music: the early years

The screen door slams behind me as I bust out into the sun, my transistor radio pressed hard to my ear, the volume cranked and distorted. My favorite song has just come on and I am seriously fired up, eager for the adrenaline rush again. Bad Company's frontman, Paul Rodgers, is singing the first verse calmly enough, letting his special lady friend know just how special a lady she is, but he's getting close to the chorus and that's where all kinds of guitar-fueled hell breaks loose. Almost quietly he sings, "Feel like makin'..." but before he can finish his thought the stuttering power chord slams like a truck into a wall and he and I both tilt our heads back to the sky and bellow in unison for all the world to hear, "FEEL LIKE MAKIN' LOVE! FEEL LIKE MAKIN' LOVE! FEEL LIKE MAY-KIN' LOVE TO YOU!" I am twelve years old in the middle of my front yard and I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I had a weird relationship with quite a few of the songs of my formative years. Some, like Bad Company's aforementioned anthem to The Urge for Intercourse, tingled the as-yet-to-develop horny adolescent regions of my pubescent brain and spoke to me in an indecipherable yet somehow fundamentally relatable way of the females who would soon become my one and only focus. Foghat's Slow Ride is another good example. I loved two things in the sixth grade: Beth Aslakson (she had no idea), and Slow Ride. See, this guy takes his girlfriend out for a leisurely drive in his car - a "slow ride", if you will. Well, he starts out taking it easy, driving slow, but by the end of the song he's driving really, really fast. Actually, as I discovered some time later, the song is about good old-fashioned fucking, plain and simple. Like Ravel's Boléro, it's a nice example of form following function, the musical equivalent of a prolonged and vigorous sexual encounter with an enthusiastic partner; starting slow, then building, building, accelerating, and finally careening wildly into a sweaty, orgasmic finale, during which the lead singer (nobody knows the name of the lead singer of Foghat off the top of their heads) also tilts his head back to the sun and lets loose, "SLOOW RIIIIDE!!", then laughs maniacally as the song finishes up and presumably falls asleep immediately.

Other songs left me confused and anxious, or just plain freaked me out. Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff always gave me an uneasy feeling, and not just because the song sucked. I would try and imagine the setting in which the nameless, murdering, boring protagonist explained the "self-defense" killing of the sheriff in irritating, yawn-inducing detail. Even now, if I'm unfortunate enough to have to sit through this song, I think the same question I did when I was eleven: if you didn't shoot the deputy, man, who the hell did? And America's A Horse With No Name quite simply blew my nine-year-old mind, what with the whiny, Neil Young-ish voice, the reliance on that one repetitive note, and the batshit-crazy lyrics. I pondered many questions: First of all, why not just give the horse a name? Is that so hard? And what's with all the plants and birds and rocks and things? Things? Can you be more specific? Finally, please explain why you let the horse, your only mode of transportation in this desert/ocean, run free? I wanted some goddamn answers.

It's a rare treat: lunch with my dad at the Sonic! We sit in the car waiting for our burgers to be delivered, talking about nothing in particular, listening to the radio, having a good time. As I hear the familiar opening piano of Jim Croce's Bad, Bad Leroy Brown I think to myself, "Hey, I really like this songHOLY SHIT THIS SONG HAS CUSSING IN IT!" I quietly panic. How can I keep my father who, in my mind, has a soul as clean and pure as the driven snow and who, I'm certain, has never heard the word "damn" before, from being sullied by this impending profanity. Simply turning off the radio is not an option: too suspicious. Before I know it the chorus arrives: Well he's bad, bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole"DELICIOUSBURGER!!", I blurt, hoping to cause a diversion. Dad's raised eyebrow indicates success. This continues for the duration of the song - "IS THAT A TORNADO?!", "CORVETTE!!" - my sudden non sequitur exclamations drowning out the bad word and saving my dad from becoming like me, an obscenity-soaked 10-year-old who swore like a sailor.

