Take me home, car. I'm drunk

Driverless cars, y'all. That is the future. Indeed, to a certain extent the future is now. But I find myself completely fascinated with the various news articles that predict driverless cars will be the norm within 20 years. A future in which cars drive themselves is one of my favourite things to daydream about. And I love that this is a future imaginable within my lifetime.

Because the thing is, old people are not very good drivers. I used to work as a member of the American Media Conspiracy and it seemed stories of senior citizens careening their land yachts into houses, or motorcycles or pedestrians were almost weekly. Type the phrase "elderly driver" into a Google news search and be amazed at what a menace to society are your grandparents. Soon enough it will be your parents. And then it will be you.

That last one is the most important to think about, I suppose: one day it will be you. When I worked in the American Media Conspiracy I would frequently lean back in my chair and pontificate to any and all within earshot my opinion that licensing should be more stringent. I would lament the political might of the AARP and AAA and automakers, and their combined capacity to prevent any such measures from ever being seriously discussed.

But think about it a little more deeply, with or without various organisations' interests, and there is something very sad and cruel in such suggestions: you're taking away a person's freedom of movement, their freedom to go where they want to go when they want to go.

I have found myself thinking a lot about this in recent months because of the unexpected side-effect that came from Jenn and I getting rid of our car last year (1). My inability to just hop in the car and go has exacerbated my homesickness to the point of debilitating depression. This is one of the reasons I have become so obsessed with motorcycles lately: they are a cheaper (and often more environmentally friendly) means of achieving that all-important sense of personal freedom. It is incredibly important to me.

One day, though, in, say, 20-30 years, my hips won't really be limber enough to throw my leg over a motorcycle. And afterward, in another 10-20 years, my eye-hand coordination won't really be quick enough that I should be operating a car. But I doubt very much that at that point I will be mentally content to just sit and watch CNN for the rest of my life.

In imagining my life that far forward, I feel tremendously relieved to think there will be driverless cars. I will not have to lie to myself about my driving ability ("Oh, my eyesight isn't that bad... and I'm only going down to the store...") to maintain personal freedom, I will be able to just get in my car and let it worry about the road. Perhaps auto manufacturers will even think to install some sort of voice software that will patiently listen to whatever rantings are going through my old-man brain. Imagine the scenario:

"Why, Mr. Cope, what a good idea you have," the car will say. "It's a shame there aren't more men like you, instead of all these kids with their boomity-boom music."

"Hey, car," I'll say. "Did I ever tell you about the burlesque dancer I fell in love with?"

"You have, Mr. Cope. But it's one of my favourite stories. Please tell it again."

I find this all to be an incredibly happy thought. What a wonderful future it will be. Seriously. It's going to be so awesome. Sure, there will always be enthusiasts who will want to drive cars manually, but most of us, old and young, will leave the driving up to the vehicle itself.

And it occurred to me the other day: when this awesome future arrives, what will happen to road signs? Cars will be navigating via SatNav and shared mapping and radar and lidar and so on, but they won't really be reading road signs, will they? I mean, take a look at the intersection on the left, which is what I see from my office window at work.. 

Look at all the signage. A driverless car would not need three stop lights, placed in different positions to ensure they are seen. A driverless car would not need an enormous arrow telling it which side of the road to drive on. A driverless car would not need a box junction marking. A driverless car would not need 'No U Turn' signs. All this information could be communicated to the car electronically.

A few signs might be kept if they are useful to pedestrians. And perhaps at least one stop light for old-school manual driving enthusiasts, but much of the visual clutter could be removed.

Additionally, will these cars need street lights? Will the cars themselves need lights? In areas where there are no pedestrians, such as motorways, perhaps visual pollution could be eliminated. The act of driving cross-country at night could become a safe, high-speed stargazing experience.

I love to think about it. I love to imagine being able to go where I want to go when I want to go but with the added joy of being able to concentrate on other things. What an amazing future it will be:

"Did I ever tell you, car, about how I used to have to do all the driving myself?" I'll ask.

"Yes, Mr. Cope. It sounds exhausting. You also explained how the driver's licensing system was a racket controlled by the corrupt and unimaginative."

"Oh, Lord, car. It was. It was. Hey, do you mind putting on some music?"

"I'd love to, Mr. Cope. I certainly hope you're thinking of blaring ZZ Top again."

"Car, you are in luck. Because that is exactly what I was thinking."

-----

(1) I still had not earned my UK driver's license and the cost of insurance for a foreigner is insane.

Imbalance

So, let me just spoil your mood for a moment and tell you that in the past several months there have been countless times in which I have thought I was dying. Homesickness, financial woe, loneliness and their resultant depression are at fault here. Suffering them has become an inescapable, recurrent facet of my life. And in those moments when I've felt they were killing me –– eating me from inside –– I have often wished they'd just hurry up and get the job done.

But as I said in a previous post, I am cursed with good genes and a healthy lifestyle. Death will not come for me anytime soon unless I force it, and I'm too awesome for that.

I have reached a point of extreme imbalance in my life. On one side I wake up each morning to Jenn, who I swear gets prettier every day. I'm sure I'm not just imagining that. I think it is physiological fact. Though, when I look at pictures of her and I when we were first starting to go out, she's damned hot there, too. Either way, I sometimes look at her and think: "What? How is this my life?"

