baxter sez

well, alison has accused me of not blogging anything in a while. i've wanted to, but my energies are being expended elsewhere. well, five elsewheres, to be exact: the making/object side of my schoolwork, the writing/mental side of my schoolwork, writing a...a personal diary of sorts, my actual employment as a g.a. at school, and practicing guitar and banjo.

...okay. that's really boring. the worst part of blogs...so!

alison has sort of stolen my thunder. what i mean is that she's posted a weak-ass version, on someone else's blog nonetheless, of a biking story i was gonna put on here myself. what i suggest is that you check it out for yourself by taking a look at my friend kenneth's blog--alison's bit is in the comments. the only change i would offer , really, is that the actual quote was something that alison deleted from this site the other day: they actually said "hey! ride 'at bike, m**f**!"

while you're there take a listen to kenneth's band. (some of the best moments of my life have been spent playing music with kenneth--i miss him.)

to go on with the bike stuff:

many people over time have suggested that i might want to wear a helmet when i ride. this is smart, i know, but ill-informed. if one wants to truly protect themselves when riding in the south (generally, a non-bike-friendly locale) i would suggest a bullet-proof vest--or even better, full body armor. i've only hit my head once while riding, but have been hit by other things numerous times, e.g.: the leftovers of a fast food bag, a large ball of ice, something small and very hard that i couldn't identify (a bullet?), an almost entirely full can of beer, thousands of stinging/stupid words...

which brings me to this (it's a little negative, but allow me to moan a bit):

it has to do with the nature of those hurtful comments like i've gotten while merely riding a bike down the street. i ponder the need for people to do things like that, you know? i mean, those guys that said "hey, ride that bike"...what? is that all they could come up with? why did my presence on the road mean so much that they felt compelled to comment even when they didn't have something to say? the REAL question is this: what threat am i posing?

this brings me to my next "unsolicited comment" question. here goes: i've rarely had an acquaintance walk up to me and say something like "is someone paying you to wear that shirt?" or, "hey, why don't you leave that way of walking to people that can do it for real?" however, they have no qualms about saying this when i walk around singing. not even loud or anything. just kind of singing along...

they say it like it's a joke, but it hurts me. (i'm very sensitive about my singing anyway.) is there a parallel here with the biking? do people fear other people's expression that much? is it a "get-back-in-the-herd" thing? i'm just singing because i'm happy, you know?

to add a little more to this rambling post: some of you may know that i have a hard time starting in the middle of a series. like the alphabet. if i want to turn to the letter "G" in the dictionary, i usually have to sorta mumble "abcdef...g" to figure out where it is. this has been real detrimental to me in using the "nashville number system" of musical notation, by the way. i've just had to learn it by shapes, rather than letters. the reason i'm on to this tangent is because i've had to look up a few things in the dictionary to finish this post.

i'm not an atrocious speller, but not a gifted one either. for this post, i've had to look up "parallel," "herd" (!), and "acquaintance." to me, the alphabet has some misfit letters--like the misfit toys on the christmas special. these letters are j, q, v and w. xyz goes without saying, but since they all live together, they appear okay. they have thier own community.

now, i don't really have a hard time with j. it settles into its spot fairly well--mostly because of the relationship to its better cousin, the letter g. w is also okay. it lives down there with the other wierd ones. but Q? why is out there all by itself? shouldn't the alphabet really be:

abcdefg hijklmnop rstuv-v-V! wq xy and z?

have a good day.