NEWSLETTER vol. 4

My back went out somewhere between Reno and Coon Rapids last Tuesday. I couldn't tell you the exact moment. I only know that by the time I got home, walking had become something I attempted rather than something I did, and it stayed that way through Saturday afternoon. My back runs on a schedule, every eighteen to twenty-four months, like clockwork. This round showed up right after a stretch of real momentum, a good stretch of running and hard endurance work crewing for Nora, which made the stop feel less like a pause and more like a wall.

Depression follows the back on the same clockwork. It buried me this week, and it runs an old play once it's in the house. Historically, that's meant pulling away from social media entirely, deleting accounts, thinning out who I let see me. This time it also convinced me the rink isn't enough, that I failed by leaving Trek, that I need to go find something better before anyone notices I haven't. Two different coats, same exit. Both are ways of disappearing without having to call it that.

This time I caught both on the way out the door instead of after. The urge to thin my accounts showed up right on schedule, and I let it stay an urge. The urge to scroll job listings between struggling around the house and struggling around the rink showed up too, and I noticed it as the same brain that's remarkably good at building problems that don't exist yet and handing them to me as if they do. Naming a pattern while you're inside it is different from naming it after.

Yesterday, however, I fumbled into a kit slower than I'd like to admit, carried the bike up from the basement, and got myself and the bike out to the street anyway.

Thirty-two miles later, back pain included, I had the ride. Sitting down this morning to write this, a third exit showed up, quieter than the other two. Does the world need another newsletter. Does anyone care what I think enough to keep me saying it to the thirty-five people who signed up because of a Zamboni post or otherwise. The same brain that builds problems before they're real is fully capable of building a case against the one thing that's actually helping.

I wrote it anyway, same as I rode anyway. Doubt showed up first both times and lost both times. That's twice this week the choice held. Write. Drive. Move. Bikes, running, movement. Stagnation is devastation.

Music this week: David Bromberg, Demon in Disguise. Apple Music | Spotify