Archive for December, 2009

My handlebars were just a pinch narrower than the gate at the end of St Alban street. I rode the path so many times I never even had to slow down to get through. I knew I could make it, and carried as much speed as possible onto the dirt path on the other side, sliding around the corners, wearing the soles off of my shoes faster than I could outgrow them.

People yelled at me to slow down, but I just couldn’t. I was 10 years old, my bike was my future. I could go anywhere, the whole world was open, and if you couldn’t catch me you couldn’t tell me what to do.

Years passed by, and with every one there were more and more ‘slow down’ voices. More people who said what could and couldn’t be done; voices saying that this way was the right way – the only way – to do things. Saying that the future must look a certain way because that’s what the past always looked like. And little by little I listened. I slowed down. Tried to do it right. But it just isn’t in me to do things that way, and invariably I walked away bored, frustrated, joyless. I can’t seem to do the right things right. Hell, sometimes I can’t even do the wrong things right.

The first time I left – packing all my stuff into a little yellow car and setting out with a friend for someplace new – it wasn’t for all the reasons I thought it was. It was because some part of me felt that if I could just reach escape velocity, if I could just get to Los Angeles, I could be right for once. But we didn’t make it and it took me nearly twenty more years to get where I wanted to go.

I met that old friend for dinner few months ago, a block from my home in downtown L.A. and we talked about that trip.
“Man, I’m sure glad we went back.” He said “Who knows where we’d be if we came out here then.”
I didn’t even have to think about my reply. “I’ve always wished we’d kept going.”

The part of me that went back, won that day. It told the other part that I was wrong – that I had to fit the mold. The battle was far from over though, and for all these past years, the two of me have been fighting it out – the one who says to listen to everyone else, and one who says to listen to the wind.

One of them needs to die.

I click down a couple of gears as I approach the gate leading to the bike path along the Los Angeles River. Up ahead a flicker of the past appears, a 10 year old kid on a bike. He looks back and laughs at my uncertainty. “Hurry up!” he yells, “You can make this; I’ve done it a thousand times.”

I put the bike in the big chain ring and hear the wind get loud.

Whose voice will you listen to this year? What gates will you go through?

Running errands in the early morning Los Angeles rush hour, I nick the light at Olympic and Fig and ride the green wave all the way to Western where a bus blocks the lane and the light turns red. A man standing on the corner wearing a metro uniform and a bright orange vest starts talking the moment I stop.

“Man, I mean to tell ya,” he starts in. “There’s this guy right and he gets on the bus and he’s wearing a dress, but he has long hair, and he’s real pretty, but then I looked closer and I see he’s got stubble. Stubble! So I got a look at him again, and I check out his legs under the dress and they’re smooth like he be shavin’ em, but then I looked up and there is that stubble. Stubble! I told him he needed to boost his hormones or something.”

The light changes and I head south toward USC, take care of a little business and back on the bike towards home.

A big green garbage truck and an orange metro bus conspire to keep me in my place, dinosaurs, moving slowly with traffic until we finally all meet up at the red light at Adams and Broadway. The next block is my left and I’m three lanes away from where I need to be in heavy traffic. I jump the light the second it goes green, drop two cogs down and throw Cameron into the street. The dinosaurs bellow and belch but they can’t keep up now that I am in the clear. The light at Main turns green and I lean through the corner before opposing traffic can move, slow down for a minute and cruise nice and easy back into downtown.

I stop again at 4^th and Main on my way to the bank. A dark complected man with a shopping cart stands 20 feet back from the intersection yelling at a pale man with an identical shopping cart who stands at the edge of the crosswalks.

“Its green man!” yells the dark man. “It’s green! You can go motherfucker!”
The pale man looks back and smiles a wide toothless smile and slowly pushes his cart across the street. Once he has crossed, the dark man approaches muttering, “Crazy-ass white boy cross the street I don’t wanna be close to you with that hep-C.” Then yelling “Cross the street!” at no one in particular.

The light goes green and I push off.

The crazy mans shouts grow fainter as I move up the street. Up ahead I see a UPS van moving slowly towards the turn lane – my turn lane. I drop down a cog and increase my cadence.

I slay Dinosaurs.

The only problem I have with doing the same thing day after day is that it means doing the same thing day after day. The old site is coming down to make way for some other projects that need that domain name. I’ll pull some of the better posts over here once I figure out how to do that, the rest of em will end up in the dung-heap (see sidebar on appropriate Rhinoceros behavior).

Welcome to bigrhinodog.com. I’m riding on a train right now, on my way to Santa Barbara to spend Christmas with a good friend. I love trains. For forty three dollars I get a round trip ticket – each direction a two and a half hour elevated ride through the desert and along the ocean. The ride north ends at a beautiful terminal a block from the beach in Santa Barbara. My friend will meet me there in her little convertible and we’ll go to her house where a man from Italy is cooking lasagna for our holiday dinner. It’s a short trip; I’ll be back home snuggled on my couch with the dogs by late this evening. Still, every time I get on a train, it feels like an adventure.

I made some changes the last few months of 2009. Sold my business, went on a long bike ride, took a couple of trips and picked up my camera again. Bigrhinodog is an evolution of that change and of my original blog which was hosted at chiplatshaw.com.

The new The new blog still has random bits and pieces of my life, but is more closely focused on photography, writing, creativity, and all the stuff I go though in the pursuit of them. I think the time away from photography was good for me. It helped me see more clearly how I want to live my life. I want stories. I want pictures. I don’t want a life, I want an adventure.

The whistle blows as we pull into Simi Valley, I look out the window at the big brown rocks and scrub vegetation baking in the sun. The doors open and close, the whistle sounds again, and we move on in the bright morning air.