Last night, Joel and I went to Lawrence with a bunch of his co-workers to ride the River Trails.
It’s a rare treat and one I go for every time it’s possible.
The river trails are great for a mtb moron like me. They’re not rocky, just swoopy and twisty, which is pretty much my ideal.
As hot and dry as it’s been lately, the river sand is trying to re-assert itself, and so some of the corners are just deep, powdery sand wallers, and if you hit the corner at speed or pedal through it, you end up doing a Dukes Of Hazzard type rear wheel slide. Joel relishes drifting the corners that way. For me, it’s one of those little gooses of adrenaline that leaves my palms slightly numb. Eeek!
When I met up with Joel at the shop to head on to Lawrence, I had been in kind of a sour mood. Working at customer service more or less ruins me, and I’ve pretty near hit the wall where having to talk to people for 8 hour straight every day is concerned. But pretty much as soon as we were out on the dirt, my nasty mood peeled off me like so many layers of dried up onion skin, and I started just having a good time.
I’d catch intermittent whiffs of honeysuckle, and that glorious scent kicked off a little philosophical re-epiphany that I need to have or keep in mind more often. Things like the scent of honeysuckle, bike rides in the woods, eating really good watermelon; these are transient simple pleasures and I need to make a point of taking advantage of these wonderful things whenever I can, ’cause the opportunity is not available just “whenever.” You only get good watermelon in the summertime. Same goes for whiffs of honeysuckle. Getting the right weather and the opportunity to get out on the trails is a matter of serendipity in the thunderstorm-prone midwest. When the stars align and the trails are dry, and I have a ride out to Lawrence, I’d be seriously amiss if I didn’t just go for it!
I have to do enough things that I don’t enjoy, like be grumped-at by the general public as a matter of course in order to bring home a paycheck. If I don’t get in on the good fun when I can, I’m going to end up a vitriolic and miserable shell of a human, and really, the world doesn’t need any more of those. Believe me.
Well, here’s a slosh of petty bile, ’cause I’m just out of sorts today and the stupidest things are rubbing me the wrong direction.
I think gourmet pizza is the biggest ripoff and also a total misnomer. Especially the alleged pizza from a certain overweening, pretentious pizzaria which calls itself Pizza Bella. Just because your pizza oven runs on wood rather than gas doesn’t make it better, just more labor intensive. It’s been about two years since I ate at Pizza Bella and I’m still kind of pissed off. It was the stingiest pizza I ever paid actual money for. Only about a third of the pizza surface had any sauce on it and that was barely a smear at that. All it did was kind of moisten the inner circumference of the pie; it certainly didn’t add any particular flavor. It might have served to adhere the toppings, if there had been any to speak of. That was the shittiest, most expensive shitty pizza I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.
There’s an old saw that pizza is like sex, and that even when it’s bad it’s pretty good, but I am here to say that both bad pizza and bad sex are woefully disappointing.
For my pizza dollar, if I’m paying for somebody else to make it (and I make a pretty damn acceptable pie by my own plebeian standards) then I’ll pay either Minsky’s or D’Bronx for the pleasure. When I am going to eat pizza, I’m looking for a crust that isn’t mooshy, tough, or crumbly. There needs to be plenty of sauce, tomato, with plenty of oregano and garlic for preference. Also generous vegetables and a good sprinkling of cheese to glue it all together.
The other thing I’m irrationally irritated about today is the utterly cliched trend of doing photoshoots in the West Bottoms. I swear I can’t get home from work without dodging any quantity of shutterbugs, professional and amateur, who have decided to express their inner beauty amongst the outer decrepitude of one of Kansas City’s erstwhile districts.
I’m particularly enamored (and don’t think that I’m in any way sincere) of the fashion shoots that seem to take place pretty much continually throughout the back alleys of the Bottoms. I’ll be trolling the dumpsters, as is my wont, and have to dodge a photographer, her tripod, her assistant, his umbrella-thingys, and two or three crispily-tanned and expensivly coiffed JoCo schoolgirls in diaphanous dresses, who have set up a fetchingly juxtaposed scenario, enacting Paris Hiltonian moues on a crumbling loading dock.
I’m not sure where all of these fashion-shots get used, or if they ever do. But I constantly see photographers out there, putting their pricy gear to the test, while an apparently endless parade of well-groomed Midwestern pulchritude pouts, preens, and poses at the cameras.
