for I walk through the valley ...
A light rainstorm settled into town on Friday night. The drops felt like a cold sigh on my face, and I would've enjoyed it if not for the fact that the rain on my glasses caused light to refract in many interesting and dangerous ways. Headlights burst like brilliant kaleidoscopes, obscuring the road in front of me, and darkness was a muddled, many aspected thing illuminated by the dim bulb mounted on my handlebars. So I rode to the first traffic light, slowing down purposefully to catch it switching to red and took off my glasses so I can dry them off. I felt something give, a sickening crack and my glasses fell apart in my hand.
So I was blind, twelve miles from home, caught in a winter rainstorm, at night. I got off the bike and walked to the sidewalk to examine my glasses. The bridge had snapped off cleanly from one of the lenses, probably metal fatigue, a weld on the lens frame that just couldn't hold, but tape couldn't fix it, and glue wouldn't work in this weather. I briefly considered calling someone to pick me up, but I was supposed to be having dinner with the car-less MrDevilsAdvocate in an hour, and waiting for a ride would've precluded that. So, I tucked my glasses into my rain jacket, wiped the water from my face and rode on.
There's a one and a half mile segment of my commute that approaches and crosses a major interstate highway. It's two lanes without much shoulder to speak off, filled with potholes and I usually have to sprint the quarter mile segment where cars are merging on and off the interstate. It's a tricky enough ride in the daytime with proper vision, and I thought that doing this in the evening would probably be suicidal. But, I thought, there's always the bike path.
The bike path runs parallel to my commute, but in the winter it's an unploughed mess, ten miles of ice and snow with more treachery than a house of Borgias. The spring thaw cleared off most of the crap, but there are still good reasons why you don't ride the path at night, through dark trees with no light and no company, where psychotics can ambush you and nobody can hear you scream for help. And, yes, that probably sounds silly and a rational part of my brain realizes that I've never read of a murder or a kidnapping that's ever happened on the path, but that's still countered by the lingering psyche of a child who's scared of dark, long hallways filled with monsters lurking in the shadow.
But then I was buzzed by a tractor trailer, roaring past me and showering me in grime, and I decided to listen to reason. I turned off my main route and headed for the path. It was about a half mile down, marked by a crossing light to stall traffic. I pulled off to the sidewalk, hit the cross button and didn't even have a chance for a deep breath before the pedestrian light went green, and I looked down into a narrow, empty corridor of silent, barren trees swaying quietly under a dark night sky.
Just fucking go. You'll psyche yourself out if you stand here too long.
When my glasses were on, the night looked like it was exploding with stars and brilliant clouds. With my glasses off, shadows in my periphery looked mobile and sinister, the tree branches looked like skeletal hands reaching out for me, and what was that up ahead? It looked like a person, a short person, a hunched short evil person, a hunched, short, evil gnomish -- oh it's only a milestone marker.
The previous night, I had gone to see The Passion with brigid, plankton and damiel. Yes, the film was violent, and the violence was usually excessive, frequently gratuitous and often pornographic, and, yes, the anti-semitism skirted a fine edge, but what haunted my memories of the film was Rosalinda Celentano's portrayal of Satan. She lurked at the edge of a story, like a predator held at bay by firelight, and she was creepy in the way that Satan should be in the Catholic canon -- where God is a capricious father, loving but demanding, ready to spurn you if you reject his love, casting you into darkness if you lack faith. And once you're cast in darkness then you're prey for The Adversary.
And it was a dark night, a bad night to think about Hell and damnation and how many times you've fucked up in your life and how death might lie just around the bend -- an awful night to think about how much you hate Catholicism because of its good cop / bad cop dogma and its hypocrisy, and for all you've done in a decade to distance yourself from myth and superstition, all it takes is a single movie and a dark night to turn you into a pathetic little eight year old, scared of the shadows and waiting for the apocalypse. But all I could do was ride and look straight at the pale glow cast by my headbeam and try not to think about the long slender puddles that looked like black snakes. I think I sprinted that mile and a half, trying to outrun my fear, seeking the warm lights and wide roads of Lexington before my mind succumbed to hysteria.
