Beaver Bites Man, or, An Eel in the Butt Is Worth Two in the...

            Like a lot of people, most of my exposure to news today comes from social media. Someone will tweet a headline or post a video on Facebook, and then I can kiss the next fifteen to sixty (or more) minutes goodbye as I delve into not just the original link but any and all things even slightly related to that topic.

This week, there were two stories that cost me productive morning hours. The first was a story about a Chinese man whose, ahem, “offbeat predilections” resulted in a20-inch eel burrowing into his large intestine. The writer of one story about this incident mentioned that eels like to burrow in “muddy places,” so the introduction of this creature to one’s anus is even less advisable than you might think, if that’s possible. (Fun fact, which I discovered at minute seventeen of my eel exploration: electric eels are not really eels. They’re knifefish).

            The second—and more interesting—story this week was about a beaver attack. Someone in my Facebook feed who enjoys wasting time even more than I do (you know who you are!) posted a video about a guy in Belarus who saw a beaver waddling its way down a road and thought, “Hey, what a great video opportunity.” It probably sounded different in Russian. Or Belarusian. Or whatever they speak in Belarus (note to self: Google this later). Anyway, things didn’t work out so well for him. The video is scary; what begins as a cute nature video becomes, in an instant, an outtake from The Blair Witch Project: the beaver charges, and the image goes blurry, then frantic, and finally static as the camera falls. Cut to black.

            It maybe goes without saying that after watching it several times, I headed straight to Youtube and searched “beaver attacks.” Turns out, there’s a lesson to be learned. Don’t get close to wild animals.

            But the real story is not my penchant to follow trivial and tangential paths through the Internet; in fact, I think I may have covered that in an earlier post. The real story is about truth.

            If this story is true, the man died, having bled out when the beaver severed his femoral artery. When I showed the video to a colleague—not with any particular purpose in mind—his immediate response was, “That’s fake.” I asked why, and his only reason was, “C’mon!” We happened to be with some of our creative writing students, so we turned the question to them. After watching the video, they were split. Some laughed, and some cringed. The ensuing debate—if you could call it that, which I wouldn’t—led to two important and paradoxical questions, especially if you’re someone who is working on the craft of writing.

Is everything believable today?

Is anything believable today?

            In his excellent book The Art of Fiction, author and teacher John Gardner calls the world the writer creates the “fictive dream.” A writer’s job, therefore, is to invite readers into that dream. It’s a backbreaking chore with not a whole lot of payoff, this business of creating worlds out of words. And I wonder if the job is made harder or easier by our internet culture—have we become more willing to believe the stories that abound out there, or have we become cynical that any of them are true?

            I’m not sure what the answer is to this question, even for myself. I know, intellectually, that there’s no such thing as Hogzilla or the Montauk Monster or the Derbyshire Fairy, but part of me wants to believe in them. Wouldn’t that be cool? Who doesn’t want to live in a world with chupacabras or with a horse-sized dog named Hercules? And sure, I believe in science, but I still want to charge my iPhone with an onion.

            Exactly where I range on the continuum between absolute gullibility and jaded cynicism varies, but I do know that whether I’m trying to write the fictive (or non-fictive) dream or getting lost in it as a reader, it helps if I want to believe in the world’s possibilities, even if some of those possibilities are downright scary, like beavers who attack or eagles who fly off with children.

            I’d love to keep going, but during one of the fifty-seven breaks I’ve taken while writing this, I checked Facebook and read another story that I need to follow up on (right after I find out what language they speak in Belarus). Seems that there’s a guy in Australia with a rare genetic condition. Every part of him has aged normally except for his head. Instead of jumping right to “Aha! Photoshop strikes again!” I find myself wondering what life is like for him. What does he go through each day? What trouble finds him because he has the head of a baby? Can’t there be some kind of truth in all of this?

            I’ll keep you posted.

Books and Junk

In southeastern Arizona there’s a little town called Quartzsite. It wasn’t much more than a blip on my map, but it looked like the only spot of civilization for miles around. Pedaling onto the main drag, I saw a big banner that proclaimed, “Home of the WORLD FAMOUS MAIN EVENT,” and that’s it. I assumed that the seemingly endless rows of stands selling a colorful assortment of crap—signs, rocks, pottery, t-shirts—were said main event. I appreciated how obvious it all was. It was only my fifth day out, but that time had  stretched into one long lesson about how badly I could misjudge things--distances, the heat and wind, my energy, and most of all, how exposed I would feel alone on my bike.

