mercuryfern

Tune Up

On Monday I dropped my bike off for an extensive tune up I can't afford.  It'll end up costing me the equivilant of six tanks of gas, but unfortunate noises coming out of automobiles are always significantly more costly to remedy than those which issue forth from bicycles; best to preserve the car's health for something more important than these measly five mile trips about town.  My bike tires are starting to crack, and the snow we will be having in not so long is really managed best with knobbier ones, anyway; might as well true the wheels and clean the chain while they're at it.  With minimal friction, I will make extensive use of my balaklava and snow pants this winter, good little blood for oil opposer that I am.

The mechanic bore a startling resemblance to Thomas.  It’s not that he looked like him so much as carried himself the same way.   Must be a type: wrench with an art degree.  Marriage to a proffesional means you never have to think about maintaining your own bike.   For five years I haven't pumped up my tires or changed a single flat.  Pffft: and I call myself a feminist.

It was the first time in five years, only the third time in my life, that I walked into a shop through the front door like any old customer, and had to pay, actually pay money.   I let him talk me into expensive tires because that's what they had in stock and I didn't feel like being without a bike the extra day it would take them to get something cheaper from the other location.  Thomas would have been annoyed that I wasn't willing to wait for a better deal.

When I was ninteen, I brought my bicycle in for a tune up at Thomas’s shop.  How romantic: I even kept the claim slip in my wallet for years afterwards.   It resides safely in a photo album now.  At the time I was riding a venerable old Shwinn named Esmerelda, all shiny fenders and curved handlebars.   To those bikies for whom the sport is just another excuse for conspicuous consumerism, such a ride is laughable.  Ah, but once you’ve lived with bike messengers who tear through Philly on Frankenstiens built from garage sale cast offs and dumpster dived parts, purchased speed fails utterly to impress. 

Thomas cooed over my bike, how pretty she was.  He knew a gem when he saw her.  We both prefer objects with history, celebrating underappreciated beauty, defying greed by living simply.  Translatoin: we are cheap; he even more than I.

For a woman with serious badass credentials, I fall in obsessive debilitating love with embarassing ease.  Since I agonise over every little crush or fling much longer than the algorithms in Cosmo reccomend, I always figured I’d be a natural at forever.  Au contaire, dear reader.  Imagine my shock: this marriage thing is Hard.  Seriously.  Hard.  There are so many compromises, so many little things on which to find middle ground.  Turns out, I wasn’t done being selfish.  Sure, sure, I got married too young, that should have been obvious.  Yes, thank you, it is apparent to me at long last.  So, now what...

We are making it up as we go.  He gives me so much freedom it raises our families eyebrows.  This fall, at my insistance, we don’t live in the same city; not even the same coast.  So are you getting divorced?  No, no.  He’s finishing his novel, I’m staying with friends.  I need to be twenty-four now so I don’t freak the hell out over my lost youth in ten, fifteen years.

He’s the sort of guy 21st century strieght women dream of: sesitive, arty, smart, good with kids and pets, able to talk about his feelings, hilarious when the situation requires, but macho, a nice body, an athlete, able to fix stuff or scare off bad guys if need be.  (Not that bad guys aren’t scared of me.  I mean, they are.  I’m just saying.)  If I made a list, and for the sake of full disclosure I should tell you that I did, he meets or exceeds every criterion. 

In theory.

I find myself wondering sometimes if I love him enough, if I love him the right way.  If I love him.  How sickening to see it sitting there in type like that.  What the hell is wrong with me?  There’s that list with all the items crossed off, remember?  Missing now and always in my feelings for him, though, is an edge, a burnign clarity that I’ve caught glimpses of before.  I’d managed to convince myself it was not nessesary or real, just an illusory high of a greedy bipolar mind.  Lately I’m not so sure again.

