Herding Cats 101

So the bike club had its first outing today. And the only thing I can think of is that it was like herding cats.

Only half the people came on time. Two people (beginners) got themselves bogged down in half an inch of mud and managed to block their derailleurs. Pablo, who’s a pretty experienced cyclist, lost his cassette twenty miles from the starting point (and, since he’d just had his bike given the once-over the weekend before, never thought about bringing any kind of tools to fix it.) One of the newbies, who hadn’t been on a bike in twenty years, wore really heavy black clothes, roasted in the Indian summer heat...and almost passed out from a superbonk that was only surpassed by being forcefed Arrowroot cookies. Pablo’s wife, Susana, got a fruit fly in the eye and we ended up having to squirt a litre of water in her face before dislodging her contact lens (I don’t know if she ever managed to get the bug out), and my pump decided it had a particular craving for Presta valve tops and chewed up two inner tubes before decapitating a third, which blew six miles before the end. Thank God The Owner drives a Volvo station wagon, and thank God for cell phones because I don’t know how I would have gotten home. A success, all the way around. :-/

And I made an important but not particularly pleasant discovery today, one that at least makes me feel (slightly) more in control: I think that I was in love with G-Man, and might still be. Uck. I cannot think of any other reason why things would still be pissing me off this far down the road. Feelings for a guy who’s just a fling does not hang around you like the smell of camphor, like old sweat on a drunken bum.

You don’t find yourself getting irritated by the small stuff, like when he tells you that he can’t go shopping and then calls your from the sports superstore the very next day, asking you if you need anything. (If you didn’t have time to go, then why are you there??)

You don’t wake up in the morning, touching the pillow and realizing that you remember the constellation of moles on his shoulder, how he grabbed your hand and kissed you on the beach as you were putting sunscreen on his back, how lovely his hands looked on your stomach after lovemaking... And the only way to get over this is going to be cold turkey. Just nothing. Just walking away from it no matter how much it hurts, because at some point you have to realize that all the swapped helmets and bike trips and gagged-on Powerbars will never translate into love. He’s never going to wake up one day and feel this great chunk of something missing in his life....

“One of these mornings / Won’t be very long / You will look for me / And I’ll be gone...”

I don’t usually wear music when I ride, mostly for safety reasons: there aren’t that many car-free areas where you can ride in Madrid, and I don’t trust my own with-it-ness not to start playing air guitar mid-ride. But as I’m sitting here in the bedroom, plunking away on the laptop, thinking about what I could make for dinner that wouldn’t involve actually going into the kitchen where my room-mates are smoking themselves silly, I realize that maybe it would be a better anaesthetic to start heading out with the MP3: I wouldn’t be left alone to start delving deeper into my thoughts and starting to realize that kind of shit. But in a sense, if it’s going to happen, it’s better that it happen on a bike, I suppose: when you’re riding a bike, you can’t focus on the faces of the other people. You go hiking with someone who’s in a bad mood, you can’t get away from it. Someone’s on a bad mood on a bike? Ride thirty yards ahead – problem solved. So while this little revelation dawns on me today and hits me full in the face like a cruel laugh, the one comfort I could take was, at least, no one could see me want to cry.

And riding with beginners is like herding cats is like trying to get over an ex-boyfriend: All you can do is try to get everything together beforehand: once everything is set in motion, there's no other option except breathe deep, hold on and don't read too deeply into what's going on.