TKM

“Hey, do you guys fix and sell bikes?” a passerby stopped to ask one Sunday as le domestique and I tinkered with our bicycles in the garage.

At first it seemed like a random question, but then I took an objective look at our garage, noting the shop stand; the shelves full of spare pedals, saddles, and other bike parts; two bikes in various states of undress, their tires propped against the fence; and three other bikes hanging about.

“No, sorry,” I said. “We just really like them.”

After a brief discussion about where she might find a cheap used beach cruiser, she went on her way, not realizing, I’m sure, the tribute she had paid me. Imagine me, a bicycle mechanic!

If you’re like me, you seldom appreciate the talents you have, instead eyeing with envy skills you lack. I, for instance, have not as yet revealed anything in the way of musical aptitude. As much as I love music and covet the ability to make it, notes and chords and…stuff aren’t at all intuitive to me. I can poke at keys on a piano or strum something vaguely recognizable on a guitar, but only by rote and not at all soulfully. If only my parents had pushed me to be a well-rounded child, I’ve thought poutily, then I might have developed my musical gifts early, when our skill sets are elastic. And if such had been the case, the reasoning continues, I would undoubtedly be making my living as a singer-songwriter today.

Instead, I make my living as a copy editor. I’m pretty good at it. Give me a muddled manuscript and I can bully it into making sense. I may even be able to make it sing, manipulating the words—mostly the author’s, some my own—and orchestrating the commas and their poorer punctuatorial relations into some kind of musical flow. On especially rare occasions, I’m even artful enough to get away with making up words, like punctuatorial.

But in my continuing quest to decide what I want to be when I grow up, I’ve lately flirted with the idea of going to school to become a bicycle mechanic. Not hard flirting, mind you, rather the kind of flirting one might engage in while already in a committed relationship.

While I’ll admit that, for me, a major industry attractant is the wardrobe, there are others: I enjoy hanging around bike shops, tools are cool, bikes are sexy, and basic bicycle technology—not the quality of components or frame materials but the way a bike works mechanically—has remained static for about a hundred years. That can’t be said of cars, which in a single generation have morphed from the family sedans our dads tinkered with on weekends into vehicles with engine cavities so inscrutable those same dads can only stare forlornly at the tightly packed network of housings and hoses, wishing they could tell us why our goddam “check engine” lights keep flashing.

I got my first taste of wrenching at a hands-on “advanced bicycle maintenance” seminar offered at a local bike shop. I was the only one who showed up, resulting in plenty of personal attention—as well as an earful of sensitive information. My instructor, let’s call him “Dave,” had become a certified mechanic, he said, in response to his fiancée’s demand that he relinquish his former career as a host at swingers’ parties in Chicago. Dave’s was a niche market: He served as a “fluffer” at gatherings of white heterosexual couples who fantasized about having three-ways with black men, he being one such man. Dave didn’t actually have sex with anyone. Rather, his job was to, (a) entertain couples who indulged in the fantasy aspect alone, and (b) prime couples who might be inclined to contract with a hustler, should one happen to be available, coincidentally, at that very same party. Dave may also have appeared in one or two erotic videos, but if he did, he stressed, he didn’t engage in sexual contact—rather, he (may have) played the porn trope of the third-party voyeur, that ubiquitous fellow who stumbles on a couple having sex in, say, the copier room, he being there maybe to fix said copier, and gets so turned on by their naughty public display that he must then remove his own pants and play with his pee-pee. Anyway, his fiancée, a corporate attorney, thought maybe they should move away from Chicago and that maybe, once a couple thousand miles away from his networking circle—in which he operated under a pseudonym connoting meatlike properties—he could do something…else. And he loved her, so he went to bicycle mechanics school.

