Avalanche

I found the following piece of writing a few winters back, pasted to a coffee can within a snow cave that BGR had set up....fully stocked with booze, food and a radio that received the Navajo station quite well.....Black Flag followed by Hank Williams Sr followed by Parliament Funkadelic....it was quite the happening, with a full kitchen, sleeping berths and view of the dawn that never quit.  In any event, I've utterly failed at finding out who wrote this gem...if you know, please let me know so that I may give them due credit.  So in honor of the first snow of the season on the Kachina's, I give you Avalanche. The pictures, mine; the words for now, belong to the wind:

I dated an actor once

And asked her how to trust someone who made her living

At deception

She told me she was much less suave as a real woman

But the first time we had sex

The smile never left her face

The perfectly executed orgasm.

Photo - Troy Marino, Skier - maadJurguer

And yesterday in our town, an angel committed suicide

By swallowing the barrel of a shotgun.

She dressed in white and blessed us daily,

The preschool, the local potter's wheel,

The drunks in the bar where she sipped white wine.

After she died we read she wasn't an angel after all,

Just a mother of three from a small town in Arkansas.

Now we walk the streets looking over our shoulders

In case the blessings weren't for real either.

Photo - Troy Marino, Skier - maadJurguer

"What does it mean?" you asked.

When we passed the homeless man, again

Eight blocks, ten blocks, twelve blocks down

He was our oracle

With wild black hair and a Rolling Stones t-shirt

But I knew he was not an oracle, for he was John Kirby

Who carried a limp, blue backpack and kissed the hand of grace one night

But that was not right either

for Kirby froze in the cemetery

Last winter

Remembering beauty and talking to sparrows

During these long winters

The local avalanche forecaster tells us

We will see stability where we want to see it.

Tells us if we desperately want to make first tracks,

We will find safety where there is none,

With blessings, oracles, and second chances,

We step to the crest, turn our heads from the wind

And push forward

Ignoring the breaking snow at our backs

The groundskeeper

the solitary solace i find in mind,

a noble fancy, the passage of time.

Windswept emotions cry foul before others,

mistaken in their magnitude they garner regret,

of the fun I have on wheels in spite of threat.

your sunrise comes blowing on whisper and glow,

scent of grass and pine, my pace slows.

but for a time when I breathe in the scene before me,

a calming of sorts, the quiet of morning, the still day transforming,

we'll never be the same, "this light is tremendous", i yell in mourning.

the earth exhales as the sun grows higher,

creating a symphony of light and sensation, my sweat starts flowing.

I stop for water, a drink of thought, a thought extreme

a notions fancy, a moonlight scream.

In your motion I see no other, a wisp of notion, a smell o'dream;

your scream for me now, to wander across body

is lightened by patience, an exercise extreme;

your mysteries unfold, a novels untold,

stories unknown, and action in bold.

a higher path is claimed asunder, a ride which transforms,

forged in thunder.

a thought that pierces beyond the mists,
a mind a'wandered

the deserts below the peaks uplifted', the canyons wont speak,

for you lie naked alone,

I am the groundskeeper, a seeker of truths, 

a bier of sorrows, you exist in mind, 

and alone you heed.

Yet in my mind a new truth exists,

the pedal that stops, the grounding in mist,

the dust that forms low, on my face and furrow,

is the last breath taken,

the show,

is over.

Circles

I skipped a month....or was it a week....or was it a year.....I'm sorry, I've forgotten what was it that mattered......was it the blogging about my radness....or was it, to paraphrase a buddy, "I got busy gettin' to know a gal, so I started going on rides that ended in drinkin' beer and makin' out"? Yeah....it's something like that. Somewhere along the line, I became Ahab...and yet Ahab still learns, still evolves and keeps seeking.


It's taken a fat year to learn that it stopped...it's taken a fat year to get fat...and it's taken a fat year to realize what I knew before the strife. When the fear run dry...I ride for no woman, no bottle of whiskey or no bill. I ride for the thrill.....I ride for me....I ride to F**k it up......and I F**k it up good......

Stopping off at Mustache Richards.......I find that his equally hard stance on equal opportunity employment is clearly posted......

.....and as I graded, I reviewed the stock.....glowing from the background light..........

 ......illuminating the tools of the trade, I hear a chord in my soul which clearly illuminates for me that Steel is Real............

Pedaling on into the Ponderosa......we stop to contemplate the spirit feeding animal within us all.  Now, I know that most of us are aware of a spirit animal within us all.....but how about the spirit feeding animal?  I, am a deer......Mustache Richard is a Wolf, and tRoy is a squirrel.  I am a deer because I will eat what ever is presented to me even though there are signs that state, "Do Not Feed The Deer".  Simply put,  I will get sick when I eat human food as I am used to my strict diet of bikepacker food...........tRoy is a squirrel in that he brings a sampling of everything with him but will hoard other offerings along the way.......and Mustache Richard will just gorge upon anything he finds........it is clear to us that on a bikepacking adventure......having a wolf in your company is not a good idea.......this thesis was presented to us by the wolf himself......caveat emptor........ignore the convincing grin and offering in hand.......

Rolling up to the site of tRoy's first kill, we replayed the Elk-hunt-Bikepack.......the scout.....the bivy......the Elks last magnificent moments of life....the shot at 50m.....the flee of life.......the confrontation and exchange of life...witnessing the sharp sight of grasses through the eye socket of this animal after eating upon it's meat for the past few months, made me respect it more....how beautiful we all are, how frail........

....it was real......it felt real to hear the story.....to rub the teeth, to feel the ribs and to see the bones.  How blessed we all felt to be here....how blessed we felt to be with the one who took this life, who looked it in the eye as it died....and who took the body that we would eat from this night........

Riding on from the kill site, we descended on one of the carviest bits of singetrack through Aspen Forest to be had on the Coco...........here, tRoy leans into a hardscrable corner, notching himself into the halls of Valhalla.....

That night......perhaps it was our hubris or the spirit of the Wapiti.....or both....but we got hammered.  It was the worst storm any of us had ever experienced outside.....and we've all gotten to the point outside were we called to the heavens that we'd had enough......and yet, during that night, when the light flashed at the same time you were able to feel the shock wave in your gut.....you no longer were high on the stoke.  We all were making light of the situation with typical gallow humor when the flash would come......and a freezing motion would overtake us all, a feeling of humility on that naked ridge we were bivied upon.....as if our slow human reactions would protect us from the physics of the situation.  It was positively humbling.......it was exactly what I needed............we all fell asleep to the fading sound of thunder, sleeping in an inch of water, relieved that the storm had passed............

"What the Hell IS THAT??????"..........this is the first thing I hear and understand after the night before...a night of alarm, flash, thunder and alerts as to the flooding within our bivy........As I wake from the sleep of early morning dawn, I look over at tRoy to see him shooing an inch long insect away from him....into my sleeping bag.  I shoot up yelling, "MOFO, Don't put that THING IN MY BAG!!!!".......we awake in laughter.....as we play with the clumsy insect as it grapples with the slick nylon covering of my down bag.......

What the bug failed to do, the sun completed.  It woke us fully; a clear and awakening day of upright grass and yellowing skies pressing upwards past the canopy of verdant needles into an ink blue atmosphere laden with more rain that promised to press down upon us throughout the day..........

It was also a morning of reckoning with the heinous sidewall slash I'd experienced just before we camped the night before.  I'll never know if it was the event that precipitated our campspot, or if my partners ahead of me had decided before me.....it matters not.......here I was, with an inch-long gash, with a third branch opening in an Y-style incision......the boot I had to use was huge.....and I doubted its ability to hold me for another 40 miles......and yet I placed homage in it....it was the same boot that brought me through the Canelo Hills on the AZT......it would hold, I told myself......it will hold......

As I patched my tire....I watched tRoy make coffee with a Press-Bot, made by Canyon Coffee.....they also double as camera tripod's....check them out!

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Before we packed up......tRoy cooked up some ground elk that he had processed recently from the kill we had observed..........the circle here was complete......and yet we had another day of riding to get home......which is fitting......the circle never ends......we now were entrusted to take what the Wapiti gave us and make it our own........

It sounds trite........but it's true..........the circle will never end, as long as your life is as glorious; a life worthy, a life which enriches your own........

Vicarious transformations

Through the eyes of the uninitiated, the ritual of summer can regain a luster since tarnished with the passing of time.  Sharing an experience with someone for the first time is akin to taking someone on their first ride on singletrack....we can all identify with the newer perspective, and appreciate the finer details of what it means to be transformed all over again.

