Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 80   I need approval from women

My weakness in life has always been a need for approval from women. I gave up trying to get approval from men because my father taught me that it wasn’t manly or whatever … I don’t know what his message was, nor do I know why my mind works the way it does … it may have nothing to do with family failure. It may be entirely genetic.

The behavioral scientists and profilers are working on such subjects, and I bet they find new things every day because there are no concrete answers.

When you stand back at a distance and look at people’s behaviors, you can generalize human actions and plot them under the normal curve. Behavior can be reduced to statistical probabilities, and that’s why an actuarial can tell the government and insurance companies how many drunken driving deaths will occur per year.

Unfortunately however, no statistical analysis can tell exactly who is going to be involved in the drunken incident. Most likely it will be a drunk or somebody who drinks regularly, but sometimes it’s just a strange set of events that catapults a regular Joe into catastrophe. Joe may have drank no more than two beers at one sitting during his entire lifetime, but for some reason he drank 5 beers at the outdoor picnic and then drove down the road and ran over some hapless soul wrestling mail out of the rural box.
 
The problem is simple: there is no way to predict what individuals will do.

It’s a lot like quantum theory where scientists can track the overall effects of atomic particles and use that information to make electricity and computers, but they can’t track single atoms or predict where those single atoms might go next. Quantum theory and behavioral theory are quite similar, and that’s no coincidence since the full universe operates on the same basic rules.

One of my pet theories says we can study the universe by understanding behavior over spans of time. In other words I say that stars and planets will follow the same seemingly random rules that we see in human behavior. However, what masks our ability to see this happening in outer space is that our lifespans are so brief compared with the actions of bodies in space.

Ok, enough said about physics, because everyone will soon fall into a coma … but I had to mention my enthusiasm for physics … and there is a reason for this. It has to do with bicycling.

When you ride a bike, you sit atop two very strong gyroscopes. This is the reason that a bike can stay upright. A gyroscope is an anti-gravity device that parallels exactly what scientists observe in space. Planets and moons and stars have this identical motion … and so do atomic particles. Gyroscopic movement is a universal theme, and can be used to study the properties of physics.

The fact that I’m studying the underlying reasons for behavior while simultaneously using a bike is no coincidence. Although it may have been coincidental that the two should merge, and may be mere happenstance that I would have been a scientist or observer of the world no matter where I was put in life.

The bike has let me see and feel things that nobody can teach about the natural world. Riding has let me break bonds with both my planet and my culture. Most people eagerly await their fate within society and see that as their destiny, but I don’t.

I see society as a boundary beyond which no thought is allowed. The gossipers control who you are. That’s the local code. They weigh how you look and how you act and then make a determination who you are. There is no measure you can take against these people except to avoid them at all cost … but they are everywhere … and they ply their trade continually.

You cannot walk anywhere on earth anymore without the gossipers. They will wither your spirit. They force conformity to the import of their own lives.

Anyone who stands different will be bent and throttled by the gossipers.

A bike lets me see things that car-drivers can’t observe. I can see deep inside the souls of people and understand that their civilized behavior at the grocery store is just a ruse of cooperation that dissolves into their personal turmoil as soon as they are freed in a car. In other words, the same civilized guy who helps you pick up spilled groceries will next moment drive intentionally close to a bicyclist.

Uncertain behavior is the truth of the universe. There are no rules. Anything can happen, and it will happen, and people know it. That’s why people look to the heavens as a symbol of regularity despite the fact that Jupiter will one day blow off into space and become a star.

I can write this book and refer to myself in a dispassionate third-party monotone as if my life is a test-tube experiment. This subjectivity has allowed me to do my work and not see the social consequence because I am disassociated from myself as well as the other humans. In fact interaction in any prolonged sense causes me anger. People piss me off with their cues and voices and nuances and bullshit stuff I can’t understand.

If something bother me, I tell the person. I have absolutely no social skills whatsoever.

But there is good reason to mask yourself. The gossipers and socializers and haters.

Overall, I find it to be a huge clumsy burden. It’s a fucking game… and yes it is … that’s why the probation department pushes a game over on people. They try to force people into the game.

You can’t understand humans until you witness the immense effort they undertake to force conformity. They will batter a person until the end of time to force conformity … even when a man has not broken the law.

