Just the FAQs

 

Some frequent questions people ask me about my bicycle trip:

1. Why the heck are you doing this?
"You're brave." = I think you're foolish crazy.

My answer varies depending on what mood I'm in and who I'm talking to. The answers are mostly bullshit, because I can't explain to someone in two sentences to make them understand. You could read this whole blog and still might not get it.



2. How do you not work for six months and have money?
= Aren't you spoiled because your family is loaded?

I let people know that I live cheap as fuck. It costs less money to keep me alive than the American consumer spends on Starbucks in the morning and candy at checkout lines.

But they still want to know where the money I spend is coming from. So then I rob them. Just kidding. My parents were cheap and thought they would get away with not giving me allowance when I was a kid. Now they are paying for it.

A follow up question that people don't ask: Don't you feel ashamed relying on you parents and not taking care of your own future?

No, I don't ask them for money and I don't really want their money. They're giving me this money with the intention of forcing me into a 'normal life', not to help me pursue what I want.

It's not something every parent can afford, it's a lot more than nothing, but it is less than livable income. I challenge you to live on $15 a day. Your housing alone costs twice as much. They want to dictate my life through what they give me, and that's why I don't want it.

If my parents didn't give me money, I wouldn't ask other people for theirs. I'd sell the car. I would starve or use soup kitchens.

I could work as an independent non-profit organization. Perhaps become a more practiced musician. Maybe I'd finally get to teach somebody Calculus in exchange for a sandwich.

This trip would look a LOT different. I probably wouldn't have a bike. I'd run it. Maybe I'd have to wait longer inside cities. I'd have to plan VERY carefully which route to take and look diligently for sources of food.

Maybe I'd still do it. Maybe I'd have visions on my journey or maybe die from dehydration and hunger. Some day I still might.

Do I rely on my parents? If I were relying on my parents, I'd be living in their basement, listening to their worries, going round to employers asking for a job. No, that is not my life and I am not dependent on their care.

But aren't they supporting you financially? I realized it doesn't matter. Whether or not they are giving me the money or I receive it some other way, that's not my purpose.

If I am to have any future, I am to pursue life. Providing for myself to prolong the amount of time I am alive, unlike most people, is not my number one priority. I could care less whether I am alive, but as long as I am - the only point is to use my life for something.

Depression is a sign that I am not fulfilling my needs or potential, and not all the money in the world can fix it. Medication is not a treatment, but a crippling of the mind to submit one into complacency. The only cure to a deficient life is life itself.



3. Do you realize that I'm cool because I see you're bicycling?
I can tell that you're traveling because I know about bicycles because I ride one sometimes.

Some people who come up to me and talk aren't interested in me at all, but just want to show off to me about their experience with bicycles.


Uh... okay.
Wait, tell me again. Why am I supposed to be kissing your ass?

You're bicycling now, but see, at some point in my life I did something marginally resembling the same thing. Which entitles me to tell you about it.

I guess you win!


I picture them as little children in my mind and humor them. Tell me they did something like I don't know how to do it. I poured orange juice. "That's very good. Good job. You're great."

I wouldn't go up to some guy on a paved trail just because he was riding his bike and be like...


Hey, I saw you riding a bicycle. Well, I ride a bicycle too.
I'm going a thousand times farther than you will today. You think about that.

He be like, I got a job and I just bicycle on the weekends with my wife and children...

I be like, um... uh... I have Ulix, kaybai!






Me 'n Ulix



4. Don't you get tired?

Seems like a rhetorical question to ask.

I mean, how am I supposed to answer that? Nope, not human. I am a machine from a post-apocalyptic world that has no bicycles, sent back through time to ride bicycles.

Or I should answer like the Terminator. 'Affirmative.'

A more pertinent question for me would be:

         "Don't you get smelly wearing the same clothes every day?"

To which I should answer,

         "Your clothes. I need them. Now."

         "Take off her clothes too."

         "Now kiss." "MAKE THE SMOOCHING SOUND!"

Some questions rarely asked of me, ones I'd enjoy being asked are:

How are *you*? Are you enjoying your trip?

- Most days, regardless of whatever misfortune befalls me, I feel great. There's at least one moment of every day that I feel proud and alive. And if not, I keep moving ahead, knowing there are moments to come.

What are some memorable experiences that you've had?

• Humping up a giant hill on a hot day in Paradise, CA then downing about six large fountain sodas and needing to pee really bad.
  
  
• Scary nights bicycling outside of town: Frogs and bats and graffiti bridge where I imagine people get murdered; A silent one-legged stray dog running up the road; farmer dogs chasing at my heels.


• Seeing the horizon break free of a tree line, with white clouds spread from cheek to cheek. Feeling the front wheel tipping over the crest of a hill, and knowing I am about to get throttled by wind.


