Page Two: The Edge Defined

June 30, 2025

I like to have a theme for my bike tours. In this case, my theme is The Edge. I'm not talking about riding my bike to the edge of our flat world and falling off into space. (I don't have enough cycling skills for that yet.) I'm referring to a different edge--the edge of America.

More important than the geographic edge, the edge I'm writing about is a state of mind. Looking at things from a different perspective. Changing things up a bit. Getting back to eating and sleeping in the great outdoors. Walking and peeing on the earth. Living. Going against my comfort zone by writing incomplete sentences. Stuff like that. Even if it's only for three days.

I hope you cranked up "Losing My Edge" to maximum volume on your high- fidelity Bluetooth loudspeakers.

I'm sure it's difficult when a musical artist comes to the realization that he's losing his edge. It's no less difficult for an aging bike tourist. He can't ride as fast or for as many miles as he once could. The length of his tours keep getting shorter. He starts planning his trips around the distance between towns and campgrounds rather than the quantity and quality of wild adventures. He starts questioning his relevance in the bike touring world. His journals look bland. He can't keep up with photographic, videographic, and blogographic technology. He stubbornly refuses to call his journals “blogs.” His on-line bragging isn't as exciting as the bragging of the cool kids in the 20-to-60 year age group. And once he thinks he caught up with the cool kid lingo, he finds he's ten years behind.

The cogs in my brain go into action when I need to write some hip lingo in my journal.

At least he can recognize the irony in including 60-year-olds in the “cool kids” category. Back when he really WAS a cool kid, he had different terms for folks of that age—terms like “ancient,” “square,” “out of touch,” and “I hope I never live to be that old.”

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A beautiful cloud formation like this requires a photo no matter how out of context it is to the bike touring journal I started yesterday.

Actually, I'm an expert at making up specious context. I took that picture last night after The Feeshko and I attended a Shakespeare in the Park performance of All's Well That Ends Well. The context is that maybe I'll incorporate some Shakespearean jibberty-jabberty somewhere along the way.

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Bill ShaneyfeltYeah, I once had an edge... You think losing it at 60 is tough, just wait. At 79 1/2 I don't seem to have much of one. Didn't even try to listen to the sound bite you so laboriously added because my auditory sensors no longer function well enough to figure out what the lyrics are (although even when they did work, most were not intelligible to me) and can only sometimes pick out enough of a melody to figure out what it might be and maybe start an earworm that lasts for a little while.

Never quit!
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6 hours ago

Mark BinghamLet's hope All's Well That Ends Well, as it usually does. Looking forward to yet another outstanding journal.
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4 hours ago