Monday is Presidents (Presidents’? … President’s? … Presidence? …) Day. Do you know what that means? Well, for one thing, it means there’s never been a better time to finance or lease that new Hyundai you’ve had your eye on:
For another, it means the schools will be closed all week for Midwinter Recess (Recess’? … Reese’s? … Mmmm, Reese’s …), which means this blog will be closed, too:
Yes, that’s right, the team here at Tan Tenovo Industries will be off duty for the entirety of the Precedence Day Week Extravaganza™, and will return on Monday, February 23rd, with regular updates.
So please note the date in your Palm Pilot:
Sure, it seems quaint now, but the Palm Pilot was a remarkably successful device in the pre-smartphone era, especially when you consider its name seems like a euphemism for a chronic masturbator.
In the meantime, you may be wondering who won the Great Gravel Lube Contest:
[The AI’s take on “a generic graphic for a contest of some kind.”]
And the answer is that you’re gonna keep on wondering, unless you won, in which case you will receive your prize in the mail in the coming days.
Oh, sure, I could make a big fuss over the winners, but this contest was about the Spirit of Gravel, and if you truly want to understand what it’s all about then you must learn the most important lesson of all:
Humility.
In the meantime, while I may be off next week, rest assured I am not effing off to cycle around the world for four years:
As someone with a deep and abiding love for cycling I should find stories like this compelling and inspiring–or at the very least I shouldn’t find them irritating. And yet I do:
In April 2022, Andreas Graf set off on his bike from his home in Norway. His dream was to cycle to India. A week later, having reached Sweden, it was already becoming more of a nightmare. “It was pouring with rain and I was lying in my tent in my half-wet sleeping bag and I was like, I could be in my very cosy Oslo apartment,” he says. “I had this good life, a career, a partner, and I had left everything behind.”
Why is that? Having solved the whole pesky “Spirit of Gravel” conundrum, I must now turn and confront this vexing existential question. I mean what’s the matter with me? Here’s someone who followed his dream in a way that hurt absolutely nobody (apart from himself occasionally), and here I am feeling not merely indifferent but actively annoyed.
Oh, sure, you probably think you know the answer: “You’re jealous!” But that’s too easy. Certainly on the surface this makes sense, since here’s somebody seemingly able to sashay around the globe for years on end while the rest of us must stay home and tend to our many onerous responsibilities. However, in my case this theory doesn’t really hold sealant, for the simple reason that my life is what I believe the British refer to as a “doddle.” I mean I’m not exactly toiling for conflict diamonds here. At worst, sometimes I can’t ride for a day or two because I’m too “busy” or the weather’s too lousy. Meanwhile this guy’s crashing his bike in the Andes and getting wrist surgery:
He had an accident in Colombia and broke his wrist. “I had cycled the length of the Andes, almost 10,000km, and coming down the last mountain I crashed. I came around the corner and there was a pothole and a bit of an oil spill. I just flew over the handlebars.” He cycled to the nearest hospital. “I had split my radius lengthwise into three different parts. I had surgery and ended up with a titanium plate and eight screws in my hand.” He was sanguine about the incident. “I was in a very calm state of mind and I was like: ‘Shit happens. It’s part of the adventure.’”
No thank you. I’ll take my ten thousandth ride up Route 9W over that any day. (Though admittedly that doesn’t always go so well, either.)
So I must look deeper. Could the reason for my irritation be that the rider is from Norway?
Opting out of the rat race and going on a big adventure is not unusual in Norway, he says. “I know quite a few people here who took the kids out of school when they were young and went sailing for a year.” He thinks the pandemic unleashed a lot of latent wanderlust: “Coming out of Covid, people had an excitement for going out into the world.”
This is another tempting theory, but it’s also far too convenient. Hey, look, no country’s perfect. We’re pushy, Russia’s handsy, China is both pushy and handsy, and Canada pretends to be all polite whilst being deeply judgmental and exuding an overbearing smugness. So sure, Norway may be a place where people can decide to go sailing for a year because they live in a wealthy petrostate that still allows whaling yet everybody else thinks is “green” because they’re in Scandinavia and they drive electric cars, but to say I resent Norway or Norwegians is patently unfair, and I reject any and all accusations of anti-Norwegianism. In fact, by way of healing the unfortunate rift between our two great cultures, here is an AI-generated image of Paul Revere shaking hands with a Viking:
So could it be that because of my contrarian nature I’m inherently skeptical when people experience profound spiritual revelations whilst taking extended vacations?
The moment was a turning point. “I felt really, really at peace with myself. You can sit in the outback for a whole day lost in your own thoughts. And I think most people would experience this as a sort of purgatory. For me, it was just so blissful. And I didn’t know I had it in me, spiritually speaking, to get there.” The journey was changing him. “Change is a constant companion on the road, right? You don’t even realise it’s there, but it’s changing you dramatically one way or the other.” Now, he says, his priorities have shifted. “I used to be someone who was very career-focused, and I think that part of me has disappeared.”
I suppose there could be something to that. Why is it that people have to go on these long, exotic journeys just to feel at peace with themselves, and why do we have to keep reading about them? Isn’t this like an article about someone who went out and bout a $20,000 bicycle so they could discover the profound joy of cycling? What about finding the beauty in your own backyard? What about the profound joy of riding an old bike you fixed up, and the revelation that can come with turning down the road or trail you’ve ridden past a thousand times and never explored, and all that other seemingly mundane stuff? Isn’t every day an adventure? Isn’t the so-called “rat race” this guy supposedly escaped not only a path to enlightenment, but the one that’s most accessible to us? Ever hear this one?
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
You don’t need to travel to the Australian outback to get “lost in your own thoughts.” You can do that just as easily on the toilet.
This isn’t to say I have a problem with traveling to the Australian outback or any other remote location and losing yourself in your thoughts. However, I would humbly ask that if you choose to do so, please don’t return with any lessons for the rest of us–especially if that lesson is that humans should stop reproducing because it’s hot in Vietnam during monsoon season:
The climate crisis was also unavoidable. “In Vietnam in the monsoon season, it is 45C and humidity is at 95%. And I actually don’t know how people live there. They get up super-early in the morning, but then from noon to 5pm you see people lying on the side of the road under a mango tree, sleeping.”
Now he dwells on the ethics of one day bringing children into such a world. “If they wanted to take a similar trip, I wonder if that would still be possible in 20, 30 years from now. The temperatures are already very extreme. There are a lot of places that I think will be uninhabitable in the next few decades.”
Ironically, after riding around the world he seems not to have missed the most fundamental lesson of all, which is that Vietnam’s climate is very different from Norway’s.
And with that, I bid you farewell…for now. I’ll see you back here on Monday the 23rd, and I promise not to return with any lessons. In fact, if anything I’ll be even more thick-headed and contrarian.
Thanks for your readership, and your support.
Love,
–Tan Tenovo
