[sic]

Frankly though I’ve mourned the passing of a voice and talent that I literally grew up with, Michael Jackson’s public memorial madhouse service scheduled for Tuesday at Staples Center is so not a be-all/end-all event for me and I submitted my request for tickets rather sheepishly.

I’ll be veeeeeeeery surprised if my name gets pulled from among what will undoubtedly be the hundreds of thousands out of the proverbial hat. But if indeed I become the recipient of tix to the event and seeing as I have the day off I might just bike on down into the vortex of the grief storm to see what I shall see.

And if the scene turns out to be even more out-of-this-universe crazy than expected I can always adjourn to Wurstkuche or Blue Star and raise a glass in private tribute.

Well, when it rains it pours. First my handlebarcam finally goes kaput Wednesday. Frankly it’s something of a wonder that the Canon SD1000 lasted this long since it first started exhibiting troubles last December after four or five months of dealing with the hostile and unstable environment of being mounted to my bike — which is why I went and bought a replacement SD1100 and after the 1000 magically resurrected itself had the luxury of making my little timelapse vids and having a still cam at the ready.

It was camtastic.

But apparently the 1100 isn’t made of the strong stuff the 1000 was, because no sooner did I timelapse yesterday morning’s commute to work with it, when it malf’ed. Any attempt to power it up and the lens extends just a smidge before it powers down.

So I was cam-less for last night’s ride home, and anyone who reads me knows I hate rolling nekkid like that. Well, I did have my iPhone but anyone with one of those devices knows its cam is just laughably craptacular.

To add insult to injury, for the first time since 2003 I broke a spoke last night.  Right in front of the Culver City Cop Shop on Duquesne. Removing it I then disabled the front brake so the now out-of-true rim wouldn’t rub against the shoes and commenced rolling s-l-o-w-l-y to Orange 20 Bikes to procure a replacement (plus a couple spares, which I installed after I got home. I even managed to re-true the rim enough to be proud of myself.

This morning — which just so happens to be the 45th anniversary of my coming into the world — I’m searching for the the cam’s receipt so I can submit it for service under the warranty still covering it, but of course I can’t find that crucial bit of documentation, so it looks like I’ll be dropping the SD1100 off at Samy’s for repairs. In the timelapse-less interim I’ll be forced to use either of two back-up digicams: an old Olympus which is balky and predisposed to shooting everything in macro mode, and an older Polaroid that’s just a couple steps up from my iPhone cam.

Better than nothing.

UPDATED (6:43): Found the receipt! Happy Birthday to me!

That’s where my virtual bike odometer and I will end up for the year when I complete my planned 46-mile roundtrip bike commute tomorrow afternoon.

A huge part of that achievement was the fact that of 257 work days in 2008, I biked 197 of them — an achievement in and of itself.

But 6,606.16. That’s an achievement, too.

Here’s the 15 from this morning, along a different route that involved downtown and a flat tire:

Typically my commute mileage comes in around 30, but I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning and taking the loooooong way in via the westside through across Brentwood to Ocean Park to the Santa Monica Pier and then the beach path to Venice and then through Marina Del Rey to the Ballona Creek Bikeway.

Just because.

Show of hands: how many people add miles to their trips to work, just because. That’s the magic of the bicycle.

On the return trip I’ll be coming home with decidedly less deviation along 4th Street and with one last climb up the Occidental rise south of my house. The same one upon which I pedaled into the back of that double-parked minivan back in September.

Of course there’s more to tomorrow’s extended trip than just because.  If I stuck to the routine I’d be 10 miles shy of the 6600 mark, and it just won’t do for me to be within striking distance of something — especially something so relatively irrelevant — and let it go unattained.

So there you have it. I set out this year to bike 3,000 miles. I had that done by early June. As to what’s in store for next year, at this late date I haven’t decided anything and in fact  I may just go all laissez faire and let the good miles roll across ‘09 without a finish line. We’ll see.

UPDATED (12.31): Make that 6608.17. I was cut loose from work at noon today so I cranked out a couple additional miles meeting my friend Manny at Langer’s in MacArthur Park and biking home from there.

As expected, I reached my 6,000th mile on my way home last night, entering it roughly in the Melrose Hill vicinity of Western Avenue and Hobart and exiting it on approach to Santa Monica Boulevard on Heliotrope. In the midst of it I stopped at no better place to commemorate the achievement than  where my cycling enthusiasm got restoked way back in the summer of 2005:  the Bicycle Square/Quadrant/District/Zone/Land/Arena at Heliotrope and Melrose… pretty much the ground-zero of the city’s bike culture:

Of course I timelapsed the whole 15-mile ride home, but for the sake of expediency I’ve extracted the momentous (and at times gridlocked and gloriously lane-splitted) mile and saved it as a Quicktime file — albeit about a 15-meg’er what with me slowing the frames down a bit — that can be viewed here.

