Prediction: 2025 will be the year that we normalize things that, previously, were unimaginable.
Hostile takeovers of sovereign nations. Congressional bloodshed. Jogging. Nouns and verbs that scarcely a decade ago would have been laughable as merely ideas will become table-stakes for basic survival.
Take your physical condition - round, like a tater tot - in the passenger seat of your buddy's car on the way to Pantani - as a guiding example for just how much things have changed. Look, I get it. The snow slammed down hard five weeks ago, right where you had pencilled in "Pantani Training Ride" on your calendar, and it dug in deep, hardened, froze you out of your own free will. You could only bear witness to the transfer of power. You rode the trainer exactly once, for an hour, where you were confused to find you'd broken a spoke somehow, and you had to cut it short. When did this happen? Were you strong enough, at one time, to have produced enough watts to break a spoke on the trainer? Did someone, in the space between then and now, tie you up and feed you like 3,000 pork chops? What have you become?
What have we done?
It's a rare thing, in my experience, to show up unsure if you've got the condition you need to be successful and actually have it. Most often, if you don't know, you don't. But bravado is something, anyway. So you shove off at 10 AM like you always do, down Markwood, at least in good company.
What's not clear is this: have we evolved beyond the need for history? Maybe forgetting the things that came before us - all those lessons learned - frees us for what comes next. At least, that's what you're banking on, because, look, that's all you've got. You're up and over Fox mountain in a hurry, son. Someone flats and you don't stop to help them. You're running 90 PSI in those 38s and you're on a hot streak, pardoned for the crimes you committed, free like Icarus: YOU ARE RIDING AN E-BIKE.
Dose of lightning in your bones.
Blessed by the plug in the wall.
Kissed on the forehead by death, himself, like a baby.
You absolutely pummel that thing on the pavement. You own Blackwells Hollow now, from the Mormons in the South all the way up the side of the Doyles to the Sun, as gluttonous and far as you could ever desire. All those Monacans that left long, long before you got here, before you named the rivers and cut the trees. Their loss is your electric mastery. You are a God now.
Yet, somehow, despite all those bonus watts, things start to get weird near the top of Simmons Gap. There is absolutely no reason that you and your extra 1500 watts should be feeling this bad, aside from the awful truth that this always happens. You've got the throttle wide open. The gravel is buttery smooth. The sun shines, but still, comeuppance unfurls eternal, those same mailboxes you always pass, that jab of a headache near the top of your spine, those same hallucinations of aliens. Retribution lurks. Is this terrorism?
Down Wyatt, because what else can you do? There's a corner halfway down with no fewer than 3 riders and bikes, sprawled horizontal across an ice patch, looking a little like Rebs and Yanks right in there in the same muck, frozen on top of each other. One of them is wailing, but you've got The Fear now, so you drag a foot through the inside corner, maintain speed, and press on. Those are passes after all. Maybe this will all work out.
But on Brokenback, this damn country, eventually your number always, always gets called. Nothing is permanent. Not long after you make the turn and head up, up, up, straight into the sun on your fancy waxen wings, the battery shits out, fizzles and pops, dies with a soft whistled dirge. You're in a military tribunal, now, fingered as both the culprit and the victim. You melt, right into the side of the hill, walking, then crawling, then oozing, just like you always do. Someone hands you a gel. Someone says the road will level out soon. Someone says this is no road.
Perhaps that fitness was never yours to begin with? Perhaps this country was never ours? We're all just renters now. We are passengers on an unmoored balloon, unprepared for what comes next, unable to jump off.
Maybe you make it back up Markwood intact and maybe you don't. If you do, you've probably learned nothing, and that's fine. No one is going to tell you what to do anymore. But if you don't, and I hope you don't, this has all been a gift. Failure is the only way out. If it doesn't get really, really bad, we'll continue to make the same mistakes, higher and higher, closer to the sun.
We are electric. We are half-molten now. We have no idea.
2/9 at 10 AM. May we be so lucky.
Up, up, up.
