The Racing Chronicles
w/ Bill Stone

They Fry Donuts in Oil; or Conflation, The New Alchemy.

Our whole culture is bedeviled by the simile,
by the relentlessly mediating and protective
preposition "like."
Things are constantly sliding into other things; a movie
a book, a trial, a scandal become social and
political palimpsests to be unpacked, analyzed, interpreted, so
that by the end of the commentary, life's real facts and events
have been reduced to nice, cushy abstractions, with easy,
comfortable morals and conclusions.
Nothing is allowed, like, to just be, to follow its own nature. But
a person is a particularity without end; a person cannot
be appended to "like."

Lee Sigel, The New Republic,
And when two female rock stars exchange
a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas
goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of
the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling
place. And Kansas cuts those rock stars' taxes.

Thomas Frank
"What's the Matter with Kansas."

I.

Sports are way too important to be taken seriously. They are so inherently grand that words always come up short. Andrew Cooper cites by way of example Red Smith's description of the day the Giants clutched the pennant from the Dodgers, without question the most brutal day in sports history. He wrote of Bobby Thompson's damnable home run: "Now it is done; now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." Sports don't just stand alone. No, they tower; they dominate; they are so too fine. What they certainly are not is metaphor for the trivialities of live. And most importantly they do not teach "larger lessons."

These are undeniably savage times. The local churches here in Hooterville stopped the kids from performing "To Kill a Mockingbird." At a time when kids cannot even read the most important thing in Louisiana is to try to ban a text book because it told the truth above southern lynchings-in court is was argued that there was no need to bring up this ancient 1930's history in a history book, a position also held by Lynn Chaney when she was in charge of overseeing new history guidelines. School corporations are in courts arguing that evolution be replaced by faith based science. Not even Nixon in his vilest hallucinations saw a time when people would chose perpetual stupidity and its concomitant powerlessness. Sport simply cannot inform such lives; it would simply be corrupted.

The Self has resigned himself that the Age of Enlightenment has been suspended, a victim of the End of Days novels. In this minstrel freak show inquiry will continue to be no contender against the lexicon of the new alchemy. "I think," "I believe," "I hope" and "I know."

Cycling has nothing to do with this nonsense. Cycling should not have to suffer such foolishness.

II.

When I woke up this morning
Things were looking bad
Seemed that Total Silence
Was the only friend I had
Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down
AND WON
And it was twelve o-clock
Before I realized I was having no fun.

John Prine, "Illegal Smile"

The Self long ago stopped reading sports books. (1) The exception is A.J. Liebling's "The Sweet Science," a collection of his New Yorker articles about boxing. In the Forward, Robert Ansai notes that the stories "avoid the dazzled mystification of much 'literary' boxing prose and the hard boiled sentimentality of the sports journalism of his day." Today, a bicycle race cannot be just a race. (2) Just read the folderal in Velo Fluff, letters to the editor, and worst of all the pure pedantry that now appears with mind defying repetition on the pixels of Truesport. This endless bonehead buncombe can be mostly avoided by simply refusing to attend to drivel that starts out with:

Cycling is a lesson in life's values.
Success in cycling requires the same competitive drive it takes to ….
It takes work ethic to succeed in cycling and life….

Also to be ignored are these jewels of self laudation:

I believe that someone didn't cheat.
I know that everyone cheats.
As a (father, Christian, long time fan, business man) I think that …. .

Most of this flummery is distinctly best served by silence, just more fools to suffer. If someone wants to make sports performers examples of lives well lived so be it. That a grown man could possibly permit an athlete's peccadilloes to form a crack in his psyche is simply not worth any concern. And if anyone chooses to be affected by the immoral implications of cortisone use, it is simply another laughable explicate in the folly of mistaking heroes with rectitude. However, it is an entirely other thing to equate riding a bike with anything important. Just putting an object at the other end of "I feel" does not make it true. Dying is for many an important episode.

III.

And you, my father, there on the sad height
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Dylan Thomas

Apparently, for some, it is necessary to accept as extant that fight and aggression have something to do with curing life threatening disease. Undeniably attractive, it is almost certainly but solipsism, albeit a mighty mine one indeed. The evidence is apposite. As with most things aggression, rage and what passes under even a sophorific expansive notion of fighting don't help. These are stressful behaviors that burden already compromised immune systems. The notion has much less to do with a patient than making the well more comfortable. We just don't like the randomness of death and thus try to find explanations for why someone died and another lived. It is a more sophisticated example of "he must have been speeding."

It is basic psychology that people entertain thought processes that give them distance from their fears. Simply, people accept as fact that which they need to believe in order to get by. Some need to distance themselves from premature death.

This also explains why some people refer to Sally Jenkins' as told to book as support for this try hard theory of curing cancer. Admittedly Self spent only twenty minutes on it but does recall that Lance specifically rejected this cure by battle nonsense.

Anyone with a computer can write about his personal relationship with cycling and gurgle up bowdlerized syllogisms on the importance of competition in western civilizations. Such conflations pass for logic these days and are at worst just pathetically hubristic. Articles about death should perhaps be left to those who help people die; they might just know something about it. (3)

IV.

Liebling saw boxing as the pros do; a job, more difficult than most but also
most rewarding. He doesn't make the ring over
into a setting for a morality play or an alternative to
Armageddon

The Como World's Roger's Cup was held Sunday. There was a break. Stricky beat MKA in a head up sprint. Roger wasn't competitive enough. He has become soft. He is no longer a hero. Sad that. He needs to realize cycling is most serious.

December 14, 2004, or the Fourth Year of the End of Reason
Bill Stone

(2) America's greatest short story writer was Damon Runyon. Interestingly he started as a sports reporter in a time when people in New York tended to read only one newspaper and thus game accounts could be written before the game was played. Today of course most people don't read anything which makes telling lies even easier. Anyway, Runyon routinely covered six day races at the Garden.