Today could be a truly pivotal day for bicycling in the city of Los Angeles what with the City Council’s special bike-themed Transportation Committee meeting taking place at City Hall.

I spent the week mulling ways in which I could take the day off and attend, but it’s just not going to happen, dammit.

So instead I’ll have to settle for being there in spirit between being in the saddle to and from work.

In other news I’m but 28 away from pedaling past my 6,000th mile for the year, which means I should arrive at that milestone this evening somewhere around the Bicycle Kitchen, appropriately.

Nearing the end of last week I knew that if I didn’t get a bit of weekend riding in, I’d end up on the last day of the month about 11 miles short of breaking the 682-mile record I set for the month of May. I could lie and say that didn’t matter, and while it didn’t matter enough to get me in the saddle Saturday or Sunday, it mattered enough yesterday to think about taking a long way home from work so that at the end of the day I’d have a new all-time-high mark.

Initially I had plans of heading to Marina Del Rey and then up through Venice and into Santa Monica to come back along San Vicente through Brentwood and West LA to West Hollywood and across the rest of the town via Fountain Avenue.

But in the end I opted for a slightly extended homeward route that brought me up through Los Feliz Village and over to the north side of the Silver Lake reservoir where I then in total and gratuitous mileage-junkiedom chugged out three laps around the perimeter and ended up at home with 684 miles for the month.

Please make a note of it: 584 of those miles were commute related, which translates into 29 gallons of gas not consumed, which (@ $4.60 per gallon) equals $134 not spent.

Another record achieved during June is one that required nothing to be sheepishly tacked on. For the first time I biked every available commute day in a month: 21. Only about a year ago I would amaze myself if I strung together five in a row.

Been a bit dormant here the last couple days. Sorry ’bout that. I’m happy to report that my “Ride of a Lifetime” ended up being a 70-mile affair and when I got home pretty much the only thing I did was play catch with the dog, drink a couple tall Pabstsesses and watch the clock drawing to the time when I had to get cleaned up, suited and over to Granada Hills High School for my daughter’s graduation yesterday evening.

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Both the outrageous birthday bike trek and my Katie’s awesome achievement have left me in a bit of a proud and contemplative state of solitude, but yesterday in between beers I did manage to upload a buncha photos of the pedaling portion of the day here on Flickr, with links to photos of the specific places on the list:

1. Good Samaritan Hospital, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles (May 29, 1964)
2. S. McCarty Drive, Beverly Hills ( - 1966?)
3. Westminster Avenue, Los Angeles (1966? - 1970?)
4. S. Hamilton Drive, Beverly Hills (1970? - 1972)
5. S. Tower Drive, Beverly Hills (1972 - 1974)
6. Holly Drive, Hollywood (1974 - 1977)
7. S. Wilton Place, Hollywood (1977 - 1979)
8. S. Hamilton Drive, Beverly Hills (1979 - 1983)
9. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys (1983 - 1984)
10. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (1984 - 1986)
11. Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys (1986 - 1988)
12. W. Tujunga Avenue, Burbank (1988 - 1990)
13. Verdugo Avenue, Glassell Park (1990 - 1990)
14. E. Palmer Avenue, Glendale (1990 - 1991)
15. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys (1991 - 1991)
16. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (1991 - 1994)
17. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys, (1994 - 1994)
18. Seabury Lane, Beverly Glen (1994 - 1995)
19. Burbank Boulevard, Encino (1995 - 2001)
20. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (2001 - 2003)
21. Del Mar Avenue, Silver Lake (2003 - 2004)
22. N. Occidental Boulevard, Silver Lake (2004 - )

And this morning I got around to building a rough-n-ready composite of the narrative video clips I captured at various points along the bike route the way and foisted it onto YouTube:

There are two ways you can read that headline: 1) As coming from someone whose patience is waning, or 2) As coming from someone answering “What’s this about?”

From my perspective I’m way more in the No. 2 camp. See, this Thursday it will be 44 years to the day that I came into this world at 7:08 a.m., delivered via C-section at Good Samaritan Hospital, across the street from Pacific Dining Car restaurant. I like to wonder who might have been having their breakfast a baseball steak’s throw away from me when I got hauled into the cold and light.

If you happen to be nothing more than acquainted with me you might roll your eyes when I tell you that I really have no issues with the number. Why not? July 6, 1994, that’s why not. Folks who either know me well enough or those whose visits here have happened to coincide with some sort of exploratory recap of that particular evening might recollect I could have died that night. But since I didn’t — whether it be for the grace of god or a fluke of impact physics, or vertebrae density/resilience/flex, or the fact that I’m a tough sumbitch who can go motorcycle helmet-first into the side of a car at 40mph and stand up right away with a wrecked head and a flood of blood — pretty much every day since has been a gift too precious to get too bogged down worrying about the trivial realities that come with hiking further into middle age. The scars and damage I suffered may still bother me, but the wrinkles and the gray? I’m just glad to be here to have ‘em.

