Cycle Diary

Today I saw the sunrise from the Waitakere Ranges, and the sunset at Piha Beach. And I set off this morning under a full moon.

8.30am:
After stopping at The Piha Store for a coffee and to sit down and eat my breakfast and start writing this, I felt the nudge to put pen and paper back in the pannier bag and continue cycling the further one kilometre to the beach.

I now sit in the dunes and grass, the clear morning sun at my right shoulder spotlighting an endless blue stage. A pod of surfers sits, watching a horizon that swells with small, clean breaks. The prize peak arrives and three or four surfers leap to their feet, walking like disco Jesus; then the wave obeys them and they get back in the boat.

The west coast is benign today, tempering my image of it as wild, frightening, and deadly.

With only four kilometres left to ride I'd seen my shadow for the first time on the road before me, stretched and sharp - a silhouette mirror. I'd woken early and set out in the dark at 6am, an hour before I'd planned to, but the moon was perfectly full and the roads empty, being Good Friday, so I set my rear light pulsing, and rolled. My bike hummed on a new front tyre, and my vintage pannier bags enjoyed their first airing for 20 years, reunited with their purple aluminum Bor Yueh bike rack. Despite being 25 years old, my blue Bauer road bike still has plenty of life left in it. One careful mother-in-law owner, it sat in the garage at the family home for who knows how long, and five years ago Lynn gave it to me.

It's been a sweet ride, but its low gear isn't low enough for me not to have to push it like a pack mule up some of the gnarly hills in the ranges. I'd planned to stop for breakfast at the top of the hill, but I felt good, so I pressed on, completing the 30km ride in 98 minutes.

After a breakfast of sago pudding, boiled eggs, two feijoas, half an apple, and some pie crust, I made for the beach where I'm generally just sitting around soaking in the remoteness and sea-renity. And reading my book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, and writing. And eating my peanut butter sandwich.

For lunch I hoisted my vagrant ass up the stairs at the Piha Surf Life Saving Club restaurant where I sat on the verandah overlooking the lifesavers over the road, and hammered a beef burger and fries. I'd hoped to also have a beer, but the restaurant isn't serving alcohol today, because this Friday is Good enough already ...

Saturday:
Fortunately I had a can of beer in one of my pannier bags, which meant I was still able to have a beer with lunch, but just not while I was eating it, and not in the restaurant. I saddled up and headed back around past The Piha Store and on along the road to North Piha Beach, where I would be staying the night. To my surprise the carparks at the north end were just as full as the two at the other more iconic and "glamorous" (some very snazzy holiday homes there) end.

The first public toilet I came to seemed like the perfect place to drink my beer, so I tied up my steed, drained my bladder, filled up my water bottle, and went outside and drained my can. Dinner was a fall from grace: rice and a few potato crisps mixed together in the bottom of the chip bag - something I'd prepared earlier; I was pleasantly surprised to find that the chips were still crisp.
To be continued ...

The the

Candles

The future is the buried wick
the past the crumbled soot but
the flame burns up, bright and tall
moving imperceptibly to those whose
way it lights


Pigeons

The pigeons downtown must
think it strange to see
people pigeonholed
in their towers
working late
to be able to
afford
to buy
free
range
chicken

Dream team

Last night I felt what it's like to intercept a pass in a rugby game when, in my dream, I was caught up in a match that broke out in the stand at a NZ Warriors rugby league game. This is the latest episode in my recurring dream that I am facing my fear of playing rugby, and my intercept is, thus far, my greatest rugby moment. I was eventually tackled, which wasn't as bone-crunching as I expected it to be - in fact it was almost as though I was put down gently on the concrete bleacher. Perhaps there is something in my Kiwi psyche that knows I should play, or at least have played, rugby and it's found an outlet in my dreamland. Perhaps it's not too late to return to high school as an adult student and sign up for the 2nd XV, or at least try to start an impromptu match on the sideline.

