furthermore, flask: things that begin with tr...

if you do not want to read anything about my squishy bits, this post is not for you.

let's start with wednesday, shall we? i thought maybe i would go for a little bike ride and racked my bike to go to catamount (get your own blasted link) and when i got there i was missing a wheel.

...which made me look back on that suddenly stopping and reversing pickup truck and that second pickup truck meeting an officer of a local police force that i do not like and the subsequent flurry of state and local police officers in the area with a little paranoia.

did i lose my wheel where it had maybe caused an accident? was i being looked for?

probably not.

but all the way home i was a little nervous, plus i really wanted to find that wheel and i was driving my route backward looking for it and that's when a passing car ticked a stone into my windshield, which is why i was getting it repaired yesterday morning, which is why after i got done my grocery shopping i decided to take my bike ride just up the road instead of going to all the trouble of racking my bike and going back out to williston.

i decided to ride from my house up to the preston pond loop trail by way of notch road , take the trail across to stage road and come home. it combines a nice steady dirt road climb with some trail riding and it gets me out and back very nicely.

and there were pretty flowers!

i saw my first trillium of the season but it was not unfurled, so i didn't stop.

oh, let's be real. i was climbing on a thing that's kind of tricky to me and managing to pick good lines and keep going, so no way was i stopping to take pictures of it.

but i had gone to the trouble of putting my camera (complete with hard case) in my jersey pocket, so i was thinking that i would have to keep an eye out for more pretty flowers, especially up where the trail levels out, and on the western slope, where things are likely to be more developed.

trillium

and i'm moving happily along, feeling good, putting my tires right where i want them which is a big, big plus if you're going over any kind of rocks and stuff and i was even tearing it off with a little style and that's when i noticed the trout lillies and more trillium, and i was thinking that i would have to be on the lookout for some nice ones to photograph and i'm still picking my spots pretty well, even with the mudholes and waterbars.

i will pause here to tell you that my weight combined with that of my bike is well over 200 pounds. and (spolier alert!!!) a slow-motion fall on a bike can be much more dangerous than a speedy fall, because you go right down instead of sliding or rolling.

so i was looking off to the side at a lovely little trout lilly and noticing the trough of a waterbar in the trail and i was thinking "alex, can i have "things that begin with "tr" for 500 please?" and then i thought "ha. "trebek" begins with "tr" and that was the last thing i thought before things went very bad.

i had, in that moment, decided to make a little hop to go over the mudhole in the waterbar instead of just putting my weight full back and rolling, but gotten it wrong and so i managed to fully commit to preloading my front shock, only where i landed that front tire was not on the other side, but stuck right down in the trough.

a thing with my kind of mass carries some pretty good inertia. so when my bike suddenly stopped moving forward, i did not. and instead of flying over the handlebars and rolling or skidding as i might have done had i been moving faster, the whole of my weight came crashing down with my squishy bits on the headset.

this is where i fell.

this was followed by the immediate ricochet back so that the seat jammed into my back (i'm still clipped into both pedals, so the bike hits me carrying the force of all of my weight), which was immediately followed by another sickening fall forward, but no, not mercifully onto the ground, but placed just so the headset jammed into my belly and my squishy bits were most forcefully and painfully struck by the top tube.

THEN i fell to the ground, landing directly on my camera.

it's fine, thank you. remember that hard case?

i have not yet looked in the mirror, but let's just say that anyone seeing me nude would have a good idea of the size and shape of my camera case.

well, for a few minutes i just laid there in paralyzing pain. then i laid there for a while more in paralyzing pain.

"wow", i said to nobody in particular, "that fall would have KILLED a man."