My parents used to ship me off to my Grandma's in Kerrville, Texas for weeks at a time during the summer. The stated excuse was my mom's graduate schooling or something but I think the real reason was to just get some damn peace and quiet for a while and to repair the damage I'd done to the house and property during the rest of the year. It was on one of these visits that the Angel of Death visited me, though not in its usual black hooded robe and scythe carrying form. No, this time Mr. Death was a song: Gilbert O'Sullivan's Alone Again (Naturally). This catchy tune casually introduced me to the cheery notion that my parents WOULD SOMEDAY DIE. As a nine-year-old, I had never considered this a possibility before and as I spent each day of my sentence aimlessly roaming the empty streets of this mostly geriatrically populated town, alone (naturally) with my thoughts of my beloved parents ceasing to be, this godawful song would occasionally play on my radio but would continuously play in my head; the cloying, nasally voice rising up into the most upsetting minor key possible, the maudlin lyrics detailing the heartwrenching demise of first the singer's father, then his heartbroken mother. I was inconsolable and forever changed. To this day I can't stand to even think about this song lest it get lodged in my brain, like it is right now. Thanks, Gilbert. You're an asshole.

I remember being awake in the wee hours of the morning in late 1976 (ongoing bicentennial excitement, no doubt), my little AM radio rasping out Bob Seger's Night Moves. It was chilly outside, "with autumn closing in" as Bob says, and I drew pictures into the dew that covered the inside of my window, a crescent moon lighting up my work. The song told the story of this horny kid making out with this equally frisky girl wherever and whenever possible, that part I got and appreciated. What I didn't really get, though, was that it was actually about remembering these shenanigans much later in life. The wistful nostalgia, the hint of melancholia at the end of the song was to me, a thirteen-year-old, troubling but in a strangely enjoyable way. It's as if I knew, even then, that I, like Bob, would frequently enjoy the pleasant pain of nostalgia as I grew old, with my own autumn closing in.

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Ol' Blue

"NICE BIKE, BITCH!!"
The carload of miscreants sped through the left turn lane as I waited casually at the corner. My heart swelled with pride. "You're goddamn right", I thought. I suspect the one who yelled it saw my bike and found himself uncontrollably blurting out his praise but, fearing certain ostracization from his friends, hastily added the somewhat ill-conceived "bitch" at the end. Whatever. I never tire of getting compliments on my bike, ill-conceived or otherwise. And you know why? Because my bike deserves it.

I named him "Ol' Blue". He was born of extreme fiscal irresponsibility at the height of my youthful impulsiveness in 1982, my sophomore year in college. I was suffering from a bad case of bike envy; my buddy Jeff had a cool bike: a single speed Cook Bros. BMX with a 26" frame and I decided, without giving it much thought which was par for the course back then, that I would purchase a cool bike for myself, an idea that made perfect sense at the time. I went to the bike store on MLK Boulevard and, much to my mother's later consternation, bought everything the guy recommended. For $625 I walked out of there with a deep blue, custom-built SE Racing OM Flyer with chrome Landing Gear forks. Ol' Blue was born and he was glorious.

Suddenly, I was mobile and free in the big city of Austin, under my own power and unfettered by things like "traffic laws" and "designated transportation areas". I was connected to the city and to myself in an exhilarating way that driving a car could never produce. I went wherever my legs could take me, wherever I pointed the front tire. Ol' Blue got me home from the clubs at 4:00am when I was falling down drunk; he took me from one end of the state capitol building (with a wheelie through the rotunda) to the other on a boring Sunday afternoon; down whatever staircase I chose; on countless visits to Barton Springs; and on sweaty, late night summer rides around downtown. He was good for my love life, too: a cute girl once left a flirty note on him for me. Sure, Ol' Blue and I had our share of spills - dislocating both shoulders during a not-very-well-thought-through jump attempt comes to mind - but these just added to the richness of the adventures. My life would never be the same, and not because I didn't get to go to Europe upon graduation because I had unknowingly depleted my college fund by buying things like bikes. No, I had discovered the joy of urban biking with my trusty steed. Little did I know that things were going to get even better.