The cycle that propels us around once more, moving us in an elliptical orbit, provides enough eccentricity to keep us focused on the changes within, however slow they may occur.....

Riding on the path of old takes on a new hue, when shared with someone who is visiting for the first time.  The same old fields of Rocky Mountain Iris on the Cabin Loop become new and enchanting once again....however, I'll always be partial to this sentinel of early summer....

Sitting in the coolness of a shady spot, my old friend, the spotted coral root orchid exists in a symbiosis....not with the sun through photosynthesis, but with the fungus within the soil....feeding from a different source to produce it's beauty.

As the water trickles out of the spring, draining from gently tilted beds of sandstone, we sit in enjoyment...gaining from the coolness of the spring, the sound of the water....the reflections that mirror the sky....a world beyond reach.

....but inside the pane of reflection, we find more transformation.  The stone caddis draws an arc in the sediment as it crawls around, feeding from the microscopic organisms within the pool....growing, until one day it will leave its protective rocky tube, formed from grains of sand, and float up to the pane of reflection where it will linger for a bit, only to fly away forever.......unencumbered by its protector of old, weighing it down at the bottom.....

Perhaps on its flight....it will stop to appreciate the colors of the coral root and their shared transformation....then again, it's just a caddis fly and it knows nothing of the symbiotic nature of things.....that's left to a few lucky mountain bikers who just stopped for a bite to eat.

Turning our attention to more novel thoughts....a mantle piece for my new cabin's fireplace comes into reality...the start of something new, rising from the old....

Along the way, we bridged over the reflections, the transformations and the epiphanies, and in spite of our complex selves......

.....we rode in simple enjoyment....bikes on singletrack in the pines of early summer.

Red Submission

What can I say.....I stared at you for hours in in the beautiful quiet of day....watching as the sun drew shadows across your face.

In spite of your sabotage of a friends ride, I still marveled at your beauty.......

The tears that streamed down your cheeks, leaving your mascara streaked, reminded me of how vulnerable we all are to the forces of time.

Sometimes you make me feel small when I'm swallowed up by your presence....but it's a powerful lesson to feel this way from time to time.  I can see so much more awaits me in the universe when I'm pulled from my solipsistic ways and forced to come to terms with my insignificance.

Your intransigence forces me to walk with you at your pace, obeying all that you lay out before me in submission....

I give myself to you completely......

When I stopped counting

The shift started slowly; a move away from the past with only one direction, something different. I've been riding for the past 3 months without a gps. In the run-up to Strava, Stravassholes and Strava lawsuits.....I dropped the electronic tracking for all my rides. I wanted to erase any sense of time holding my mind....a place polluted with Outlook color codes for meetings, flights and telecons.

I wanted to stop benchmarking my mileage....a place that meant training....a place where the training became more substantial than the event itself. I spent 4 months of my life training for a great event....and you know what I remember and choose to remember? It's the training rides that fueled my passion, my soul and my best memories. During the event...I was so numb, focused and dialed.....that I did not let a single emotion hatch, creep in or whisper into my conscious ..until it was prematurely over and I cried for 2 hours.

I wanted to stop holding numbers as the gauge for how I felt about my day, my week or my month. I suppose that quitting anything comes with withdrawal and this was no exception. I felt naked without my numerical and geographical reference points converted into two dimensions displayed on a 1 x 1.5 inch screen. Once I got over this, my emotions took a dive. I started feeling slower....I was no longer able to calculate split-times; justifying away a slower section because of a mechanical or some other happenstance,   I was depressed that my rides seemed less frequent and.....gulp....slower.

But then something strange happened. I went riding with folks. For the longest time...I was riding alone because I was so focused on improvement....the ugly side of training. Reluctantly, I went on a group ride, fearing I would hold up the group. Time and time again....folks gave me snarky comments on how I was now hammering.....really, I was not trying....I just feared those behind me....so I gave it my all.

Now....I'm not going to state that I am actually faster...I'm sure I'm slower....my gut's bigger, so there's no denying that an office job and constant airline travel has it's nasty side. But when I'm riding with people, sharing in experiences and only in experiences...I'm urged to be my best without devices of measurement.   When I think about this, it makes sense to me. When I was riding all the time...I would have slow rides, I would have medium pace rides and then I would have hammer rides. You need to do this when you're riding 6 days a week....you simply can't manage recovery if you're giving your physical all, all the time.