            My destination for the night was Salome, which was still about thirty-five miles down the road. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he mentions taking a bus from Blythe (where I’d slept behind a bait shop the night before) to Salome, and I tried to recall the line but couldn’t. As I headed out of Quartzsite, something happened that seemed to defy mere coincidence. I spotted a used bookstore that was open even though it was Sunday.

            The store, Reader’s Oasis, sat at the end of a long, gravel parking lot, and the building itself had a western-y feel to it. Wooden front porch and rail that, if it were one hundred years earlier, I might have used to hitch up my horse. As it was, I leaned my bike up against it. And as I did so, I glanced into the store and did a quick double-take.

            A naked man stood in the doorway.

            Well, almost naked. I was looking at him from behind. His body was rail-thin and resembled an old baseball glove left out in the sun too long. A cowboy hat sat atop long gray hair. Down below, the tiniest hint of string circled his waist and disappeared into his butt crack. He was talking to a guy wearing glasses, a collared shirt, and khakis, and I assumed that I was looking at some crazy customer talking to the store’s owner. I was more or less right.

            I could hear one of them speaking: “…I live a celibate lifestyle, but I still like to look at sex books. Do you have any sex books?”

It was the guy in khakis.

            “Well, I can show you what I have,” the naked man said, and the two walked to the back of the store.

            After a few minutes the naked man returned, smiling.

            “You look like you’re on quite a journey.”

            “Uh, yeah,” I answered, trying hard not to think about the little crocheted sack that was holding his junk. “San Diego to North Carolina.”

            “Isn’t that something?” he said. “Mind if I take a gander at your rig?”

            It took me a second to realize that he was talking about my bike.

            He inspected it closely, asking me questions about the ride, the panniers, what I packed, and how the trip had been so far. Somehow, as we talked, I completely forgot that I was talking with a naked man and we were not standing in a locker room.

            “I’ve got a Trek myself,” he said, pointing with his thumb to some vague spot behind him. “Once a year, the wife drives down to Yuma to do some shopping. I’ll bike down there and catch a ride back with her. Yuma’s nearly all downhill from here.”

            I felt a question forming on the edge of my mind, but then the celibate guy came back to the front of the store. In both hands was a stack of reading material that I assumed were sex books. If I didn’t already know better, I would have sworn he was some preppy grad student getting ready to write a research paper. The naked man left my side, and I took a look at the numerous flyers that hung outside the front door. One was bright yellow and read, PUBLIC NOTICE—STORE-OWNER WEARS ONLY A “THONG”…IN OTHER WORDS, NUDIST ON PREMISES.

            The naked man returned to talk to me, now his only customer. He told me his name was Paul Winer, and he’d been in Quartzsite for almost twenty years. In addition to being a nudist and running a used bookstore—a pretty good one, I’d decided after poking around—he was also a musician who used to perform under the name “Sweet Pie” and a cartoonist who still drew for the local papers.

            “I’m the second most Googled thing in Quartzsite,” he told me.

            “What’s first?” I asked, hoping that our understanding of the word “google” was the same.

            “The big gem show every year.”

            I was about to take off when I remembered the reason that I stopped in the first place.

            “Ah, Kerouac,” he said. “I haven’t seen a copy since last December.”

            As I maneuvered my bike back up the gravel to the main road, Paul shouted after me, “Keep your eyes open!”

            I pedaled back onto the highway and continued east, already shaping the encounter into an amusing little story to help me on the uphills I was surely heading toward. I was trying to figure out the ending—some way to work the sex book guy back into it—when the question that almost came to me earlier returned, fully formed. It was so sudden and so obvious that I actually shouted into the sandy, rock-strewn hills all around me.

“SHIT!”

            I should have asked him if he bikes to Yuma naked.

Why Bike?

            “It’d be a lot faster by car.”

            I was eating a stack of pancakes at the Coyote Flats Café, a little place that—together with the gas station a quarter of mile down Highway 60—was the only sign of civilization I’d seen in this desert for the last few hours. The pancakes were perfect. All spongy in the middle and crisp on the edges. They were so good that I didn’t even mind the imitation syrup, no parts of which had originated in any tree of any kind.

            The place was empty except for an older couple a few booths away—regulars, I’d gathered, based on the way they tossed names back and forth with the waitress. The only other person there was a barrel-chested guy who’d been lingering by the pool table in back, an unfriendly-looking bulldog panting by his feet. The man stood and wandered behind the counter, where he refilled his coffee cup and squinted through the front window to where my bike was leaning in the shade. He asked me about it and stepped from behind the counter. That’s when I saw the big silver .45 strapped to his hip. Welcome to Arizona.

            I forced myself not to stare at the gun as I told him that I was biking across the country, that I had left San Diego about a week earlier and was hoping to get to the Atlantic by the end of next month. When he shrugged and offered his succinct advice, I didn’t contradict him.