Dave inspires me, not for the obvious reasons but because when I think about the almost total lack of overlap between his former skill set and that required of a certified bike mechanic, I imagine that my own transition would be a breeze. After all, wrenching is wrenching, whether fixing broken drive trains or clunky sentences. If you want your wheels (subject) to move, you need to pedal (a verb), but if your chain (subject-verb agreement) is broken, your trajectory (sentence) will stall. With all other parts in harmony, your journey (idea) will ramble beyond control should your brakes (punctuation) fail. If you want to move not merely forward but toward a specific destination (direct object), you’ll need to pedal and steer (a predicate), as opposed to merely pedaling (an intransitive verb).

Still, just as experienced copy editors can spot disagreeable text without diagramming sentences, competent mechanics are able to localize a bike’s problem without having to think through how bicycles work. And just as enthusiasm for reading doesn’t necessarily equip a person to edit what he or she reads—though we all occasionally want to chuck a book or magazine across the room because the person who is being paid to write but is not therefore a writer is incoherent, predictable, annoying, abstruse, contrary, or plainly inept in directing their story—riding a bicycle gives me no particular talent for fixing one.

Thanks to Dave’s instruction, I can do more than clean a chain and fix a flat, though my efforts at adjusting derailleurs and truing wheels are amateur at best. Happily, I don’t let that stop me from hiking my bike up on a shop stand and performing a professional pantomime, turning cranks and shifting gears as I watch the chain’s motion and listen for disagreement. As with language, there’s a certain music to all components working in harmony (and as with music, my overambitious manipulation of said components often results in discord).

Still, I can sling my guitar or drape a mechanic’s shirt over my shoulders and fool casual passersby into thinking I am what I am not, and for just a moment I’m not what I am: a comma jockey, wielding no instruments or tools but a dictionary and corrective pens. Not that I think my skill set is unimportant. A poorly punctuated maintenance manual results in confusion at best and mechanical breakdown at worst. And I do so wish that Joan Osborne had asked, “What if God were one of us?” even as I recognize that though Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” might inspire images of an egg-retentive hen, “Lie Lady Lie” just isn’t…musical.

So we all, or most of us—I can’t speak for retired fluffers or Bush administration appointees—stick to what we do best, happy in the knowledge that there are others out there ready to do for us what we suck at most. But don’t think for a moment that I’m therefore willing to concede my guitar or my mechanic’s shirts, because the one thing in which we all excel on common par is dreaming.

Sometimes you get a haircut, and sometimes the haircut gets you.

Last week I was just itching to shave my head, not because I had head lice but because I was in San Francisco, and being there reminded me of a time when I shaved my head but not my legs—an attitude that horrified most hets and a few homos too. Ah, glorious baby dykedom.

About 10 years ago I ran into a college classmate at the West Hollywood Gauntlet. I didn’t recognize her at first. Now a professional piercer covered in tats, she had been an unassuming sports dyke—a shot putter on full scholarship—when we had an autobiography seminar in common. When she recognized me I remembered her immediately. She and her track buddy used to sit across the room from me, and we never spoke even though it was clear that we were all sisters. I told her I had always wanted to break the ice with them but that they seemed unapproachable.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “You were fucking scary.”

It tickled me to think this mammoth alpha butch was once intimidated by me, though I wasn’t actually cultivating “scary” back in the day. While I first buzzed my head in a dark mood, I maintained it more out of utility than anything: I rode a motorcycle to school and I hate helmet hair.

Shaving my head served another important utility: My mother never again complained about the length of my hair, as long as I had some.

My partner reminded me last week that our South Carolina beach week is coming up and that now might not be the best time to revisit my lost youth, what with gay-bashing on the rise and all. So I split the difference and asked my hairdresser for a “soft” crew cut. God love a West Hollywood hairdresser: My boy’s not afraid to get out the clippers when I say “summer cut.”

I don’t spend much time on the motorcycle these days, but I do bicycle—a pursuit for which I gladly shave my legs—and I still hate helmet hair. With this cut, when a shower isn’t readily available, the sweat generated on a ride is generally enough to revamp and restyle.

