My body continually lets me down. Oh, yeah. Sure. It’s amazing. It can do all sorts of things. I can ride a very long way sometimes, but why do I always have to pee?
I always have to pee. Here we are riding along. The day is beautiful. Soft breeze. Trees swaying. Flitting birds. The sound of tires and maybe running water. I would love not to stop doing this, not to tromp through the brambles and find a private-ish spot behind a tree, to make whoever’s with me stop too. Maybe not to get some poison ivy. Maybe not to scare a dog walker.
It is a design flaw of the human body that we cannot evacuate waste material on the move. It is a tragedy of cultural norms that it is not cool to drop trou and let fly. I’m a man, too. My logistics are not nearly as involved as my female friends.’
And why always with the eating? Three meals a day? For f*%’s sake, does that not strike you as inefficient. And if I don’t eat, what? My legs turn to molasses, my brain to s#%. It hurts. Not to mention the time and energy that goes into planning all that eating.
It’s frustrating, distracting. There is so much to think about when you’re making a big effort, not least navigation and fueling, so carving out some portion of your attention to solve a problem like urination, or how to chew a sticky, sugary thing without choking to death is a real bummer.
Of course, balancing this is the imperative to move, to get that feeling of charging through time and space. Quite why would there be an imperative like this which comes so quickly into conflict with the others is beyond the ken of my little mind.
Then also the imperative to live, which has served to propel me through piles of miles when what I felt like doing was laying down to die. The whole thing is absurd, stumbling through the woods half drowning in your own human frailty, having paid to do so maybe, all to grow yourself mentally and spiritually, if only ever to tear yourself apart physically, as biological imperatives push and pull you in every wrong direction.
Ahhh. Humanness. What a sweet, beautiful, pain in the ass.
At least we don’t have to just sit and eat and eat and eat all day long like some animals! (Note that I said we don’t “have to” because most of us want to and a lot of us just do)