Thesis Part 10

It was in the French Alsace village of La Tenatrice that Spartan Pete’s short-lived professional cycling career came to an end. As with most of the tales so far-related regarding the ups and downs of Team Gustav, this one too inadvertently hinged on the actions of a woman.

La Tenatrice roughly marked the halfway point of the TGICT, and the newly reinvigorated Team Gustav (holding a steady third in the race) had been invited to a cocktail party in their honor. The party, held in a well-appointed banquet hall above the village’s most exclusive clothier, was quite typical of affairs of this kind. It was a stuffy room full of halfway decent food and less decent booze, peopled with plenty of glad-handing public officials, decrepit town elders and moneyed socialites, along with a smattering of actual cycling enthusiasts who had snuck their way in to see the Swedish and Yankee curiosities. What ended up setting this soirée apart was the gusto and frenetic grace that Team Gustav brought to the event.

Cured of their romantic despair and bursting with confidence, Team Gustav were winners for the first time in years, and it showed–perhaps a little too readily. Their innocent guffaws at poorly told jokes, their exotic accents and their endless succession of boisterous toasts gave the party a youthful, democratic air. And as the highball glasses continued to be refilled, and a few enterprising party-goers left with shouted promises to bring back more wine, it seemed to all that the women began to grow more beautiful and the men more charming. Only the the true sourpusses were unmoved.

One such sourpuss was La Tenatrice’s Minister of Culture, Guy Magiot, who stormed out of the party after a particularly inebriated reveler–drunkenly pontificating on the uselessness of rain wear, attempted to pour an entire bottle of port into Magiot’s galoshes.

Spartan Pete, for his part, was deeply enjoying this break from the routine of the road (and the ever-present games of chess that had come to define Team Gustav’s success), but more than anything else, he was doing his best to enjoy the company of Helen “Kitty” Piraeus, the one true celebrity at the event. Kitty, the daughter of a well-known Greek shipping magnate and a less-well-known Parisian cabaret singer, was possessed of particularly fantastic level of beauty and charm, and like all beautiful women, she was part evil.

From long experience, Pete knew that he was most likely stepping into a giant heap trouble, but found that he didn’t quite care. He half-hoped and half-expected that it would turn out to be the good kind of trouble. Of course, if there’s a lesson our tale has thus far attempted to impart to the reader, it’s that the forces of chaos particularly enjoy paying visits to those fools who expect one thing to happen over another thing.

Continued soon…

Special thanks to Isabelle La Place-Sacher for the French translations. Any grammatical errors are purely mine…

 

Holy Frijole, Soon! I Promise…

Monumental delays over here at the Golden Circle Doughnut Shop, with due apologies to whatever my sparse and ever-dwindling readership happens at this moment to be. However, the next installment in the saga of Spartan Pete and his bicycle race across Europe is almost done, and geez Louise it promises to be incredibly anticlimactic!

In the meantime, here’s another low-yield ditty to mull over as you consider the state of your interpersonal relationships.

 

And a Dollar Short

A note from the proprietor:

Generally speaking, this writer is chronically on time. Those who know me can attest to the unintentional anxiety my exacting punctuality can cause–I’m always the first guest to arrive at parties (if you need help setting up your cheese plate appetizers, just invite me to your soiree and you’re guaranteed an extra pre-party hand). Even when I try to arrive to appointments and engagements casually late, I usually show up exactly on time, rather than my usual half hour early. I like to think that this quality is an endearing character trait, but so far in my life, most people just tend to find it annoying.

So then you may find it surprising that I’m continually behind on my self-imposed deadline for posting new episodes of the Golden Circle (a promised every two weeks). All I can say is that sometimes I lack the emotional fortitude to put pencil to paper, and that these last few weeks have been good ones for those who like to watch baseball.

A new episode should be up by the end of next week. In the meantime, please take a moment to consider the emotional/contextual/metaphorical relationship between the phrase “the downward spiral of romantic attachment” and the drawing below.

 

Thesis Part 9

From the outset, it was clear that the team’s new philosophy had the potential to benefit not just divorced Swedish bicyclists, but a wide array of the (often lonesome, often depressed, often yearning) population across the globe. It was just a matter of spreading the word. Perhaps a little ahead of their time, Team Gustav saw it as a question of marketing–they needed posters, slogans, and–first and foremost–a catchy term of art for their new discipline. Not being men prone to poetic turns of phrase, this endeavor proved difficult.

To their credit, Team Gustav understood the power of a name. There was no question that the right name would make or break their burgeoning movement. After all, what if, instead of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway had titled his first novel A Sad Time in Italy? Or what if 21 Jump Street had been called 25 Year-Old Undercover High School Cops? And suppose Cary Grant had stayed with his given name of Archibald Alec Leach? You get the idea, and so did Team Gustav.

As the TGICT continued across the Western reaches of Germany (with Team Gustav in a dead tie for second place with a team of Italian widowers), Pete and the boys toyed with and abandoned several potential titles, including How to Keep on Keeping On, Aerobic Memory Training, Introspective Peace Exercises, The Game of Life, Experience Contextualization for Happiness, and Chess Jammin’.

