It is 9:49pm. In one hour I will be leaving the house to participate in my 12 hour shift, from midnight until noon tomorrow, in the Faster Mustache 24 hour relay bicycle race.

I’ve just cleaned and lubed my bike. I’ve eaten. I’m ready to roll.

I’m excited, but I have no idea what to expect. I’ll be posting updates throughout the night from my phone and posting pictures and whatnot tomorrow.

I’ve even grown a mustache myself in order to participate properly.

Wish me luck!

I don’t really know precisely what it means when you see those letters and numbers written in the top corner of a car’s back window in some sort of magic marker, but I think it means the car or the window itself is a salvage sort of situation. Which is to say that either the car or the window or both came from a junk yard.

I was considering this when the car bearing these strange markings viciously cut me off. It was a red late 90’s era Jetta. I hit my brakes, thankful to have recently installed front and rear brakes on my fixed gear around-town bike.

“Whoa!” I yelled, not having a horn, then “Asshole!”

The windows were open, thankfully. I like for drivers to hear me yelling at them when they do something fucked up. It makes me feel like I am contributing to their improved road worthiness going forward.

The tint applied to the window with the markings obscured the occupants, but not the finger flipped at me by a passenger in the back seat with longish curly hair. The finger was a dark, defiant shadow in sharp relief against the sunny roadway seen through the car.

And it was a finger that didn’t care if I died.

Obama has certainly energized a lot of people, and he’s got a command of charisma and the ability to reach out to people. He’s really amazing to watch.

He comes to us at a time when people are annoyed with the old guard and ready for change. He has the right message, the potential for groundbreaking history as our first black president and he even comes with a pro-muslim America feeling. He’s ridiculously perfect.

It’s too bad he’s still not going to win.

That’s right, I said it. Barack Obama will not win the presidential election in November 2008. I am so sure of this that I am willing to bet $100 USD on McCain. I tried to bet on some overseas betting websites but apparently they can’t accept US credit cards, so I’m hosed on that front.

I hope Obama does win, personally. He seems like a much groovier dude than McCain, for sure, and that counts for something. We can all agree that it counts for something even though we all know it absolutely shouldn’t.

Which reminds me of how we all know we were lied to to get us into a war in Iraq and no one seems to be held accountable in the slightest. No one at all is being held accountable for lying in the face of America and sending our sons and daughters to die in the sand. No one. Even though we all know who did it.

The only thing that’s happening is the guys who were involved enough to know what happened but not involved enough to be legally culpable are churning out book after book after book on the subject. If you watch the Daily Show, as I do, you’ve seen a parade of them.

Here is the climate of our times, folks. Something is horribly broken and I just do not believe that anyone inside the system can fix it.

But if it’s so broken, why not change?

Because change costs money. It hurts the people who are on top and they do not like to be hurt… least of all in their pocketbooks. I’m not saying that there’s a shrouded evil conspiracy at work. I think it’s all completely legal and above board. I just don’t think there’s going to be any change like the kind Obama is selling any time soon and it’s going to be depressing when I’m right.

Which is why I’d like to at least have an extra $100 from winning a bet on the subject.

So… any takers?

I was thrashing about in the water, moving imperceptibly and being grabbed at by masses of weeds. I never got my form right at all, I don’t think. Not once. It felt like I was swimming through a net.

I did make it out of the water eventually, though.

On the bike I was bombing down a hill and my front tire started wobbling really fast and threatening to toss me off. I’m not sure if it was the bike or I was just really tired and out of it from the swim. It was drizzly and rainy. I passed a lot of people.

The run wasn’t bad at all. I stayed at a decent race pace and legged it out.

So, that was my first triathlon!

MALE CLYDESDALE : 10 - 99
DIV   OALL                           SWIM  SWIM   TRAN  BIKE  BIKE    BIKE  TRAN RUN   RUN    RUN   PENALTY FINISH  RACE
PLACE PLACE        NAME          AGE RANK  TIME    #1   RANK  TIME     MPH   #2  RANK  TIME   PACE           TIME   NO.
===== ===== ==================== === ==== ======= ===== ==== =======  ====  ==== ==== ======= ===== ======= ======= =====
   40   523 Jim Hodgson          34    52   13:34  2:28   42   43:48  18.1  1:26   38   29:07  9:24         1:30:22  1041

Kudos to Peachtree City Tri for having a sweet goody bag. I got a nice pair of socks and a cool shirt. I’ll be back next year!