We have now become the mind-reading society!!! How provincial… isn’t that the society that burned the witches??

But I tell you folks, that is what is inside people at their very heart. People are easily spooked and run with the herd. There is no law. Law is an illusion that people roughly agree on, but at the end of the day, it means nothing.

The mind-readers had pulled out their biggest gun … the sex pistol. And they started shooting women at me with the sex pistol …boom boom boom  in order to catch me doing what? What was I supposed to do with these women? Commit the wholly inappropriate thing of talking to them?

Oh my god almighty. I might talk to a woman … and to the sex-pistols that could only mean one thing… inappropriate SEX … god dam, lets set up the stakes so we can burn the witches again.

What is my crime here. I demand to know where my crime is. Did I eyeball women. Did I talk to women. Did I buy dirty magazines. Did I masturbate to dirty images in magazines.

Where in the fuck is the crime???????

I have never touched a woman inappropriately. I have never pulled out my wanger except to pee in the back yard in what I assume is privacy.

So where is my crime. Where is my victim.

The made-up story … that’s what the mind-reading society has specialized in now.

There is no way to predict anything with certainty. And the uncertainty of survival and adequate food supply has forced otherwise quite irrational humans into social alliances.

Back to our topic of unpredictable human behavior: The crime fighters offset the unpredictable nature of behavior by using profiles to guess against the uncertainty … especially when dealing with ambiguous people like me.

Authorities use profiles to say who is most likely to offend our cultural sensibilities. They interview abusers of the social code to better understand these people, and afterward use this information to narrow down who might be a serial bike offender.
 
This said, let me return to the topic of women, and more specifically my mother. Approval from my mother was a welcome respite in my life. Whenever she praised me I knew it was something real and her approval kept me alive when I was young … but there was always a distance between us that couldn’t be crossed.

I never really knew my mom. She was this huge person who protected me and stood up for me, yet she remained unreachable. Circumstances in her life caused her to push me away and there was so much left unshared.

After mom died in 1986, I tried to retch up that sick feeling, and thought it was wrong not to cry, but nothing was there. I couldn’t overcome the feeling that it was her time, but I felt guilty for thinking it was good that she had passed quickly. This was my mom for christ’s sake … how could I feel so callous? But she smoked all her life, and towards the end she got weak, and a cough invaded her life. I imagined a slow hard decline that would end in cancer.

Nobody wants to see their loved one depleted like some great force opened a spigot and now their life was draining out. I wouldn’t want to go that way. And my mom was proud, and she was a fighter … she would rather die with her boots on too. When she went, she went fast, and I know life shuffles us back into the deck.

Still I had all these questions about my mom, but there was no way to connect and now she was gone. What about her life? What had I missed? Was she an alcoholic or just the adult child of alcoholics? Why was she in such pain?
 
Why were my memories so unresolved?

From 1995 to 1999 I knew a lady who worked at a pharmacy, and from afar I always liked her. She reminded me of my mom in some ways. She was nine feet tall. She was huge. And I don’t mean literally, I mean as a measure of her character. When I stood next to her, I remember being surprised that she was actually shorter than me. She had smart eyes and was forgiving like my mom. Everybody liked her and respected her.

I liked the way I felt when standing in front of her and remember thinking her husband was a lucky guy. But I never spoke to her except over business.

For me, connection with society meant talking to women, but I didn’t talk to this lady.

I think it was 1999, and the pharmacy lady got divorced. One day she came right out and told me about it. I didn’t ask her, she just told me. I didn’t know anything about it before that.

She said she moved into a new house and was living there with her daughter. Prior to this we never had a personal conversation, and somehow I felt she was telling everyone her story including me. Shit I don’t know anything, I can’t measure people, but I liked sharing with her at that moment.

My emotional need has always been about sharing. Sharing is difficult for me. I don’t share with men, and don’t have any stories to buddy-over how I blasted a duck to pieces or gigged a frog. And my road stories tend to make people blink, so I couldn’t relate that way. Whereas with women, I am open and more apt to ask questions that pop into my mind, and believe me, I got a rather coarse filter at times. Let’s face it, I deal in broad brushstrokes and laugh when heavy objects fall on people in the movies.
 
