20.1

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I’ve had a longstanding goal – a 20 mph (32+ kph) time trial on the bike. To a serious racer, this would be laughably slow (breaking one hour for the 40 km time trial is a common dividing line between the weekender and the race boys), but for me, riding my own little time trials along the riverside trail, it’s been an elusive summit, ever just out of reach.

It’s a flat trail, with four little turns to break your rhythm and many pedestrians, kids on their bikes with Mom and Dad, but beyond that it allows as much flat-out riding as my legs, lungs and heart can bear. I can get over 18 reliably, and I’ve pushed up over 19 once, but the magic 20 always escaped me.

Lately, my approach to the challenge has been to ride gently out to the trail’s north end, a 45-50 minute warmup, then blast the down-and-back 20 miles, then ride home to warm down. It’s a great 40 mile workout, and I figured some day things would click. Saturday they did.

You can see my heart rate profile here. The key is the middle section. The graph pops up about minute 52, at the start of the blast, and I held my speed up, keeping my heart rate in the high 150s for the first half hour. That’s high aerobic – unpleasant but sustainable. Once I turned around at the south end of my little track (out-and-back is mandatory, to balance any wind advantage), I started kicking it up, until the last 15 minutes, which you can see is in the red zone – anaerobic.

A couple of factors at play here. I’d ridden three times during the previous week, so my legs weren’t flat, but none of the rides were particularly long or hard, so I was well rested. Also, I was experimenting with a carb drink, which seemed to keep my usual two-hour bog at bay. When I finished the time trial, I still felt like I had some spring left in the legs, like I could have continued. And mentally, I felt great, not a stress or worry in the world. My life’s good, and that makes everything easier.

In Frank We Trust

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Tom Mulhern: Maybe they mistook you for Duane Allman.
Frank Zappa: Oh sure they did. People do all the time.

Ferrying Nora to the record store this afternoon I scored myself. There were times when Frank Zappa had to just torch the place, to show that he could do the straight up guitar thing. One of my favorites is the Illinois Enema Bandit, another is Muffin Man (“Good night, Austin, Texas, wherever you are.”). Today, I picked up Them or Us for cheap, which includes what the Rykodisc catalog rightly characterizes as “a straight-faced cover of the Allman Brothers’ `Whippin’ Post.'” The story goes that Zappa was playing in Helsinki when some guy in the audience yelled out, in ragged English, “Whipping Post”. Frank was disappointed at the time that the bad couldn’t just rip it out, so they made a point of adding it to their repertoire. The later were, in fact, able to rip it out. Plenty of other great guitar playing on the album, and do-whop.

The Millennium Problems

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On a recent visit to the library, Lissa picked up The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin, thinking I might find it amusing. I do. It is the story of a set of seven mathematical problems for which the Clay Foundation has offered million dollar prizes.

Devlin offers up for himself what he acknowledges at the outset is an impossible task – to explain to us, dear readers, that which is not reasonbly explainable:

For the most part, I do not aim at a detailed description of the problems. It is just not possible to describe most of them accurately in lay terms – or even in terms familiar to someone with a university degree in mathematics.

This does not make the book, at least so far, any less enjoyable for the knowledge that when I’m done I won’t understand the problems. I’ve become comfortable with black boxes, with knowing that there are thinks I won’t understand, and don’t need to. As long as one carefully circumscribes the box and understand its place in the system, one can get by quite nicely as long as one can place trust in the box builder. A lot of my science writing falls into this realm. In some cases I understand the box’s inner workings, but leave it as a box for readers. In some cases it’s a box in my own mind.

Think of the boxes as functions, a concept I take for granted in writing computer code but that was a thoughtful innovation a century-and-a-half ago. Quoting Devlin here, if I may be tricky and self-referential:

A function can be any rule that takes objects of one kind and produces new objects from them. According to this new conception, the rule that associates with each country in the world its capital city is a bona fide function (albeit a non-mathematical one.)

Mathematicians began to study the properties of abstract functions, specified not by some formula by their behavior.

So my black boxes are functions:

capital = f(country);

If I want, I can look at the way the author of my library (I slip into softwarespeak here) has written the function to return national capitals. Or I can trust the library, and treat it as a black box, thinking instead about the context rather than the ugly details.