Stage 1. You are petting the dog and notice that she’s getting a bit whiffy. Comment to anyone in the room (or to an empty room, whichever) that the dog’s getting a bit whiffy and that you’re probably going to give her a bath on your next day off.
Nonchalant.
Stage 2. Day off arrives, get stuck into some big, messy, ridiculous project. Forget entirely about bathing the dog.
Neener!
Stage 3. Remember about three days later that you were going to give the dog a bath about three days ago. Note that she smells slightly worse than the last time you noticed her odor.
“I do not stink!”
Stage 4. It’s your day off again! Yay! To celebrate, you take the dog on a three hour walk, complete with extra poop bags, a water bottle for each of you, and your camera. To celebrate even further, when you both get back panting from the heat, you take a two hour nap, her on her rug, you on the bed.
Stage 5. Oh crap! I was going to give the dog a bath last Tuesday! She’s looking a bit greasy these days, to boot. Okay. Next “weekend” she’s getting a bath for sure. No joking. No doubt.
If you can’t find me, you can’t bathe me!
Stage 6. It’s your day off again. You’re either deep in the mires of some project or else watching the Mythbusters blow shit up on the Internet. Anyway, the dog rambles into your work-room and you actually smell her coming before you hear her tags jingling or feel her wet snoot upon your ankle.
No wonder she smells…
Stage 7. Believe it or not, you managed once again to blow off washing the dog. This is serious. You are like the absent-minded professor, but without the professor bit. Or the mind. You can smell the presence of the dog, and yet you fail to get the hint? You should definitely just go live in a sewer, ’cause it’s obvious that stench and filth don’t affect you in the least. Imagine the utility payments you wouldn’t have to make every month. You’d be rollin’ in the green stuff, and I don’t mean money.
Stage 8. Speaking of rolling in stuff, the dog has taken the liberty of finding an extravagantly dead rodent of some type and has wallowed liberally upon the carcass. There’s no getting around it this time. She’s definitely getting a bath. So, you break out the secondary leash, tether her to the back porch, hose her down, soap her up, scrub-scrub-scrub-scrub, hose her down. “Lather-rinse-repeat.” Rinse. Rinse. Rinse. Argh, this dog has a lot of fur for soap to hide in. Rinse. Rinse. Towel. Rub, rub. Stand back for the violent fur-shaking. Floka-floka-flok go the ears.
Stage 9: Smells good enough to cuddle:
Stage 10. Well, you’ve got at least another month before you do this dance all over again!
I was on my way home from work last Thursday and saw this on the street. Of course I turned around, rolled it up, and bunjied it to the package rack of the old yellow Bianchi. Fortune favored the prepared that day; not only was I riding a bike with a rack, I also happened to have a couple of bunjie cords in my bag. Joel and I had been talking about the need to get a door mat for the front porch, so I’d have been seriously amiss if I’d passed this one up. Plus, I think it’s kind of pretty, for something to wipe your shoes on!
As I rolled through the West Bottoms after collecting my floor mat, I noticed something blowing along the street ahead of me. And it didn’t look like the usual stray grocery bag. So I caught up to it, and what did I find?
A vintage silk scarf with a pattern of Zinnia-esque orange flowers. It was a little grubby, but a nice hand-wash with Dawn dish soap brought it right back around!
Maybe they’re meant to be strawflowers? I’m not sure, but in any event, I sure like this print and the colors.
The next day, on my way to work, I saw a book lying alongside Beardsley Rd., just south of the 12th St. Viaduct. I stopped to see what it was:
Sweet! A hardcover copy of what is arguably Cather’s most popular novel. And in good shape, too. I didn’t have a copy of this one, and it’s one I remembered having liked a great deal when I read it in high school, so I was happy to find this one. I’ll be re-reading it shortly.
I’m not a big purse-and-shoes girl, but I found these two in an alley in the Crossroads district on my way home from work on Sunday. The canvas one with the green and yellow isn’t really “me” but I am strangely fond of the little pink, sari-esque bag.
In the course of my adventures I’ve developed a weather eye for scavenging. I’m always slightly on the lookout, and whenever it is at all possible, I try to check out anything interesting that I come upon. I also try to have at least some means of toting fresh treasures home, in the event that I discover some. These habits have netted me clothes, household goods, tools, a blow torch, and enough pop bottles to build a boat.
