truth

Blah-g: When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 6 Comments

I’ve noted that writer’s block is not really real. If you stick to the dictum and write what you know, you can come up with something. I always do. But then again, I’m not a journalist on assignment; it’s my blog, and I can lie if I want to. But sometimes, that blinking cursor taunts me (a second time), and I just don’t have much pithy to say. So some days are trickier that others. And if writer’s block is real for you, what are some ways out of the trap?

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Snow in Austin, Winter in America

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 6 Comments

Snow fell from the cold, dark skies on my bike ride home from the gym. The frozen precipitation is rare in Central Texas, especially in relatively mild winters like we’ve been having. So it’s a wondrous sight when it does snow. I felt lucky to have been outside riding when it came down. Light, white, wet kisses on my face melted quickly. Some accumulated on car hoods and lawn chairs, and the roommates and dogs were happy to see and feel it, too.

Of course in other places, there are no romantic notions about snow, because they’re drowning in it and shoveling it by metric ton. Another substance is also being shoveled in similar quantities, but it’s brown, smelly, and comes out of the back end of a cow. And by that of course, I can only be referring to the State of the Union, which was by some accounts a total snow job. Winter isn’t coming, Jon Snow, it’s already here. The revolution will not be televised. It’s winter in America.

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Meeting Bicyclists and Writers at a Poetry Reading in Austin, Texas

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 7 Comments

My first time at Malvern Books, a small independent store in Austin, Texas, was exactly what I expected and yet wholly surprising. The expected part was that people would come to hear the author and the poet, there’d be snacks before and Q & A plus schmoozing after. One Page Salon creator and host Owen Egerton had announced the reading of his good friend Walter Moore, who also read a page earlier in the week. When I bicycled over to the site formerly adjacent to Vulcan Video, I was greeted outside the door by Owen. He took a moment from his conversation with the smoking guest poet to smile at me. I thought he was opening the door but instead gave me a big hug. Sorpresa numero uno.

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MLK on a Bike, the Struggle for Justice & My First Bicycle Consulting Client

~ A Dude Abikes ~ 11 Comments

April 4, 2018 marks 50 years from when The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated by a racist.  Imagine how different the world might be if he were allowed to live.  The movement to end the US war on Vietnam, the Poor People’s Campaign, the overall condition of African-Americans in the US, and many more were issues he advanced, making life better for all of us; they all could have progressed further much had he not been killed.

How much more could he have accomplished?  Lives saved?  Dignity restored?  Barriers broken down?  It breaks my heart to think these thoughts and to write these words.  As well it should.  We lost a true American hero that day.  But to cheer us up, here is a picture of him on a bicycle a year before his death, yes, riding a bicycle on Fire Island.  A Dude can link ANYTHING to bicycling.

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