a collection of savage and bitter facebook posts induced by over the counter cold medication

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resuming bike setup and testing

so pulling the new bike i'd only ridden a few times before i injured myself was like making out with a sexy woman you want to um, "grunt" with...but not quite going all the way.

criminy, this marin only has a hundred and sixty miles on it!

as it is, i think i need to shorten the stem just a nip to fit my riding style and maybe soften up the suspension a tad--since i've actually LOST weight during four months of relative inactivity.

at any rate, i took it REALLY easy and stuck to the easiest trails in golden gate park i could find with a few minor exceptions.

i'll tell you what, as compared to my first ride back on a 29er hardtail, praise be to the life giving sun for 120mm of suspension. i hardly feel anything through the shoulder i dislocated!

i think i'll stick to easy rides in GG park every other day for a week or two, then i'll start grinding up those fire roads in marin.

chasing trains and eating poorly

yesterday, my friend patrick picked me up bright and early, after which we drove east to stockton, then south through the valley. our goal was to watch trains between stockton and a bit south of merced to chase trains on the BNSF stockton subdivision between richmond and fresno. here's a few of the photos:

next weekend, the plan is to check out the union pacific around pinole and elsewhere in the east bay. stay tuned!

back in the saddle!

the medical people said it was OK for me to ride, so long as i don't do any crazy shit. golden gate park doesn't have much extreme terrain which is why i chose the hardtail--with the new dualie i'd have been tempted to ride stuff which might require sudden tests of my range of motion which likely might require further hospital visits, possible surgeries and all that bad juju.

as it is, i'm able to deal with moderate terrain--i rode over several twelve to sixteen inch drops and felt no discomfort at all. i'm not sure how a twenty mile ride through the headlands might feel though. i'm figuring fatigue might become an issue and with that in mind, i am going to bring myself along slowly and carefully.

i'm nowhere near out of the woods yet.

to use a sports analogy, the team is still down fifteen points with four and a half minutes on the clock and one timeout remaining.

emergency rooms and taking long vacations with a fucked up arm suck!

easing back on the vitriolic throttle with pretty pictures...

why i want to tie asshole macho men down and beat them senseless with lead pipes

here is my savagely angry rant for the day--an example of why i loathe "tough guys" and "macho men" who think being dicks make them bad-asses:

hey, old white haired irish job superintendent on the new building going up just down the street from my house: you are a motherfucking dickhead asshole and your attitude towards the neighbors sucks. you could at the least smile and say "hello" to the locals instead of glaring and spitting like the living, breathing chunk of horse-shit you are.

i know how you act towards people, you fuck. i've been watching you and the miserable ugly condo you're building since the very beginning. the screaming tirade into your cell phone a few months ago cemented my opinion of you as a overpaid fuckhead.

i hope the building you're working on collapses and burns and that every job you're in charge of is a miserable fucking money-draining failure.

you goddamned irish contractor asshole. you get back what you put out. one look at you tells me you're a racist, misogynistic, alcoholic waste of flesh.

i would whack you HARD right across booze-reddened fucking forehead with my unused aluminum 780mm bike handlebar on general principles if i had the use of two arms.

if there is any bad-attitude sonofabitch on this planet that needs a good, painful sucker punch that causes severe damage to your facial bones, it's you.

i'll bet you treat your workers quite badly too, you pinched-face asshole. it's obvious they absolutely hate seeing you drive up to the job in your british douche-mobile. the expressions on their faces when the white land rover appears tells me all i need to know of what the men working this job feel about you, shithead.

i wonder if you savagely beat your wife and children at the end of the day. everything about your demeanor and attitude tells me your family likely despises you too, because you're a miserable, angry man who is very small and filled with hate and fear inside.

why do some tradesmen, especially the bosses, have to be such goddamned dicks to everybody they make contact with?

is anyone capable of reasonable and rational thoughts?

By U.S. Navy investigation board - U.S. Navy military archieves, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1359036

here's an excerpt of a comment made on a facebook post:

(remember i spent much of my time in school during my youth reading about WW2 and doodling P-51 mustangs in class while i should have been working out long division problems--i became much better at drawing a P-51 than calculating the square root of a rat's ass)

what i mean to say is some will take a grain of truth and blow that little grain completely out of proportion for ideological purposes. i'm thinking a lot about japan's attempts to surrender before the a-bombs were used and the overall situation at the time.

now, using the bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki was barbaric...i won't argue about that with anyone--but in the context of the situation, president truman and the U.S. government and the allies were looking at a physical invasion of japan which would have very likely resulted in a horrible, prolonged bloodbath for both sides.

beside the incomprehensible casualty factor, few people remember how the russians went into manchuria against the LARGE japanese force still there on august 9, 1945 (which, once the invasion and battle of japan were underway could be diverted from the asian continent to the home islands with some difficulty--likely suffering heavy losses resulting from allied bombing of troop ships). once again, in the context of the times, the united states government did NOT want the soviets to become too much involved in the political reconfiguration of asia.

we all ought to know what happened in east and southeast asia, anyway. let's discuss that at a later time.

so. the japanese were talking surrender. the islands were already in shambles. that's why the bombs ought not to have been used.

millions of ill-informed people accept this simplistic logic.

ONCE AGAIN, LET'S THINK WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE TIMES WITH SOME DEGREE OF OB-JECT-IVITY

never mind that if an invasion had taken place, unspeakable numbers of japanese civilians and military personnel would have perished during the final battle for the home islands. what's more, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind curtis lemay and chester nimitz would have continued unrelenting air and naval bombardment of the islands, resulting in further heavy casualties.

the revisionists also conveniently sidestep the fact xx bomber command had been area bombing japanese cities with incendiary ordnance starting in 1944, a brutal practice which would have likely continued for the duration of the conflict.

curtis lemay. remember him and what he was about? if you don't, do some reading.

now, when a well informed, rational head of state whose nation has endured four brutal years of unrestricted warfare and its accompanying casualties is presented with facts like those i've laid out (and probably many more which were and still may be classified) what is the choice?

unpolluted by partisan ideological blinders. (although the soviets were a serious consideration for several obvious reasons)

WHAT...IS...THE...CHOICE?

right.

you are going to put an end to this pacific war shit any way you can.

TAIG. (that's All I Got)