s knee pads.

When you get done spilling off the ramp, get your board and your butt out of the way. Someone else wants to ride that ramp, like right now, not after you’ve done first aid.

If your board goes one way, and you go the other way, learn how to grab it next time. Don’t be a two-way obstacle.

If you manage to crash with your face, first ask if anyone got that on video, then sweep up your teeth. Nothing stops a board worse than a tooth on the ground.

Riding against traffic is okay, as long as you’re on the highway. At the skate park we never do that. Thanks for whipping me with your shirt tails too, by the way. Jerk.

If you bring pizza, you better bring enough for everyone.

If you bring a drink, pick up after yourself. It’s not fun skating through piles of plastic bottles. Unless they’re filled with gas and you light them on fire. I’ve only seen that once, to be honest, and it didn’t end well…but it was fun to watch!

Young to Old

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The secret to staying young is always telling the time by hours, minutes, and even seconds. Think about it. Give a child a digital watch and then ask them the time, what do they do? They tell you the hour, the minutes, and then the seconds as they tick by,

“…forty-three, forty-four, forty-five…”

Middle-aged people will sort of fudge the time a little by the minutes, or they round off, up or down it doesn’t matter. They see a clock with the time reading: 5:21, and without hesitating they say, “It’s five thirty.”

The old are more concerned about how long between naps or meals. You can ask an old man what time it is right now and he won’t tell you in any straight way. He might tell you what time he got up this morning: “Four A.M.” He might tell you when he had lunch: “I had a sandwich at ten.” He might even tell you how long it takes him to get up the stairs. “Yesterday it took me ten whole minutes, but today I couldn’t make it that fast. I think the top three stairs alone took me ten minutes. I need electric stairs.” I know a few oldsters who wouldn’t even talk about time if you brought up the subject. They’d talk about their time in the war, or tell you about their latest knee surgery.

“You wanna see the scar?”

Writing Prompts (update)

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I don’t usually enjoy retreading an archive post, but the prompts I threw together were rolling around in my cranial cavity. Playing with words is fun for me, so I couldn’t help but rework some of the previous notes.

The Metro.

A place? A person? A method of transport? Whichever gives the most positive vibes.

High school.

What they didn’t know was how high. It was high enough that if you failed you might fall, and if you fell, you might never come back. After anyone looked down from the edge, they decided failure was not an option.

Typewriter.

Which type? The lonely writer? The stuffy author? None of the above. The fortune cookie writer! “You have a magnetic personality.”

Clear tape.

Erase all evidence. Flee the vicinity. They know too much. The secret mission is no longer a secret.

Faith.

And charity.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Want to do your own writing to the prompts? Here is a list of seventeen writing prompts. If the seventeen below aren’t enough for you, use the five above as well. When writing to a prompt, you can really do any kind of style you want. What does the prompt bring to your mind first? Do you instantly get a storyline in your head? Do you reminisce about something? Does the prompt throw you in a completely different direction? All of these are acceptable. Write whatever you want!

  1. Malt mash
  2. Razor burn
  3. Drive-in
  4. Frontal lobe
  5. Half staff
  6. Sexually healthy
  7. Gauntlet
  8. God’s gift to women
  9. Cat in the box
  10. Goat farm
  11. Chocolate covered
  12. Fat rat
  13. Perceptual sphere
  14. Anger issues
  15. Race track
  16. Plastic skeleton
  17. Right on

Writing Prompts

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The Metro.

Take it downtown. Take it uptown. Fall in love. Lose a love. Make new friendships. Lose friends.

High school.

Graduate. Matriculate. Make a date. Love and hate. Your homework’s late.

Typewriter.

Clickety-clack, DING! Hammering the letters onto the page like you really mean to make them stick. One-finger typing. Two-finger typing. Nine-finger typing. I don’t think anyone actually uses all ten fingers to type.

Clear tape.

Great for pranks. Sometimes, on certain surfaces, you really can’t see it. It’s invisible!

Faith.

There’s a certain philosophical flavor to the concept of faith. Without faith, the lion never leaps.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Want to do your own writing to the prompts? Here is a list of seventeen writing prompts. If the seventeen below aren’t enough for you, use the five above as well. When writing to a prompt, you can really do any kind of style you want. What does the prompt bring to your mind first? Do you instantly get a storyline in your head? Do you reminisce about something? Does the prompt throw you in a completely different direction? All of these are acceptable. Write whatever you want!

  1. Malt mash
  2. Razor burn
  3. Drive-in
  4. Frontal lobe
  5. Half staff
  6. Sexually healthy
  7. Gauntlet
  8. God’s gift to women
  9. Cat in the box
  10. Goat farm
  11. Chocolate covered
  12. Fat rat
  13. Perceptual sphere
  14. Anger issues
  15. Race track
  16. Plastic skeleton
  17. Right on