i dusted my guitar yesterday and pumped air into my bicycle and rode the river for a while. god willing i might meet some old chords and new friends and find my way back to source. a dusting off may not go a great distance but i’m telling you…every creative effort makes a moment a little brighter for me and you. and that’s something to love about life.
Tag Archives: Bicycle
suicidal tendency
death by MVA
There must have been 4 tons of car coming at you with a green light letting us through. Me in my Volkswagen, an old man in a Chevy, and a lady sliding off the highway in a Subaru. The time was 2pm, the city drenched by waves of heat. I saw you riding your bicycle slowly into the intersection ahead, and wondered would you stop? You kept pedaling with an icy stare into us, 3 lanes of traffic against your perpendicular. I’m not sure if you wanted to die, but you sure knew what you were doing. The physics, the mathematics of the equation, did not at all look promising yet you kept a steady pace, a mane of black hair falling behind your tan face. You looked maybe Latin or Native American, and ready to die by MVA. Why? Did you lose someone close to you? Were you socioeconomically starved? We all pressed into our brake pads, and the old man in the middle lane lay on his horn.
We were long gone when I wondered; were you laughing in the aftermath of an adrenaline rush? Or were you disappointed? Or had you gone on to Broadway, indifferent to us all, searching for cool water, a smoke, friends, and some shade.
bicycle
cycling makes my world
go round
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| k on motobecane cafe noir |
cycling
cycling adventure (part II)
I remember the moment, standing over my duffle bag full of camping gear at 4am, half-awake and trying to choose between a pillow and long underwear. The pillow won. Over the next several days we woke up from camp @ 530am to a car alarm someone was setting off on purpose (and i thought i got away from the city) to sucker us out of our sleeping bags and tents and inside for coffee and breakfast before heading out for our long daily adventures up in and around Auburn, California… my decision would come back to haunt me… zooming down steep hills at 7am in nothing but a cycling jersey and t-shirt clocking 40 miles an hour max was a fine recipe for bronchitis — and yes, it was so worth it. We had a blast, me and my team ladybugs compadres and i definitely contributed at least 250 miles (i confess i didn’t do them all this year).
The weather was outstanding, the crew was incredible, the food was excellent, the cyclists were friendly, and the Gold Country Fairgrounds was a very nice homebase. Nobody got injured (i heard one person maybe fainted) and everyone worked together to make it a safe and sweet trip. I particularly loved listening to tent zippers and trains chugging along, rattling through the night. I hope to stay on the every other year plan but who knows. I seem to have less and less time anymore to do anything. For now my plan is to get back and finish Book #3 of my trilogy — the Daughter of Darkness series — so you probably won’t hear from me for a while about running or cycling events.
Oh! I forgot to mention i could not wear my prescription eyeglasses so i got a little bit lost every single day of the ride. We were trying to follow arrows taped to the ground to know where to turn and thankfully we had maps and crew looking out for us, so i never went more than a mile or two off track. Also, in Auburn i greeted a unicyclist with a coffee who was riding a steep grade like a pro, and one gorgeous solitary deer the last day on the American River Trail heading home. There were plenty of horses and cattle and goats and bees in boxes, and the occasional snake which had unfortunately been run over. We also got crop dusted the first day at one of our rest stops. The planes seemed to be dusting us more than the fields! Don’t know what that was about – we don’t look like crops? – but it felt like a mean country bumpkin trick and we got out of there as soon as we could!
The final day we rode into William Land Park [via the Sacramento Riverside road and Marina and Old SacTown and a desperate turn through Loaves & Fishes and the Railyards] to a staging area for lunch, and I was the VERY LAST one to arrive because i got lost again that day, somewhere near Loaves & Fishes. I got on course and pedaled hard and made it just in the nick of time, as we had to line up and ride with a motorcycle escort to be at the Amphitheatre by noon for the celebration. A cyclist with a puppy dog in his basket fell over and some asshole almost ran him over. Everyone got scared and angry for a second. Then he was back on his bike, puppy intact, and everything was golden again because the group that was there to celebrate our homecoming was spectacular and loud! And the mayor of West Sac was there to give a nice speech as we stood up with our bikes on the stage and hero medals around our necks. I shed some tears myself, which immediately crystallized into salt on my cheeks. I was rather dehydrated.
Anyways, thanks to all our friends and supporters, and to the organizers of the event! This year we have thus far raised close to a quarter million dollars! Love from me to you.
KatYa ‘just another ladybug on wheels’
cycle
cycling adventure 2017
We are 16 hours from liftoff, the start of the ride at the Barn in West Sacramento, and i am rushing around getting some last minute things in place, doing my laundry, securing cat-sitters, packing my bags, getting the bike ready, doing therapy, and, well, i just had to sit down for a minute, take a deep breath and thank god and the supporters who helped us get here. This is my second NCAC. NorCalAidsCycle 2015/2017. A 300-mile, 4-day bicycling adventure through Woodland to Placer County then up to Lake of the Pines and back to Auburn, down to Roseville and back up again, then down through Granite Bay to Beals Point on Lake Folsom and back home to William Land Park.