And often just she is enough to outweigh the extreme misery of homesickness-induced depression.

I'm going to digress for second here, but, dude, where the hell did that come from, by the way? Remember when I was going crazy with need to move to Britain? Remember when I first moved here and only half-jokingly said I planned to throw away my U.S. passport because I didn't intend to use it anymore? Where's all that sentiment now? And how did things swing so far in the opposite direction? OK, yes, a lot of awful things happened, but how I feel is now so incredibly different from how I used to feel that it is hard to fathom.

Whatever the case, this homesickness-induced depression is so, so, so awful. I have had days in which I've sat there in bed thinking: "I can't go on." 

Each breath hurts, such is the emotional pain. Every single intake of breath is filled with sorrow and ache and hurt and loneliness and fear and the terrible, terrible feeling that too many of my 37 years have been irreparably wasted. And then comes the awful realisation that even though I'm curled up in a little ball, crying and thinking, "I can't go on," in fact, I will. I'll keep breathing for years and years to come. And I'll have to endure this evil hurt for decades more.

This hurt is exacerbated by circumstance. Caused by or causing it all is the feeling that I have lost my creative writing mojo, that I will never be the writer I want so much to be able to call myself.

That, mis amigos, is imbalance. On one side is this incredible, beautiful woman. On the other side is every negative emotion one can generate. 

I do want to go home. I'm not cagey about that anymore. 

For a long time, it was the case that if someone asked me about moving back to the United States I would do that thing my father does when he's asked a question he doesn't particularly want to answer: starting his response with a protracted "Well..." and following it up with diplomatic language he hopes will bore the person into forgetting their question before he has to get around to actually answering it.

So, I used to say: "Weeeeeeeeellllllll, you know, I'll grant you that on the outset it can appear that there may be certain areas in which the overall quality of American life may perhaps rival or in some cases exceed that which is experienced in the United Kingdom. Climatically, for example, one might prefer the greater variations afforded to the United States, especially in terms of summer months. This all said, however, it's important to weigh other aspects...."

And on and on. Now, though, my answer is: Yes. I want to move back. If you can help me achieve that goal, let me know. Otherwise, stop rubbing salt into my wound (1).

Because the fact is, y'all, this is where I live. I am here now. And in as much I can either keep wishing each breath could be my last, or I can try to rediscover myself and the whatever-it-was that made me give up everything to come here in the first place.

This is a realisation I was coming to in November, as the rumblings of a new great depressive episode were becoming impossible to ignore. In the months previous I had managed to shake off an exhausting bout of depression and writer's block to complete work on a book I've titled Tales of a Toffee-Covered Llama. Already by that point the project's momentum was beginning to falter. I had written the thing and sent it off to my agent but was now doing little more than waiting. 

Since then, of course, the agent has rejected the project, which was/is the source of all kinds of pain and confusion about who I am, what I want to be, or what I even can be. But I'm digressing.

The point is that I knew a depressive hell was coming and I wanted to counteract it. At roughly the same time, I had suddenly become terribly interested in motorcycles. The interest fed into by desire to fight against depression, to find a way to connect with this place that is my home at the moment, regardless of whether I want it to be anymore.

"When have I been happiest?" I thought. "When have I felt most myself, or, at least, most like the self I want to be?"

When I'm moving. When I'm in a car or pickup, trundling along with just my thoughts and the ability to go wherever I want. Often that 'wherever' is not so great or exciting –– in my teens I rarely drove beyond Bloomington's city limits –– rather it's the ability that's important.

I decided I should get a UK motorcycle license. Motorcycles are considerably cheaper to run than cars and better suited to the tiny roads of her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, whilst providing that all-important ability to just go. But additionally, I felt, getting my license would be an accomplishment, a thing done, that could bolster my confidence and help me to take on other challenges, like finding a way to get my book published.

Before long, the whole motorcycle thing had become an obsession with me, to the extent I even set up a separate blog where I talk of nothing else. But it turned out not to be the confidence booster I had hoped. Getting a license in the UK isn't as easy as when I got my license in the US.

Firstly, there are more tests –– five in total. I started the whole process in February and only finished yesterday. Secondly, it is more expensive a process. And thirdly, the tests are harder, especially the last one, which I failed twice before passing. This confidence-boosting exercise backfired. It filled me with anxiety and self doubt that was only exacerbated over the months by all the depression and homesickness and then the fact that my book had gone dead in the water. It ate up money I didn't really have and in so doing worsened the situation I was trying to fight against.

In March and April, especially, I felt myself drowning in frustration and sadness. 

Yes, OK, let's step outside of me for a second and admit that much of this is a great big pity party. I am an educated white male with all the privilege that society still gives to such a status; I have a super hot wife; we live in a flat that we own; we live in a country that has had a stable government for several hundreds of years, which has been at peace with its neighbours for more than half a century, and which provides really great things like free health care and Strictly Come Dancing. There are literally billions of people on this planet who would lose their shit for the opportunity to have half of what I've got. And I'm sitting here going into death throes because my not-very-exhaustive efforts to get a book published were unsuccessful, I don't have bragging rights to claim immediate awesomeness in manoeuvring a two-wheeled piece of machinery according to the notoriously persnickety British standard, and I miss sunshine and Dairy Queen.

