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I'm concerned about the lack of thoughts in my head. I'm not sure where they've gone, hopefully on vacation to an exotic locale, but I'd like them to come back refreshed and abuzz with possibilities.

It seems almost unfathomable, but I think I'm tired of communication. I'm tired of expressing both the easily expressible and the ineffable. Other people should just know what I know without all the effort.

A coworker told me the other day about this article that finds a correlation between monkey brain size and the size of their social circles. It's really helped me to organize people in my mind. While I dislike the inherent dehumanization involved in this, I find my current strategy - or lack there of - to be unsustainable. As it is, I try to recognize everyone's humanity, which reduces everyone to a 1-bit character. Or somewhere in between 1 and 2 bits.

So by totally ignoring the humanity of the vast majority of people I meet, I can save my limited resources for people who are important.

Instead of everyone being an equal friend on Facebook, from Mom and Dad to former and future girlfriends to that guy from 7th period English class, I am falling down the rabbit hole that is Google+, organizing people into circles.

The problem, of course, is the bike tour, where I get paid - and get paid more - to recognize people's humanity. The more I know about someone, the more customized I can make the tour, which leads to more financial rewards. Which especially sucks when I work hard to recognize someone's humanity and then get stiffed.

Then there are tragedies like Norway. I know cerebrally how terrible it is but keep it from really sinking in. I don't think most people have the capacity to process such savagery from around the world on a daily basis. 80 people is already half way to 150, the theoretical max for our social circle - our Monkeysphere. I hesitate but want to call it a "tribe".

I also liked that the article talked about "grooming cliques," which are only a couple of monkeys. I would like a grooming clique of a handful of people with whom I'm really close. Not all physical affection has to be sexual. I think our society has this black and white attitude - sex or non-physical - and it creates this arbitrary distance between people.

I started this post to tell you how there's nothing in my head these days, but then all this came out - granted it's not very well organized or particularly interesting. At least I tapped into something; I'm just terribly out of practice.

Le Grand Boucle

They call the Tour de France Le Grand Boucle, The Big Loop, and yet it rarely ever looks like a continuous loop around the country. In this year's race, there's a day near the end where they hop on a train to race the next day around Paris. I'm sure it's a difficult race to organize - year in, year out - but they seem to be missing the point.

Or maybe I am.

Regardless of everything, it's an amazing feat: a physical feat, a logistical feat, a cultural feat.

Yes, maybe even a medical feat.

This year's Tour started with 378 feet, belonging to 189 riders on 21 teams. I don't know why they vary the # of riders every year, but this is one of the biggest fields.

Perhaps because of that, perhaps due to myriad extraneous reasons, it's been a total shitshow: every day there are crashes, and often the crashes end a rider's tour, forcing him to "abandon."

It's been all the talk, perhaps because many of the bigger name riders have been forced to abandon.

One British announcer was near tears when British star Bradley Wiggins broke a collar bone. I cried a little today, but I'm not exactly sure why.

Chris Horner's condition got to me. After a brutal crash, he was lying motionless, unconscious on the side of the road. He had had a concussion and somehow came with enough clarity to ride the 20 remaining miles. At the finish though, he couldn't seem to figure out why he was 16 minutes behind everyone else. [Watch it]

Then today, Alexander Vinokourov broke his leg in a massive pile-up that affected so many riders that the peloton waited around for 5 minutes to allow everyone to get back on.

Vino is a total badass riding in his last Tour - monumental misfortune.

[When I first read about it, the news headline said that his crash was "career-ending", which alluded to something even more serious than a broken leg. It just happens to be career-ending because he's at the end of his career.]

And then the nightmare.

A French TV car was passing a group of riders at grande vitesse - too fast - and had to swerve to avoid a tree, clipping a rider and causing another to do a double somersault in the air before landing backside first on a barbed wire fence. [Watch it]

It was just so ghastly. Every cyclist's worst nightmare. And the car, with its smug, unchanging expression, seemed so unapologetic, like it did it on purpose.

Which would be the case if it happened to me on Chicago roads.

It's getting to the point that I don't even care who wins and loses, hoping instead that everyone stays safe. In the Italian version of the Tour de France earlier this year, a rider died from head injuries sustained during a crash. It happens and it's scary. Or maybe it's scary because it happens.

see: Wouter Weylandt

Ignore the struggle

I've been struggling to struggle but have been mostly struggling to get by. I haven't had the strength to embody the struggle, instead ignoring it, cursing and suppressing it.

At the end of a long day, the last thing I want to do is open myself to scrutiny.

And the days are getting longer as the temperatures soar, and it's the point in the bike tour season that I'd be happy to get paid to do something inside for a few days.

And right smack dab in the middle of the summer, crisis cum opportunity rears its ugly head.

As the people come and go in our lives it changes the balance of the mixture; the chemical reactions speed up or slow down with the change in pH.

In this case, things have slowed down precipitously with a sudden exit stage left.

When relationships start and end, we catch a glimpse into the very reasons we pursue or eschew them. For me, at least, there's a glimpse of a glimpse but I'm still unclear on the nature of the concept.

What do I get out of people and why aren't I getting it any more?

At the very time that I have lost most desire to meet new people, I am being surrounded by people with opposite problem: an addiction to hanging out.

The porch dwellers - a depressed, nicotine-fueled band of drunks - hang out for the sake of not being alone. It smacks of pathetic desperation - a harsh judgement whose relevance is highly suspect.

To be fair, these folks don't have a job that forces them to be pleasant and interactive with strangers all day.

I'm getting tired of validating people, but they're the ones who pay the bills.

#betweenarockandahardplace

The way out is the opposite of the way in.

Being bombarded with social situations wears me out; batteries are recharged in isolation.

What I'm doing now, in fact, writing this post, is part of the solution.

I think.