Yeah, but do I hop up out of bed and greet every single day with a whistle and a grin? Hell nah. I’m not some sort of carpe diem freak. It may all be gravy to me these past 14 years but sometimes that gravy is lumpy and cold and gloppy.

But this Thursday the gravy’s gonna be savory — in part because I’ve decided to do something I wouldn’t normally do and take the day off work… so that I can do something I wouldn’t normally do and start eeeeeeeeeearly spending the better part of the day celebrating the milestone by pedaling a 68-mile route around the city that’s been percolating in the cranium for quite some time under the working title of “This Is Your Life” ride.

That might be something of a misnomer, because it isn’t really anchored on specific events of my life so much as all the places I’ve lived during that time. Thus will I be pedaling to each of the 16 addresses I’ve lived at throughout the first semi-nomadic half of my life (assuming I’m indeed somewhere in the middle of it) — and my first stop will be Good Sam Hospital where it all began. I’ve charted the 68.3-miles via Gmaps as follows:

Chronologically speaking, here’s the where and when (any question marks early on indicate approximations and do not take into account a period of my very early childhood spent living with my grandmother in Carbon Hill, Ala.):

1. Good Samaritan Hospital, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles (May 29, 1964)
2. S. McCarty Drive, Beverly Hills ( - 1966?)
3. Westminster Avenue, Los Angeles (1966? - 1970?)
4. S. Hamilton Drive, Beverly Hills (1970? - 1972)
5. S. Tower Drive, Beverly Hills (1972 - 1974)
6. Holly Drive, Hollywood (1974 - 1977)
7. S. Wilton Place, Hollywood (1977 - 1979)
8. S. Hamilton Drive, Beverly Hills (1979 - 1983)
9. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys (1983 - 1984)
10. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (1984 - 1986)
11. Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys (1986 - 1988)
12. W. Tujunga Avenue, Burbank (1988 - 1990)
13. Verdugo Avenue, Glassell Park (1990 - 1990)
14. E. Palmer Avenue, Glendale (1990 - 1991)
15. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys (1991 - 1991)
16. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (1991 - 1994)
17. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys, (1994 - 1994)
18. Seabury Lane, Beverly Glen (1994 - 1995)
19. Burbank Boulevard, Encino (1995 - 2001)
20. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks (2001 - 2003)
21. Del Mar Avenue, Silver Lake (2003 - 2004)
22. N. Occidental Boulevard, Silver Lake (2004 - )

For purposes of the most mileage-efficient route we will not be going in chrono order, instead it will be as follows:

1. Good Samaritan Hospital
2. Del Mar Avenue, Silver Lake
3. S. Wilton Place, Hollywood
4. Holly Drive, Hollywood
5. Westminster Avenue, Los Angeles
6. S. Tower Drive, Beverly Hills
7. S. Hamilton Drive, Beverly Hills
8. S. McCarty Drive, Beverly Hills
9. Seabury Lane, Beverly Glen
10. Beverly Glen Boulevard, Sherman Oaks
11. Burbank Boulevard, Encino
12. Murietta Avenue, Van Nuys
13. Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys
14. S. Tujunga Avenue, Burbank
15. Verdugo Avenue, Glassell Park
16. E. Palmer Avenue, Glendale
17. N. Occidental Boulevard, Silver Lake

If this seems an outlandish thing to do, I’ve done more over-the-top stuff. A couple years ago with the help of Susan and my good friend Rachel Rausch I summited Death Valley’s 11,049-foot Telescope Peak my last day as a 41 year old and for the first morning of my 42nd year bombed the 17-miles and 8,000-feet elevation drop between the Mahogany Flat campground and the Panamint Valley floor.

To me this seems totally tame in comparison.

I pedaled past my 2,000th mile this year with today’s bike commute (that included a trip to the dentist to fill a cavity and seal up a previous root canal retreatment… that’s right: I not only go for bike rides after riding bikes, but I even bike to and from unpleasant things). My annual mileage total now stands at 2,007.

That particular number has significance because it was my overall mileage goal for 2007. Further, I achieved that goal ahead of schedule in September of last year, going on to surpass 3,100 miles by December 31. Further further, I’ve done in less than the first five months of 2008 what it took me more than 9.5 months to do last year. Further further further, should all go well and according to plan I stand a rock solid chance of catching this year’s goal of 3,000 miles by somewhere around the middle of June — at which time, I’ll have to recalibrate to a new year-end number, dare I say… hmmmmm — 5,000?

I dare. But first let’s say hey to 3K.

I’ve rolled past my first thousand miles today, finishing up with this evening’s commute home at 1,005 for the year to date. Only 1,995 more to reach my goal for 2008.

Here’s a moment somewhere around mile 880 during the bike tour March 2; this macro of the cheap thumbnail image courtesy of the first time ever that the MarathonFoto folks have actually staffed the bike tour course: