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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.

whom shall i say is calling

i'm carrying around a mystery box, in which i keep all my most prized possessions.

its contents, are, as you should assume, a mystery, but that doesn't stop me from making you guess.

i don't look inside all that often; it takes a lot of effort to pry it open and handle the contents with the care usually afforded to radioactive waste.

behind each object is a secret, and the objects themselves are mysteries, so it's an impossible game to win, or even play.

for as much as i think i understand the rules - and most of that understanding is based on coming to terms with never truly understanding - there really are no rules. nevertheless, this doesn't stop people from guessing: few have ever won, most have lost, and the largest number have never really played.

the objects in question are less matter and more clouds of possibility. Heisenberg should have been a psychologist. like genes, they are tendencies and get activated by the environment.

mostly though, they stay locked away in the box.

and on the outside of the box, i draw pictures that are fun and friendly, inviting and endearing, comforting and comfortable. it's an image, a surface. Artifice.

the images are taking on a life of their own; the box stays closed for longer and longer. the shadows are growing longer, while the sun continues to set.

but the shadows aren't real, just an eclipse of the light.

at the heart, it's definition and the act of defining that make me feel claustrophobic, like I am entirely trapped within the box. but i mostly experience life as a set of possibilities, perpetually expanding and evolving.

this makes some things difficult and others more amazing. at the very least, it puts me at odds with the concrete, American world of business which requires a firmer footing.

maybe it's my own fault. i forget too easily and often about what's really important and find myself getting caught up in the surface details. which is unlike anyone else i know.

but then i don't have structures in place - people, places, or moments - to call me to attention. so i drift.

define me, if you must, as someone who eschews definition. but know that i will give into definition when it suits my fancy. and my fancy is fancy.

for, for as much as definition makes me uncomfortable, it is a nice counterbalance to a world of greying confusion which can overwhelm us with complexity, confusing us with its sublime nuance.

Wine

I got 2 Groupons to buy some wine online. I dabble in wine, whereas I have a deeper investigation of beer. Beer is cheap and can be local. Wine is expensive and comes from exotic locations like Chile and California. But the Groupons gave me an entrée, ou bien, une rentrée into this lush, red-velvet world.

[The only wine worth the effort is red. I don't dislike white, but I'd rather drink beer.]

Now, after having drunk 2 bottles from this order ($25 for $75 not including shipping), I am excited - re-excited - about wine.

The first wine in this whole process was actually at a bar: a 2008 Cab from the Libery School winery in the Pablo Robles region of California. Delectable. Never mind the fact that I paid $10 for a glass and found out today that you can buy an entire bottle for as much. Such is markup in downtown upper-middle class restaurants.

Later that evening, after COT's He/She, my ladyfriend and I killed a bottle of Vinum Africa from 2007. Another Cab, this one is from, you guessed it, South Africa. See? Exotic. And really good.

Finally, for Mother's Day, I brought a bottle from my Groupon order (from Barclay's) of Roza Ridge from 2005 - another Cab. This one, from Rattlesnake Hills, WA, was also totally worth the effort and money, giving me a reason to reach for it over beer.

I cannot abide by 3-buck Chuck. Tastes like the poison alcohol pretends not to be. 3-buck chuck is about $.75 per glass, which does work out to be less than most beers. The cheapest beer I can bring myself to buy is $9 for a 6-pack, about a buck-and-a-half per bottle. This wine, at full price, is about $15, so $3.75 per glass. And you wonder why wine is so expensive by the glass!

All 3 of these wines were worth it, regardless of whatever notes of this and that try to assert themselves irrelevantly on my palate. I prefer to taste the goodness and leave the notes to the mystery. It is, after all, just grapes transformed by time.

all the world's a stage

This started as a minor annoyance and grew to something worth writing about.

I live in a mansion. We call it the Kedzie Castle, because it's on Kedzie Ave and looks like, well, a castle. Not a super-fortified mofo from the before times, but something in ornate limestone. Like Neuschwanstein if it were made 200 years earlier by an anarcho-syndicalist band of itinerant farmers.