I thought about praying, was tempted by the thought of it, the way that an ex-smoker might think about a cigarette after having drink, but in the end, I made it through the trees and darkness by just focusing on my headbeam and the little bit of pavement that it illuminated, always just ten feet away.
So I was blind, twelve miles from home, caught in a winter rainstorm, at night. I got off the bike and walked to the sidewalk to examine my glasses. The bridge had snapped off cleanly from one of the lenses, probably metal fatigue, a weld on the lens frame that just couldn't hold, but tape couldn't fix it, and glue wouldn't work in this weather. I briefly considered calling someone to pick me up, but I was supposed to be having dinner with the car-less MrDevilsAdvocate in an hour, and waiting for a ride would've precluded that. So, I tucked my glasses into my rain jacket, wiped the water from my face and rode on.
There's a one and a half mile segment of my commute that approaches and crosses a major interstate highway. It's two lanes without much shoulder to speak off, filled with potholes and I usually have to sprint the quarter mile segment where cars are merging on and off the interstate. It's a tricky enough ride in the daytime with proper vision, and I thought that doing this in the evening would probably be suicidal. But, I thought, there's always the bike path.
The bike path runs parallel to my commute, but in the winter it's an unploughed mess, ten miles of ice and snow with more treachery than a house of Borgias. The spring thaw cleared off most of the crap, but there are still good reasons why you don't ride the path at night, through dark trees with no light and no company, where psychotics can ambush you and nobody can hear you scream for help. And, yes, that probably sounds silly and a rational part of my brain realizes that I've never read of a murder or a kidnapping that's ever happened on the path, but that's still countered by the lingering psyche of a child who's scared of dark, long hallways filled with monsters lurking in the shadow.
But then I was buzzed by a tractor trailer, roaring past me and showering me in grime, and I decided to listen to reason. I turned off my main route and headed for the path. It was about a half mile down, marked by a crossing light to stall traffic. I pulled off to the sidewalk, hit the cross button and didn't even have a chance for a deep breath before the pedestrian light went green, and I looked down into a narrow, empty corridor of silent, barren trees swaying quietly under a dark night sky.
Just fucking go. You'll psyche yourself out if you stand here too long.
When my glasses were on, the night looked like it was exploding with stars and brilliant clouds. With my glasses off, shadows in my periphery looked mobile and sinister, the tree branches looked like skeletal hands reaching out for me, and what was that up ahead? It looked like a person, a short person, a hunched short evil person, a hunched, short, evil gnomish -- oh it's only a milestone marker.
The previous night, I had gone to see The Passion with brigid, plankton and damiel. Yes, the film was violent, and the violence was usually excessive, frequently gratuitous and often pornographic, and, yes, the anti-semitism skirted a fine edge, but what haunted my memories of the film was Rosalinda Celentano's portrayal of Satan. She lurked at the edge of a story, like a predator held at bay by firelight, and she was creepy in the way that Satan should be in the Catholic canon -- where God is a capricious father, loving but demanding, ready to spurn you if you reject his love, casting you into darkness if you lack faith. And once you're cast in darkness then you're prey for The Adversary.
And it was a dark night, a bad night to think about Hell and damnation and how many times you've fucked up in your life and how death might lie just around the bend -- an awful night to think about how much you hate Catholicism because of its good cop / bad cop dogma and its hypocrisy, and for all you've done in a decade to distance yourself from myth and superstition, all it takes is a single movie and a dark night to turn you into a pathetic little eight year old, scared of the shadows and waiting for the apocalypse. But all I could do was ride and look straight at the pale glow cast by my headbeam and try not to think about the long slender puddles that looked like black snakes. I think I sprinted that mile and a half, trying to outrun my fear, seeking the warm lights and wide roads of Lexington before my mind succumbed to hysteria.
I thought about praying, was tempted by the thought of it, the way that an ex-smoker might think about a cigarette after having drink, but in the end, I made it through the trees and darkness by just focusing on my headbeam and the little bit of pavement that it illuminated, always just ten feet away.