I am forward with women and feel I can ask them anything, but I was unaware I was doing that. I was unaware that I stepped closer to women than to men … I assumed everybody had this wholesale lack of social boundary.

It’s all about my emotional needs. I am an absolute black hole starving for nourishment. And that nourishment comes from being close to women and sharing their lives in a peripheral way. My father refused to share with us. He never gave us anything, and when he did throw out a minor recognition, we gobbled it up and acted like total fools, which reinforced to him that we were needy fools. That’s how I felt growing up around him, but this shows how emotionally needy I really was.

I needed human bonds but that was void in our family. But on the flip side, I was predisposed to being a loner and liked playing alone. However my mom let me have that freedom and was always there when I got back from my forays into the forest. I could show her the things I found, and the little boats I carved, and the gourds I grew in the garden. Still there was a limit beyond which even my mother would ridicule me.

If I tried to speak too much in-depth about something, or if I showed her my art. Those things somehow bothered her. And of course I learned early-on not to share anything with my father because he would twist it into something negative.

The fact that my father was forever twisting my being into a negative is a critical point for this story of psychology and activism … because that’s a mirror image of my relationship with the police and society over bike riding.

So given this context throughout my life, I approached women as though I was a ungainly fool, and only secondly let them see the warm-hearted person inside. Paradoxically, that same warm heart has turned to rage against the perceived inequities in my life, most apparently when I rode a bike.

Next Chapter I

This is hard to explain. I live vicariously. I cannot actually bond very closely with people, but having conversations, especially with women, and being able to ask them personal questions and talk to them about routine daily matters, gives me complete nourishment.

All my customers over the years were women. I shared time with them in this peripheral way while working around their houses. Some women found satisfaction sharing this conversation, and I don’t want to create some lonely-housewife titillation because that was never the case. Nor did I spread their stories to anyone else.
 
Let’s clarify something completely before going on: I never had a relationship with a customer. It was all talk, and nothing else. And these women introduced me to their neighbors and friends and this expanded my business. This is how my business worked … I befriended influential women and they introduced me to new people.

Over the years I developed several close relationships with women in that manner. But it was all within the context of the workday and never an after-hours hoo-ha. Sorry folks, but I don’t have any interesting tales.

In retrospect, I can see how some women probably assumed my forwardness was sexual, but it wasn’t.

In the mean time, my assumptive approach to women was breaking the hard social boundaries that sex police feel is the paramount evil in our society.

Back to the pharmacy lady. I thought she would be interesting to know. I liked her, she was nine feet tall, and she was just divorced … and that reminded me of my mother. My god, would I be able to ask her about those feelings and find out what mom felt?

The pharmacy lady had opened the door to a type of friendship I thought by confiding her recent marital change, so one day I bought her a paint brush and dropped it off at the counter; telling her there was a psychology at work: that she would want to use the brush to paint her new house, but would find the task too daunting and call a professional painter instead … and since I was a professional painter, who else could she call, LOL.

It was a good brush too, one that I’d use myself so if she ended up doing the work herself, it would be a real tool and not some piece of junk that shed hairs in the paint. Or she could re-gift it, whatever. It wasn’t flowers nor intended to be.

I don’t remember her reaction, I think she laughed, but she was busy.

A few weeks later she asked me what kind of work we did, and I gave her a flyer listing our complete offering. Later she asked me if I could help her with a problem at her house and we arranged a time for me to call on Saturday and get directions.

I went and gave her an estimate. At some point while I was standing there in her dining room, she reached over and touched my right shoulder in a pinching motion with her left hand. At this point she said, ‘I trust you’ in a very matter of fact tone, and I said, ‘well we wouldn’t run off with your chairs’ (as if somebody else would).

This was the second time she touched me in this exact manner. Once at the pharmacy, while I was standing there a few weeks before, she reached across the counter and touched me exactly like she did at her house. I never touched her or responded to her touch.

Honestly folks, I may be a dork, but I thought it meant she liked me. I thought she was comfortable with me. And I liked her too, and liked the way she made me feel.

I genuinely felt competent around her in the same way I feel around my best customers. She had the style for sure.

I was a dork but started to figure she was interested in me … or so I thought … and I think it was a romance thing, and I guess that entered my head at the time, but I was ambivalent at the moment. Sure I liked her but I wasn’t a romance guy, and I was married.