“By the way,” said a disheveled 52-year-old runner I had met just moments before, “you’re an old soul. You’ve led 36 lives. I’m very psychic.”

It was a jarring non sequitur.

The disheveled woman in question, whose name turned out to be Dierdre, had flagged me down on the Sepulveda Basin bike path. She looked distressed, and I figured she needed to use my cell phone, probably to call her husband for a pickup—the valley heat had crested 100 degrees on this Saturday morning. I veered off the smooth pavement and managed to stop just at the edge of an unevenly bricked area; weenie racing tires and rough surfaces don’t mix well.

“Oh, thank you for stopping,” she said breathlessly, her face splotchy with broken capillaries and her dyed black hair dripping sweat. “You look like a good person to ask: How do I buy a bicycle?”

Not what I was expecting, but I was ready to take a break from the heat myself. I was a couple of hours into a ride that had taken me across the valley and back, with a rest stop at Jamba Juice for a big protein-fortified fruit slushy. Not that I have to ride across the valley to get to a Jamba Juice—there were undoubtedly three or four along the way—but I’m trying to build my stamina back up after many months of energy-sapping physiological and psychological weirdness that kept me and my bike parked indoors, on a stationary trainer in front of the TV. A trainer can mimic road resistance and keep you pedaling—and will even keep you up to speed on Law & Order reruns—but it won’t re-create the brain-frying dispirit of riding into a strong hot wind. For that, you need the great outdoors, which is why I was on the path, counting the miles in my own personal Tour de Bonk, and was all too willing to stop when Dierdre caught my attention.

She apologized for interrupting my ride, but in truth the only thing bike geeks like more than riding bikes is talking about bikes. Also, talking about riding bikes. And since bike talk is so terribly scintillating for people who don’t give a crap about bikes, it’s exciting to encounter someone who actually wants to talk about them.

I asked her what she felt like she was in the market for. She said she didn’t know, that she had blown out her feet running and needed to find another way to stay in shape, then, she said, she saw me and thought, Bicycling!

I don’t have a terribly prescriptive personality, so the idea of sizing a stranger up and telling her what she needs makes me uncomfortable. (My partner probably shot milk through her nose laughing at the concept of me not liking to tell people what to do, such is the yawning gulf between her perception and my own.) So it was that I began to tell Dierdre everything I know about cycling. Maybe she was just trying to change the subject when she told me about my old-soul status.

“Ancient Egypt, Samaria, the French Revolution, you’ve seen it all,” she said. “And the old souls are being awakened now because the world needs them.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

“My teachers warn me to be careful with my talent. My psychic eye is very strong, and not everyone is ready to hear what I have to tell them, but you have a strong spirit and you know you’re here for a greater purpose.”

Goodness, am I that transparent? I have always thought that I’m here for a greater purpose. I mean, maybe not a great purpose, but, for instance, when I was still waiting tables four years out of college, I thought then that perhaps there might be something better in store for me. Ditto when I worked, briefly, for a publisher of gay male erotica. Indeed, I shouldered through the colorless depression that practically consumed my post-college life with the gilded hope that an unknowable purpose was yet to come, and here was confirmation that my purpose is extant!

And while I don’t remember much from my Egyptian and Samaritan lives, I’m pretty sure that during the French Revolution I was Marie (Madame) Tussaud. How else to explain my sick fascination with wax museums? I remember as though it was just yesterday: I (Tussaud) had been a friend of the court and was consequently arrested by the Jacobins on suspicion of royalist sympathies. I was to be executed, and my head was shaved in preparation for the guillotine, but on the eve of my doom I managed to save my neck by consenting to root through the decapitated heads of my friends and make death masks of them for posterity. In my present life, too, I have shaven my head during dark times, and I used to enjoy pulling the heads off Barbies. Coincidence? I think not. Besides, the resemblance is uncanny, as shown here in a waxwork I made of myself:

Dierdre continued to extol my virtues, which included but were not limited to: my powerful insight, my compassionate nature, my valuing of the human over the material, my patience, and, oh, the list just goes on and on.