But it's the internal, y'all. This is what makes depression so hard for people to understand. I can list off my strengths all day. I can without exaggeration paint myself as the most incredible muthahuggah you have ever met. But that doesn't take the pain away. A defeat is a defeat regardless of context and it carries extra weight within the mind of a depressive.

In March and April, my book was rejected, I was turned down for a full-time job for which I had interviewed, and I twice failed the final motorcycle exam. These defeats left me feeling further away from the people and places (most of them in Minnesota) to which I would turn in such a situation. It felt like hell.

There's just Jenn trying to counterbalance all this incredible negative weight, and it's not fair. I want so much to fix myself, to be the better man I think (maybe "wish" is a better word) I can be. But I feel otherwise alone in trying to do so. 

Family and old friends are thousands of miles away, as are the roads I would drive and the creeks and rivers I would swim. I went to the aforementioned provider of free health care, but in Wales that does not extend to mental health. I was told there was not really anything they could do for me. They had me go to the library and check out a book, so maybe I could sort things out on my own. In the introduction of the book it says this: "It may not be wise to undertake [the methods prescribed in this book] while in the midst of an episode of clinical depression."

But then I finally passed my motorcycle exam. The weather was perfect –– sunny and warm –– and as we rode the bikes back to Cardiff (the test had been in Newport) I felt so greatly content and at peace. I had the ability again, and perhaps that could help me rediscover my ability in other things.

Perhaps. It's hard to say. In the process of writing this post I received phone calls rejecting me in two jobs for which I had interviewed last week. I feel now the reality of my same old situation: I may have a license but I still do not have the money for a bike. I still cannot explore any part of this country I tried so hard to move to. I am still thousands of miles away from family and old friends –– both physically and financially. The energy with which I awoke this morning has slipped away.

After the second rejection phone call came I sat down on the bed and held my face in my hands. 

"I'm not sure I can do this anymore," I said aloud. 

But in fact, I will. And that's the most depressing part.

–––––

(1) Seriously, yo. People will say things like: "Why don't you just move back?" 

Hey, why don't you just kiss my ass? Are you going to pay for an international move? Are you going to find me a job? Are you going to find Jenn a job? If your answer is "no" to any of these questions, shut your cake hole. 

You know, and I know, and they know

I don't care how many times I watch this, it's awesome every time.

 

The art of failing

I don't know how to start this blog post. I feel obligated to write something, feel an internal longing to try to organise the noise in my head with words, but I'm not sure I really care enough to do so.

I turned 37 years old last month. It used to be that on each birthday I would write a blog post or column (remember when I wrote columns?) pretending to lament the fact I was still not president of Cuba. It's an old in-joke –– a response to yet another spate of sustained failure. 

Failure is what I do well, yo. It's not just a matter of never accomplishing things, but failing to accomplish them in such a way that is baffling, that leaves just about everyone, myself included, thinking: "Gosh, I don't understand how that happened."

That's the mark of an artiste. The guy who fucks things up completely, no one ever believes in him. But me, I almost get it right, even excelling in certain areas to make the failure seem all that more happenstance. A fluke. A one off.

Look at my history, though. Look at the past 20+ years of my life. Look at how many big ideas I've had. Look at how many times I've almost gotten things right. There's a pattern there, amigos. My failings are not lone misfortunes, they are the one consistency of my character.

But I'm jumping ahead. In high school, when all my friends were looking forward to going to exotic universities in exotic places, I was faced with an indeterminate number of months of summer and night school before I could earn my diploma. As our senior year drew to a close we were asked to state for all-time yearbook posterity what college we were going to and what our future plans entailed. I said I was going to the University of Havana and planned to become president of Cuba.

The faux lamentation of my continued civilian status started about a decade ago –– around the time I decided seriously that I wanted to be a writer.

Oh, hell. I feel like such a fraud to have ever called myself such a thing.

Last year I got a writer's bursary from Literature Wales. Amazing! They gave me money to sit in front of my laptop and tap away. Awesome! And that's exactly what I did. Fantastic! I wrote what I felt was the best piece of something I had ever written. Super-duper! 

But since then it's gone nowhere. Classic Chris-style failure.

The book languished in the hands of an agent until recently and now I find myself wondering whether I even care anymore. Career-wise I am almost exactly where I was 10 years ago with my writing, possibly a little further back because I've spent so much time swimming in the stagnant pools of Welsh literature. 

(I don't really mean that as an insult, just that if you're writing in Welsh, well, you're not going to go very far with it. The same things are written by the same people for the same minuscule audience over and over and over. It's a dead end.)

I can't help feeling I should stop.

When I was a teenager, my family was blessed to live in a house so large we had a room we didn't know what to do with. Down in the basement, I called it the Room of Forgotten Things. When there was an item no one really knew what to do with –– an old jacket, a possibly useable bicycle part, a silly hat –– it would end up in the RoFT. Don't confuse yourself into thinking this was a storage room, though. Things are organised in a storage room. People store things in them, to be used again. The RoFT was a place to throw something you couldn't quite get yourself to put in the garbage.

I use the word "throw" literally. We would just open the door to the room and heave the item in question into the air, usually shutting the door before the item landed.

This is where should go my writing ambitions: into the RoFT of my mind. Put it there with every other bad idea and dumb thing –– from the time I spent trying to get people to call me by my first name, to attempting to assimilate to Welsh-language culture.

