CUL-DE-SAC

There’s a route that people take when they want to see San Diego Bay and get some exercise. It starts at the central train station downtown, dips all the way down to Imperial Beach on the border with Tijuana and it travels back north on a spit of land called the Silver Strand, which ultimately runs into Coronado Island.

The words bay and bike are alliterative so coming up with a catchy name was easy. The Bayshore Bikeway. I rode the bikeway’s 24 miles yesterday. That may not sound like a huge distance but when I arrived in Coronado my legs and ass were sore and I was really ready to quit. Thankfully Orange Avenue in the tony seaside town is full of good places to get a beer and lunch.

The Bayshore Bikeway

But… why was I doing this? Because I never had before. Also, I’m training to cycle across Iowa this summer in RAGBRAI, a bike journey I’ve known about since I was a kid, growing up in the state. I’ve been reconnected to the event (which I never took part in) by my buddy Scott Horsley who started doing it with other reporters for NPR who had to cover the Iowa Caucuses.

He told me their cycling team was known as “No Pie Refused,” which refers to the fact that locals who live along the RAGBRAI route across Iowa have a tradition of offering pies to the bike riders. It took me a while before I realized this was also their sad, lame joke about what NPR stood for.

Getting back to the Bayshore Bikeway. The upper part of the bay route coming out of downtown is dotted with hotels and other parts of the tourism/convention industry. Travel further south and you see shipyards, commercial port ops and the San Diego navy base. Lots of hardhats and uniforms.

Go further south near Imperial Beach and you see the saltworks, with huge piles of salt that are brilliant white in the sun that are extracted from seawater and sold to midwestern cities that use it to melt the snow and ice on their streets in winter.

As industry fades from the scene the southern part of the bay looks like a lagoon with a shoreline that fades into the water and you see small islands that are covered with reedy plants. Seabirds float on the water then disappear as they dive for food.

I’ll tell tourists who come to San Diego to do the Bayshore Bikeway. They have to be into biking — it is 24 miles — but they’ll see a lot of stuff tourists don’t normally see. And it’s flat. It’s along the shoreline so it’s flat and there are no hills to climb.

I returned to the mainland of San Diego on the Coronado Ferry. I chose not to go back the way I came and double my milage on the bikeway… for reasons stated. A woman on the ferry winked behind her sunglasses. On the trolley back to my neighborhood I saw a beautiful, cheerful couple who were in their late seventies. I imagined what they looked like 40 years ago.

Maybe I’m too old for this long-distance cycling shit. RAGBRAI is a big rolling party but it is about 60 miles a day. Next time I’ll try to turn around when I get to Coronado. It’ll be good for me.

I’m in my 50’s and I have two parents around the age of 90. And this has brought the reality of aging and death closer than I’ve ever known. Now I no longer understand… in fact I cannot even conceive of the desire to live forever.

Maybe nobody really wants to live forever but every part of our culture seems to be aimed at defeating deadly diseases. I’m a Catholic and I know that life is sacred but so is death, even though I can’t be entirely sure we go to meet God when we’re done with life. I accept some things on faith but I’m still thinking about that one.

Another thing I think about is research that shows you can reverse cellular deterioration with certain proteins that reprogram cells back to an embryonic state. It doesn’t quite mean aging can be stopped. But maybe it means aging is malleable and living to 150 is a possibility we can take seriously. But who wants to live to be 150?

I think of the well-used saying “When you’re tired of London you’re tired of life.” I can imagine being tired of London or any other place, and I think we reach a point where being tired of life is perfectly natural.

Life is a process of seeing the same stuff over and over and it’s not always that great. People complain about the same old things and they keep performing the same acts of stupidity and selfishness. When you’re young everything is new and exciting, even the bad stuff. Get a little older, you tolerate it and roll your eyes. When you get old you’re sick of it and it makes you grumpy. You look at the hopefulness of youth and you think what they hope for will never happen and when will they stop kidding themselves?

It gets harder to see life as a gift when the thing looses its luster.

Like I said… this a natural tendency, and how long do you want to live like that. I ask myself how far do we need to go in avoiding the inevitable grasp of death.

People march for the causes of defeating cancer or heart disease. But if you don’t die of cancer or heart disease then what are you supposed to die of? I have never experienced the death of a person who is very close to me. Uncles, grandparents, long-lost friends… their deaths were distant and not something I would expect to to be powerfully moved by.

When my parents die I wonder if I will I feel pain and sadness, emptiness or simply relief. I wonder this when I see my father struggle into the passenger side of a car and pull his right foot slowly, slowly into the footwell. It takes him an eternity to just get in. He’s to a point mentally when it takes him an eternity to finish a sentence.

It sounds weird, even shameful to suggest we should welcome or be relieved by death in any way. But we do. And I’m pretty sure when my time comes, I will.

In the American presidential election I am one vote among tens of millions. But it doesn’t seem that small. It seems a lot smaller. It seems meaningless. The reason for this is the Electoral College.

American presidents are not elected by people, they’re elected by states. And today, December 20th, the states cast their electoral votes. All of the state’s electors go to the winning candidate in the state. I have influence over who wins in California but no influence over who wins the presidency.

Donald Trump lost the election by almost 3 million votes, and he’s going to be the next president.

Unless you live in a swing state your vote is wasted. You may as well write in Calvin Coolidge. And if you live in a large urban state your vote counts less than it does in a small rural state.

In Wyoming each elector represents 143,000 people. In California each elector represents 500,00 people. In the 2016 election Donald Trump lost by almost 3 million votes. And he still is going to be the next president.

With the Electoral College, the presidential election is a stacked deck in a game of cards. The arcane system of choosing presidents through state electors was a compromise reached in the late 18th century that had little to do with reflecting the will of the people.

It had a lot to do with protecting the interests of former colonies that were jealous of their power. It had a lot to do with protecting the interests of slave holders, who managed to get people they considered their property to be counted as three-fifths of a person in the U.S. House and in the Electoral College.

The argument for getting rid of the Electoral College is as simple as the principal of one man one vote. My vote for president in California should have exactly the same value it has in Wyoming or South Dakota. It should be exactly as important as a vote in a swing state because they are no better citizens.

We need to have a popular vote for president. It’s long past time. The Electoral College is undemocratic. It devalues the office of the president, and it has to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

I got a Christmas card from my old friend Vera Bestgen, who follows this blog all the way from Hamburg, Germany. She said I’m not writing enough. She doesn’t just mean I’m not writing to her enough. I’m not writing in CUL-DE-SAC enough. She’s right of course.

I started this blog in October of 2009, after a took a class that taught me to use the blogging software WordPress. My first post was the story of my first trip to Disneyland at the age of 49. Since then I’ve written about Germany and the year I spent with Vera and her family as a high school kid. I’ve written about my daughter’s first communion. The list goes on. Seven years worth.

I’m a professional journalist and I learned a long time ago that I didn’t have the time or inclination to write a successful blog. Maybe I don’t really get it… this blogging business.

What I write is essentially a diary. I love to write, and when I open my laptop and pour myself a whiskey on the rocks I get great satisfaction describing things and summing up my thoughts on a topic, even when I know I may be the only person that’ll read it.

A lot of what we know about the past comes from written correspondence. And the care people used to take with the letters they wrote is not seen in the volumes of electronic correspondence today. Historians are bummed. But maybe blogs like this are the same thing as the letters of the old days. Maybe what I’m doing is writing letters to myself and, naturally, to anyone else who cares to read them online.

I’ve gotten way off the point of not writing enough.

But I’ll write more and I’ll try to keep them interesting. The last thing I wrote about was my dog that died. Since then we’ve gotten two new ones. Here they are.