Black Days

The content of this blog has deteriorated.  This blog was focused on how dope increased athletic performance in cycling.  I never intended to focus on any other topic.  But since my frostbite accident, my blog has been more of a journal of my personal spiral into madness than a protest against doping in cycling during the "steroid era."  However, I have made small subtle references to a bicycle anti-doping agenda in an attempt to remain on topic.

The worse thing that could happen to a dysfunctional moron such as myself is to have an accident.  The only form of transportation I had was a bicycle or my feet, and the reason I bought a bicycle in the first place was so I could stop walking twenty miles a day.   Injured, without the ability to ride my bicycle, I nearly starved to death.  Currently, my poor bicycle is sitting in a garage with a rusty chain, I cannot ride the poor old thing, although I love and need that bicycle very much!  My hands are healing, the weather is improving, the primal urge is screaming, I need to go for a bicycle ride!

I can't even wipe my own ass.  If I wanted to off myself, I could do so very easily by riding down a large hill, and bang! collide with some rich ass hole's car.  Knowing my luck, I would fuck that up too.  I would probably awaken to the disapproving frown of some trauma surgeon.  "All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put Humpty Dumpty together again."  But knowing my luck, some surgeon wizard would put velovortmax back together again, much to my chagrin and endless suffering.

People in a surge of generosity gave me a large number of personal items, which in the end I will be forced to abandon, like my old bicycle.  Parting with a bicycle you love is like parting with a woman you love, the memories never die, good or bad.  A thought worthless bicycle thieves should keep in mind, people love and need their bicycles!  Bicycle thieves should be pilloried in the public square for depriving people of their precious bicycles, a suitable punishment for human filth.

I want to walk away.  I need a bicycle to survive.  Men walk away from their women and die.   I walk away from my bicycle and die?

Read the Old Curiosity Shop.  When Nell and her grandfather wander the streets all day in some old sooty industrial town, they decide to bed down in a stairwell of a doorway on the cold rough cobblestones.  A furnace tender comes to the rescue, he tells Nell and her grandfather about the bad things creeps do to young helpless girls at night in industrial towns.  Charles Dickens was a master of painting stark canvases of his day, the industrial revolution was a tough time, there was little compassion for human life.  People tangled their limbs in the machinery, surgeons were busy with the most primitive tools.  Injured people were left stranded to fend for themselves without any form of assistance.  Modern life, the information age, has an abundance of material possessions, fat bloated people, but disabled people are still left to fend for themselves without assistance.  People still live outdoors and are caught in windstorms, their frozen body parts are amputated.  People still die of hunger, people go blind from lack of nutrition, people cannot afford medical care, there is very little if any improvement from Charles Dickens' day...

I am the brunt of insidious jokes, people want to use me as a cheap Halloween prop.  They wish to employ me to terrify children because my hands look like something out of a cheap horror show.

I thought I was an enterprising sort of guy, always living on the edge, pushing my luck, daring fate.  Then Mother Nature exacted her revenge, and She is waiting cold and unfeeling for my return to finish me off.  To Mother Nature, human life has no value.

I have a date with destiny.  I was convinced that I would die on a bicycle ride, but the fates seem to have something more gruesome in store for me.  I am suffering from mental derangement.  A jaded social worker would love my anguish and attempt to intensify my angst.

I have fallen on black days, the Sun refuses to shine in my vacant world.

Odes to Post Graduate Social Isolation, 1986

An Outside View

I awoke from an enchanting dream where
A vast labyrinth barred my path,
Strewn with broken pillars, cornices, casements.

A large white balcony stretched over a yawning precipice
Embossed in pure marble!
But this idyllic view was besmirched
By an encircling dank moat.

Hopelessly lost in a perpetual maze of stupid ironies!
A diminutive candle, if you don't mind, PLEASE!

Oh, Muse! Where is your guiding beacon?
Somewhere beyond these obstacles lies a solution to the Myth!
Are not all things discernible with the aid of a flickering candle?

Mixed with a sweet lyrical strain of a cherub's faultless innocence
Came a far distant rumble.
Under a sight of an infantry gun,
Or reports from a darkening sky filled with anvil clouds?

A moth flies precariously around the open tallow flame.
Agape! A spectral vision, nowhere to implode?
But yet the light quivers!

Another Boring Tangent

Muse! When I begged you for inspiration you cruelly deceived me!  I asked only for an audience, but my lyre was met with deaf ears.  My tongue is silenced; a rotting corpse.  But my head is inundated with the stinking excrement of our time.  I have tried various methods to exclude unpleasant sensory impressions; songs, poetry, rudeness, all to no avail!  And my critics have crucified me with exile!

Terry D. Holfeltz
Salt Lake City, Utah
1986