In sum, I am awake, and I am here to help heal a world in peril, as is Dierdre. (How could she know how special I am were she not equally special herself?)

Oh, and she’s probably going to get a hybrid bicycle, with a more relaxed, comfortable geometry, though she’s considering a racing bike like mine.

I have a confession to make. I find this very, very sexy:

I’ll surrender my lesbian card to the proper authorities if such lust sullies my integrity, but I can’t help myself.

The Tour de France begins tomorrow. Yay! And also, boo!

A doping scandal implicating a Spanish doctor and several superstar cyclists has cast a pall over pro cycling on the eve of its signature event. Incredibly, not one of the three riders who stood atop the podium at the conclusion of the 2005 Tour will race this year. Lance retired, and the second- and third-place finishers, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, respectively, were implicated in the doping dragnet. Just last month the thoroughly adorable and charming Basso won the Giro d’Italia, arguably the second-most important grand tour on the circuit. He dedicated his win, now tainted, to his recently deceased mother.

I understand the desire to take performance-enhancing drugs. Pro cycling is a brutal sport that requires long hours in the saddle and, as a result, a massively high pain threshold. The average person may be able to fold himself into the classic racing crouch, but holding it for five hours while pedaling at an average speed of 30 mph? That takes a special kind of determination and training. Your classic performance enhancers don’t so much give you a leg up on race day as they allow you to train longer and harder with less pain—they make you superhuman.

There are days on my bike when I feel bionic, and it’s an amazing feeling, like I could ride straight up a mountain and dance around on top. But most days I feel very, very human, with all the pain that entails. And it’s that essential humanness that makes us look upon professional athletes with awe, even idolatry. They seem heroic because they show us what the human body is capable of when pushed to its very limit, which is why it can be utterly heartbreaking to discover they weren’t so very human after all.

Cyclists who don’t use performance enhancers are harmed threefold: They’ve been denied an even playing field in past races by any number of dopers; every cyclist implicated for drug use casts doubt on the integrity of every other cyclist; and to further the insult, the eventual 2006 winner, a man who will have spent about 85 hours in the saddle to ride 2,261 miles over the course of 20 race days, will have a win with a mental asterisk denoting that he didn’t face the “real” competition—never mind that those guys cheated their way to past wins. And in a devastating turn, at least one leading contender who is innocent of drug use won’t be riding in the Tour because of the scandal: Alexandre Vinokourov won’t be allowed to compete because so many other riders on his team have been disqualified they don’t have enough men to field a regulation squad.

I’ll still be watching the TdF, mind you, and there are still plenty of well-toned calves that haven’t been disqualified to keep me happy, but the Tour is tainted for fans as well as riders. We’re so utterly human, and we thrive on success stories because they illustrate the art of the possible. But for heroes we’d best look to ourselves. Even if our “possible” doesn’t take us high into the Alps or sprinting through throngs of adoring fans, at least we know our victories are real.

*The calves featured in this entry belong to Levi Leipheimer and are in no way implicated in the doping scandal.

Ever start writing something about your stupid life and then get so bored with yourself that you can’t imagine why you’re worth writing about or how on earth anyone else could possibly be interested in what you have to say? Yeah, me too.

But since my mother, whenever I call, reliably greets me with, “Oh, we were wondering if you’d died or something!” I thought it would be best to head off that kind of thinking at the pass here. Because I know it’s only natural to think, Golly, she hasn’t written a blog entry in over a week. I wonder if she died.