            What I thought was, Well, yeah, it would be faster by car, douchebag. But speed isn’t really the point.

As I was biking through Monument Valley on Highway 163 less than a week later, a Honda Civic blew by me at about seventy miles per hour. A few minutes after that, coming the other direction, a rusty white pickup truck crossed the double yellow line to pass a slow-moving camper. There wasn’t much of a shoulder to speak of, and both of these vehicles came close enough to push me aside with a blast of hot wind. But I was annoyed less by almost being flattened than by their need to rush. We were in the midst of one of our country’s most picturesque places, the land where John Ford filmed some of the greatest westerns of all time. All around us, ancient fingers of red rock reached into the azure sky, dwarfing those of us just passing through this land of almost spiritual quietude. And then some bozo would roar by, jockeying around a car to get somewhere—where? where?—just a little bit sooner.

I was annoyed at the flash of recognition, too. I’ve been that driver, hurrying to pick up one of my sons at school, hurrying to a meeting, hurrying to a movie, or just hurrying because I was angry at that guy ahead of me who couldn’t seem to find his gas pedal with both feet and a map.

But life goes by fast enough without us shoving it along—an easy thing to do when we’re insulated. In our cars, with the windows up and the radio on, we’re separated from everything with sound and AC and metal and glass. A speedy little bubble on our way from here to there. On a bike, though, there’s no bubble, no real speed. And slowing down does wonders for your perspective. It’s hard to miss things. Even when I was headed downhill or cruising along with a tailwind, I could still see every empty coffee cup and broken bungee cord on the ground. I could get nice long looks at a field of corn or dark rain clouds. I could stop and talk to a woman hanging garage sale signs—like I did in Blythe, California—or ask a farmer about how the tobacco crop was looking this season—like I did in White House, Tennessee.

Of course, life on two wheels is what you make of it. One afternoon, as I was working my way to Dodge City, a motorcycle pulled off to the shoulder up ahead of me. The rider dismounted, stood in back of his cycle, and gave a little wave. When I stopped, I could see that he was smiling.

            “Need any water?” he asked.

            “I’m good,” I said. “How’s it going?”

            He grabbed my hands and gave it a few vigorous pumps. “I’m Ron,” he told me. “Thirty years ago I did the same thing you’re doing.”

            He was twenty when he set out from Boulder to New Hampshire on his bicycle. Now fifty, he was retracing his route. He still had his original map, which we somehow managed to look at in the blistering Kansas wind.

            He told me that he’d turned twenty-one on that ride. On his birthday, he was in upstate New York, deep in wine country. He wandered into a winery, bought a bottle, and drank it by himself outside of his tent that night.

            “I’ll always remember that,” he said.

            We talked for a few more minutes, took each other’s picture, and then parted ways, but not before he gave me a hug and told me to travel safe.

            I took my time before starting again. Standing next to Rusty, I leaned into a stiff prairie gust—the kind that had been pummeling me all day—and watched Ron’s motorcycle grow smaller in the distance. I turned to remount, and as I did, I noticed two spots of color on the other side of the road. Bikers, both bent low over their handlebars, legs churning furiously. The headwind that had been slapping me in the face gave them a powerful shove from behind.

            When they were nearly opposite me, I smiled and raised my arm in a big wave. I hadn’t seen another biker in days.

            There was no way they didn’t see me, but they sped on by without so much as a nod.

            I’d like to report that they were racers sporting skintight spandex, ultralight bikes, and teardrop-shaped helmets. People out for weekend exercise, focused on the task at hand to the extent that a stop-and-chat was out of the question. But they were just like me. Front and rear panniers filled to bulging. More gear wrapped tight on top of the rear rack. At least three water bottles visible on each bike. Out on the road for a while, no doubt about it. Eyes straight ahead, locked on course, no time to share a few minutes with a fellow traveler.

            What’s the hurry, guys?

Yet Another FAQ (Plus a Few Words about Revision)

            I tell my students that writing is all about revision. All writers’ drafts are crap at the outset, and it’s only through careful, astute revision that strong writing emerges. But what is revision? One thing it’s not is proofreading; correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, changing a word here and there, maybe adding a sentence are all final steps in the writing process, and jumping directly there from drafting is to leave out the part that involves the real work. That work—revision—is like radical surgery, the kind involving amputations, resections, grafts, and reconstructions. And when you’re performing such procedures on something you love…well, it can be difficult.

