by the light of the silvery moon?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my brain in fine shape. It has been a glorious day in the middle of a glorious October. The corn and beans continue to fall to their own version of the grim reaper. In fact the harvest has started in full force. As a public service announcement,; if you happen to be one of the jerks that is blessed enough to have all of the planets (including Uranus) in orbit around you, chill out. If your child is ten minutes late to soccer practice or you're ten minutes late to work there maybe some embarrassment but the world will not have ended.  If you keep your mouth shut and breath deeply the embarrassment will probably be less by being late than acting like the planet mentioned earlier.

Before I get started with the real content of this week's blog, I want to acknowledge the passing of Steve Jobs. The truest testament to his accomplishments came from The Onion, which is really just Mad Magazine for grown-ups. Their headline; Steve Jobs, the last man in America who knew what the F*** he was doing, has died. It is pretty much true. I once had the opportunity to go to an Apple store on a Sunday morning, and it was like church; there were greeters, there was a message, there was the teaching.  The only difference that I could see is that everyone there was enjoying church and the offering basket ended up being a lot fuller. I was joking with a co-worker. I said that it was pretty humbling. Compared with Steve Jobs, my co-worker and I had managed to design a mildly improved Indiana tax processing system.

I wrote last week about rediscovering bike riding as enjoyable exercise. I wrote that blog as an introduction piece to this blog. A week ago last Friday night, I discovered the exhilaration of riding a bike in the dark. Of course, I was well lit. I have a very cool red strobe light on the back. I have a blinking headlight. While in theory is it bright enough to light the way, it is really just bright enough to let people know that there is something to swerve around out in the road;  kind of like the red-devil eyes of a opossum. To address this deficiency, I had purchased a ray-o-vac headlamp. It is one of those geeky creations that is really just the Reese’s cup of flashlights and sweat bands. It works great. My helmet fits right over it, and it throws a nice beam about 15 ft in front of you as you are going down the road.

So a week ago, Bev went to Chicago for a wedding shower for our niece. This is the perfect storm for an empty nester. No kids and while I miss her deeply no Beverly either. These occasions have always been marked as a beer and Oreo weekends. That's right, 48 hours of drinking beer and eating Oreos, and if truth be known, doing things that are just a little bit dumb; ergo a night time bike ride. I didn't say that it wasn't well thought out. It was. It was just a little bit dumb. I had been noticing that the headlight wasn't going to be bright enough as the days started getting shorter and my bike rides would bump up against dusk. So on about June 23rd, I devised a plan and went out and bought the ray-o-vac and kept it tucked away for the perfect opportunity.

The Friday night was perfect. I was home late from work so I was cutting it close anyhow. It was cloudy so it got dark even earlier. The voice of reason in my life was no where near my ears. I had a cool ray-o-vac head lamp. If I went down and got hurt, I plenty of beer and Oreos to get me through to Monday morning. I was wearing a helmet. How bad could it be? I was golden.

I took off, there was just a little bit of sunlight fighting its way through the cloud cover. It was enough to get me to the more deserted roads. And then the darkness descended. I am a control freak that likes to see all of the possibilities in front of me and then plan for all of the possibilities. In my minds eye, I have the world's largest radar array in my head that is looking forward trying to figure out what is going to happen and then plan for all of the revealed possibilities. It doesn't matter if I won't use a hundredth of the permutations that my brain develops. The plans have to be developed and submitted to management for evaluation and approval. It makes me a pretty good project manager. Spontaneity not so great.

That is why I am surprised that I found it to be a great experience. While 15 feet seems like a good distance to illuminate, it evaporates very quickly at 16 miles per hour on the flats and even faster at 25 miles per hour on the hills. My world suddenly collapses to just that 260 inches in front of me. No worrying about that hill, what gear should I get ready to shift to, I didn't know that bridge had a reflective sign on it. It was so cool. What was a 12 and a half mile ride suddenly became about 4400 fifteen feet rides. It is so different.

While I won't become a nocturnal rider and will still do most of my rides in the light of day, I do think that it is a road that will teach me something illuminating about myself and how I look at the world.

Take care

Roger.