But in this case, I suppose, the 'F' in RoFT stands for something else. It is the Room of Failed Things, and it is too full to close the door. Things spill out and suddenly attack me in the middle of the night.

I have been toying with the idea of giving up on writing. I don't know how serious I am in this because I don't know what else I'd do. I am cursed with good genes and a relatively healthy lifestyle. It's fair to assume I've got 50 more years on this planet; I need to be doing something. And if not writing, what?

–––––

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25 Sure Signs You Grew Up In Texas

Doug Stanhope: Come to America

"America is fucking great. It really is. I know you don't want to hear this from me but that's the truth. Brits love to bitch about America, and they love to hate America –– the government and the wars and the torture. But that's not life here, come on.

Life in America is actually fantastic. Everything works; come here. I want you to be here. Just get a nonstop from Heathrow, go directly to Florida, walk down that ramp and tell me if you can't immediately sense: something's really good here.

Rent a car. Get a convertible. Fill up the tank. Look at the price –– fucking $11 a gallon (in the UK). Look at the price; you're going to fill up your tank, you're going to fill up the backseat, as well. Just because it's that fucking cheap comparatively.

Drive down big, empty highways. Drive to the beach. There'll be a half a dozen cabana bars open, it's only 8 o'clock in the morning, and they're waving at you. They're smiling at you and they're waving for you to come on in. They want you to be there. Because they don't know yet that you don't tip.

Come on in. Come on in. Have a seat at the bar. She's going to hand you a big breakfast menu... You know what we have for traditional American breakfast? Choices. Yeah, lots of choices. You want some eggs? How do you want them done? We can do them 10 different ways. You want French toast? You want a waffle? Pancakes? We have chocolate chip pancakes. They'll put a whip-cream smiley face right on there for your fucking British ass. Or maybe you want a whip-cream frowny face to match that dour expression. You're still trying to fight liking here.

Order a cocktail and she's going to do something you've never seen before: she's going to pour it like this, and it'll go up and down and she keeps pouring it. How can this possibly be right? In the UK when you order a mixed drink some scientist pops out of the floorboards in a lab coat, and he uses a system of weights and measures and a fucking stainless steel cylinder that assures that you will not get any more –– even the vapors –– of one measured ounce in your fucking $15 cocktail.

Life here is really fucking good. Yeah, we have a lot of dumb people here, but you can afford to be dumb here. Everything makes sense. You're lost, you don't know where you are. Where are you? 77th Street? Go a block, you know what's next? 78th Street. It makes sense. You don't have to think. It's not like your roads that are all criss-crossed and mesh-mashed and they're all built 1,100 years ago for donkeys and carts, and you don't know where the hell you are or where you're going.

Hitler did his best to help the UK and level that country flat so they could start over. Like "Extreme Country Makeover." And what did the Brits do? They spat in Hitler's face and built it back, brick by brick, exactly the way it was 1,100 years ago when it didn't make sense.

Come to America, you can stay on my couch."

Getting in gear

"The transmission on this thing is kind of fubared," I say, trying to jam the bedraggled Yamaha back into first gear.

"Well, give it a bit of time, Chris, I'm sure it will come to you," says the bloke stuck watching me stall out the 125cc bike as I attempt to do circles in a car park.

He doesn't believe me. But then, why would he?

Kick, kick, kick. Clutch out, clutch in, clutch out. Roll back, roll forward. Kick, kick, kick. Finally, the neutral light goes out and I return to the all-important task of perpetually turning right.

"See if you can get it up to second in the straight, Chris," he shouts.

I am doing my CBT –– Compulsory Basic Training –– the first step in the prohibitively complex process of becoming fully licensed to ride a motorcycle in Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The CBT is shaping up to be very much like the whole of the licensing process I went through in Minnesota when I was 18 years old. In that process, I was required to watch a film, then listen to a dude with a mullet explain the benefits of wearing leather before being led out to a parking lot and explained the bits of a motorcycle. Then I drove around some cones for half an hour and was handed a piece of paper saying I was legal to ride.

In Britain, this is just the beginning. There are several more steps after the CBT: at least three days more training and four tests.

Paul, my instructor, has already spoken to me on the virtues of wearing a helmet and protective clothing. He's not keen on leather. A large man with just a slight lilt in his accent that reminds me of Matt Baker, but with the Welsh valleys habit of incorporating into every sentence the name of the person to whom he is speaking, I get the sense that in a more social situation he might be disparaging of motorcyclists who prefer leather, might suggest they suffer from some kind of fetish. No such sentiment has been actually spoken by Paul but I still feel silly for having shown up wearing a leather jacket.

On the positive side, he did commend me for my extensive knowledge of the Highway Code.

I have been going around in circles for roughly 30 minutes, in a car park that is no more than 50 metres in length. I struggle to accept that there is actually enough space to get into second gear before needing to drop back down to first for the corner. After stalling the bike half a dozen times attempting to downshift I decide I will just get the damn thing into second and keep it there.

"Very good, Chris. Up to third when you're comfortable," Paul shouts.

For those of you playing along at home, the gears on a motorcycle are manipulated by your left foot. You pull in the clutch with your left hand and move a little lever up or down accordingly with your foot. Bafflingly, the gears go like this: 1 N 2 3 4 5. (Many bikes have a sixth gear) Because the transmission on the bike I'm riding is awful, I am occasionally mashing it into neutral when I downshift. This isn't a terrible thing, but the high revving that results from throttling up when I think I'm in gear is, I know, communicating to my instructor that I'm an idiot.