Difficult but necessary. And the best way to approach the task is without emotion. Yes, you may have worked hard to write that particular scene, but that doesn’t change the fact that it might not help the story and therefore needs to go. The same might apply to a character you happen to like. Or the narrative point of view. Every great novel has its phantom limbs, which are felt most keenly by the person who did the messy business of removal—the author. My own approach to revision is best summed up by a line from my favorite movie: “it’s not personal…it’s strictly business” (if I have to name the movie, then I don’t even know what to say to you), and I’ve been repeating this line to myself ad nauseum over my winter break, which I’ve spent cutting and slashing material from my book, trying to get it down to a reasonable fighting weight of about 100,000 words. It’s slow going, but not because of the emotion; revision is hard work even without that.

So with all this said, I’m presenting another installment of my “Frequently Asked Questions.” One caveat, though. These short pieces might not be the “sneak previews” as originally billed; they may very well end up being deleted scenes.

Without further delay, here is today’s question:

“What Did You Eat?”

            Lots and lots of crap.

When I told people that I was going to bike cross country, alone, they pictured vast expanses of nothingness where I’d have to dig for water and forage for meals. I have to admit that I’d pictured a little of this myself. Chopping wood for a fire, clambering down rocks to get water from a reservoir, cooking up a nutritious gruel made with whatever roots and berries I could scavenge.

But I never cooked a thing while on tour.

The vast majority of my food came from gas stations or grocery stores with names like “Piggly Wiggly,” “Ingels,” “Loaf ‘n’ Jug,” “Shnucks,” and “Harris Teeter” (I thought that this last one, when I first saw it, was an upscale furniture store).

Also, I didn’t carry a lot of food with me.

In the morning I would eat and drink leftovers from the night before. A bottle of Vitamin Water, a banana, maybe half a bagel. Throughout the day at various stops, I would load up on the same and indulge every now and then.

I went through a Milky Way phase in Kansas and switched to Three Musketeers in Tennessee. About 90% of my gas station stops resulted in the purchase of a cherry pie. The Hostess version had better icing, but the Little Debbie ones were cheaper and came in a box that kept them from being crushed in my overstuffed handlebar bag.

In Arizona I discovered the single greatest beverage in the history of beverages: The Vanilla Rockin’ Refuel from Shamrock Farms. Sweet nectar from the heavens. In addition to taste, it had everything I could hope for in a road drink: calcium, vitamins, fat, sugar, and a shitload of calories.

And then there were Clif Bars. I always had one or two of these tucked away somewhere on my bike. Unlike so many other protein or meal replacement bars, Clif Bars don’t pretend to be candy bars, so there’s no chocolaty coating to degrade into a gooey mess after sitting in my handlebar bag for more than twenty seconds. I ate so many Clif Bars that I can no longer eat Clif Bars. Just typing the name makes me a little queasy.

I didn’t carry food, but I met a few bikers who did. One was a young guy heading from Orlando to San Francisco. Stashed in various places on his bike were two family-size cans of vegetarian baked beans, cups of instant mac ‘n’ cheese, cans of soup, a couple of boxes of rice and beans, a loaf of bread, and a huge jar of peanut butter. On top of this, he had a small cookset and stove. He was obsessed with caloric intake and kept to a schedule where he ate five meals a day, making sure that each one packed at least two thousand calories.

I met another biker who always had a bag of bagels with him. We bunked together one night, and I watched him work his way through half of it. He washed it down with a half gallon of orange juice. "Eating for tomorrow," he said, juice running down his face.

Food was sustenance, and I’d shovel it in like coal to a raging furnace. But once in a while it seemed to be something more. A bag of pretzels from a guy named Pete at a gas station just over the Kansas-Missouri border. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a mom at a scenic overlook in Tennessee. A bottle of water from a guy named Sam at another gas station, this one in North Carolina. Whenever strangers stopped what they were doing and gave me something to drink or eat, I’d feel a little less alone.

I met Alan in the Ozarks. He was in his late fifties, worked for the forest service in New Zealand, and was on his way from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Our paths crossed for two nights running. On the first night, I learned about how his wife had died of cancer, how he’d felt lost after that, and how he found his way back on his bike. On the second night, I dragged him through rain-soaked streets to a $4.99 all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. I was in the mood for some serious eating, and it turned out that Alan was, too. We very nearly cleaned them out. Between the nine different kinds of pizza, the pasta (with a choice of marinara or alfredo), a loaded salad bar, and stacks of crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside brownies, we racked up over a dozen plates of food. By the time we were done, our table looked like the wreckage from a little league team after its end-of-season party. We shared some of the stories from the road and our lives in that brightly lit booth, and in the morning we would part ways, Alan heading north to St. Louis and me due west to Chester, Illinois. We never saw each other again—I knew we wouldn’t—but when I remember our brief friendship, I can still see those steaming platters of pepperoni pizza, the heaps of salad and toppings, those plates overflowing with sugar-dusted brownies.