Like attracts like, I guess. While most of my housemates aren't tilling the earth, per se, they would gladly start growing a certain ilk of plants indoors, using sunlamps and what not - if it were legal.

I get along pretty well with most of them, but there's always one...

Let's call him Stan - a pathetic attempt to dissemble his identity.

Most "discussions" I have had with him - there have been about 3 or 4 I can firmly recall - end up with him pontificating passionately, a tirade of fuzzy logic and empty statements. They start out innocent enough - I'm a sucker for debate, especially when someone says something that needs to be challenged - but then quickly become one-sided, vapid, foaming-at-the-mouth statements of fact like "Everything is language!"

Yes, usually fueled by alcohol, though I never think he's drunk enough to just excuse it like that.

While trying to watch the Bulls and Hawks games - the end of one, beginning of other, simultaneously at the bar - he launched into it. It started innocently enough; he comes up and says "rrr-rrr-rrr" [grumble] and then "tee-hee" [giggle], and then says "ha, it's all the same."

I was confused. Whence grumble? Whence giggle? Wherefore equation of the two?

I said: "Context?" A simple word, a simple question, a request to which most would comply. Not Stan. "No. No context. You shouldn't need a context. [grumble], [giggle], it's all the same. You wouldn't need context if you read more Jane Austin. Charles Dickens."

Me: "I don't read Jane Austin. I would consider Charles Dickens."

Stan: "Wha? No Jane Austin? That's a crime. It may be a hundred years old but people are the same." And then something about class conflicts and people saying one thing and meaning another - totally profound.

Oh man, it wouldn't end. From class conflicts, it turned to sports, which was all around us on 3 big screens, to which most of the eyes in the packed bar were glued. He said something about wanting to play hockey and/or basketball but not watch them.

I can appreciate that, but he missed my point about why people really watch sports. It's not necessarily about gladiators galavanting for our amusement; it's about building community around a team.

But it was only later that I really understood his point: he doesn't like to spectate, preferring to be the center of attention. He doesn't like to listen but likes to be heard. He also happens to be an actor, working in the theater. So was it all just a big, lip-flapping performance? [And by "lips", I mean "anus."]

Certainly, ass-flapping. [And by "ass" I mean "donkey."] But I think he really meant it when he said: "Language is everything, and music is language. And it's not what you're saying but what you aren't saying." I think he was leaving out too much.

The people around us at the bar were either really impressed that we were having such a deep discussion or completely annoyed at how redundant it was getting. I felt really self-conscious and embarrassed to even be a part of it.

I finally found an out and went to a different bar, Revolution, to watch the rest of the hockey game.

Happiness is not killing yourself

On the cover of Wired, there's a statistic that gave me pause: "1 Million Workers, 90 Million iPhones, 17 suicides. Who's to blame?"

What about making our gadgets is causing these Chinese workers to end their current incarnation?

Should we feel responsible? Should we demand that Apple and other outsourcing companies have higher regard for their employees well-being.

17 suicides is a peculiar number. It's not an insignificant number, but it's not unimaginably large. You can almost imagine each individual and the impact their sudden departure made on their families.

But then I thought, really, for a million workers, 17 seems below average. I found the following statistics.d

• Highest rates:
  • American Indian and Alaska Natives — 14.3 per 100,000
  • Non-Hispanic Whites — 13.5 per 100,000
• Lowest rates:
• Hispanics — 6.0 per 100,000
• Non-Hispanic Blacks — 5.1 per 100,000
• Asian and Pacific Islanders — 6.2 per 100,000

First, it's interesting that non-hispanic whites are almost as prone to suicide as American Indian. Second, the lowest suicide rate is non-hispanic blacks, which, if mathemagically converted, is 51 suicides per million.

So, while the working conditions still may not be ideal, this should sound more of a domestic alarm about the suicide rate.