There are paths I would have taken if I weren’t marrried.  One in particular.  Three years ago I got into Antioch College with a big merit scholarship but didn’t attend because Thomas thought we couldn’t handle the debt.  He never asked me to decline, but complained and worried so much about the money that I looked into the future and saw more resentment between us than it seemed we could weather.  Other chances that I thought for sure would come through instead collapsed in on themselves.  A cold calculation creeps into my mind these days when my defenses against it are down: is what I’m given worth more than what I sacrifice?

We have what I thought I always wanted, and yet, here I am, the bad spouse, thinking about giving it all up.   I bought myself those tires precicely because I knew it would piss him off.

Madness Running

I don’t do moderation.  Knowing this, I generally err on the side of under- rather than overindulgence.  Many people who share my brand of insanity struggle with substance abuse problems.  This has not been the case for me.  My experiments with recreational stupor were early and short lived.  Until recently I didn’t drink alcohol at all, ever.  I’ve been a vegetarian of varying levels of strictness for ten years. You could argue that I take abstinence to unhealthy extremes; perhaps in my long ago past this has been true.  I eat eggs and cheese now.  I no longer let myself skip meals.  In the last year I have begun to enjoy sipping a beer or two over the course of a night.

My affinity for obsession has advantages.  I excel at much of what I attempt.  Not that my achievements come consistently; no, it’s a torrent of writing, a fever of ideas and execution, and then nothing, nothing at all for days, weeks or months while I wonder if it all was ever real in the first place, while the people who depend on my initially demonstrated competence lose faith and expel me permanently from their esteem.

Recently, my intensity has been channeled into exercise.  Probably narcissism is not entirely absent from the equation, but mostly I do it because keeping a decent amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins is a good way to maintain my emotional ballast.  This summer I spent 150 weekly miles on the designated bike path at a pace that left me limping and queazy when I dismounted.  Unlike many other sports, running, for instance, on a bike you’ve got a piece of equipment between you and the task at hand, and as such, you really can buy speed.  I don’t ride anything fancy, but it thrills me to unsubtly pass the many people who do, to defy the money equation with my straight bars and cheap derailuer, my own private class warfare victory. 

This autumn, I go to the gym instead; everyday, for at least an hour.

Yesterday, I quit a job after only one day, a record even for my demanding self.  One thirty in the afternoon found me doubting my worth for all the old reasons and a few new ones, too.  I got on a machine and went for an hour.  Then I sped up and gave it everything I had for another ten, twenty, thirty minutes.  No matter how I tried to exhaust myself, there was still more to pull up from under my many failures, like a scarf of near infinite length from a cheap magician’s hat.  I kept expecting to find myself spent, holding an unattached corner, but instead the yellow just gave way to red then green and blue.  However low I fall, I hit bottom with the rock of my willpower as companion, and there it was again, giving birth in my unmoving motion to a small euphoria that grew until it was about to dwarf guilt and shame.  Before it could, though, before I reached that moment where everything is so clear, at three o'clock I stopped to cook dinner, to try and make amends.  I will be better to the people who care about me.

I guess the other thing about channeling my energy into tasks which are perhaps not particularly prestigious is that I want desperately to excel at something.  I squander talent and opportunity with stunning efficiency.  When I can exicute a simple task with dignity, I remember what it was like to feel that golden touch emanating in more useful directions.  How can it be wrong to want to be reminded of what it feels like to accomplish?

She came home while I was mixing up the batter for the frittata, veggies in the pan, parsnips sliced and roasting in the oven.  I was so exited about my ninety minutes.  I am not a runner, after all. 

“An hour and a half?  That is not okay.  That is not reasonable.”

“I think it’s fine.  People who run marathons or whatever go way longer than that.”

“Fern, it’s a kind of eating disorder to exsersize all the time.  90 minutes, I’m sorry, no, that is not reasonable at all.”

Later last night, I was doing something on the computer, and I had occasion to exclaim under my breath, “argh, I said submit, motherfucker.”

“Fern, you are manic, settle down.”

“No, I’m not.  I’m annoyed.  Not everything I do is a pathology.”

“Yes it is.”