I graduated and moved to Chicago where I found a veritable biking utopia. Here I roamed an area one mile wide and six miles long, flat and full of interesting things to see and investigate. I pulled wheelies under the Calder sculpture on Mies van der Rohe's Federal Building plaza, I rode up onto the sloping base of the giant Picasso sculpture on Daley Plaza, I explored the abandoned railyards just south of downtown, I logged hundreds of miles along the lakefront and dozens of trips to Ed Debevic's for meatloaf and waitress watching. I was sitting on Ol' Blue outside Wrigley field on August 8, 1988 when the first night game was played. I stood alone with Ol' Blue in city hall late one night while a freshly-deceased Mayor Washington was on display in his casket. In the winter I would bundle up and head out into the icy, slush-filled streets, stopping for a Subway sandwich, and eventually making my way out across the frozen tundra of Lincoln Park to the edge of the shore. I'd sit protected from the wind and driving snow by the base of a sculpture of some colonial American patriot, eat my sandwich, and contemplate the barely visible jumbled ice block surface of Lake Michigan in the inky blackness. All the while Ol' Blue was there with me, waiting for the next adventure.

Then, just like that, he was gone. Stolen. Some determined asshole climbed two floors up the outside of my apartment building and probably used a car jack to break the balcony railing Ol' Blue was locked to. I was stunned and heartbroken and I imagined, as I rode around searching in vain on a hastily-bought, $15 piece of shit 10-speed, that the thief had been immediately hit by a bus as he'd made his getaway and slowly dragged to death over several blocks. I spent a couple of weekends searching, a photo of him in my back pocket as evidence of prior ownership, to no avail. Suddenly, Chicago went from being a great place to live to being the place that Ol' Blue got stolen. It made the decision to move to Los Angeles a month later all that easier.

It took 17 years, the invention of the internet, the development of eBay and craigslist, and me entering low-cost midlife crisis mode before a lightbulb went off over my head and I realized I could and should own Ol' Blue again. I began searching in 2004 and quickly realized much had changed in the bike world during the last couple of decades. SE Racing, originally started by Scot "Old Man" Breithaupt, entrepeneur, BMX racing legend, and designer/namesake of the OM Flyer, had been sold to a Japanese conglomerate and, while they were technically still making OM Flyers, the design had changed substantially, the quality had plummeted, and these new-era bikes were considered a joke in the online old-school BMX community. Meanwhile, original edition OM Flyers from the early '80s like mine, now rare and cherished, were selling for $2,500 and more. I looked for months on eBay with no luck, only finding bikes with the wrong color paint or ridiculous gold-colored parts and accessories. Then, in May of '05 a search on craigslist turned up a blue one, perfect, and it was in Venice, no less! I went to the guy's house and let out an audible gasp when he wheeled it out. It was like seeing a ghost or, rather, like when your beloved dead dog shows up in a dream. I fought back a couple of tears as I took it for a ride and couldn't believe it when he said he only wanted $750 instead of the $1000 it was listed for. He explained that he could tell I'd be giving his bike a good home and he was right. I know it sounds silly, but that was one of the happiest days of my life.

In general, Los Angeles is a shitty place to ride a bike. The streets are wide and ugly and full of people driving fast while busily eating, shaving, reading, applying makeup, talking on the phone and/or composing text messages while giving scant attention to people on bikes. Venice and Santa Monica, where I live and work, have the same highly distracted drivers but are different in feel - more small town-ish, more like Austin. I've enjoyed what has to be one of the most pleasant commutes possible - 2 1/2 miles, mostly on the car-less beach bike path, usually partially clad, to my office where I can sit and stare out the window at Ol' Blue parked across the street. I watch as people walk by and eye him, sometimes stopping and pointing, sometimes getting excited as they, too, bore their friends with tales of their own long-gone bike glory days that seeing Ol' Blue has conjured up. Over the past four years I've ridden him to work more and more often until finally last December, when the lease on my car was up, I decided to make him my primary mode of transportation and go without a car. It's been wonderful and I've made it a point to not take it for granted because these sorts of things don't last forever.

Actually, they only last until next Thursday as that's my last day of work here in our Santa Monica office. When I get back from my vacation a week later I'll be driving the car I'm buying tomorrow to our new office in Sherman Oaks and it'll be Scott's turn to have a nice, short commute for the next five years. It's the end of an era, but what a great era it's been. Of course, this all may strike you as sappy, maudlin, and thoroughly ridiculous: a middle-aged man using masculine pronouns to address a bicycle in what is basically a love letter to an inanimate object. But that's ok. Ol' Blue deserves it.