The stupid thing is my wife and I both went to her pharmacy … although we never went at the same time. However I figured out later that the pharmacy lady didn’t know I was married, and maybe my swagger around the ladies gave the impression I was a live-wire player or something. But I am very slow romantically, and it takes me a while to develop a friendship that kindles intimacy.

A problem arose however. Problems always arise when I’m dealing with people … so what else is new?

I guess my behavior was confusing, because I finally concluded that she wanted a relationship just about the time she discovered I was married. Afterwards she started giving off vibrations whenever I strode into the pharmacy that she wanted nothing to do with me … and I was slow to read that too. Here I was vomiting all over myself, thinking I was somehow obligated to let her I really liked her but was married, but that I really liked her … which I did.

Does it sound confusing? Well, welcome to my mind when it comes to making sound decisions about people. I am best when I stay completely away from people.

Ok, here we go. A few weeks later I was in her neighborhood giving an estimate and really wanted to stop by and say hello on the pretext that she hadn’t hired us to do the work yet. I changed my mind and was driving on to my next appointment when I looked up and saw her pass me while driving toward her house.

I said no, and drove another five miles, but suddenly changed my mind and decided I wanted to see her. I made an illegal u-turn on highway 6 and drove back to her house. Was this romance? Probably so, but for me romance takes a long time, so this certainly wasn’t a sex try by any large stretch of the imagination.

My appearance at the door was a calamity the very moment it happened. I couldn’t have felt or been stupider in my life than right then. It was a huge error, and I should’ve immediately acknowledged that, but I was so startled by her reaction that all I could do is retreat to my dirty unwashed van. God, I could’ve hit myself in the head with a plate. How could I be so dumb?

It was because I was following my feelings and I had feeling for her … but she was so way out of my class … how could I be so stupid?

The next day I tried to call her house and apologize but my call was blocked. Jesus, I might as well jump off a building as commit that social suicide, but I thought I could smooth over and apologize and put things right.

It was too late. Behind the scenes this incident was cast by the sex police as stalking, because this lady evidently felt I was a stalker. And this set into motion several years of hell in my life.

Next chapter III

My intuition is the only way I am able to read situations. I don’t have any friends, and around this time my brain heard a bomb go off. I felt it, and it caused me great unease.

First of all, let me add that I got the message from the pharmacy lady to stay away and I walked wide around that place from then on.

To that lady: I apologize. If I misread you from the start, it was my fault. I never thought of you as anything but a wonderful person.

Enough groveling, lets get down to the meat of the story.

The first word of trouble came from an older painter named Willie. He was half retired and hung around the paint store.

Willie was sitting there looking straight ahead but addressing me when he said, ‘the judge has something in store for you.’
 
I was ready to blurt back, ‘well I’m not hard to find,’ except the warning told me instantly to stop riding a bike.

I would have ridden later that afternoon, but a warning like that tells you they have a trap waiting. Ah, and that explained some of the other things I had been seeing.

They had put listeners next to my restaurant table several times over the past year and I’d seen them following me. They had a policeman sit mornings in McDonald’s when I ate there, and in fact I read through him that they’d made up their minds about me and there was no way out.

I knew they were coming a year before they actually made a move.

Now something else happened. Buckle up, here goes … I can occasionally see things before they happen (play the twilight-zone music).

Many times I knew that a customer was going to call before they called. I could see other things too. I sometimes knew how things were going to happen before they happened … but I couldn’t talk about this ability, or it would disappear. Or at least that’s what I thought.

I will say this; I trusted this instinct as solidly as anyone would trust their own eyes. I saw things clear as day, and then the exact thing would happen precisely like I saw it. Sometimes these things came in a vivid dream and sometimes they were just vibrations across the land, like a flash intuition. But emotions and feelings are real folks. Just because you see them apart from the rest of the world doesn’t mean it’s true. The Earth is one big electric dynamo and whatever we are is connected to that current. And this is why people have historically been able feel the ‘winds of war,’ and everybody feels it before it happens.

That aside, the judge has a very quiet mind. Among some people, and probably among those at the highest levels, it takes this ability to still the mind because I think they protect themselves by letting out very little that might betray their hand.
 