I haven’t died. My partner and I were in Georgia—the state, not the country—Wednesday through Sunday to visit her parents and catch some of the northern stages of the Tour de Georgia. Road cycling being not such a big deal in the States, folks can get almost close enough to the pro riders at the TdG to lovingly stroke their sculpted calves. My favorite moment—easily besting my first glimpse of a motley contingent of Confederate reenactors standing cheek to jowl in Chickamauga with the cyclists, the soldiers’ dirty gray uniforms revealing almost as much pot belly as the bikers’ colorful Lycra jerseys revealed muscle—happened when we were wandering among the team vehicles after the finish of the Dahlonega stage and a Belgian rider from the Quick Step team stripped out of his cycling kit and stood in the middle of the parking lot just as naked as an eel chatting with his teammates while an assistant massaged his still-twitching muscles.

I wish I had been born in country with a less inhibited culture. I’ll bet Belgian bloggers hardly ever harbor anxiety over the worth of what they have to say—and they never have panic dreams in which they find themselves naked in the middle of a crowd.

There was a fair amount of yelling coming from the bedroom this morning while I was getting ready for work. Toweling my hair I went to investigate and found my partner sitting on the edge of the bed, positively riveted by an Olympic curling match: Sweden v. Canada. Most of the yelling was coming from the guys on TV, but occasionally she’d let loose an “Oh!” or “Nice!” I tackled and pinned her to the bed in my own homage to sport, and once she had affected a suitable look of mock-terror I rolled off to the side and watched the match for a minute.

“Oh!” she yelled as the broom guys scuttled toward the target with the big pucky thing and it knocked some other pucky things out of the way. Gauging my blank look, she asked whether I wanted her to explain why that play was so extraordinarily cool.

My partner revealed her true self to me close to 11 years ago, only a few weeks into our relationship. I was in the impossibly small kitchen of her studio apartment and she was in the bedroom/living area. “THREE!” she yelled gleefully, and I couldn’t imagine what that meant. I went into the other room and found her watching a UCLA basketball game. Good God, I thought. She’s a sports fan.

We were both attending UCLA at the time, and, as I was quickly made to understand, it was a playoff game, a really big playoff game that, if won, would get them into the championships, so I was willing to chalk her enthusiasm up to school spirit, in which case it was really kind of endearing. Rah! Go team! I could get behind that.

But I was deluding myself. Her love of sport revealed itself to me in fits and starts over the next year, becoming fully manifest once we moved in together. And though that playoff game served as my early warning sign of the many athletic diversions to come, she’s not much into basketball as a rule. In fact, of the “big four” U.S. sports—which I would soon learn include football, baseball, basketball, and hockey—the only one she pledges allegiance to is baseball. Not that she’s some fanatic who runs around thrusting a big puffy number-one hand in the air, but she grew up rooting along with her family for her hometown boys, an underdog Atlanta Braves team in its fallow pre-’90s period. A kind of passion resulted from that long courtship, followed at last by victory. I could relate to that, having grown up within spitting distance of the Anaheim Angels.

Other than baseball, her taste veers off the beaten base path: English soccer, women’s billiards, sheep dog trials. Seriously, she used to watch a show called “One Man and His Dog” on BBC America—when the BBC was still trying to figure out what British shows Americans might cotton to—and it was like watching paint dry. Oil paint. On a hot day. But she loved it. And she has this talent for absorbing information in practically osmotic fashion, such that watching a man in a plaid tam play with his border collie for 30 minutes makes her an instantaneous expert in sheepherding skills. It’s uncanny.

I took a shine to bicycling a couple of years ago, and within a few months’ time she knew more about the sport of cycling than I’ll ever know—even if I were to apply myself. The first time we watched the Tour de France together she quickly committed the team names to memory and gleaned the roles of the various riders, from sprinters to climbers to domestiques. Her zeal makes me a little lazy, because I know that I can just watch all the colorful jerseys and beautiful bikes fly through the French countryside while she keeps track of what’s actually going on. I expect to tap her talents next week when we go to the South Bay to watch a leg of the inaugural Tour of California. I haven’t so much as glanced at a roster or route map, but my partner, if asked right now, could rattle off every European team committed to attend, along with the name of each team’s star rider—”captain” in cycling parlance—and the distances they’ll be riding each day.

