Rides, ramblings and rants on a motorcycle.
- We are scientists, too!
11.04.2007,11:24 PM
All your roads.....
What are roads?
Do they really belong to us?
I can't sleep, so I'm going to go off on a little philosophical jog here and maybe I'll write myself to sleep. And bore everyone in the process.
It's been......two? three weeks? since we returned from Tennessee and I finally finished sorting and cataloging all the photos. Of course, my Mac finally protested being gorged with over 5K of full resolution photos and started regurgitating warnings at me. Like your kid before he or she has to throw up:
"Um...Mom....I think I'm going to......"
Warning, warning! Danger, danger, Will Robinson!
I finally burned two DVDs with photos to archive and trashed them off the laptop hard drive. Do you know how hard that is? It's like cutting off your fingers millimeter by millimeter. And when they go in the trash I hear a tin can lid close; but when I empty the trash, there's little puffs of smoke wafting across my monitor and sounds of ripping cyberplastic echoing from the sound card. (If I'm negligent a deep raspy voice whispers "Hey, Knucklehead! Such and such needs your attention.")
I kid you not. I love my Mac.
So, several hundred photos and six videos later, I finally have them all organized; the best go in a folder with the appropriate day and size (600-1000 pix) and the originals are stored on the hard drive where they sleep in little sarcophagus files, extracted copies imported into iPhoto where they can be stretched croped intensified sharpened and hopefully nothing has to be done to them at all. (I'm resisting the modern DSLR magical fix of Photoslop).
I cut and pieced together a video of the water crossings while riding the learning curve of iMovie. A fun program that has way more potential than I am even aware of, and of which I've only just touched the tip of the iceburg. but the raw material, aka the originals, are not all that good due to inherent first run and more error than trial. But everything is a lesson, right? I'll edit and piece together the next video next weekend.
And then I ask myself 'Why are you doing this?' And I shrug: I dunno. And what does this have to do with roads?
Because everything we do as a cyclist has to do with roads. But we don't own them.
They own us.
At one time in life someone may have said to you, or they will, "That road leads to nowhere." And they'll wonder why; what the heck are you doing, and shake their head. And we'll stand there and smile. Because we know something they don't know. And many never will.
Some drag their feet on the roads of life, others set anchors and never move. Most go on the roads as if they were on moving walkways in the airports: so many people moving and going nowhere. Too many give up. They sink. They don't see, they don't hear, and many times they don't care.
We do. Sometimes we may not even know why. We just do. And we can't help it. Because the roads -tarred, gravel, dirt, wet, sandy, snowy, grassy, root-bound- are us. They own us and take us places others don't go, can't go, don't want to go, can't find, can't see, don't hear, don't feel.
But we do.
The roads don't go to nowhere. They go everywhere.
And so do we. Because it's in our soul and in our blood.
And we can't stop.
See y'all on the road somewhere.