But now that I feel blessed if I'm able to ride 3 days a week.....I just hammer. At first, it was based out of guilt for not riding as much. Then it turned to anger at working more than riding. And now....well....I see it as the only way I want to ride...with no numerical checks on my emotions, my legs, my lungs or my heart.....I figure if I have 2 hours, I'm gonna give it my all.

And I can find some poetic justice in the fact that for years I was driven by my heart but unaware of the checks I had placed upon myself. Now, I'm driven not by my heart, but out of a base necessity to put in the miles because I only have 2 hours to myself....so I choose now to do it without limit, check or measurement....just the wind in my helmet, the sweat stinging my eyes and the beautiful sound of quartz and feldspar grains singing beneath the constant turn of my tires.

And it's in this moment... among the brittlebrush, wet creosote smell of a late spring storm and the scurrying quail of sunset, I find my heart again....unencumbered, unshackled and open.

Atonement for the Muse

Sea Change.....Pardigm Shift......Shit Happens. As a writer, I've benefited from a force that was everpresent and seemingly everlasting....until it was, no longer. I benefited in a strange way, from the pain and turmoil that roiled below the surface for nearly 3 years.....and then it stopped. What has torn me as a writer is that the source of this inspiration was pain, angst and dark visions that haunted me to the ends of sanity......so I rode away from them into a physical netherworld that gave me peace, tranquility......and in hindsight, an over-inflated sense of what the world was about.

I sit here writing about something I've now contemplated for the past 6 months. I am happy. As an artist with my background....this is a curse. I'm not bitter.....to be forward...I am ecstatic ....but I miss the cathartic flow of words that seeming gushed from my fingertips into the keyboard on a weekly basis......just a ride away from inspiration

I now realize some truths of happiness that I've struggled hard to realize.....this struggle has been harder than acceptance of death. When you think about this, it makes sense. You can't deny death.....especially when you find it laying there in all it's ugliness....alone....before the paramedics, firemen, policemen & trauma counselors show up. You can sure try to deny it.....but there is not a single neuron to be found in your mind that denies the simple fact......death just happened.

But.....you can deny happiness. As a writer, I've always felt I should be talking about things that are difficult. So in a way, I got lucky....if you can call losing your career of 13 years, your wife dying, losing your house and your dog....all in 6 months.....lucky. To put it another way.....I made lemonade from lemons.....really bitter lemons.....and I knew it, so I added a lot of sugar ....and my sugar was the one thing that very few people have ever been given......Time.

From this position I took the one weakness that the enemy of my happiness had, and I turned it against it.......Time......I had lots of it. I capitalize "Time" for a reason.....it is the one thing in our culture you can't sell and can't give as a person. Time happens independent of who we are.....we think we might control it, but we don't. I have it on good authority that time does not even exist....that it's merely a construct of the human mind......but I digress.

Time was my savior. For every injustice my personal emotions incurred....I had Time. To paraphrase Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, I had time to wait, to think and to fast.....and so I did....and I did it on my bike. I occupied a bike seat as the world fractured around me into a thousand tiny pieces.......I hear a person lied about his life fracturing into a tiny thousand pieces on Oprah and even sold a bunch of books, but I rode through it and just documented it on this blog....I never made a dime....but I did find a path through to the truth. What I realized in this process was that my will to survive was contingent on my ability to find beauty wherever it might lie.....and this is the bridge into my life as I now see it.....because as once before.....I find this is the only thing I can hold onto, however tenuous it may seem these days. Find the beauty......the grace will follow.

During the time before......I took pictures.....and I wrote.....I wrote about riding past exhaustion into sunsets that rose crimson into my emotions, lifting me from the morose of a tired day into the euphoria of a day spent seeking the beauty only to be found out there. At night, I lay naked and raw....but content.....viewing the cosmos above and alone.....but strangely happy. At dawn, I propped my head up on my backpack and viewed the coming day in all of its beauty. Never once on these trips did I experience the violent and sensory altering dreams I was encountering at home.....waking at night pacing and screaming until someone close to me would shake me lose....or I would wake. At no time in my solo trips into the middle of the desert, did I ever have trouble sleeping.....I found only peace, beauty....and grace.