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I ran a marathon

Remember a long time ago when I was going to run that marathon? Well, I did. Here is my story.

Our first stop was in Houston for a visit with my great aunt Thelma who just celebrated her 104th birthday. That's one hundred and four! Years! Here she is with her favorite little nephew, Max.

For someone born in 1905 in Indian territory that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, Thelma is doing extremely well. Her hearing may be shot but she remembers all. She is sharp as a tack, funny as hell, and flat out amazing.

Next, it was on to Lake Jackson where we took care of the requisite nostalgic moment with the rediscovery of my 8th grade shop class welding project.

Soon to be refurbished back to its Bicentennial-era glory. Thanks, Mom!

Dad stayed busy with the murder of crows in the backyard. That's called "wordplay".

(Please note, no actual crows were harmed during the firing of this pellet gun.)

Ok, time to get down to the business at hand. On the eve of the race I began my intricate pre-marathon preparations. After a few hours of practice and with my father's expert help, I affixed my timing chip to my laces...

...and my bib to my shirt.

RACE DAY! Awake early, I unsuccessfully tried to convince my digestive tract that it was not 1:30am in Los Angeles. Damn you, willful digestive tract! We headed to Houston at an unholy predawn hour. Here I am walking up to the convention center. I was excited and a little nervous.

Entering the convention center was a mind-blower. Here in one gargantuan space were tens of thousands of runners milling around in a pre-race frenzy. It looked like a freshly disturbed antbed in there. I dropped off my bag of stuff and went and found the end of one of the many porta-potty lines. As I looked around my jaw slowly slacked open in wonder - I have never seen so many porta-potties in one place, not even in my most ambitious recurring bizarre-bathroom-themed dream. I was standing in line with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other people. Like a giant flock of birds we all had one thought in mind: drop the ballast before taking flight. Sadly, no pics of the vast porta-pottie array stretching to the horizon. Use your imagination.

I lingered in the infinite porta-potty fields a bit long so I hustled over to the starting line and jockied for position near the starting line - not too presumptuously close and not so far as to be shuffling along for ten minutes before actually starting to run. The sky was still pitch black as various minor celebrities said various encouragement-based things and we all sang the national anthem and readied for the gun... BOOM! or, rather, the cannon. Wedged into our starting chute, we all began creeping toward the starting line, slowly, then a little quicker, then finally this thick river of people was running.

I was off!

Prior to this day I'd run in 4 organized races: a 4 mile race on July 4, 1979 with my dad (thanks for doing such a fine job of checking me in that day, Dina!), and three 5K races in February, March, and April of 2008. Dad had encouraged me to run the 5Ks to get accustomed to the general race-day excitement and hoopla and I think they helped. But, as I crested a freeway overpass about a half mile into the race, nothing could have prepared me for the incredible sight of eighteen thousand running people in front of and behind me in a flowing phalanx stretching as far as the eye could see, all bobbing along together, with like mind and purpose, in the early morning luminescence.

Meanwhile, my family jumped into the car and began their grueling 4 hour odyssey around Houston, gamely dealing with closed roads, snarled traffic, and frayed nerves just to see me for about 10 seconds at various points and stages of decay along the 26 miles. Mile 4 was a bust but they got me at mile 8. I was running about an 8:30 pace at this point and felt great.

Such exuberance!

The Houston Marathon gets high marks for enthusiastic crowd participation and now I know why. Almost the entire length of the race was lined with cheering people, clapping, yelling, shouting out my name (it was on my bib), offering encouragement. It was just plain fantastic! There were many bands set up in parking lots or the median cranking out the tunes ( I heard Whiter Shade of Pale twice - go figure), an Elvis guy croaking out Hound Dog, a Blues Brothers tribute band, even a high school band doing their thing. And this was at about 7:00am on a Sunday!

Mile 12. Still feeling fantastic, still all smiles and high fives. I would soon hit the 13.1 mile halfway mark at 1:54:19. Right on target for a 3:50:00 finish!

Mile 16 and still feeling peppy. Houston was starting to warm up, though.