Summer

Close grey ice sky
bare wood branches
fissure network
from frosted earth
The expanse separating the water above from the water below

Bright new green leaves leak blue light through gaps
from overlap
by crepe paper shapes that scrape and separate;
A thousand dazzling lights
pierce the thick black sky

Stay-home OE

He's like the guy I worked with at Mico Plumbing Supplies who returned to Thailand to visit every year or two. But this guy comes out here to New Zealand twice a year he told me today, every summer and winter. Why in winter? He’s from Japan, which is far enough away from New Zealand to be the opposite season, isn’t it? I see him in town occasionally from a distance, his distinctive gait and spindly frame, cargo shorts and ageless face, unkempt hair and glasses, a real loner. God knows what sort of cracks he’s fallen through in Japan. He’d stay at the backpackers where I lived and worked 13 years ago. Maybe he still stays there - we didn’t discuss that today. He’d come here and watch TV endlessly in a shitty room off the kitchen at Conor’s Topfloor Hostel. The wide open spaces.

He’s an accountant, and he’d done his math because Conor’s was the cheapest room in town at only $16 or $22, depending on whether you wanted to share a room with others, or just hear them through the walls. A British relationship breakdown; the operatic sounds of a Latino woman being pleasured. Little surprise that I should bump into him at the language school where I now work, our orbits colliding on the fourth floor - he sitting serenely in the window waiting for a free English class to start, me in the corridor fast lane, head turned deciphering his side profile. He couldn't get his head around that I now work as a teacher, a far cry from my days cleaning toilets five floors up, yet still traveling through Auckland.

The Importance Of Not Being Ernest

It’s believed that Ernest Hemingway once wrote a six-word novel: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." This guy really knew how to trim the fat, which is partly what made me want to write like him. His deceptively simple writing style had a childlike quality, and my attempts to emulate him read more like creepy children’s stories, so I went with that and wrote kid’s stories instead. I didn’t send them to a publisher because I didn’t need reminding that I was a failed Hemingway who couldn’t even write something decent about worms.

But then I had to put aside my insights on life as a worm and write a best man speech for my brother’s wedding. And that’s when I started writing some crisp one-liner jokes. That was way back in the year 2000, when the future started. I first set foot on the comedy stage in March 2001, and since then I have looked back. I have looked back trying to understand how I went from serious ad school student to market research telephone interviewer and worm author, to standup comedian. Maybe as a telephone interviewer I was practising talking into a tiny microphone to a stranger laughing at me, and perhaps as a worm author I learned to lighten up and become a kid again. This is partly the theme of my new standup comedy show: https://www.comedyfestival.co.nz/find-a-show/my-way-or-the-hemingway/

Waiheke for a day

Yesterday on Waiheke island I rode my scooter down to tranquil Rocky Bay. I spied a good parking space, but was aware of a guy sitting nearby at a picnic table smoking a cigarette and gazing at the bay. I parked there anyway, and as I turned off the ignition he said, “good to have a scooter to look around the island.” I replied, "yeah, you can have your tranquility back now." He didn’t seem too fussed. I sat down at the table and started devouring my supermarket pizza, and as we talked he pointed to schools of baitfish close to shore. His kayak with fishing rod inserted lay at the water’s edge less than 10 metres from where we sat, and he said that at high tide he can pop open the sunroof and catch a snapper from his car, which I thought was a bit dismissive of the beautiful surroundings. “Drive-thru fishing”, I joked.
I asked him if he knew Sam McLean, an old Scottish guy who lived in Rocky Bay and owned a 50-foot yacht that I crewed aboard to Fiji in 1993. He didn’t know. That was a long time ago now.
“What do you do on the mainland?”, he asked me. “All sorts of things”, I replied, “cheese gives me really weird dreams.” At first I thought he was joking when he told me his job, but as he went on I knew he was for real. For a sea captain I thought his glasses looked too trendy, and he looked too young and homeless, but maybe that’s just the dress code in Rocky Bay. He explained that oil companies pay $500,000 a day for offshore seismic surveying, and that, with its eight-mile-long lines trailing from the stern of the ship, pilot boat out front and rear-guard boat, his get-up is the largest moving object on earth. “Oil companies think nothing of the cost - for every dollar spent they get 20 dollars back”, he added, relighting his exotic cigarette. He pointed to his recreational craft, a 23-foot yacht moored out in the bay, which he’d bought for $1800 in the Bay of Islands and taken a week to sail home due to a lack of wind. He'd had to motor the whole way. I had more island to see, so with a full tank of vegetarian pizza I hopped on my scooter and buzzed off.