Stuff I Saw

As I continue to work on the final revisions to Queasy Rider, I'm also thinking about how I'm going to assemble the different narrative pieces. Most of the book consists of long chapters that "cross cut" between my experiences on the road and various memories, but there are also shorter chapters that will pop up from time to time, like the "FAQ" writings that I've posted here.

And then there are the comics. My plan is to sprinkle throughout the book several different comics--a couple of multi-page stories as well as some one-pagers. One group of these one-pagers is a short series called "Stuff I Saw," which I intend to appear a little rough, as if from a sketchbook. I did all of the layout, lettering, and art myself. Most of the images are based on pictures I took, and observant readers may notice two of them that already appear on this blog. Anyway, here's a preview of four of the "Stuff I Saw" comics:

A little gruesome, maybe, but I had to pay some kind of tribute to all of the dead animals that I saw. By the way, coming across roadkill while biking is about a hundred times worse than while driving. First of all, there's the smell. Second, there's the fact that I was moving slowly, so I had plenty of time to take a good, long look. Third, there's not much you can do to avoid it. I tried to move around a dead possum in Missouri and almost got hit by a pickup truck.

I love roadside kitsch, and to my mind, there's none better than big statues of fake people. My two favorites are on the bottom row, both found in the tiny Illinois town of Metropolis. The best part was that "Big John" is about ten feet taller than Superman.

Comics are good at amplifying the quiet moments of life, and I tried to keep that in mind when I sketched these landscapes from various parts of the trip. I'm the least happy with the "Tennessee" panel; all of that dark stuff is supposed to be kudzu, which grows crazy-fast and has taken over thousands and thousands of acreage in the South.

Not every dog was my enemy. I made some canine friends along the way, too, and I wanted to get them into the book in a unique way. 

I'm planning to post more of the comics if there's any reader interest, so let me know!

#soccerdad

As far as entertainment goes, it’s tough to beat people watching. It’s free, easy, and you can do it just about anywhere. Sure, some places are more rewarding than others—the airport, Las Vegas, Black Friday sales—because you can always count on the fact that at any moment someone will do something completely devoid of common sense, self-consciousness, or even a rudimentary understanding of basic civil conduct. For my money, though, there's somewhere that tops them all.

The sidelines of any kids’ sporting event.

I’m not sure how many of my kids’ games I’ve attended or coached, but the number is pretty high. And in terms of parental behavior, the sports can differ quite a bit.

At one end of the spectrum is cross-country. The courses are often hilly, twisty, and extend way beyond the bounds of any field of play involving a ball. So, it’s incredibly difficult for parents to observe the entire thing; the best that the most ambitious of us can manage is to jog around to different points in the course so that we can get a quick look at our kids zipping by. This has two main advantages (from our kids' point of view, no doubt). First, parents like me are usually too winded from running from place to place to do much more than clap and offer a “Woo-hoo, [insert son or daughter’s name here]!” And second, there’s something about the sport that invites shouts of encouragement only. When your child is only doing one thing—in this case, running—you don’t really have much to offer in the way of detailed advice. Plus, they’re not listening anyway.

On the other side of things is baseball, where I’ve seen some of the worst parental behavior on display. One reason, no doubt, to the length of the games. After sitting out in the heat by a dusty field for a couple of hours, even the meekest of souls might be stirred to take someone’s life—or at the very least, to do some serious maiming. Also, baseball is a “narrative-rich” game. There are all kinds of little stories going on, and these stories provide way too many opportunities for parents to insert themselves. Consider an at-bat: all those pitches, and with every pitch, the story (and, of course, the shouts of advice) changes. Then there’s the story of a hit ball, the story of a fielded (or not fielded) ball, the story of a steal. For each of these stories, there are multiple characters and perspectives—the team at bat, the team in the field, the various players who become involved in any given play, and naturally, the parents of all these kids. Sometimes after coaching a game, I’d have no voice left because I’d spent most of the time trying to make myself heard over the shouts coming from the stands.

When you study something long enough, certain patterns emerge, so without further adieu, I’d like to present a few characters—all dads—that I’ve encountered over the years. There are more, but these are my favorite. And by “favorite,” I mean “least favorite.”

The Analyst

Anyone with a child on a sports team knows that parents are required to show up at least sixty minutes before game time. Sometimes more, depending on the sport. While the kids warm up, the parents look for something to do. For me, that usually means setting up my folding chair and grading papers. For others, it means chatting over the tops of Starbucks cups. For the Analyst, it means checking out the conditions of the field, listening in on the coach’s pre-game advice, and studying the other team as they run through their drills.