I may not have many special talents and powers, but I must say that I’m making out pretty well with the few that I’ve got.
Another Regatta has passed with no deaths, arrests, or maulings by invasive Asiatic Carp, so I guess we can chalk up yet another successful run down the Missouri.
So last Thursday evening, our back porch looked like this. My neighbors love me.
On Wednesday night, I was prowling throughout Strawberry hill with a leaf bag and a dog on a leash, prodding through people’s recycling and trash looking for soda bottles. Obviously, I succeeded.
I also found a wok and a rattan planter for my asparagus ferns. I’d wanted a wok for ages, and the planter is great for keeping the ferns from tipping over all the time and getting broken and ratty.
You might rightly wonder how my neighbors took to me digging through their trash, and I am happy to report that they took it remarkably well. It was a beautiful evening and lots of people were out. Parents supervising kids playing in the yard. Gardeners tending their plants. Folks just kicking back on chairs on the porch sipping on cold beers. Whenever I came across somebody outside, I’d just ask them if it was cool if I harvested any pop bottles from their trash. Not a single person told me “no way, fuck off you crazy trash-picking loony person.” I am constantly amazed and heartened by how accepting people are of weirdness if you have previously informed them, politely and lucidly, that you are about to do something very odd.
I ended up with more than enough bottles to float my boat. We ended up using only the 2 litre bottles, plus some large juice jugs and a couple of big-assed empty Vodka bottles that I found on Beardsley Rd.
I found yet another one on my way home from work on Sunday. Somebody who either lives off Beardsley or travels it a lot is going through a hell of a lot of el-cheapo “vodka.”
I had begun by just lashing bottles straight to my PVC-and 2X2 framework, but they just wouldn’t stay put. Joel had already constructed his raft using salvaged foam insulation sheeting for his pontoons, and there was just enough foam left for a single layer on each side (his were constructed with two layers of foam, as seen below:
So I un-wrought the network of inner-tubes and bottles I’d originally laced together, laid down the sheets of foam, and found that re-instating the bottle pontoons was immeasurably easier with the base layer of foam in place.
So by Saturday morning we had two rafts, but they needed wheels so we could tow them to the launch. Joel had some angle-iron from an old bedframe and some forks and wheels from a few old 16″ kiddie bikes (and also a TIG welder) so he shortly cooked up a pair of chariot trucks for our amphibious trailers.
Here’s my rig in land-mode.
And here it is on water. There are two bikes on the back ’cause Greg needed a way to get back to his car at the end.
Greg didn’t have a chance to build a boat this year, but he has this beautiful sky-blue kayak so he spectated from the water. He also saved my bacon when I overshot the landing at Glow In The Dark Park and couldn’t get turned around. He rowed out and towed me back in to the landing after I kind of panicked and lost my tiny little mind!
I’ve yapped on long enough about the construction of Joel’s and my boats, so now it’s time to feature the real star of Saturday’s show, Anne & Paul’s amazing raft, The Super 40.
Buoyed by four large industrial storage bags, this amazing trashboat comfortably accommodated four passengers with style.
Her chariot wheels canted inward and rubbed against the body of the raft creating a particularly piquant burning-rubber stench during the mile-ish ride from Korruption to Kaw Point
While we were waiting at Korruption for whomever else might arrive, we were informed by a band of punk-rock boys emerging from that venue that we were the weirdest thing they’d ever seen in the West Bottoms.
My heart grew twelve sizes that day.
And now for some gratuitous pictures:
Cheering section cheering from the Main Street overlook near City Market.
Security guard down at the Point had to see what in the hell all these weirdos were doing. He was cool with it, just curious.
As we approached the old and new Paseo Bridges. The new one is the concrete one, the old one is blue. The new bridge stops about halfway across the river. It was a little freaky to pass beneath it, knowing it was suspended and supported by its cables alone.
Eeek.
Up close & personal thanks to the marvels of zoom lens technology.
Underneath the bridge:
A re-purposed barge dock – what was once a restricted area for unloading hazardous materials is now a riverfront patio complete with a charcoal grill and lawn chairs. The sign says:
WARNING
Dangerous Cargo
No Smoking
No Visitors
No ????? Lights
The river has been up really high due to the excessively wet summer we’ve been having. A week prior to the Regatta, Glow In The Dark Park was closed as the boat ramp was completely flooded. Now, it is just coated in a thick pudding of squishy mud.