It occurs to me sometimes that she deserves someone with whom she can share her vast reserves of idiosyncratic information, someone who would feast on her knowledge of curling rules like a dog alone at last with a honey-baked ham. And while I really do try to digest why that curling play was so cool, what I’m really thinking, what I can’t help thinking while she’s explaining it to me is, You’re so goddam cute when you’re excited about something.

Happy Valentine’s Day, sweet fan of mine.

This morning my primary care physician had me attend “neck class” on the theory that the neurological complications I’ve been experiencing for the past year are the result of mixed signals not so much from my brain as from my cervical spine. At least that’s how I like to spin my presence in neck class. It’s entirely possible that my PCP sent me there because he couldn’t think of anything else to do or any more specialists for me to see and he’s trying to distract me. “Look, over there, something shiny!”

I wouldn’t call Kaiser’s physical therapy department shiny. In fact, when I arrive at 7:15 a.m. it’s fairly dark. When I was admonished to arrive early for my 7:30 session my admonisher hadn’t mentioned that the department wouldn’t open until, well, 7:30. So I sit in the waiting room and read by the dim ambient light of the hall, something I wouldn’t do in an ophthalmology department for fear of reproof. Here I merely sit up straight, with exceedingly good posture, my book held at an ergonomic angle to my sightline.

I think about these things when on the campus of my health maintenance organization, especially since my physical compromise has been so cagey, hiding its source from GPs and neurologists, plus one wacky ENT and a rheumatologist so freaky I prayed he wouldn’t find anything just so I wouldn’t have to see him again. Since doctors like to know things, my case has been a little irksome to mine, and I think they’d love to be able to write me off as a head case, someone who’s making herself sick. I don’t think anyone’s headed down Munchausen Way: I saw a neuropsychologist in July who conducted eight hours of testing and determined that I seemed to have some subcortical brain damage consistent with stroke activity, so that cleared me of a broad spectrum of factitious-disorder allegations. Neuropsychologists are trained to sniff out fakers.

Still, none of my imaging backs up the stroke theory. More important, my symptoms relapse and remit, and stroke-injury complications should be constant. That note of discord might make any number of doctors peer longingly down Munchausen Way, thinking about how lovely it would be to send me down yonder, out of their exam rooms. I can’t say as I blame them. I’m really the only one who should know for sure whether I’m the cause of my own symptoms, and even I wonder sometimes, when I’m in remission, whether I can just concentrate really hard on remaining able-bodied and thus make it so. I have a friend who’s been known to insist that all illness is mental, that even wearing glasses is a sign of personal weakness—us myopic types only THINK we can’t see that far horizon where cancer is cured by fairies playing hornpipes.

So I sit up straight, lest anyone think I’m subluxating my spine and have only myself to blame for whatever nerves are severed as a result. God knows I don’t like having my integrity called into question.

Receptionists arrive and check folks in, after which a sunny PT named Sherry comes to fetch me and my three neck-class schoolmates, all of whom are women of a certain age, conjuring an image in my mind of a swimming pool full of seniors doing light aerobics. We’re taken to a room full of padded exam tables—with pillows! Unfortunately, we’re asked to sit in the chairs between the exam tables instead. Then Sherry rolls over on her doctorly stool and begins to engage us, three of us anyway; one woman is perversely resistant to any of this poppycock about minimizing disability and is bitterly rude to my sweet, sunny Sherry. Unless this woman can prove that Sherry has directly caused her pain—say, by misapplying a choke hold to her in a previous neck class—I am so ready to kick her ass at Sherry’s bidding. Sadly, Sherry’s too nice to ask for such a thing, so the rest of us are braced to cringe every time Ms. Acrimony opens her mouth.

