Glenn Kubish

I wonder. I wonder if part of the resistance to bicycle riding in the winter reveals itself in the last seven words of that sentence from Robert Hurst’s Machiavellian book, The Art of Cycling. I wonder if the backlash to riding a bicycle in the winter, the ridicule with which it is visited by some critics, the determinism it invokes, is, after everything else is stripped away, precisely that we don’t know how winter riding is good for the soul. Princely book Or why the soul needs good. Or what the soul is. Or how there could be some kind of connection between the soul and, of all things, riding a bicycle in winter. What exactly is going on in this explosive clause? Hurst pulls the pin and drops the thought like a hand grenade right there, moving on in his account to more practical matters, including how to ride through public plazas and across curbs. We are left to make sense of the debris. As Strummer warns us, the soul is hard to find. For me, the good news is ...

Tonight on satellite radio James Taylor's Carolina In My Mind flowed into our living room. And pictures came to mind. In one, I see myself in the basement at 6704 (that's the address-inspired nickname of the northeast Edmonton house I grew up in) listening again and again to that magnetic song. In those days, that meant lifting the needle and dropping the arm on the LP's groove, second song on side one. That line about maybe hearing the highway calling, wow. I would sit down there, lights off like in a theatre, and let that homesickness carve me. In another picture, I am in Calgary. High school days. Jaime and I are there for a debate, I think. In a bar there's a singer with a guitar on a stool and he's singing Fire And Rain.  Those pictures in my mind are nothing special in themselves, I suppose. But it's more and more interesting to me that the first notes of that song somehow illuminate the images in my memory. It's kinda like looking at a Youtu...