A couple of Saturday mornings ago before my younger son’s soccer game, I was trying to in vain to find something resembling a thesis in one of my students’ papers when one of these dads saw me. I was hunched over, pen in hand, brow furrowed in concentration. So of course he assumed that I wanted to talk. Or rather, to listen.

“This is gonna come down to our midfielders,” he said, nodding.

“Whuzzat?”

“Last time we played these guys, they killed us in time of possession. They got some big guys. Big, but not fast.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Field’s pretty sloppy in the center.” He paused here to point out some dark spots on the grass. “There, there, and there. If our guys are quick to the ball, they can use their guys’ size against them. Didn’t hear Coach mention that though.”

“You should say something,” I said. And let me get back to grading.

“Yeah…yeah, I think I will,” he said, nodding, as he trudged across the sub-par field, pausing to more closely study the spots that would figure in to his unbeatable strategy.

The Macho Man

For some odd reason, this dad has linked his own sense of self and masculinity to his son’s performance on the field. Sadly, this psychodrama usually plays itself out publicly and almost always involves tears. The son’s, of course.

I’d see it all the time in baseball, usually when a kid got plunked at the plate, or caught a grounder with his chin, or was hit in the back as a base runner by an errant throw. When you think about it, baseball with young kids is insanely dangerous; they’re unskilled, usually hopped up on some post-school sugary snack, and wielding aluminum clubs and rock-hard orbs.

Once, one of my players was at bat, turned toward a high, inside pitch, and took it square on his left cheek. Now I’ve been hit with a baseball before. It hurts. And this kid started howling. Another coach and I ran over to him with our league-issued ice pack, and before we got to him, his dad was at the backstop fence, fingers locked into the chain link. He had sunglasses on, and I assumed that behind them was a look of concern. I was wrong.

“Suck it up and get back in there!” he shouted to his son. “Be a man!”

We iced his face, calmed him down, and got him back at the plate. He was terrified of the ball (and who wouldn’t be?), but I think he was more scared of his dad.

Mr. Advice, aka “Captain Obvious” (this nickname courtesy of my son Tony)

This is the dad who knows exactly which kid should be doing what and how. He’s not the coach, mind you—No time with work and all, out of town a lot, you know how it is—but that doesn’t stop him from liberally dispensing pointers at the top of his lungs.

During an 8am basketball game one Saturday morning, in a gym that was so cold it might as well have not had a roof, I was sitting next to a Mr. Advice. While most of us were trying not to succumb to hypothermic shock, this guy was on his feet for nearly the entire game. I couldn’t really gauge the breadth of his basketball knowledge because he was concerned with only one thing: how often the kids would pick up their dribble, get swarmed by the defense, and turn over the ball.

Now, this was rec ball and these kids were pretty young, so the scene described above pretty much sums up every game. Most parents accepted this, but Mr. Advice was dead set on helping out.

“DON’T PICK UP YOUR DRIBBLE!” he’d yell from in front of me. Then he’d catch my eye.

“Why do they pick up their dribble?” he’d ask. I’d shrug. He’d turn back to the game.

“WHY?!”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to cop to being a Mr. Advice in my past. With soccer, no less, the sport about which I know the least. I had all kinds of tips for the kids, and I didn’t hesitate to share them during game time. Then one season, my son Nick’s coach had a fun idea for a practice: kids versus parents. I jogged out on the field, confident in my ability to carry out the very obvious instructions I’d been shouting every Saturday morning (Get there! Kick the ball! Stay with him!). Ten minutes and two handball calls against me later, I’d fallen to the ground twice (once while trying to Kick the ball!), been completely unable to keep up with kids a third my size, and suffered a simultaneous attack of vertigo and hyperventilation that I was convinced was a mild stroke.

From that point to precisely the present, my sideline comments have been nothing but enthusiastic support.

It should be noted, however, that people might not share your conception of “support.”   For example, I discovered the hard way that shouting “RELEASE THE KRAKKEN!” is not universally seen as a rallying cry.

One last comment. There are plenty of different types of moms on those sidelines, too, but they frighten me too much and I’m not about to tick any of them off.

FAQ Check, Part Deux: Godfather Time

Here's another question that I've been asked about my cross-country bike ride: "Did You Get Bored out There?"

And here's my answer:

Sometimes.

Biking for six, seven, even eight or nine hours a day—often on seldom-traveled roads in wide-open landscapes—I had to invent ways to keep myself entertained and distracted.

