Worn Muscles and Memphis

To listen to this song while reading about it in the Location of the Day, right click the title above and select 'open in new tab'. Beware, because its a Lala file, they'll only let you listen to the full song once, so make it count ;)

I need to start by saying I have stopped driving unless I absolutely have to. My muscles were sore for a few days after pulling nearly eighty miles in one day. Once I started bicycling for transportation as well as leisure, I was doing 15 mph for an hour at a time. The first Monday back home, I bicycled back home from downtown, down King street, past all the restaurants, past the decaying older part with its WWII-era houses and simple poor people walking about, past the concrete fields to the left overtaken with vegetation, along the railroad tracks and the interstate, past the factories, over the climactic bringe that passes over the railroad tracks and, at the top you can see all of charleston as it is, in all its unprettiness : what has been condemned as bad neighborhoods sprawled to the right and the roads and fields lay waste and a haven of sorts. Once left alone and neglected, it becomes more natural, and you see the indestructibility of nature and beauty, that it will win your attention through the concrete and halogen light and dirty air. You throw grey liquid on it and cut down all the trees, beauty still flourishes, just a different kind of beauty. After King street becomes Rivers its just city and more city until home. I have been doing a lot of similar fast trips, and they are tearing up my legs. I haven't biked since friday, when I did my first thirty-mile circuit since about six weeks. In short, this bicycle route I take goes north through the 52/78 split (which is open and beautified with bushes on the road mounds, complete with a lone tree in this field), heads down an open expanse of red bank road, then goes up Bushy Park Road for seven miles, then heads down a country road back onto 52.

Getting started was a bit strenuous, my muscles were already sore from previous days of pushing myself. As I passed down 52, there were no colors. Charleston. It is the middle of November and the sun still feels like summer. In my heart I exclaim, "when will there be color," and as I travel further, I see more occasional yellow trees, but it still doesn't feel like fall. One of my favorite points is where there is but a thin veil of trees covering a marshy reservoir on one side and railroad tracks on the other. At one point, it was like the world exploded before me as the sunlight suddenly hit everything. The close forests burst open to fields of brush and tall grasses, and all I could do is pedal as fast as I could, intensely whispering in my heart, "YES!". A lot of the grasses had tall light-tan heads, whose filaments glowed a spectral white when seen through the two-hours-before-dusk light. They stood there in the air like skinny ghosts, all to my right side. Amazing. An open field is a stupendous, captivating thing.

Musically-Inspired Geographic Location of the Day
I really wanted to hit on this one because eastern Tennessee has, since August, been a holy land of sorts to me -- that mystic, seemingly unattainable land where things are even more full of hills, more dramatic, and sun-soaked. Every attempt to go there has been denied me, whether by car, or by bicycle. I am well aware that Memphis is in the opposite corner of Tennesse, but it seems to grasp that invisible pull westward, with its location looming teasingly at the edge of the Mississippi, the great river dividing the two worlds. I really want to visit the musical mecca Nashville, and just chill there for a week or so and really settle into the rhythm of it. I don't know anyone there. Sometimes that yields the best experience. They say you most long for what seems unattainable, but I plan to, after serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, buy a Jeep and live in it for a few months, traveling all over, and meeting people on the way, picking up hitch-hikers, soaking it all in on my terms and time frame. Sounds beautiful doesn't it. I wish I could tell you something about Memphis, but I cannot. Just imagine the dusty city with all of its lures and opportunities, and I'd like to cross-reference to another song, Pretty Girls, City Lights by Ralph Stanley, and the chorus goes like this:

Pretty girls (pretty girls), city lights (city lights)
Just had to play the game
When I got out I didn't have a dime
Didn't even know my name.

Notice the similarities to John Prine's Daddy's Little Pumpkin

I'm goin' down to Memphis got three-hundred dollars in cash
Yeah I'm goin' down to Memphis got, three-hundred dollars in cash
All the women in Memphis gonna see how long my money can last