I decide to go with the trick of simply keeping it in third. I am now whipping around the car park in a tight circle that make me think of the Cage of Death that was a requisite part of circuses when I was a boy. 

Paul signals for me to stop. I bring the bike to a halt roughly 6 feet away from him, still having not yet adjusted to the shorter stopping distances of a motorcycle. He has me get off and asks that I simply watch as he demonstrates emergency stops.

"Oh, sugar," he says as he putters the bike toward the end of the car park. "These gears are a mess."

I feel tremendously vindicated.

Paul allows me little time to revel in this victory and has me guess how much distance he'll need for an emergency stop. Again I gauge it based on how much space I'd need to stop my bicycle. I overestimate by roughly 10 feet. The hard stop throws the transmission forward and Paul struggles to find neutral.

"Bit of a trick, that one," he says. "We had someone drop it the other day. Have to get it looked at. But if you want to hop on, Chris, and give the emergency stop a go."

I ride the bike to a corner of the car park, turn around and come at Paul as fast as I can. He stands there like a matador and raises his hand, signalling me to stop.

I stop. Hard.

"Looking for control here, Chris," he says. "We'll give it another go."

I do it again with lesser chaos. It was after this part they gave me my motorcycle endorsement in Minnesota. In the car park of Whitchurch High School, however, Paul just sets up some cones. I do figure 8s and slow cornering and pretending to check for traffic. After a few minutes of this we have our fourth tea of the day, and Paul bolsters my confidence by complimenting my sense of balance. I sign a piece of paper I don't read but that I am certain absolves 1st Class Rider Training of any and all responsibility should I get myself killed. Then we head out onto the road. The actual road full of actual cars.

If you have never driven in Britain, the basic rule here is: PAY ATTENTION TO ALL THE THINGS. There are roughly 32 million cars in this country, squished into a space smaller than the state of Oregon (population 3.9 million) and driving through towns and cities that, for the most part, were laid out long before anyone even imagined a car. Maneuvering the country's narrow roads is a challenging and stressful experience. Especially so when you are sitting on an unfamiliar and mechanically touchy motorcycle, and have the slightly Matt-Baker-sounding voice of God echoing through your skull.

I have jammed a radio earpiece into my helmet so I can hear Paul's instructions as we move down the road. His voice is calm, soothing, but equally unnerving because, you know, it's in my head. Having long been one to toe the line of sanity, I am quite used to having voices in my head, but generally they are aware of one another. In this case, Matt Baker God doesn't seem to be listening to what everyone else in my head is saying. It's off-putting.

"Cyclist on left. Empty cars. Old lady peeking from behind car on right. Oncoming car slowing, possibly planning to turn left," says the highly-tuned Safety Voice in my head.

Because I cycle to work every day, I've gotten really good at quickly identifying and assessing the various hazards on the road.

"OK, Chris," Matt Baker God says pleasantly. "Coming to a built-up area here. What's that elderly woman going to do? Mind that silver car, where's it headed? The cyclist, Chris. Eyes on the cyclist."

Matt Baker God is identifying all the things I've seen already but in a different order. Because he is inside my head, I can't help assuming he has heard the other voices already and is now identifying new aspects of the hazards. Perhaps the old lady is armed, or the cyclist on fire. My adrenaline level cranks to 11, my eyes dart around fearing I have missed something and that a very hurty collision is imminent. No. Nothing new. In the confusion I make an awkward downshift.

"Nice and easy, Chris," says Matt Baker God. "Coming to a stop now, Chris. Remember: ABC."

British people love speaking in acronyms and Paul has spent the day offering me a hearty alphabet soup for which I cannot remember the significance: OSL-PSL, PINS, BOLT, and so on. I am now past the point of even considering trying to recall the meaning of ABC (1) and simply bring the bike to a lurching halt 10 feet short of the line.

"Drivers are easily confused, Chris," says Matt Baker God. "Stop that short of the line and they're liable to try to come 'round you, which can be very dangerous."

It goes on like this for an indefinite amount of time. Matt Baker God's perception of the world is oh-so-slightly different enough to add more confusion. When he tells me to turn "just past that tall tree," for example, I temporarily get lost in an internal discussion of what qualifies as tall amongst the four equal-sized trees ahead of me.

At a roundabout, I spot a woman completely unaware of my presence. Almost by accident, I honk at her, which emits a pleasantly surprised kind of cheer from Matt Baker God.

"Clever use of the horn, Chris."

I get lost in the immediacy of my actions –– assessing and responding to all the things, doing whatever Matt Baker God tells me –– and become wholly unaware of my geographical position. Eventually I find myself being directed into a McDonald's car park in a boxy retail park. I have no idea where I am; I can't even guess.

"We'll get something to eat here, Chris," says Paul. "Sun's out. Want to sit outside?"

Any time the sun shines, the British insist upon pretending it is summer. It is 7C (44F) and I am physically shaking from cold and adrenaline; I would very much like to sit somewhere warm and close my eyes for a moment. But because I have trained myself to simply respond to Paul's voice I nod in agreement. I buy MgNuggets and fries and consume them in greedy handfuls. This is the first time I have eaten at a McDonalds since 2005. I have missed out on nothing in the interim 8 years.