It's with irony that I now find myself occupying seat 4a on a flight too and from from Washington DC, that I write this. I've struggled with the turn of my muse.....I no longer have a muse to claim. My muse for the longest time was my grief......and I grieve no longer......and yet I miss her.....my muse....not her. My muse was the source of a creative flow that was cathartic. Now, I realize that I must be my own muse. I must be the source of my own inspiration. I must drag myself from the comforts of modern society and place myself back out there. I must take a leap of faith.....and push myself past my ever shrinking boundaries of comfort.

We as writers have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We are not the page writers of what always happens and certainly should not be just the tellers of the good times or the easy ones.....we must tackle the things that are difficult. For me, what is difficult is how to embrace this happiness I now find myself in. I found it easy to accept that my life before was a shrinking one.....a place where powers outside my control took things from me.....a place where my dreams were extinguished both in thunderous instances and tortuously long ordeals. I accepted this and after a time, I was fine with it. A very close friend of mine recently told me that for two years, I went Gollum.......I can't disagree.....because I was focused on a singular precious and let everything else go in the quest......what scares me now to no end is how easy it is on any given day, to let it all go and not care at all because I seek my precious.....my muse........

This is my atonement for the muse that gave to me such rich subject matter for such a long time.....I'm grateful for it....but good riddance you wonderful, creative, insightful bitch. You gave me beauty I could control and held it in front of my drunken nose long enough for me to appreciate, capture and write about it.....a beauty no creator could destroy because to destroy it would have been to destroy the creators creation. But now that you've left me, I'm glad......the horizon is clear and now I'm on the ocean of creative uncertainty once again......only this time....it's called happiness. We're all uncertain....and that's the way it should be.....with the winds of creativity tinted with a hit of the muse from time to time.....we just have to be sharp enough to capture that wind and run with it......

A fearful paradox

I find myself fearful at the thoughts of those who dare not explore beyond what they can not see.  I am wary of a world where a person does not feel free to explore beyond what they already know. I have an idea of what to expect on my next ride: the turns are familiar as are the climbs up the hills. The trees I bank around with green foliage scratching at my leaning body are familiar to me. Less familiar is what is beyond that hill to my right where the faint double tracks disappears into the scrub of the desert. I ride my route as I often do, spending 2 hours on a loop that is predictable just like my work day, but I hunger for more.

I want to be fearful of not the fears themselves, but of the unknowns that still exist within my mind. I want to be terrified as I lie awake at night, unable to sleep. The idea of what is beyond that ridge prevents me from fading into the sleeping nothingness. It tears at the active part of my brain, straining against my bodies need for rest. It claws at me, much like the trees on my ride.

I have become my fear these days, predictable as a clock. I move to a rhythm not of my own, but of a company that pays me twice a month at the same time every month. I board a plane at a prescribed time and arrive to pick up my car in much the same way. I sit in the same seat on the airplane each time, looking out the window in seat 4A. I take the same seat in the shuttle from the airport to the rental counter, placing my carry-on luggage in the same slot upon boarding. I have the same room at the Marriott when I stay there...the window faces west and when I sleep in that bed, my feet face south. I wake at the same time every morning and I eat the same meal before arriving in the morning at the same time to sit at the same desk. I am fearful of predictability.

Out there, nothing is predictable.   My mind searches for hint of water, my fears multiply with each passing mile I travel. Where will I sleep tonight, will there be shelter from the wind, will it rain and will I have to dig for water. The fear in the moment is not a fear at all. It is the feeling of my innermost being doing what it does best. It is problem solving, it is planning, it is weighing personal and bodily risk against benefit...something it does better than anything else.  It is sharp and focused when it deals with these tasks. Will my knee continue to hurt when I wake, do I have enough food, what if the route I've picked dies out......????

Some call the life I now find myself in as comfortable and successful....but to me it feels like a slow death. To be comfortable is to die....to be fearful is to live. I am fearful of being comfortable because in this paradox, I am fearful of not feeling fear. This fear drives me into the unknown in search of something new. My fear takes me onto that ridge to peer over it into the expanse of the unknown. My fear is my friend....and right now, that faded doubletrack is calling me....

Arc

Coming down from the full effect of a week off is never easy....especially if one spends it eating and drinking their way through Paris over New Years.