It was shortly after the above picture was taken, about mile 18 or so, that my wheels started to fall off. The cold I had predicted six months before and then of course caught about a week before the race started to catch up to me and I began to struggle. I needed to cough but couldn't really muster up the abdominal/lung strength to do so. My legs started hurting in the general groinal region, an unpleasantness I hadn't ever felt before. I wasn't hitting The Wall in the traditional sense because I was carrying a large supply of energy gels with me in my hydration belt, plus I was loading up on all the bananas and orange slices the nice rich people who live near the Galleria were handing out. No, this was the cold virus saying, "You've had your fun, now I'm going to kick your ass." I soldiered on but things deteriorated rapidly.

Mile 22. Full-on agony. I've never needed a pep talk from my father more than at that exact moment and in this picture that's pretty much what I'm telling him. I won't even try to describe what I was feeling. Let's just say it was pretty bad. I was trying to look casual, though.

By now the race had taken on a decidedly different flavor. Now it was solely about three things: pain management, the condition of the pavement immediately in front of me, and where the hell is the next goddamn mile marker?! All traces of celebration, fun, and levity were long gone. My addled brain was transforming the cheering crowd into a jeering crowd, like it couldn't process their enthusiasm as a positive thing in light of the intense pain I was feeling. I was going to attempt to draw a parallel to that scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where JC is dragging that giant cross while everyone is screaming and beating the crap out of him but on second thought, uh, maybe not.

The race course layout sadists included a couple of underpasses at about mile 24 and here is where my resolve not to resort to my traditional cursing rants crumbled. After 24 miles, running on anything that isn't perfectly flat is just torture and I'm sure that anyone within earshot understood my displeasure. I came out of the underpasses into the winds whipping through the highrises of downtown, swearing when I could summon the strength and literally creeping along. By this point aunt Thelma could have walked backwards faster than I was running.

I made the final right turn onto Rusk and thank god could see the convention center and the finish line in the distance about a quarter mile away. The crowds were thick along this last stretch and I could hear the music and the guy on the loudspeaker shouting his exhortations at us weary runners in these final moments. "C'mon, man!" I thought, "Don't let all these people see you running slower than your 104 year old great aunt can walk backwards! Pick it up! GO!!" So, I sucked it up and shoved the pain to the side and started running - fast (or so I thought) - passing people left and right, not caring that I wasn't going to break four hours, just happy to be finishing, proud to have finally achieved my goal. I hit the finish line, waved my SE RACING cap in the air (in honor of Ol' Blue and so you could pick me out in the video), then finally - after running for four hours, two minutes, and fifty-four seconds - I stopped.

Plenty is said about what goes on during a marathon but nobody talks much about what happens immediately after. I was surprised at how much of a stupefied daze I was in. I felt totally drugged but not with painkiller-type drugs, that's for sure. I staggered over to the post-finish photo area where I tried to smile but ended up making the kind of face you'd expect from someone in incredible pain and trying not to show it. Once inside the convention center I thought I'd be faced with a huge selection of post-race food and drink but instead found myself just wandering slowly around the mostly empty hall, befuddled and unable to decide what to do. Should I go and get the free meal? Should I go explore those booths way over yonder? Everything looked about a half mile away in there and as I dawdled my legs began to tighten up to the point that I was afraid they'd eventually stop working. I staggered about, finally just slowly sinking to the floor where I tried, unsuccessfully, to stretch. My legs felt like they didn't belong to me or, rather, that I had been involved in a leg transplant operation with a meth-addled surgeon.

So, I'd done it. I felt happy and satisfied and proud and a bunch of other things. You might think that crossing the finish line was the moment I had been waiting for but really it was here, beneath the giant R in the area where runners were supposed to meet their families, that I finally got to enjoy that moment.

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and you may ask yourself, well... how did I get here?

I started running almost exactly one year ago today. I remember that first one - it was cold, dark, and drizzling. I made it to my turnaround point a whopping mile and a half out, paused for a good two minutes while my heartrate slowly backed off the redline and fought to catch my breath, then slogged the return mile and a half, soaked with sweat and rain, exhausted. I've literally come a long way since then having logged some 469 miles since I started keeping track in late August.