The forecast is just great, sunny weather through the weekend and in the mid seventies. Unlike two years ago I know many people in this years ride, some from the 2015 ride, others from Kaiser (including my doctor who is riding with his sister this year), and I belong this year to ‘Team Ladybugs’ which is comprised of 4 riders and 3 crew members all of whom i work with at the GHC in Sacramento where I am a volunteer counselor. Feels good to belong and I am excited to get on my trusted ride, the same one I used in 2015 and have owned since 2011, sleek black steel with carbon forks, Motobecane’s Cafe Noir. Two wheels and twenty seven gears of delightful freedom.
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| quentin and k. selfie @ rainbow bridge |
All contributions to this cause are going directly to the healthcare providers who locally have a direct impact on the community, offering essential and immediate services at low to no cost and sliding scale, to the people who need them. Anywhere from hiv testing to counseling to advocacy to affordable medical care, respite, crisis intervention and basic needs for indigent peoples who lack them. California is remarkable for offering services that other states in this great country do not provide.
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| keyko and k. william pond rec |
I can’t wait for the camping tech-holiday and break from work. I’ve been working 12+ hour days all this year if you include my job, my new volunteer job, and all the hours i put into writing/blogging, and I am pretty darn beat up and frazzled! Thank god i love what i do, or else i would surely be miserable. I haven’t had to train for the ride as hard this year, thanks to the marathon training i did all of last year.
Anyways, the beauty of life is in the journey, day by day. I wish you could all be riding beside me but for sure you will be in my heart. And may we all be grateful for our health and longevity, and keep the memory of those friends and family we lost to HIV/AIDS alive today. We will be having a candlelight vigil on saturday night up at the Gold County Fairgrounds in Auburn where we are camping. I will at that time light a candle for them, too.
love and gratitude,
KatYa ‘just another ladybug’
jaded as jade. revisited.
‘Jaded as Jade’
by Katya Mills
There i was…
Headed out from my apartment on foot
Cheap walmart moccassins
Expose my toes
Dressed to kill fashion
With blood on my arms
Where my kittens attacked me
While sleeping off a one night stand
With my pen
There i was…
A young american
Single white female
Contemporary genXer
Using animated semi-fiction
to report
the hideous truths
could never be received
by the culture
embedded within
them
There i was…
Bicycle framed on my shoulder
Takin’ myself too seriously
And then some
All the way down the
Stairway to the
Street…
Tryin’ for light-hearted
All through the morning
Highlighted strands of hair
Fallin’ out behind my fuji feather
Lickin’ the base of my neck like
Blonde flames
Under the influence of anti-gravity
In the dark and baby blue of the dawn
There i was…
Down the street after dawn
Dealing with all the personalities of the world in a single room…
And then some
Tolerating as best i could tolerate
Day #5 without a cigarette
My own personality, the most difficult and least refreshing of them all
Splitting hairs with split personalities
Spitting in the wind
Jaded as jade
There i was…
Banana fucking split!
Upright on my bike
Riding back home
Five miles of
Legs and no
Hands
Praying i might take a dive on the railroad tracks
Just so i could feel something
Different
Split ends and all
my hair falling back ‘gainst
gravity to lick my
neck in the
wake of
me
There i was…
With the sinking depression that clung to my soul, all of my life
Sinking back into my pain, as the burning sun rose silently over my head
In central california
Here i am…
Split ends and all
In the wake of me
Without shade
Praying for a miracle
Jaded as
Jade
Last night
i almost met my maker last night at the mercy of the mind of a lunatic, in flight. Or just plain mindless. Or selfish, impatient, impudent, or blind. Or had bad timing. In an absolutely unforgivable way.
I did not stay to find out. Lacking the ability to forgive, as I was.
I was fresh out that place unseen and unforeseeable, where life and death overlap. Where glistens the oil upon the rod ’round which the serpent coils. With intent to kill.
Yeah. Could have been my immediate end. Unlike the beginning. Much less predictable.
I just rode headlong into the flank of her white whale, on my black bike. The side paneling of an SUV against flesh is quite responsive, I am here to say.
Now I can be here to love words some more, and kind people I can be kind to, in kind. I am here to continue doing what needs be done, directly. Here to love men who love women who love women and men who love men who love women.
And kids too. And dogs and cats and feather pillows. And family. Sunrises and sets. And the imminence of things almost not yet.
The imminence of things almost not yet.
The imminence of things.
Almost
Not yet.
