not dead

Ever start writing something about your stupid life and then get so bored with yourself that you can’t imagine why you’re worth writing about or how on earth anyone else could possibly be interested in what you have to say? Yeah, me too.

But since my mother, whenever I call, reliably greets me with, “Oh, we were wondering if you’d died or something!” I thought it would be best to head off that kind of thinking at the pass here. Because I know it’s only natural to think, Golly, she hasn’t written a blog entry in over a week. I wonder if she died.

I haven’t died. My partner and I were in Georgia—the state, not the country—Wednesday through Sunday to visit her parents and catch some of the northern stages of the Tour de Georgia. Road cycling being not such a big deal in the States, folks can get almost close enough to the pro riders at the TdG to lovingly stroke their sculpted calves. My favorite moment—easily besting my first glimpse of a motley contingent of Confederate reenactors standing cheek to jowl in Chickamauga with the cyclists, the soldiers’ dirty gray uniforms revealing almost as much pot belly as the bikers’ colorful Lycra jerseys revealed muscle—happened when we were wandering among the team vehicles after the finish of the Dahlonega stage and a Belgian rider from the Quick Step team stripped out of his cycling kit and stood in the middle of the parking lot just as naked as an eel chatting with his teammates while an assistant massaged his still-twitching muscles.

I wish I had been born in country with a less inhibited culture. I’ll bet Belgian bloggers hardly ever harbor anxiety over the worth of what they have to say—and they never have panic dreams in which they find themselves naked in the middle of a crowd.