It was a dark and stormy night…
It actually was. I had moved back to Michigan in mid August of 2019. When we had moved back, my wife and I had decided to remain a one car family. There were several circumstances that contributed to this decision being pretty workable for us, including the distance that I lived from my workplace and the fact that I love biking.
And I do love biking, and I love bikes. It’s what I do for a living, and even through the craziness of the pandemic when it seemed like everyone either wanted to buy a new bike or fix the bike that had been mouldering in their garage for twenty years, I never got tired of it. Days off meant working on my own bikes, and then riding them recreationally, rather than as the way I got back and forth to work.
To be honest, the first time I rode through a fall storm on my way home from work, it was awesome. Doing something that a lot of other people don’t do is pretty empowering. And that first storm, I got home that night, stripped out of my riding clothes and took the best shower of my life. Then, I went to bed feeling pretty good and slept like a log.
It was still raining the next morning when I put my riding clothes back on to ride into work. And it was still raining when I left work that afternoon.
And that’s when it hit me: just because you love something, doesn’t mean you’re going to love it every day.
I felt a similar rush of empowerment the first time I rode through a snowstorm. But the bloom came off that rose pretty quick.
I’ve drawn a lot of parallels for myself about how I feel about riding and writing.
I love writing. At the best of times, I feel like I’m letting the story unfold in my head, like something I’m experiencing rather than creating. At those best of moments, I let it flow and write down what I’m experiencing, and hope that I don’t fuck it up.
But unfortunately, that’s not every time I sit down to write. Sometimes the flow is a trickle and it feels like I’m trying to see the story through clouded glass. I’ve come to accept that as just something that happens occasionally. Just because you love something, doesn’t mean you’re going to love it every day. As long as you love it most days, then you’re doing what you should be doing, and you can push yourself through the dark and stormy nights to ride and write in the sunshine once more.
The Chimerical Dark 