Despite the usual complaining tone of my previous running-related blog entries what I remember most about the last 12 months of training is not the pain and the hellish wind or the eventual realization that running is at least a 75% mental effort but rather the beautiful things I saw along the way. It's hard to imagine a more picturesque place to run than the bike path along Santa Monica beach and beyond. Whether it's raining and desolate, blazing with the midday sun, displaying another jaw-dropping sunset, or giving me a shadow to chase with a big full moon, the beach is a magical place. I'll never get tired of it and I'll never take it for granted.

Here it is, January 13th, and we're currently enjoying probably the best weather we'll get all year long. There's a light breeze, the sky is crystal clear, and it's 81 degrees out. My last run was 8 miles on Sunday this past weekend. I started out as the sun neared the horizon and as it sunk lower, more and more people stopped in their tracks along the bikepath, transfixed by the blue luminescence of the sea and the sky and the slow fade to orange as the great ball of the sun finally touched the ocean. Then, as if by some silent signal, everyone turned around to watch the full moon, the largest one of 2009, creep skyward over Santa Monica, enormous and cool and white, the perfect balance to the blazing sun that had just disappeared. I ran on, glad I had made the decision to run this marathon and thankful I live in such a beautiful place.

For those of you interested in following my progress this Sunday there are a couple of ways to do so. Apparently the marathon website will have a map of the course on which I'll be represented by a little red dot. Another option is to click here to get text message updates as to my whereabouts during the race. If you're only interested in the money shot, the marathon website can direct you to a video of me crossing the finish line, hopefully in running mode and not on my hands and knees. I'm registered as Stu Royalty and my bib number is 3925.

At this point I'd like to say thank you to those who have been so supportive of me this last year. Thank you for listening while I droned on about the minutia regarding energy gels or my shoe laces or some other mind-numbing topic. Thank you for encouraging me when I was convinced it just wasn't going to happen. And Dad, thank you for inspiring me yet again.






















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accidents happen

There are four kinds of bike wrecks: those due to Mechanical Failure, those due to Rider Stupidity, those due to Others' Stupidity, and those due to Natural Causes i.e. lightning, sinkholes, mountain lions, etc. As is usually the case, today's accident was 100% in the Rider Stupidity category.

I have four decades of bike wrecking experience under my belt. I'm a grizzled veteran of the two-wheeled tumble; an old pro at the slide and roll. Like I said, the vast majority of my wrecks have been caused by my own staggering lack of common sense. Early on, this was usually coupled with wheelie riding as I was the undisputed wheelie king of my block back in the day. Once, when I was about 12, I was riding a wheelie and went to jump off the back of the bike because I had pulled too hard only to find that my untied shoelace had wrapped around the pedal. As I sped along on only the back wheel, I slowly tipped over backward, unable to put my feet down, finally landing on the pavement on my back with the bike on top of me tied to my foot. Later, after my dad had come to my rescue because he'd heard me yelling at the top of my lungs, he admitted that he had no idea up until then that I could cuss like that. Another good crash occured on campus in Austin when I... well, let's just say I tried something incredibly stupid. I ended up at the Health Center with two dislocated shoulders and had to make the Sophie's Choice as to which arm would get the one sling I was allotted. I also used to enjoy riding wheelies down the length of those covered construction walkways and was doing so when my handlebar just clipped the wall inside and down I went in a bloody, splintery heap. Good times!

Today's wipeout was a bit more mundane. I was heading to work on the beach bike path, ironically considering the possibility of getting a helmet for the first time in my life. I have a shortcut through the outdoor dining area of one of those burger stands and to take it I have to ride through a ten inch gap in the curb that separates the bike path from the rest of the pavement. I was riding no-hands, of course, and thought it would "be fun" to try and shoot the gap without touching the handlebars. Naturally, mayhem ensued.

It's been a long time since I've wrecked my bike and as I picked myself up today - not daring to look at the people gawking as they passed by, hoping they hadn't seen the whole idiotic thing unfold - I found a certain comfort in the familiarity of it all, the dull pain from the bloody holes in my palms, the sting of the strawberry on my elbow, the new aches in my legs, the humility. Regardless of the circumstances or which of the four types of accidents you find yourself in, the bike wreck experience is always the same - one moment you're riding along happy as a clam, there's a split-second "uh-oh!", and the next thing you know you're on the ground, embarrassed, in pain, and assessing the damage. It's nice to know that some things just never change.

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