For instance, I’d make up little stories about the things I saw on the side of the road.

A water bottle filled with cloudy yellow liquid became a trucker’s emergency bathroom, filled while driving and then tossed out the window. He’d been breaking the speed limit all night long ever since he’d checked his phone in Phoenix, saw that his daughter had left a message, and heard only part of a garbled sentence—You’d better get back here fast—then nothing else.

A plastic triceratops was a teenage boy’s revenge on his younger brother, who was getting all the attention on the family vacation and generally making the car trip miserable. I could almost see the younger brother napping, the older brother snatching the dinosaur and then dropping it out the window of the moving car.

A broken syringe was cast off from a young couple—rail-thin and heroin-addicted—on their way south, following the road by day and wrapping themselves in an old blanket at night.

During a five-mile stretch near Jacumba, California, I spotted a red onion or two about every hundred feet. The reality was that they had probably squirted loose from some truck’s cargo, but reality can be boring. I preferred this: a husband and wife are on their way home from the market, where they’ve stocked up on red onions for pickling. The basket sits between them in the front seat. The wife looks out her window while her husband divides his attention between the road and the back of her head. He’s losing her, he knows. In fact, he’s pretty sure she’s already gone, thinking of someone else. He reaches a dirt-caked hand into the basket and pulls out an onion, feeling its heft. He squeezes it and asks a question. When she answers with what he suspects is a lie, he tosses the onion out of the window and grabs another. Onion after onion out the window. I was just getting to the part when that basket is empty, but then the road dipped precipitously and I suddenly had other things to worry about.

These were games, and I’ve always loved playing games—especially with my older brother, Vince. “Ker Plunk,” “Sure Shot Hockey," or "Life.” Home Run Derby with a wiffle ball and bat. Nerf football outside with some of the neighborhood kids. Vince, being several years older and wiser than the rest of us, was always head coach and quarterback. We’d invent games back then, too. Once we found an egg-shaped superball. It was as hard as a little rock and bounced in violent, unpredictable ways. So naturally, the game we came up with involved throwing it at each other. I stood at the top of the stairs, Vince stood at the bottom, and we whipped it back and forth for either a direct or ricocheted hit. We called the game “Acid Egg,” and if a guy got hit, he had to writhe around on the ground for a few seconds as if his flesh was burning.

There were no acid eggs on the trip, but there were awful winds, and during one brutal stretch in Kansas, I decided that the thing to do was sing every television theme song that I could remember as loudly as possible. The trick was not to swallow any bugs. I started in on the easy ones first, shows that Vince and I had spent hours watching together, sprawled across the gold shag carpeting of our living room. Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Next was a Norman Lear medley. All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times. After that, random songs that I knew most of the words to. WKRP in Cincinnati, Welcome Back Kotter, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat. When the words escaped me, I’d make something up. My brother has always had a gift for getting all the words to a song the first time he heard it. Naturally, he hated when I improvised. Pedaling into the wind, cornfields on both sides of me, trying to remember exactly why Chico shouldn’t be so discouraged by the Man, I could hear Vince’s voice cut through the whistling in my ears.

If you can’t sing it right, then don’t sing it.

But my favorite game, which I invented on my fourth day out while riding from Glamis to Blythe through southeastern California, was called “Godfather Time.”

About seven miles into the ride that morning, I was already tired, fighting the strongest headwinds that I’d ever experienced. I had a long way to go that day, and as I stopped to catch my breath, I took note of the time: 7:00 on the head. Later that morning and still far from my destination, I stopped again at the ominously-named Three Slashes Road. I checked my clock again: 9:55. I’d gone a little over twenty miles in two hours and fifty-five minutes.

The exact running time, coincidentally, of my favorite movie, The Godfather.

I could have watched the entire Godfather in the time it took me to bike those twenty miles in that desert wind tunnel.

From then on, when I needed to distract myself from some pretty miserable biking, I’d measure out the ride in Godfather units.

Less than a week later I was headed to Tuba City, Arizona, through desert terrain in high-90 degree temperatures, approaching the end of my first eighty-mile day. I saw a billboard for a Tuba City McDonald’s proclaiming that it was JUST 15 MINUTES AWAY.

In a car, schmuck!

I looked down at my speedometer. On an uphill grade, as loaded down as I was, as tired as I was, my top speed would barely reach above four miles per hour. Just fast enough so that I wouldn’t tip over into the ditch. I was looking at about another hour, assuming the grade didn’t get any steeper—an assumption, I’d learned, that it was neither safe nor smart to make.

In Godfather time, an hour would stretch from the film’s opening line—I believe in America, delivered in blackness—to roughly when the crooked cop McCluskey breaks Michael Corleone’s jaw.