Sherry explains that we find ourselves thrown together here not because Kaiser is in the habit of conducting cattle-call physical therapy but because a first session with any one of us would involve a brief explanation of the structure and physics of the CNS and an introduction to home exercises. After all, she says, necks (like happy families) are all alike. I can tell by the way Ms. Acrimony rolls her eyes that she very much doubts her neck is anything like ours. Nevertheless, Sherry notes that she’d be delighted to work with any of us individually after this initial visit.

So we go over some exercises, the kind my chiropractor has shown me any number of times while I’m waiting for him to get to the fun part, when he torques my head like a pneumatic wrench attacking a stuck lug nut. Gentle Sherry, as you may suspect, doesn’t recommend chiropractic medicine, but she adds that she doesn’t want to get in the way of any existing relationships we may have with our chiropractors. She’s diplomatic that way.

It’s when Sherry gets into discussing examples of spinal abuse that I experience a moment of horror. She’s likening our heads to bowling balls—but that’s not the horrific part—and reminding us that the farther we hold a bowling ball from our body the less support we can give it. Likewise, a 13-pound head exerts more stress on the cervical spine as it moves away from its center of gravity. Then Sherry cranes her neck forward and cocks her chin upward, calling this position the worst possible combination of stresses. She means to demonstrate an office worker in a nonergonomic computing posture, but I see something else: road cyclist.

No! Mean Sherry can’t make me quit cycling. I won’t quit cycling. She and her fascist anticycling physical-therapist friends can go to hell if they think they’re going to take that away from me. I slump in my chair and resolutely fold my arms over my chest while evil Sherry natters on about the use of home traction for headache and pain relief. She’s dead to me.

At the end of class I politely thank her, because I’m like that—I can love my enemies. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think, I need to catch up with Ms. Acrimony. We’re going across the street to Coco’s to talk smack about you over pie and coffee. Sherry gives me her card and asks if I think I’d like to come back and do some one-on-one work. “Perhaps,” I lie, “but I’m afraid I may know what the problem is from listening to you.”

“That’s wonderful,” she says. “Is it something you can correct?”

“Yeah,” I pouted. “But I don’t particularly want to. I do a lot of cycling, and the position you described as being the worst possible for your neck—that’s pretty necessary to cycling.”

She mimics a riding position to test my theory. “Yeah, you’re right,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean you need to stop cycling.”

“No?”

“Not at all,” she says gamely, beginning to melt the icy wall I hastily erected at her first intimation of attack. “Moving is good,” she says, “even when it puts stress on the body. What’s terrible for the body is having poor posture while being sedentary. Do you work in an office?”

“Yes,” I say, the earnest student returning.

“When do you get your migraines?” sweet Sherry asks.

“At work.”

“Never while riding?” she asks.

“Never.”

“Keep riding,” she says, smiling.

“Does this mean I should quit my job?”

“If you can afford it,” she winks. “Otherwise, just make your company buy you some cool back stuff. Do you need me to write you a note?”

Sherry is my friend, my very good friend.

So I’m in the backyard picking undersize oranges from our dwarf tree—for a time I was leaving them attached in hopes they would attain their proper orange size, but they’ve now started to leap from the tree en masse, indicating a certain ripeness that forestalls any plans for future growth—while my partner is playing ball with our dog, Biscuit. This is how that goes: My partner lobs a tennis ball with a thingy called the Chuckit, a curved piece of plastic with a cup on the end that not only sends the ball sailing with precious little effort by the thrower but saves her from having to bend over and pick up the increasingly slimy ball with her bare hands. Biscuit takes off like a shot and tries—oh, how she tries—to track the ball and catch it before it lands and rolls to a stop. She never achieves this goal. Instead, she most often gets the ball tangled in her legs as she overruns its rolling trajectory and kind of stops it with her body as if she’s throwing herself on a grenade. Then she picks it up in her mouth and trots around the yard with it, generally dropping it 20 feet away from my partner to segue into chasing her tail or scratching an ubiquitous itch, quickly forgetting that she was playing a game she enjoys.