Lunch over, we get back on the bikes and head out.

"I'm just going to let you ride, Chris," says Matt Baker God. "Try to remember your routines. Relax. Enjoy riding."

We reach a section of country lane, then out past some fields. I push the little Yamaha to 55 mph, which is about all she will do. The throttle is rolled all the way back. The wind blows cool through my helmet. The gas tank is cold against my thighs. The cantankerous machine I have been swearing at all day melts away and now I am just gliding past rolling green. There is no real sense of controlling a mechanical thing; it moves almost on the power of my thought.

The great cliche occurs: I feel free.

We turn onto Thornhill Road and head down, into Cardiff. My heart sinks a little because I know we are on our way back. Soon we are heading into Whitchurch Village and Matt Baker God is directing me to the car park of Whitchurch High School.

"A very good ride there, Chris," says Paul after I cut the engine. "I'm quite happy with that."

We go back inside the no-heat classroom and he fills out a piece of paper. He shakes my hand and that is it. I have my CBT; I am licensed now to ride a 125cc motorcycle –– under certain restrictions –– and free to carry on toward becoming fully licensed. There's a long way to go yet, but I know it'll be worth the effort.

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(1) Accelerator, Brake, Clutch - the order of things to pay attention to when stopping. After, of course, checking my mirrors.

Ability and audacity

I cycle past the Senedd every day. Well, every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. But still, it's kind of a nifty thing. If my life were a film and its producers strangely insistent upon keeping Cardiff as the setting, they would almost certainly have me cycling past the Senedd every day.

It's an establishing shot, you see. Nothing says "This story is set in Wales" quite so firmly as having someone pedal past the seat of Welsh legislative power. Of course, if the film were shown anywhere outside of Wales (or, indeed, in a fair few places within), the significance of the Senedd might not be immediately recognizable. I'm sure Americans would think my commute took me past a really swanky Holiday Inn.

I'm part of the elite 2.3 percent of Cardiffians who commute on bicycle (1), an act facilitated by a relatively temperate climate and a handful of traffic-free cycle routes. One of those routes is the one that takes me past the Senedd -- a roughly 1.25-mile stretch of car-free road connecting Cardiff Bay to Penarth. It is a route that suffers occasionally from inattentive skateboarders and frequently from strong gusts of wind that cut across the bay and Severn Channel, but those things are tolerable given the absence of speeding multi-ton metal boxes.

The other section of my commute, however, requires that I be on the roads: tiny, cars-parked-on-both-sides streets; hectic, there-are-no-rules intersections; and sooty, drive-as-fast-as-you-can city arteries. In Penarth I have to be alert for high-strung parents taking their children to work and drivers who are keen to do everything in their car other than, you know, drive (2). On the roads in Cardiff Bay I find myself dodging buses, white vans, and visitors to the city who DON'T HAVE A CLUE where they are going. And, of course, all of these people have to get wherever it is they are going now. No, now. Right now.

"If cycling conditions remain much as they are across Britain, cycling will remain a very minor mode of urban mobility, practised mainly by a committed hardcore of cyclists who feel able to 'do battle' with motorised traffic," wrote Guardian reporter Peter Walker in a recent blog article.

There is a sense of that in my commute, most certainly. When I get ready in the mornings -- pulling on Lycra, fastening Velcro straps, pulling on a high-visibility vest and clicking the clasp of my helmet -- I am reminded of the ritual of getting ready for a contact sport. I think of my brother when he played ice hockey, fastening all the pads, or myself before a rugby match, taping my ankles, knees and wrists.

On the road, too, my mind clicks in the same way it did when I played rugby, trying always to keep aware of and away from the 15 guys who wanted to tackle me. But getting hit by even the most vindictive prop is still preferable to collision with a Ford, so in the back of my mind there is knowledge that the repercussion for mistakes may be severe.

I have no doubt this is part of why the percentage of bicycling commuters is so low. If you were to ask my mother, for example, to navigate some of my route ("OK, Mom, you just need to zip across these three lanes, hell for leather, and move into this turning lane. When you get there, you'll probably want to not put your foot down because the gaps between cars are very small and you'll need to be able to get going again very quickly -- there will be a large van or truck behind you, which will give you exactly 3 inches of space.") she would patently refuse. Hold a gun to her head and she would seriously consider the bullet.

City cycling produces challenges some people are not willing to take on. It requires ability -- knowing the laws, being aware in what ways those laws are most commonly broken by drivers, and the physical/mental stamina and agility to maneuver through and amongst cars -- but also audacity. A confidence cranked to 11. Arrogance. The power to exude your will over people who can kill you simply by putting their foot down. Anyone who's known me for a while is probably aware that I am fully capable of being a hyper-aggressive ass. I generally try very hard to avoid being such a person, but on the road I find it hard to imagine how I could be anything else and still stay safe.

To that end, I often think it is not just the conditions that keep cyclist numbers low, but also those who are cycling.

There is the attitude, of course. Having spent many years on the fringes of the minority community that is the Welsh-speaking world I have learned that niche groups, communities of people outside the mainstream, are often littered with obnoxious, evangelical zealots. In the Welsh world it's the All-Welsh-All-the-Time hyper-nationalists who are desperate to turn any outsider's action into an affront; in the cycling community it's the people who reference the Dutch in every conversation and seem to place motor vehicles somewhere on the Evil List near Nazism and baby punching.