In other words, a long god(father)damn time.

In the time it took to climb to Wolf Creek Pass and reach the Continental Divide in Colorado, I could have watched from the opening line to just past Sonny’s brutal death on the causeway. One hour, fifty-seven minutes.

In the time it took a biker I’d met to explain his philosophy of nutrition to me one endless evening in Missouri, I could have watched up to the scene where movie producer Jack Woltz finds his beloved horse’s head in his bed. After thirty minutes of this guy prattling on about sugars this and breads that, I was picturing his head—and not the horse’s—lying on top of Woltz’s bloodied silk sheets.

In the time it took me to bike on the I-40 in Arizona from Ash Fork to Williams, on a grade so steep that I passed two semi-trucks catching their breath on the shoulder, I could have watched up to the scene where Don Corleone calls in his favor with the undertaker, Bonasera, showing him Sonny’s bullet-riddled corpse. Look at how they massacred my boy...

And in the time that I spent climbing on the Cherohala Skyway, a punishing ride through the Appalachian Mountains that twisted and turned through what seemed like eight hundred false peaks, I could have watched The Godfather twice. Twice. The whole time climbing.

Anything five minutes or so—pedaling from one end of Dodge, Kansas, to the other on a quiet Sunday morning; getting from the Longbranch Coffeehouse to the Bicycle Surgeon in Carbondale, Illinois; taking a bathroom and sunblock-reapplication break near White House, Tennessee—was a “Baptism of Fire.” To the uninitiated, that’s the five-minute bravura sequence near the end of the movie that crosscuts between Michael in church, standing as godfather to his sister’s newborn son, and a series of violent gangland executions that he has ordered.

I saw this scene for the first time at some point in the 70s, when The Godfather made its network television premiere. The piece that struck me the hardest was when Moe Green, naked on a massage table, gets shot in the eye. One lens of his glasses spiderwebs, blood flows from beneath it, and his head slumps forward. I’d never seen anything like it, and for a second I kind of believed that they’d actually murdered a guy on camera.

“What happened?” I asked Vince, who was watching with me.

“Easy,” he said, shrugging. “Blood pellets.”

It wasn’t much of an explanation, but I felt lucky to get a verbal response at all. Most of our conversations at the time went like this: I’d ask a question and he’d make a face. College was on the horizon for him, and I was still in grade school, so while I’d be looking up to him, he was looking somewhere else—probably at a future that didn’t include an annoying little brother.

Despite its impact on me, the “Baptism of Fire” sequence is not my favorite part of The Godfather. Neither are any of the film’s other famous scenes. No, my favorite part is one that most people don’t notice, and the scene itself doesn’t even last long enough to serve as any kind of useful measure in my little game. It doesn’t, in fact, really mean anything the first time you watch the movie; it’s only when you watch it a second time do you become aware of the loss that it registers.

About halfway through the film, Sonny and Michael are going over the final details of their plan to kill Sollozzo, the drug dealer who put out a hit on their father. In a few minutes, Michael will be picked up by Sollozzo and his bodyguard for a sit-down where the two of them are supposed to negotiate a truce. But a gun has been hidden for Michael at the restaurant where the meeting takes place, and he’s going to use it to kill the two men. Right after, Michael will be whisked off to Sicily to hide out until everything blows over. Before Michael leaves for the meeting, he says goodbye to everyone, saving Sonny—his older brother—for last. Sonny agrees to “smooth things over” with both their mother and Michael’s girlfriend. The two brothers look at each other and then embrace.

As they hug, Sonny and Michael think that they have all the time in the world, that somewhere down the line, they’ll get together again.

But they don’t; a few scenes later, while Michael is in Sicily, Sonny is gunned down, and that embrace of theirs turns out to be the last time that they see each other. Whenever I watch that scene, I tighten up.

For me, it’s not as much about death as it is about drifting. When we’re young, the world sometimes seems like an endless series of games. Everything makes sense and problems can be solved by checking the rules on the inside of the box top. That security is a sham, of course, but it’s easy to fool our younger selves with tidy explanations. Easy. Blood pellets.

But things change when we get older. We have to work harder to explain the things that confound us. We gather obligations. Our lives become messier. Through all of this, brothers can drift apart. I think about this with me and Vince. I think about this with my sons, Nick and Tony. Like me, like Vince, the two of them have only one brother.

So is there any other way I can watch that scene in The Godfather? Sonny and Michael hug all too quickly, and I want to say to them, to those two brothers, “Pay attention, guys. It might not ever be like this again.”

Sorry…what was the original question?