Tag: Biggie

Friday afternoon this is where I rode my road bike (not mountain bike) — this + the Shoreline Trail, which is much more challenging and rutted and rocky and hilly. I get bored of riding my road bike on long rides by myself. Sometimes I love it. But, sometimes I just can’t spend any more time in my own head (not a good sign with 8 more month of training…). So, instead, Friday I took my road bike and hit the trails. This isn’t aerobically challenging, but it’s technically hard, because your road bike simply isn’t designed for the trails. You have to focus to not fall over or get a flat or accidentally stick your skinny tire in a rut. And, the whole thing shakes your body constantly, every bump, shattering your boredom.

This is actually about three miles from our condo. You just ride past the mall, under the freeway and beyond the water treatment plant. And, then you keep going until you’ve gone far past all the recreational bird-watchers. The trail goes all the way out into the middle of the marsh that covers the blurry line between land and the Bay. You go until suddenly you’re standing on top of a marsh, surrounded by nothing, all by yourself.

I didn’t ride as far or as long as I wanted. I could say it’s because I had to take Biggie to the vet, but I was just bored. I just didn’t want to.

I did take Biggie to the vet, though. And, they said the problem wasn’t just stress from Tupac or the new situation. They said he has the same 100% fatal illness Floyd had (F.I.P) and he’s going to die just like Floyd did. Yes, it’s an extremely rare disease. Yes, it’s weird they both got the same mutation. Yes, it sucks.

I want to have a better way to say that. I want to make it mean something and have a point or a lesson. Isn’t that what writers are supposed to do? Take our own small pains and make them bigger, make them matter to other people, make them something. Instead, I cleaned. I cleaned the whole house Friday night. Because the only thing that’d be worse than having two cats die would be having the third one get sick too from a kitten that we only got to keep him company. If this was literature, there’d be a word for that.

We had to leave for a wedding Friday, after I finished cleaning. What do you do with a dying kitten when you’re leaving? One who has an infectious disease? We brought him with us. He’s not moving much, so it wasn’t hard. He just slept on the bed, walked around the room a little, enjoyed Carmel. And, we went to a wedding. We danced and partied and drank and then came back to the room and sat with the sick kitten. Then, we took him to the beach.

I tried to take a video of him running with Steve across the sand, but I accidentally took a video of what I thought I wasn’t taking a video of and didn’t record what I thought I was recording. Of course.

When we got home I went for my two hour run, barely beating the sun setting. It was ok, in that I never felt worse than I already felt. But, near the beginning, as I ran through a neighborhood and into the woods, an alarm inside one of the houses was going off. And, for ten second I wondered if it was my alarm, if I was asleep and I’d just been dreaming all this. I didn’t feel very awake; it seemed possible. I actually did a whole body check, tried to feel my pillow under my head if I was really in bed dreaming. But, I wasn’t. This was all real and that wasn’t what my alarm sounds like anyway.