I’m watching a dvd about the Galapagos islands. A finch is breaking off twigs to use as a tool to pry grubs out of bark. When i saw the first finch get a fat grub out of the bark with his tool I said “Fuck yeah” out loud. I have no idea why I favor the finch over the grub, but I think it’s the ingenuity.

If the grub had thought to find himself a stick to poke the finch with, things might be different.

I’m resting this morning after a honker of a road ride yesterday. Celebrated drummer and Sonia Leigh bandmate Dave Anthony and I put in about 42 miles with some pretty heavy hills yesterday and I’m trying to rest up for my sprint triathlon on Saturday.

In between bouts of PHP and Perl coding, I am watching a documentary called The Corporation about, you guessed it, corporations. It contains some very disturbing stories about corporate collusion with governments and fascism and sweatshops and all that sort of thing.

Basically the thrust of the film seems to be that corporations do not have an intrinsic morality that they abide by. All they care about is money.

Well, I get that. That sounds really horrible and bad, but folks corporations are collections of people. If those people cared more about their morals than their money, the corps would too, and even more importantly, if the customers cared about morality more than they cared about cheap clothing and cheap gas, the corporations would have to get in line.

The simple fact of the matter is that people do not care, or at least, they don’t care enough to act.

Harvey Birdman is one of my most favorite shows ever produced. It is absolutely hilarious. Unfortunately it is no longer made, like pretty much every really funny show ever.

I watch it as I’m going to bed, and I sing the theme song each night as I’m going to sleep. Then I try not to stay up too late laughing.

Sometimes they play a shorter version of the theme song than other times. I guess the shorter theme song means they shoehorned in more actual show on that episode, so when I hear the shortened one I feel I’m getting more bang for my buck.

I was riding with some friends this weekend and they were discussing a serious grade somewhere here in town, something that would be pretty hard to crank up on a bike. As we’d only covered about 15 miles so far on the ride, I was up for more.

We pedaled away from the coffee shop parking lot where we’d stopped to rest and take on water.

Shortly I found my conversation with a fellow rider cut short due to being forced into the gutter by a minivan while speeding down a hill. Helpfully, the van was pacing me, so I had no choice but to stay in the gutter and hopefully not get tossed by any debris or what have you in it. Thanks for the near-death, asshole minivan. You’re sure helping matters by going slowly! Making things somewhat worse were the long plants hanging over the gutter which had an extremely unpleasant whipping effect on my right arm. It was striped red when the van finally went away.

I hate it when cars pace me. Drivers, listen up. It sucks to have to wait behind a cyclist in traffic, I know. Have you ever noticed, though, that we tend to catch up at the stop lights? What does this mean? It means we’re all getting there at pretty much the same time because lights hold you up. Sometimes when I’m running in the city I’m actually faster down the sidewalk for a series of blocks than cars due to lights. Maybe you can not roar past at three inches away, or force me into a gutter and stay beside me so I have no choice but to get whipped by plants. Thanks!

After the plant thrashing, we made a left onto a side street and the traffic was nearly nonexistant. It was nice to have a break. Everyone cranked up a hill that was pretty short, but the grade was really steep. We all paused at the top.

“OK,” a rider said “That was a warm up. This is Mary George.”

I looked at a sign. We were at an intersection and the cross street read Mary George, sure enough.

“We call it Mary Gorge,” he continued. “Get going as fast as you can or you won’t make it up the other side.”

There didn’t seem to be any traffic, so we took a left one by one and started down the hill.

It was a pretty steep hill, but even more than being steep it was in complete disrepair. Streets in Atlanta are the bastard children of a joke and a nightmare, and this street was worse than most, probably due to being in a poor area of town. When I got to the bottom I was rocking along at over 30mph. This is not that fast all things considered, but the bike was bucking like mad. I stopped trying to brake or maneuver and just held on, standing and pinching the saddle between my legs like I would on a mountain bike descent.

Shortly I came to the bottom and saw the grade ahead. It looked like a wall. At the top, riders were tacking back and forth across it like sailboats. I geared all the way down and stood up and mashed for all I was worth.

I have never had to stand up and mash in my granny gear like that, so it was a new experience. I was breathing at a rate greater than my cadence which usually annoys me whether I am cycling, running or swimming, but I was going so slowly and stomping so hard that I had no choice and didn’t care anyway.