One night I got a message that told me my bike riding was causing problems and somehow those problems were related to drugs. The latter part of the message was garbled but it came very clearly from the judge and he was talking to one or two other people. It was very strong and I cataloged it carefully, but this happened some time before their final push.

Anyway I took that information to mean the judge’s hand was being forced by drug influences in our area. Maybe I tapped out a bag-man or pissed off a dealer or drug family while I was riding … no matter, it meant that some influential person in drugs was pushing on the judge. He had been warned and he was made uncomfortable.

So when Willie told me at the paint store that the judge had ‘something in store for me,’ it came as no surprise because I already knew that forces were pushing on the judge.

But why did the judge let the information slip out through Willie? Why was I forewarned? Did he want me to know exactly who it was coming from? Was their plan so powerful that I would have no defense? In the end that turned out to be true.

At the time I thought the judge was giving me fair warning, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed likely they had informed the entire community they were going to bust me. They wanted the community poised for news of the arrest … and they were going to make a spectacle … there was going to be no doubt to those people pushing on the judge.

… and they were going to haul my ase up on the most lurid and vile charges available. They were going to create a SEX charge because that’s what the police always do against someone the public hates.

I saw it instantly. They were going to put a woman in a car out on my regular bike route, and somehow it was going to become an assault. And somehow it was going to become a sex thing too. I knew exactly what they were planning, but I didn’t have any experience with that kind of maneuver so I had to stop riding immediately.

According to the manager of the paint store, the local newspaper had recently carried an article calling me a terrorist because of my bike riding. I was now cast as a terrorist in the age of terrorism.

After that dubious piece of newsworthy truth, the authorities could add the sex charge and it would be totally believable, plus the authorities could quote the article they put in the newspaper as further proof.

The red flags were flying and sharks were in the water … but could I avoid the trap?

The stalker

Maybe I was a stalker. However it seems a bit exaggerated to me, but I accept whatever people think. I know who I am and I’ve never harmed a woman in my life. But the victim has the final say, and her feelings were the only thing that mattered since I was reviled in my community.

Maybe I unknowingly made women uncomfortable, and maybe that’s standard enough to clank an iron pipe across the supposed-offender’s head and give him a lifetime stain of registration and probationary management.

I think the lady was very influential and wanted nothing of me that could tarnish her reputation. I approached her inappropriately in light of her divorce and vulnerability, and I approached her for my own selfish needs. But mostly I think the community was fed up with stories about me, and my bike riding and my spewing craziness and anger all the time.

A little gossip goes a long way when somebody is hated, and nobody is hated more than a sexual-cyclist who thinks he’s got rights against the murder vehicles.

The conservative community was looking for an opportunity to bring down a big pain in the ass, and what better way to unite everybody than to wring the goat with a sex charge.

So when they discovered that ‘I liked the girl,’ then it became an easy nuance of language to alter that to ‘I licked the girl.’

Use your southern drawl and compare the words ‘like’ and ‘lick’ and casually transpose them into the same word: ‘leek.’

For instance, I leek steak and beans … or … I leek the ice cream cone. ‘Like’ and ‘lick’ are the same word in Texas.

So, in Texas, I leeked the girl.

Nobody in Texas like somebody who trying to leek the girls, so finally the authorities had a meat-and-tater issue to throw on the bicycle rider … plus the public likes a good come-uppance on somebody they don’t want on the road.

It works especially well when they can fit the story into a morality play with all the great stereotypic characters: innocent-virtuous woman with many friends versus angry-violent miscreant. Add dirty to that miscreant, since I was fond of wearing work clothes everywhere, particularly when I rode a bike, and I never washed my van. I was a dirty turd.

It was wonderful drama to whet the public’s appetite and everybody fell into line as soon as they were advised of the proper dialog by the authorities.

The authorities were following me everywhere and they purposely stepped-up and let me see them. They watched every move, and approached every single person I talked to; telling them whatever best sold the public contempt. They said I was violent and a sex offender … and the public did their part and ate it like cows starving for grain.

My customers turned their backs on me. Some customers called saying they heard things but it must have been so vile they wouldn’t tell me what. These people were honestly shocked. Customers cancelled jobs, and I was put out of business.

And so began a three+ year social nightmare as my town scorned me heartily for my behavior.

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