Then there is all this gear we're wearing. Oh, for the love of Pete, we wear so much purpose-built gear. Lycra, helmets, breathable windbreakers, Velcro straps, gloves, scarves, special bags, special shoes, lights, reflectors. And the cottonpicking high-vis. The phrases "bad-ass" and "high-vis" are almost never uttered in the same sentence. I hate wearing high-vis, but also can't deny that every time someone moves past my office window wearing high-visibility clothing my eye is automatically drawn to him or her. High-vis is supposed to make me see a person, and against the interminable gray of daily British life it is very effective.

I have to think it's all likely to put off a novice. It creates the feeling that you have to act a certain way, have to look a certain way, and have to spend a certain amount of money before you can even take part.

In the equally small and silly motorcycling world there is the word ATGATT: All the gear all the time. It's a term used for that guy who dresses like he's about to do the Isle of Mann time trial when he goes out to get milk. The ATGATTer's response, of course, is simply to point to his skin and note that it's all there -- a crash is going to have the same effect regardless of destination or intent.

The same is true for bicyclists. Indeed, I have lately been legitimately considering getting a full-face helmet (3). But there's no denying I look like a damned fool. And even if I don't look as silly as I feel, if I were someone trying to promote cycling I'd worry a person would look at me -- or any of the other roughly 9,000 commuting cyclists in Cardiff -- and think: "I don't have all that gear, nor do I have the money for all that gear, so cycling isn't for me."

What all of this means, however, I don't know. The reason I started writing this post was simply to note that I cycle past the Senedd thrice a week, which, as I say, is a kind of nifty thing to have in one's commute. Whether I actually enjoy my commute, and whether I think other people should be doing the same thing. I'm not sure.

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(1) A somewhat impressive figure if you consider that Welsh attitudes toward commuting via anything other than car are often quite similar to American ones. It is higher than the UK average but still a good distance from London, where as much as 10 percent of the population -- depending on neighborhood -- uses a bicycle.
(2) Seriously, yo, if you text and drive I have nothing kind to say to you. I don't care how slow you think traffic is moving, nor how good a driver you think you are. I have friends who text and drive and, genuinely, I wish injury upon them. Nothing awful, nothing from which they cannot recover fully, but I think they deserve a very expensive accident that results in a major broken bone and months of discomfort.
(3) Not only would it provide considerably more protection in a collision, I think it would also signal to drivers that I may be insane and should be given wide berth.

Caveat

At the start of the year I decided I would quit drinking. This was a resolution that was easily facilitated by the fact that I spent the first several weeks of 2013 suffering some incessant kind of cold that just kept showing up again right as I thought I had rid myself of it. I am determined to simply ignore the fact I'm suffering depression in hopes doing so will convince it, too, to go away, but I have no doubt that said state of mind is a contributing factor in my inability to fully recover physically.

Lord, that was a long sentence.

As I say, I'm not so much 100 percent these days, but I have, at least, arrived at the stage where I'm starting to feel my no-alcohol pledge may have been a bit extreme. I had decided to become a teetotaler because: a) I think CM Punk is cool; b) Beer costs money; c) More often than not booze doesn't improve my mood, and, in fact, has on a number of occasions served only to make things worse. Why spend money to be a miserable person who by his actions is unlikely to win CM Punk's friendship? 

But, the thing is: I kind of like to have a drink every now and then.

So, I have come up with seven exceptions to the no-drinking rule. Accepting that I will still only drink in prudish moderation I've decided it's OK for me to imbibe if one or more of the following conditions are met:

1. I'm having Rioja, shared with Jenn over a good meal.
2. I'm having port, eating popcorn and watching "Strictly Come Dancing."
3. I am eating Mexican food or legitimate barbecue (1).
4. I am outdoors and it is warm enough for me to comfortably wear just one layer of clothing (e.g, a T-shirt).
5. I am in a situation that involves open flame. I'm thinking specifically of campfires but would make certain exceptions for fireplaces or chimeneas. 
6. I am 40 miles or more away from home.
7. I am watching a sporting event live, or televised if in the company of at least two other people.

All that probably makes it seem that I've not really given up drinking at all, but you'd be surprised. Some of those things are damned tricky to achieve in Britain, the fourth condition especially. The last time I remember it being warm enough for just a T-shirt was 2010.

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(1) If you don't know what I mean by "legitimate" it's a good bet I would be drinking water with whatever you think barbecue is. A clue: it does not in any way whatsoever involve sausages bought at Tesco –– not ever.

I blame you, Robert Pirsig

Over the past few months I've become obsessed with motorcycles -- to the extent that I am increasingly able to rattle off tedious facts about displacement and torque and various other words that are as foreign to the average person as Congolese plant life. You don't have a motorcycle, so you don't really need to know these things. I understand that, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. I find it difficult to think about anything else.

I also don't have a motorcycle, but I tell myself constantly that Someday I will. And when that magical faraway future becomes the present, I tell myself, I will be one of those dudes who pays attention to his bike and is capable of resolving most mechanical issues on his own. I will be a guru, man. I'll ride around with little more than a roll of duct tape and the hunter-orange screwdriver I bought at Mills Fleet Farm, confident in the knowledge that if there's a problem, yo, I'll solve it.

(Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it)

Inevitably, of course, this sort of thinking was going to lead to my deciding to read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which is what I started doing this weekend after giving up on the esoteric tripe of Zadie Smith. In the first few pages of the novel, a character is introduced who seems to hate the idea of fixing his own motorcycle. He prefers to take his bike to a mechanic and let him deal with it.

He does this not because he is dumb or elitist but because he possesses a hatred/fear of of the great uncontrollable unknown that swirls around him. Technology in its broadest sense is named as the object of his frustration, but I take it as something even less tangible. And it's a same sort of anger/anxiety that I struggle with in my own self. This is why, when I had a car, I would feel physically sick and filled with rage when I had to take it to a mechanic.

My car would make a rattling noise or fail to operate in the way we expect of cars, and I would have only a faint idea of the problem. I could point to the right front wheel well, say, and identify that a noise was coming from there, and thereby narrow down the list of possible maladies. Maybe it's the brakes. Or the steering. Or the suspension. But I wouldn't know. I didn't possess the knowledge to say to the mechanic: "Here is the problem, good fellow. Correct that issue and all will be well."

No. I had to take it to a person whom I inherently did not trust, to a person who did not really care about my car in the way I care about it (the mechanic doesn't need my car to get to work, he/she doesn't use my car to pick up stuff from Ikea), and who stood to benefit financially from exaggerating the severity of my car's issue. I had to put my faith in this person, I had to force myself to trust them, and after a series of inconveniences that would too often leave me feeling like a needy girlfriend ("Hi, I'm just calling to see if my car is ready... uhm... because you said it would be ready five hours ago and that you would call but you hadn't called, so I thought maybe... No? It's not ready? You found an additional problem with it? Oh, yeah... OK... that's cool. Well, you know, if you could just call me when it's ready. OK... uhm... bye... Call me.") I had to give them great sums of money that would set me back for months thereafter.

As much as I like where cars can take me, I have always hated them for the way they make me feel -- so inferior and out of control. When I sold my Honda Accord for scrap last year, I very much wished that I could be there to watch them crush it, to laugh and spit on the crumpled heap of metal that had caused me so much misery.

But, of course, a car is an inanimate object, and the thing I felt angry toward was the culture around cars and my ignorance thereof. I didn't want to have to learn about cars; I didn't want to invest my mental energy in them. I wanted the damn things to take me from point A to point B. In reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I realised I was the dude with the BMW R60, the dude who felt angry and cheated by the fact that mechanical things sometimes break.

Motorcycles, meanwhile, are notoriously more temperamental than cars. They are famous for zipping along doing what they're supposed to do be doing, then suddenly, inexplicably, not doing it*. Bike was going, bike is not going, seemingly nothing occurred between those two states apart from the passage of time. But, for some foolish reason, I tell myself that I will be OK with this aspect of motorcycling. Perhaps I am lured into a false sense of security because a motorcycle's engine is smaller and easier to see: all the bits are there and relatively accessible.

"Hell, fixing my bike will be fun," I've told myself.

I'm sure that "fun" is exactly the word I'll use when I'm sitting on the roadside in pissing rain, trying to figure out why the engine has seized up. But I'm not allowed to have any of that fun yet due to the absence of funds. (See what I did there?)

Which leads to last night. In an effort to somehow find money that could go toward motorcycle ownership I've decided to stop taking the train to work. Instead, I will take my bicycle. Brilliant. A monthly savings of roughly £28. That's not a lot of money, admittedly, but having £28 is more than spending £28.

The only flaw to this plan, though, is the state of my bicycle. When I first moved to the UK, I brought along a fancy new Trek 7.3 FX. It had to be disassembled to go on the plane and was reassembled in Cardiff by a nice chap with a shop in Roath. That was the last time it saw maintenance. In the interim 6.5 years, I have ridden the bicycle hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles, been bumped by a car, run into a bus (just because you can go fast doesn't mean you can stop fast), and subjected it to all other forms of neglect.

It's a testament to the quality of Trek bikes that it is still usable. But the bike definitely needs some work. It needs new tires, new chain, new gear cassette and new crankset. Those last two things are words I have just learned in the past 24 hours, because I have decided that if I really am going to fix stuff on my motorcycle of the future, I should be able to do the same on my bicycle of the present. I mean, hey, how hard can it be? Right?

Right.

Great googly moogly are bicycles loaded with fiddly bits. Dozens and dozens of itty-bitty grease-covered bits that have no visibly logical way of fitting together. So that if you are so unlucky as to drop the bits on the floor before getting to thoroughly examine them and memorise their order, you will not have a clue as to how to put them back onto the bike. I may imagine motorcycle maintenance to be "fun" but the words coming out of my mouth as I adjusted my brakes last night were: "You shitting cock of worthless fuckery." 

That's my new nickname for the bicycle: SCOWF for short.

But I'm committed, my friends. I am determined to restore the SCOWF to full working order, even though doing so will eat up money I'm supposed to be saving for a motorcycle. And, yes, becoming skilled at repairing and maintaining the SCOWF won't go very far toward developing the skills necessary for doing the same with a motorcycle, but I think it can still be beneficial. I'm hoping it will help me accept that some things require time and effort, and help me to overcome my fear/disdain of putting in that time and effort.

Or, it will instill in me a new appreciation of trains.

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*I should point out that modern motorcycles are infinitely more reliable than the machines of old.