It strikes me from my vantage point high on a ladder that our dog is not good at sports. There are breeds of dog, of course, that take no interest in playing ball, but judging from Biscuit’s appearance it’s in her genes to retrieve: Our best guess is that she’s the product of a cocker spaniel–golden retriever love match. And she certainly seems to be attracted to playing ball, but her enthusiasm greatly exceeds her talent.

It makes sense to think that there are dogs possessed of natural athleticism, just as there are people who are paid millions to play sports and millions of less talented people who’ll pay to watch them. Of course, less athletic dogs could give a fig about watching their superstar peers on Purina’s Incredible Dog Challenge—a televised event my partner has been known to watch, you know, casual-like, maybe when she’s waiting for me to finish showering and getting dressed so that we can begin our Saturday errand spectacular—but I think the corollary holds nevertheless. There are sporting dogs who outrun Frisbees and twist 180 degrees as they leap to nab them in midair with every bit as much grace and skill as Willie Mays* in his famous over-the-shoulder catch. (*I had to ask my partner whose catch that was, she being the baseball historian in the household.) Then there’s Biscuit.

I can relate. I’ve never shown a lick of talent for sports. I was the last one picked in P.E. throughout my school career. Been hit in the face by just about every kind of ball there is, usually while trying—and really, really wanting—to catch it. I’m not sure why, of all my failures, I should remember this one the most clearly: I’m in the 7th grade, playing flag football, and the ball is coming right for me. I watch it sailing through the air and I think I have a bead on it; somehow it seems so catchable even though I’ve never caught a football in my life. I’m backing up, practically tripping over myself to get into position, and my teammates are screaming at me—I’m not sure what they’re saying because I’m in the zone, right up until the ball glances off my nose and I fall at the feet of Kristin Yamamoto, who was right behind me, who was good in sports and would undoubtedly have caught the football had I not gotten in her way, which is probably what the other girls were screaming at me, to bug out. I probably remember that moment because it was the last time I thought I could be the hero; afterward I knew that I was just the easy out, the warm body taking up space on the field.

In the 8th grade I went out for cross-country running, largely because it would get me out of P.E. While the other girls played volleyball and softball I ran around and around the perimeter of the schoolyard. I wasn’t any more talented at running than I was at other sports, but I had decent endurance. I could push through pain, and I always finished my races, even if I never placed better than average. Best of all, there was no one relying on me to catch or hit a ball to help the team. There was no one screaming at me.

As an adult I discovered cycling, first as a way to get in some kind of shape, then as a way of being in touch with my physicality in a positive way. I’m not a fast cyclist, and I’m not at all competitive. The one time I tried riding with a cycling club I drove to Pasadena to meet with a group called Different Spokes, a gay and lesbian cycling organization, for a ride listed on their website as “easy,” a level they described as maintaining a “social, conversational pace.” I arrived at the meeting place early and rode around the parking lot at the bottom of the arroyo until I saw bicycles start to arrive. I went to greet them and received a lukewarm response. The ride started on an incline out of the arroyo; the group took the hill with more verve than I was accustomed to, but I hung in, huffing. As the ride continued I felt panic setting in over the pace they were keeping, and seven miles into it I bugged out, feeling like a miserable failure as I retraced my tracks to the arroyo and my car.

Since then I’ve ridden alone, always alone, just as I had ridden before the cycling-group debacle. I’m happier that way, I think, with no one pressuring me to take the hill aggressively or keep up with their pace, with no one making me feel bad for not being able to do more than I can do. I’ve found that, just as in cross-country, my legs will take me far when I value distance over speed, when I take in the scenery instead of leaving it behind in a blur. My cycling style will never put me on a podium, and that’s fine by me.

Maybe Biscuit has the right idea, then. Run after the ball if you’re so inclined, but don’t forget to chase your tail when the mood strikes. Let all those type-A dogs on the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge soak up all the glory. Biscuit and I think it’s a shame they’ll never know the private joy of aimless distraction.