Anne’s “mud shoes”
The recent flooding had moved some serious timber. This tree rested atop the railing along the east side of the boat dock.
This one, further up the ramp, soon filled with basking women.
Danimal’s crest is green and curly.
Corinna’s crest is hot-pink and nylon.
Here’s Super Clint showing us his new purple love (anno Race-Face cranks & bars). Yes, folks, he has regularly taken it off some Sweet Jumps.
More driftwood-based basking.
Here’s Joel inflicting his affections on Christi.
Joel and I couldn’t park on the sidewalk because our trailers were so long, so we availed ourselves of a convenient diagonal slot.
All that Trash Boating works up a hefty appetite, so we went out for delicious Mexican food down on the Boulevard. Nothing like some cheese enchiladas and a mug of Horchata to wrap up a damn fine day out.
because I got wolf-whistled while armpits deep in a garbage can in downtown Kansas City Kansas.
The absurdity of the situation just tickled me eight shades of pink. KCKS guys have basically no standards, nor dignity.
I mean, srsly?
But sexual harrassment and foul odors nonetheless, i think I got enough bottles for my boat tonight so I had a mighty prosperous evening of trash-picking.
On my way home from work today, I rode past some very busy fireworks stands in the West Bottoms. If you know Kansas City, you might know about James Street and the half dozen or so semi-abandond buildings that become explosives emporia in the week leading up to Independence day.
Being as today is The Big Explodey, James Street was a-hoppin’ as I was on my way home. I stopped in Pyro Joe’s to get my traditional box of Smoke Balls for future stress relief and then got back on my way.
Now it was a muggy ol’ day today, so when I was riding home, it was sticky and icky outside. Knowing what the weather would be like today, I dressed for it, in a wicking tee and a lightweight, knee-length plaid cotton A-line that would be reasonably respectable but also well ventilated.
All this back story is to set up the scene…it was hot and nasty outside, there were a zillion people milling around the fireworks stands, and I was dressed fairly unconventionally for a female, American cyclist. When I swung my leg over the saddle of my bike and got ready to take off, I heard several muffled Beavis-ish chuckles, a little bit of “pst-pst” and felt about a dozen pairs of eyes fix upon me.
Though realistically, I can honestly say that I don’t give a shit much more frequently than I don’t give a fuck. I probably don’t give a shit five times more frequently than I don’t give a fuck.
Not giving a shit, a fuck, or a rat’s ass allows me to do SO many things like ride a bike in a skirt, sleep in a storage room on my lunch hour, wear clothing I found in a dumpster, and set sail down the Missouri river on a raft made out of trash.
Speaking of which, holy schnikeies, the Trashboat Regatta is less than a week away!
I’m spending tomorrow sealing soda bottles with caulk and making fabulous prizes out of fabulous junk I’ve picked up off the side of the road. I have a hard-hat, a luminescent barbie doll dress, a few pressure gauges, some glitter, a crapton of fake flowers, an artificial banana, a 7/8″ box end wrench, and a whole bunch of other rubbish that will become somebody else’s problem after they finish the regatta.
I also need to construct the regalia of the Nominal Commander Of the Royal Theoretical Kansas City Navy, too. Because we will soon have a Nominal Commander, and the Nominal Commander needs regalia in which to protect Kansas City from piratical depredations, don’t you know.
An adaptation of one of the golden lines from one of my favorite dumb movies, Zack & Miri Make A Porno.
I got to thinking this the other day when, in the midst of a call, one of my customers hacked a big, throaty loogie while conducting business with me.
Because I am the consummate professional, I simply ignored it, went on with the call, and after she hung up, I had an absolute duck fit.
The loogie was pretty much the absolute limit. I mean!
It’s bad enough when people eat while on the phone. Especially if it is potato chips with lots of crunching, or an apple with crunching, plus slurping. Or people who just talk with their mouths full. It’s disgusting and every time, I want to break from my professional persona and just start screaming, “PUT DOWN YOUR FUCKING SNACK, SWALLOW WHAT YOU HAVE, AND TALK TO ME WITH A CLEAR MOUTH YOU DISGUSTING GODDAMN SWINE!!!!!”