• Opening my mouth as I descend and hearing wind whistle on my lips while I sing.


• Dancing in a supermarket after an eleven hour haul going on empty, because there is so much food around me. Hehe.


• Meeting unconventional people and hearing their stories. Travelers and enthusiasts and homeless and ones just getting by.

Some questions I would ask:

Have you found what you set out looking for?

- Nope. But I'm glad that I looked and know confidently that it's not there. There's no holy grail or magic fix to anything. But we ought to rule out the easiest possibilities. So we can wholeheartedly accept that solutions are difficult and be willing to pursue them.

Are you glad you made this choice? Would you do it again?

- Of course. Good or bad, it's the decision to take.

Not "Why are you doing this?" but "What does this trip mean to you?"

- It means life is bigger than any set of circumstances. Trapped in a life and can't get out? There is no prison of the mind that cannot be escaped.

Week of Deadly Calm

Abeline, TX

A week when nothing really happens.

Big steps

Fabens, TX

Wednesday, August 10th
El Paso, Tx to Tornillo, TX

Stumbled out of the city looking for a napping spot. Snatched a few z's at a community college, then moved on to an all-you-can eat lunch at Iron Skillet, a trucker restaurant.

Their gimmick is they use iron skillets instead of plates. Fried chicken is tasty, whatever serving surface it's on. Salad bar was good and so were their brownies. Couldn't move very far afterwards.

Fabens, TX

A tidy little town with homes across the street from businesses and public buildings. Too early for sleeping unnoticed, so I passed through.

Tornillo, TX

A kind security officer found me sleeping in front of a local high school. Escorted me to a park nearby and found a nice roofed table I could sleep on. It rained at night but I wasn't bothered.

Pesky mosquitoes did force me to cover up my face and entire body. Was hot and stuffy. Woke up with a swell on my lip and a bite on my face, but no big deal. I still got a solid nine (!) hours of sleep.


Thursday, August 11th
Tornillo, TX to Van Horn, TX

Morning camp

My body felt put together after being taken apart and I felt residual sleepiness throughout the day. But a long sleep was effective. I traveled a good distance today - about 90 miles, a personal best!

A red frontage road by the freeway looked like a running track. Reminded me of my running years in high school. It brought me back to a time when I poured my heart into every athletic, academic, musical pursuit I could master.

"Get obsessed and stay obsessed." - John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire. 

I pedaled as hard as I could, feeling teenage ambitions I sacrificed to follow a pedestrian path through university. Struggling against an institutional hypocrisy and discrimination that made it all so fruitless.

I also remembered shooting free throws at neighborhood courts alone into dusk. I was determined to make a hundred free throws. Then ten three-pointers. Or sometimes twenty, even thirty. The long hours of it.

I had motivated myself to think, this is the one time in your life you have to do this. Do it right, and don't wish it to be over so soon! It seems endless now, but how short it really is - if you practice well now, you will have the skill to play well later. If you don't, you'll wish you had the chance to do this, and had done this more, but you won't be able to!

With these memories in mind, I pedaled hard, knowing this road does not last forever, as difficult as the climb can be, but the mark I make on it will help shape the man I am to become.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Travel notes

Monday, August 8th
Las Cruces, NM to El Paso, Texas
 
Nothing much going on, besides the less than three hours of sleep I got at a middle school. Most of the night I was busy. You see, the university had a triple Pokeystop where kids were loitering until 2 am. I was there blogging and sneaking naps, and occasionally throwing Poking balls. Just, you know to blend in... even after everyone left... so I could have ALL the Pokemons to myself! (Ha ha haha)

Going uphill against 30 mph wind gusts around 7:30 pm. I wanted to lie down real quick.

Tuesday, August 9th
El Paso, TX

El Paso houses a long strip of Highway 10 with Texas on the high ground to the North, overlooking Mexico across the Rio Grande River to the south. It's a trucker route with lots of restaurants, hotels, and rest stops for 18 wheelers rolling through on their way to Florida or California.

Morning camp.

Construction workmen and in large part everyone else here were so chill. Drove by in the morning without a second look. 110% of people here are Mexican.

Breakfast at Hampton Inn. The Hilton hotel line serve fresh fruit.

Artsy shopping district made out of cargo containers.

Trendy clothing

The bottom cargo was a waterfall.

LOL great gag. I think it'd be a good laugh to sit on the next toilet, wait for the command, and slip a roll underneath the stall.

Got a shower at community college, then a Chinese buffet. Felt good.

Played flute until sunset in a large parking lot in front of movie theater.

