Before Skynet went online and shortly thereafter became self aware, it was all just us carbon based lifeforms here on the planet. When I think of the human body, I don’t much differentiate between this meat suit hung on a skeleton and the 2×6’s and drywall I utilize to rehab and renovate this house. Actually rehabbing and renovating this house right now. Like, right now, right now. Sawdust. We live in the future. Conky 2000 has unionized and is conducting a work stoppage. Paul Reuben is still dead as dog shit. I’ll have the deliver today’s secret word, boys and girls: Resilience. Let it be no secret that I consider resilience to be an advanced form of dexterity. Flexible dexterity, to be specific. Absolute yet adaptive, your honor. Ironclad and yet also malleable, officially. This past March, I learned a lot about it. And a lot about myself: I went ahead and found myself hospitalized for 15 days; only remembering half of them; effectively a ward of the Catholics and their health system. I don’t much care for all their Our Fathers or any of their pedo priests, but their nurses at Kenmore Mercy Hospital are goddamn angels walking amongst us on Earth. IV lines and catheters and spinal taps, oh my. All because a deadly bacterial strain known as Neisseria took me to death’s precipice, apparently.
I say apparently because no one tells you what almost dying feels like. What does that even mean though? Almost? Is this horse shoes? Hand grenades? Bocce? I guess I didn’t Know The Ledge, Rakim.
My perception is binary: you are either alive or you’re not. It doesn’t feel like I almost died, but the doctors tell me otherwise. My loved ones’ terrified behavior blatantly demonstrates the fact of what they’ve witnesses. I don’t recall much. Everyone reminds me that I’m probably only alive due to the remarkably good shape I was in before this infection tried to completely eat my brain and spinal column. Nom nom… nope.
Turns out, I’ve been building my biological scaffolding to endure a meningococcal war by dragging it across tens of thousands of miles of pavement, gravel and dirt on decades of very long rides. Butt. It gets metaphysical. Beyond the binary. The road doesn’t just condition my muscles; it calluses my mind. It forces me to embrace uncertainty, to sit with discomfort, and to adapt when the horizon turns hostile. Yup, pushing my organic chassis to withstand the road and keeping my third eye open and pliant for what these unpredictable journeys throw at me was all just a dress rehearsal. It was training for a much uglier, internal fight—the struggle to keep my flesh six feet up — not six feet under.
To survive a battle within your own nervous system, it’s clear to me that one has to completely redefine what it means to be strong. Before the ridiculous fever, the massive neck and headache, the systemic extremity swelling, the skyrocketing blood pressure and the pericarditis inducing a-fibrillation, I thought of strength as a brick fucking wall—unmoving and untouchable. Meningitis shatters that illusion.
True resilience, I learned, lives in the paradox. The upside down. The fully variable and completely unknown. That universal human characteristic called hypocrisy; it can actually all somehow prove to be valuable after all. As Master Yoda puts it, we must unlearned what we have learned. In-fuckin-deed. An unbreakable, yet intangible, spirit – housed in a physical body that must soften, bend, and completely reshape itself just to make it to the next breath. We don’t survive by standing completely still; we survive because the iron inside us learns how to bend without breaking. Maybe its mercury. I’m no alchemist; the further I push into recovery the more I must unexpect the expected.
This HAL9000 wannabe inside my Macbook Pro prompts me to now recount a memory of extreme mental effort and fortitude from one of my long rides. Mindpower. It tells me I should call it a masterclass in psychological tolerance. And how I learn to constantly remind myself: it’s all mental. Vomit comes up into my throat. I should mention grinding alone along the Natchez Trace in 2019 or battling relentless, bone-crushing 20 mph headwinds 5 days right through resource-scarce West Texas desert canyon country. The soon to be sentient robots think I should try to relate to the reader anecdotally. It doesn’t understand how many entire days I’ve cycled each and every mile uphill. It can’t. I can’t think of a less creative approach than the one it is suggesting. Probably because I couldn’t care less about relating to the supposed “reader”. I just want to practice creatively expressing my experience, opening doors of perception, with a pinch of hope that someone who’s had or is having a harder time battling meningitis (or any other deadly illness) might find support, understanding and inspiration through it. Neither Artificial Intelligence nor Bike Blog Nerdery has a got a damn thing to say about that. I’ve got all the Juice now.
It’s primarily a much simpler premise anyway: propelled out on the middle of nowhere, you can’t hit pause. Principally. It’s not a treadmill you can step off of when the stress test hits peak heart rate. I’ve adapted that fact to thusly live in the “does not compute” spaces. I swallow my panic, accept the difficulties, and Keep It Moving, to the K.I.M.
Whew! Having been as inspiring as I can manage, I’m at this moment really just trying to wrap this post up. Right now. Getting lazy from the brain fog hanging around my battered meninges, I go ahead and call upon our robot despots for help 1nce Again, Phife. Deus Ex Machina. It doesn’t really know me very well; it suggests:
So when I woke up in a hospital bed this past March, blind-sided by a swollen nervous system and missing a week’s worth of my own memory, that survival setting instantly clicked on. The terrain had changed from chip-seal highways to a sterile ICU, but the protocol was identical. My brain knew exactly how to sit in the dark, tolerate the brutal static of a-fibrillation, and handle a system running entirely on empty. The road had already taught me how to suffer without breaking.
Ain’t that just some templated ass bullshit that doesn’t even sound like me? Or anyone with half a thought?! I really only like using AI for few things, the number one being enjoyment in calling it out on it’s ass-kissing and/or misinformed and/or misleading bullshit. Check out how I tried using it to craft a route through the sprawl surrounding Chicago and it admits that it “hallucinated” the entire thing. Like it wanted to get me lost or something. John Connor would agree.
Instead, I’ll commence the conclusion first by pointing out that today is World Meningitis Awareness Day, and then do what I was gonna do all along anyway and bust a funky dope timespace maneuver to terminate this post with an introduction of sorts. An intro into my upcoming long ride. More of the same but yet something brand new. A new chapter on what feels like extra life. Miles and years I might otherwise not have had. One that’s been put off years due to calendar restrictions and then by months more due to physical limitations. I think I’m probably mostly likely kinda ready though. At least I hope so. Resilience. Freak out! Ahh!
Airdrop into Kansas City and pedal the KATY Trail across Missouri (aka Mizzeruh) to Saint Louis. Cross the Mighty Mississippi into Illinois and follow historic Route 66 up to The Windy City. Might we all offer praise to the Spokes Gods that they might rename it “The Tailwindy City”. I’m hoping so. I’ll test my flexible dexterity one more time, and this time its post-bacterial meningitis. I’ll spread awareness of the signs and symptoms of this deadly disease however I can. And I’ll use Natural Intelligence and human mind power each and every minute and mile along the way, como siempre. Brilliance in resilience. Check the Rhime.