From the colorful flower shops on the street corner selling spring buds.....

.....the locks above the river Seine symbolizing a love locked away.....

....the luthier shop passed every night on our way out into the city, lit brightly from within just off the metro stop next to our appartment...

....to the Pont Neuf bridging all of Paris history.

The milky brown waters of the Seine flow rapidly through this city carrying with it an arc of human history.

The vertical and palatial stature in every building, from the Louvre at sunset....

....the domes of Sacre Coeur on New Years Day...

...to the arching structures of Notre Dame and its flying buttresses at night; all contain a physical and metaphorical arc.

You can see this arc in the everday......Parisians taking communion at noon inside Notre Dame.....

....bathed in the colored hues from stained glass windows framed in an arch of stone.  

An angels shadow even rests upon an arch....set in stone and light as much as it is in darkness.

Written in stone, standing at the spot the guillotine served its capitol purpose; the 3200 yr old Luxor obelisk explains a past that most can't read....

....reminder that history here as in all places is constantly arcing from one pivotal event to another.  But unlike most places in the states...the human history arcs deep from the time of Pharaohs, the Roman Empire, the birth of Democracy and the exile of self proclaimed Emperors....the last of which is entombed beneath an arcing dome of gold at Les Invalides...spotlighted against the first sunset of 2013.

Everything in this city seemed to arc to something else, creating a focus on what came before and after; what was underneath and what was supported above.  Sometimes it seemed it was the very clouds that were hoisted above the city...pierced by the sparkling Eiffel Tower and adding a glow to the otherwise dark mist above.

From atop the Arc de Triomphe, the lights below in the streets create 12 radial swaths that pierce the darkness and create the city of light....red and white course through the city breathing life into her as I stayed focused on trying to capture the scene.

It was here I felt her hand press upon the small of my back and whisper in my ear, reminding me to aim a little higher this time to capture the yellow glow from the tower lights.....a glow that projected a whirling dervish above the Paris skyline....deep purple of the setting sky exposed for seconds at a time in the spaces the clouds had yet to fill.  The satisfying click-thunk of a 3 second exposure filled my ears...she liked this shot.  Click-thud, Click-thud.....small variations in F-Stop and film speed were tweaked providing for what was a growing conundrum....so many shots, so few words....her so beautiful.

I saw a dozen more shots from my perch there....but I walked away from my spot along the railing and turned towards her, looking into her smiling eyes. This was not the movie moment you see on the Eiffel....but it was our own, here on the Arc, in the cold winter mist of a lowering sky.  All I could see beyond the radial sprawl of brake lights and taxi cabs making their way up and down the Champs, were those eyes from the city of lights....bridging the gap between darkness and light.

Eyes that looked on as Parisians came to honor it's fallen at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier....an eternal flame protected by the arc above...

After a stroll down the Champs Elysées, we look back at the Arc to see the reflective glow of traffic and lights projected onto the smooth stone and rain...

A growing hunger began to gnaw at me.....how can I possibly tell this story, I asked myself....we had done our best to cover Hemingway's visible feast.....a veritable 'how to guide' for living....but well said and best left alone....

....watching the traffic go by at a cafe off of Bastille with drinks in hand; bikes and cars fly by early on New Years Eve.

We had walked all over the neo-gothic concepts of the city growing on top of the ruins of itself...Hugo's Paris has been so well-tread upon, I don't dare walk in his footsteps.  The Louvre with it's garish Pyramid hoisted onto the courtyard of the Palace...itself built atop the ruins of a fortress....it's laughable to think I can compete.

Should I say nothing and let the pictures speak?

It seemed trite at best and ignorantly futile at worst to even try to spill words on paper when so much has been said by so many exemplars of the written word.  Can't I just say Bonne année....happy 2013?

Perhaps my thinking about this conundrum of sorts, my struggle to explain the metaphorical arc of optimism growing in us as we initially threw our plates and senses to the city to fill....the culmination of New Years......followed by the patient and cultured descent towards our last day here....perhaps this IS the story!

As I descend from flight level 33 into Chicago O'Hare, I'm left with the feeling that I don't want to come down....I want to go back...I want to stay there on the arch, on that night, with those balmy clouds confining the rays of light in radial patterns which only converge on us.  High above Paris on an arch, bathed in the nexus of light and arc...my memory lives.