Warmup

Talking to well wishers

Music, release me

Slept at Lowe's next door. Still searching for a long night of sleep so I have knees to speed into the heart of Texas. Got rained on around 3 am, all my bedding wet. Moved to front of the store under an awning and slept on a thin orange sheet until store opened at 6 am. Employees didn't wake me up or say nothing, they were so chill. <3

Google Timeline

If you use a smart phone with Google services, which every Android phone does, your location data is being tracked.

Good for me to use for blogging, so I don't have to break my head trying to remember what and when I did stuff.

If you opt out of it, probably what happens is Google looks at it anyway without telling you and then the government stores it its NSA database. But then you don't get a saved copy for yourself to look at.

If you turn location history on, Google periodically reports where you were at what time, how fast you were going and which direction you were heading. A stylized picture taken at one location showed up on the timeline as well.

All my data since December, 2015 is only about 50 mb. It's a simple text file in .json format.

The phone guesses what type of movement you are engaged based on your speed.

Algorithms can filter this data to extract almost everything about your activities.

A user is likely to be at home at night. We filter out the
user's points which occur at night and cluster them. The largest
cluster is deemed the user's home location.

Similarly, work location is derived by clustering points which
occur on weekdays in the middle of the day and clustering them.

Given a source and destination location (e.g. home and work), we
extract the points from the user's location history which likely
occurred on the user's driving commute from source to destination

- Extracting Patterns from Location History.

It pretty much knows where you work, where you live, what time you leave your house in the morning, what time you get to work and get off work, which route you take, what grocery stores etc you visit on the way home, what time you get home. Enough information to stage The Truman Show (1998).

You could probably also write an algorithm to estimate what time a person goes to sleep, by tracking phone battery usage. Note the times that app usage, battery usage drops and when the phone gets plugged in. This is less reliable, because a person might charge their phone as soon as they get home and not use it until the next morning... but you'd know what time they got home from their commute so... you could kinda tell that too.

If you have everyone's phone tracked, you could also discover who is having an affair with who. You'd know who lives in a house together, and could detect a lover frequenting the house when other family members are away or notice irregular activities like slipping away from work to a hotel etc.

The juiciest stuff is probably the classified secret part of Google, Inc. that are not shown to civilian guinea pigs. I mean, come on, do you really believe that all this technology is funded by 'commercial advertising' for Hush Puppy trying to sell you a Christmas slipper?

If I were in the CIA, I'd be much more interested to find which cave Bin Laden lived in and who he associated with. But I think they already knew, 'cause it doesn't take that long to find the most wanted man on the planet. More likely this technology is being tested internally on civilians to see if they can out Russian and Chinese double agents trading national security secrets.

Quotable

Critique:

A message Jesus instructed his disciples:

"For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Matthew 16:25 (English Standard Version)

Majority of commentary interpret 'losing one's life' as self-denial and abstinence from greed, self-interest, power, etc... well that's just hypocrisy of the ruling class saying to the poor, 'you guys can't do it.' Promising rewards in afterlife is equally exploitative of people's self-interest, just duping the gullible they'll get more later if they buy into the present. "

Joy of Sect. S9 E13.

Sect Mover: Your family will be housed here for the first 100,000 years, then something might open up in a double.

Homer Simpson: Why even unpack?

The point is not for God to come and reward me, send those guys to Hell. It's that *I don't want to be that kind of person* whether in this life or a next life. A good deed is it's own reward - namely, nothing. That's the point of it - to gain nothing, and want it for its own sake! I neither take riches with me in this life or another.

But the exploitative use of this message to get the poor to give up their life to service for those in power, promising them a paradise that conveniently requires no funding... obeying that is as evil as being a sinner. A man behaving righteous for the purpose of gaining the rewards in Heaven, so that he may enjoy them longer than the sinner enjoys on Earth, that is not virtue but stupid greed.

Alternative:

What I think the message ought to be

"Whoever works only to save his life shall lose it, but whoever devotes his life to purpose will gain it."

'It' refers to eternal life. But shouldn't require you to lose your life to find it. Ought to be whoever 'devotes' his life for my sake will find it.

The eternal quality of true life... it's not about living forever after you die... what's the point of stagnant repetition? That would be a short life, no matter how long it plays out.

Those clamoring for their own life, at any expense to others... they live and die with no value in between. No matter how many sons and daughters follow your line, it is not you. Your one drop of blood will be diluted in the wash. No individual lives forever. But it is the collective that can survive.

Having a purpose that matters more than individual pleasures, that is a virtuous motive to live by. Through that I can find the value of life.

The just message ought to be *breaking* the self-interested motivations. No eternal life, no heaven, no revenge of judgment! It doesn't matter. Let the greedy and powerful choose a harmful existence. Let their wealth amass. I'm not trying to win a game of rewards in this life or the next.

I ought to pursue a purpose. Relinquish self-interest, greed, and fear holding me back from doing what's right. Do everything I believe in, every minute of every hour. And I'll see that eternity can be lived in a day. And live all the eternities in my lifetime, never wanting more.

Midway upon my journey

It's time to take stock of the lengths I've traveled. Past week has been good.

After the hell of El Centro, I expected the entire length of the desert to be 115F hot, having to squeeze cacti for water, molting layers of skin under a merciless sun. But nope. Cool temperatures, abundant cloud cover, smooth roads. Only delays are from passing thunderstorms and occasionally wet roads.

Too heezy. 60+ miles no problem. Mostly downhill or flat. Yesterday I made it 70 miles on two bottles of water. Didn't break a sweat. Rode 9 am to noon, then 1 pm to 4 pm. With no sun to worry about, it's another day at the office. Kinda boring almost.

I complain about something, then God goes ahead and takes care of it for me, and then I wish for the opposite. I should just accept whatever happens as A-OK.

I have two cycling goals in mind for the open stretch coming up in Texas: 100 miles in one day, and 40 miles in two and a half hours (avg speed 16 mph).

The distance goal seems easy; I feel physically capable to do 120 miles. It's more of a lifestyle habits challenge. It requires mostly for me to get a good night sleep beforehand, stock up on water and food, head out early in the morning. The speed goal is going to be more interesting, because I have no control over the type of terrain, weather, elevation, or debris I encounter. I just have to work at maintaining top speed every day wherever I can, and hope my environment cooperates!

Monday, August 1st. Tucson, AZ to The Thing at Benson, AZ.

Tuesday morning, August 2nd. The Thing, AZ to Wilcox, AZ.

Rained out at noon. Flash flooding.

Stayed in town. Rotated from McDonald's to a hospital to a university to stay dry. Camped at a park.

Wednesday, August 3rd. Wilcox, AZ to Lordsburg, NM.

Crossed state border.

I <3 this agnostic sign.

How come it only rains on my yellow house?

Lordsburg has a historical ghost town, and is on the way to becoming one itself.

Luxury motel for $28. LOL. I thought the dump was closed down with prices from 1990, but it was still running.

Slept a few hours inside Flying J's at a table by their showers. And a few more hours outside the side of the building when I tried unsuccessfully to start traveling. Too chilly, let me put this sleeping bag on and.... zzz.

Thursday, August 4th. Lordsburg, NM to Deming, NM. 

I imagine Judgment Day as everyone turning into dogs. He he he.

Where all the playas at.

.

Home is where the Starbucks is. Reminds me of communist propaganda.

Mom is dear, Dad is dear, but not as dear to my heart as Chairman Mao! I love the Leader!

Crossed continental divide.

Friday, August 5th. Deming, NM to Las Cruces, NM.

 Morning camp. Sneaky spot outside a Hilton.

Mountainous clouds in the sky. Mountains on the ground. Las Cruces.

Yay! A city with cheap buffets!

Was supposed to hit El Paso the very next day. It's only 40 miles away, so I don't need to travel the whole day. I felt cranky in the morning, since it rained at night. Then after lunch, sleepy. The afternoon sun unabated heats to 90s F, it's no longer cloudy and cool. I stayed the weekend like this pretty much.

Saturday morning camp outside some hotel.

My lower lip split in the middle while traveling, from heat or salty dehydration or inadequate nutrition or whatnot. Then I woke up with my top right lip and bottom left lip very swollen and I don't know why. Maybe to match my dark skin with negro lips.

Saturday night I slept outside a Barnes and Noble campus bookstore. Not very comfortable. Not much sleep. Not going anywhere again. Gotta hit up that $6 buffet at Cici's Pizza.

Found a stray cat to play with on Friday. Someone at the university feeds her. She was neither completely trusting, nor deathly afraid of people. I had to meow at her a lot before she would come close enough to pet. But once I found her favorite scratching spots, she was soft butter.

the cat meowerer

The next day, I found at least a dozen ticks burrowed in kitty's ears. I tweezered out as many as I could find. She meowed in discomfort, but didn't bite or scratch. I held the scruff of her neck and talked to her to stay calm. Pretty good kitty.


Looking ahead

1700 Miles to go. At a rate of 50 miles a day, that's about 35 days to Jacksonville, FL. But I need to jerk off on alternate days, preventing travel, so it'll probably take me two and a half months. :-J.

I have saved locations of McDonald's, Walmarts, Lowe's, buffets, hotels, and universities all over western United States.

I park in a handicap spot without a permit.

Since it has been raining, I tidied up my pack. I waterproofed my blankets by bundling them inside a blue tarp. It conveniently detaches for use as a seat cushion. I lay my backpack on top when traveling, looping the handle of the bag over my seat and securing the side straps to a netting that holds my tarp bundle together. Then I tuck the bag underneath a water resistant covering.