I didn’t tack. I just rode straight up the middle. About ten feet from the top I thought “I am going to make it”, even though my lungs were like “HEY” and my legs were going “AHEM” and pretty much every other area of my body was generally pissed.

The first rider to finish saw me stomping up the hill and said “Oh!” as in “Oh, I fully expected you to be dead by now”.

So, I felt a little better about being the only rider in full kit that day, like I earned it.

What must it have been like to be president back in the day? It had to be like being a king.

“Leader of the free world”, you’d be called. Frank Sinatra would be a personal friend of yours. The world would be your oyster.

I’m thinking specifically in this case of Kennedy, of course. He might very well have been the last of the great presidents, before it became impossible to be a great president. I’m not suggesting that the job one day just got harder, but Kennedy, it seems to me, was probably the last of the true fairy tale American hero/leaders.

After him we had Johnson and the first real unstoppable thrust of the greatest adversary that any leader has ever faced: information.

Let’s face it, people. War is ugly. It’s uglier than anything else ever can or should be, and it’s the mother of a host of other plagues like famine and disease. Just one single photo of a Vietnamese child running naked down the street with napalm burning her tiny body can wreck the image of any administration, and there were a lot more than just one of these.

Thích Quảng Ðức, the monk who burned himself to death in Saigon in protest (the image of which was the subject of the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album in 1992), the image of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, a viet cong officer, these images are horrific and they create a sense of horror that is not easily assuaged by feelings of patriotism. You can harp all day on the TV about how terrible the communists are, but when there are images like these and a creeping feeling that we might be just as bad as they are when the bullets really start to fly, people stop believing you and start blaming you.

Next we had our boy Nixon. Information got him, too. Somehow it had just become impossible for a ruler to suppress incriminating images and tapes. These guys had to be pissed. A lifetime of scheming and planning to finally make it to the top of the biggest heap in the world, only to be screwed out of any real prestige by a bunch of reporters.

It used to be that throwing a big war during your term in office was a ticket to a great place in history, but information has changed all that. We can immediately compare every phrase that escapes a candidates lips with everything he has ever said and scour it for inconsistencies. That’s what all those 24 hour news channels are doing all day. God help an elected official if he should have an affair with a white house aid. He’ll be looping on video asking for definitions of the word “is” around the clock in no time.

The information torrent is so wide and particular that individual soldiers now have to answer for every person they shoot, torture or photograph in the nude. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. These kinds of things have always been a facet of war, but only now are they fully revealed. Only now are the participants held accountable.

Should they be? I don’t know. It’s true that a crime is a crime and pointing to a prisoners genitals and dehumanizing him is wrong, but the gray areas in war are now being interpreted in black and white. It’s got to really suck for those trying to wage the war.

Back home, we’re laying the blame at the feet of our leaders, who are, it goes without saying, to blame. But it’s not that politicians have become worse, more scandalous or less noble. It’s just that the rising tide of information and 24-hour scrutiny raises all villainous boats, or rather, reveals all imperfections. They’re just going about business as usual in the nasty world of politics and we’re poking our noses in where our noses do not belong.

This makes it impossible to wage a war like the one we’re trying to wage in Iraq. The Bush administration forged documents and lied in order to get us in there and kicking some ass, presumably to spark the economy as wars previously have done (I’m looking at you WWII) but the big payoff never came. Poor Bush! Here he is all dressed up and parachuting down to the deck of the carrier aircraft in front of a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, and no one gives a shit.

He had to have felt like the new quarterback of the team at the biggest high school in town who has been grooming and training for years to get on easy street, only to discover that no one cares about football the way they used to.

It’s got to also be hard for our servicemen and -women who are left holding the bag in terms of doing all the dirty work. These people somehow manage to believe in America as an idea despite the constant tarnishing. If there is anything that gives me hope, it’s that these people exist. Armed forces, thank you. You kick ass in so many ways.

What we really need if we ever want to feel like one big team of hearty corn fed American heros again is to have CNN, Fox news, MSNBC and every other private news organization censored by the government. It’s either that or deal with life as an amorphous disparate blob of a thousand different sentiments and no real agreement on anything.

We are basically a giant group of people who collectively have ADD. We have too much information to process, and too many opinions to get anything done.

Man, nothing is better than earning money in your underwear, and I have my buddies over at Dhammiko to thank for it. Talk to them for all your ecommerce consulting needs!

Lord knows I need the cash.

In other news, I’m great!