Years ago, I was visiting my friend John in Olympia, Wash., and he took me for a late-night hike down through the woods to the water’s edge. It was pitch black, and for the first mile or so I was incredibly frustrated and on edge as I tried to peer down through the blackness to see my footfalls. After a while, though, I realized I could just unfocus my eyes and fix my gaze on John’s white T-shirt ahead of me and just follow it. And then I was fine.

Sometimes you have to just let go of the details.

Spanish Broom

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One man’s flower is another man’s weed, apparently.

Our neighborhood is alive right now with the fragrance of the lovely yellow-flowering Spanish broom – Spartium junceum L.. Here in Albuquerque, it’s lovingly cultivated for its lovely open green stems and wild yellow blooms. We’ve had one for several years on the mound in our front yard, next to the cactus. It’s always muddled along, but never really bloomed until this year, when we gave it its own dedicated drip water supply. Now it’s on fire.

It grows well here in gardens, but doesn’t spread much on its own. Not so elsewhere. Apparently in some wetter climates, Spanish broom is considered a Class A Weed.

Picasso

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It is over between Pablo and me.

It has been a long time coming, such a passionate thing cannot be without unpleasantness. His talent is so magnificent, all stark erotic power. I will never forget the moment I turned a corner in the National Museum to see a sketch from Les Demoiselles, and I was moved beyond all measure. But Picasso he was such a boy, always. “Look at me!” every brush stroke seemed to cry out. I am older now.

The screen does do not justice to this, but when I saw it today I was again moved. There were three side by side (this was to its left) and they seemed to me to carry the weight of the modern on their shoulders, the heavy lifting already done, only Pablo’s shouting left to announce it to the world.

I walked back into the room full of Picassos next door, feeling a bit sullen, then back to the Cezannes, then back to the Picassos again. They have lovely big piece he did in 1906, in that breathless moment before Les Demoiselles, a harem of images of his beloved Fernande. But he never loved Fernande, or me. He loved only himself. I can see now what a fool I was.

Baseball Diaries

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Kid a couple of rows in front of me at the Jake: “Dad, we got Ichiro out!”

The Seattle superstar had just grounded to Cleveland shortstop Omar Vizquel to start the game, and the kid’s dad had been down getting himself a beer and his son, probably nine or ten years old, some peanuts.

It was the last time the kid could say that all evening. They had left by the eighth inning, but if they were still there they would have seen Ichiro get his fourth hit – he was four for five on the night, with three singles and a double, a perfectly Ichiro-like performance.

It was cold out at the park – in the 50s, but windy, and I had to wear all the clothes I brought with me to Cleveland. But it was lovely nevertheless, another major league ballpark to add to my list.

Vonnegut at 33,000 Feet

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Saved again by literature on a trip from hell. Well, not hell yet, just some upper circle of purgatory in which severe weather rumbles out through the U.S. air traffic system in search of victims. My purgatorial circle was a runway hold in Albuquerque, followed by the resulting travel carnage at O’Hare. In this case, my rescuer is Vonnegut, a gift from Nora on the occasion of my 44th birthday.

She’s given me Vonnegut before, and seems to grasp his significance. On Christmas round about 1973 or so, my sister, Lisa, gave me Breakfast of Champions, which changed my life in unaccountable ways. I holed up with the book all afternoon Christmas and into the next day, and came out the other side convicted to writing.

I gave that book away – to Lisa as a wedding present – so Nora a couple of years ago gave me a new copy of Breakfast of Champions, and I read it fresh with whatever wisdom I’ve acquired in the decades since. It held up well. I ended up thinking Vonnegut is wrong in fundamental ways, all dark determinism I simply can’t embrace. But he is funnier, if anything, than when I read him a quarter century ago, and the funadamental insight I had then endured, richer for the years.

The insight is this: The written word is written by someone. The book has an author. A writer has a voice.

The book is a collection of early Vonnegut short stories, and it is interesting precisely because it does not have that voice I came to know so well. There are sparks of it here and there, but it is mostly just workmanlike prose, solid and often funny, economical and sometimes imperfect – a writer in the process of acquiring the voice that later so change me.

I finally made it to Cleveland. And so it goes.