Of course, I never do that. I keep all trace of annoyance out of my voice, act like they aren’t grossing me out of my own hide, and try to hustle them through their business as expediently as possible. Because, by golly, I am a professional under pressure.
I shaved my legs last night after posting pictures that exposed their excessive prickliness and in the course of doing so managed to scrape off about a square inch of ankle-epidermis.
They really don’t make band-aids big enough, you know? The standard size ones, the gauze pad is only about a centimeter and a half by half a centimeter. Then there are smaller ones which barely register on my radar. If an injury is that minuscule, I certainly don’t need to bandage it. Then, there are the hugeogiganormous non-stick pads for when you take half your hide off, but nothing in between.
If I could get a box of band-aids that had a pad about 2cmX 2cm and maybe a size up that were like 3.5cm x 1 cm, I’d be highly satisfied.
Most of my injuries are too big for a regular band-aid, but not necessarily big enough to use a significant portion of a Telfa pad.
I’m not sure if I’m just a lousy cyclist, or if there’s a certain proportion of falling-over-per-mile that every cyclist averages and I’m simply fulfilling my quota.
One way or another, I seem to be entering another of my streaks of wreckage, kicked off by a little offroad falling-over out at Lawrence when we got back from the Dirty Kanza. Several of Joel’s co-workers and some other friends of ours had arranged a meetup out at the River Trails. Melissa patiently bore with my slowness and tendency to randomly plummet ass-over-teakettle. They have these little log piles out there. One of them is kind of big and I’ve never given it a go, but I have ridden the two smaller ones and they’re pretty fun, but somehow, I guess I didn’t get up enough speed before I hit the one and I stalled out on top of it and crashed over into the mulberry bushes alongside the trail. Nothing tells on a Klutz like a mottling of purple goo and foliage in her hair.
Now despite the fact that I fell over a good three or four times at Lawrence, I didn’t sustain any actual damage. And at Friz on Monday, I think I was the only person who didn’t bite the grass multiple times. So obviously, I was slacking on my quotas and had to make up for lost time on my way home.
I’d been a little off-kilter all afternoon; I felt like I was drunk, all spacy and un-balanced. I went home a different route from usual, and overshot my turn into the West Bottoms and had to back-track. As I was lining myself up for the second go-around at that turnoff, I completely failed to take note of the expansion joint that diagonally intersected my trajectory, and just as you’d expect, as I leaned into the turn, my tire caught in the expansion joint and my bike flipped left while I flew to the right. I sorta-face-planted, skinning my right shoulder, left knee, and both palms. Also, somewhere on my way down, something dug a small but deep gouge in my left shin which bled enthusiastically for the rest of the evening and kind of oozed all the next day. Now, it is scabbed over nicely and looks surprisingly civilized and insignificant:
Please excuse the hairiness of my legs…they are really out of control right now and I’ll be tending to that in just a few minutes. Let the record stand that “ElastoPlast” med tape makes a great impromptu leg-wax, if you don’t mind adhesive boogers clinging to your skin afterwards.
The way that gouge bled, I had resorted to using cut-in-half panty-liners taped on with med-tape as wound dressings until my platelets finally got organized enough to do their job.
As usual, I was really, really lucky with my wreck. I wrecked perpendicular to a curb. The way I landed, my jaw just grazed past the curb. I felt my chin skim past the concrete, but apparently it didn’t really make contact. I got home expecting to see mild abrasion under my right jawbone, but didn’t see anything more severe than some sweated-on dirt.
I don’t know how many times I have counted my lucky stars after I’ve had a good wreck. When I face-planted on the way to Landahl, I was so fortunate I didn’t knock myself unconscious on the side of the road. Also fortunate that I didn’t break my glasses or teeth.
Likewise when I got hit by the truck, it could have messed up my face a lot worse or (I have a real horror of this potentiality) knocked out my teeth. Instead, all I suffered was a broken collarbone, three stitches, and a serious divot in my savings account. Also a destroyed (favorite) bicycle, which was pretty near as bad as all the rest of that combined.
And my (apparently) most visually stunning wreck, falling down a gully at Blue River Park netted nothing more than a few small bruises and cuts so minor they didn’t even leave noticeable scars.
I guess if you’re going to hit the ground with the frequency and vehemence that I do, it’s just as well to be kind of good at it. Or at least “lucky” about where you land.