Even Spartan Pete, generally a man steeped in eloquent phraseology, found the right title eluding him. Every night found Pete pouring over the dictionary, writing down random collections of words from magazine headlines and advertising copy and pasting them to a bulletin board he kept in the team’s tour bus, all to no avail. It was not until the team had a weekend off in the Alsace-Lorraine that Pete came up with a name that–while not as evocative as Dianetics or Sacred Hoops–captured the imagination of his teammates.

Many of our readers may remember the self-help book from 1978 of the same title, written by former Team Gustav member Georg Hultmann, who after his stint as a professional divorced bicyclist, moved to the states and founded a highly profitable hotel art distribution business (and later, a less successful chain of 3-D pornographic movie theaters). The first edition of the book features the dedication “For SP. You taught us chess, and the rest followed.”

Next time: an unexpected event in the Alsace-Lorraine.

 

Thesis Part 8

Team Gustav’s new outlook was a straightforward enough philosophy, and one borne out of necessity. How best to visualize a game board that exists only in you and your opponent’s mind, and to be able to remember where precisely each piece was at the start of one’s turn, especially over the course of a long bike race?

Their solution to this particular hurdle was to engage in a mental exercise that was often just as strenuous as the bicycle race they were speeding though. At the start of each turn, instead of trying to remember the board at its present state of play, each player would return in their mind to the beginning of the game and “replay” each successive move until one reaches the present round.

As the reader can imagine, this act of memorization and imagination had an adverse effect on the pace of the chess matches, with single games sometimes taking several days to conclude as the players traced each and every move over and over again from start to checkmate. However, like star baseball pitchers watching and rewatching film from their recent starts, Team Gustav began to see the game as a living creature–one capable of being bent to their purpose.

The constant replay of each game’s twists and turns revealed patterns in their opponent’s play, brought past mistakes to glaring light and more keenly focused their strategies. Chess became muscle memory.

It’s perhaps easy to see how this discipline can be applied to life in a larger capacity: if one accepts that every action in the present is based on a complex series of previous actions, turns of events, random moments and counter-reactions, an acute understanding of context is sure to follow. Those who look backward to decide how to move forward often see that every bad moment carries the seed of a good moment, and every good moment is born of previous tragedy. Wars, forest fires, knock knock jokes, family reunions, acts of charity, sandwich recipes, seductions, betrayals, first dates, oil spills, clerical errors, none of it can ever happen independent of anything else.

This broad view of the machinations of life proved invaluable to the team as they applied their new discipline to their personal lives. Being aware of the bald facts that live within one’s history are the best way to act with a clear head. Normally, we only pretend to know our pasts. We sting from hurts and cherish joys and try to act accordingly to bring forth more of the latter and less of the former, but we very often get their causes, durations, and true nature confused. Just as in chess, the obstacles to a richly-led life tend to be hidden behind misdirection and crossed purposes.

And so Spartan Pete, hoping to do nothing more than distract his team from their romantic disaffection, soon found that their collective despair had been melted down and recast into another emotion entirely. Within the complexity of their chess matches, a winning racing team had been born, but so had a philosophic movement.

A Note from the Proprietor:

Recently, more than a few trusted and concerned readers have offered us some friendly advice. They have reminded us that, much like an old man’s bowel movements, a serialized story works best when the forthcoming segment of said story can be expected in not only a timely manner, but with a scheduled regularity. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel, next week on LOST, and so forth. We here at Golden Circle HQ, otherwise engaged in the process of staying out of the hobo camps and Hoovervilles, sometimes get distracted from the drawing and the doodling and the dawdling required to belt out the next installment of our tale. We understand that delay plays havoc with dramatic gravitas and comic timing, and such havoc pains us. The Poet reminds us that the play’s the thing, and we intend to live by that oath, both on the page and in our day-to-day life: so, every two weeks? How does that sound? Set your sundials and we’ll see you later this month.

Continued here…

 

Thesis Part 7

What then, was the solution that Spartan Pete had cooked up for his teammates’ crippling romantic depression?

Like any man who’d been through as many marriages as Pete had (at the time of this story, Pete had recently separated from his third wife), he found that he had become prone to a philosophic outlook on the ups, downs, and general nonsensical whimsy of everyday existence. Most importantly, Pete had come to understand that we as a species are at our best when engaged in fantasy.

A few weeks before the start of the TGICT, Spartan Pete introduced his new strategy to Team Gustav with a speech remembered as much for its high-toned capitalist jingoism as for its unrelenting inspirational quality:

“Old Ben Franklin once said you should behave like Jesus, or pretend to behave like Jesus until the acting becomes believable to you and your community. At that point, what’s the difference between pretending and truth? Truth is written by those who pretend to know it. That’s what I have to say to you, lads. Play. Broadly-speaking, it’s how we learned to come down from the trees and run across the savanna, with the damned baboons and lions in bloody pursuit. It’s why we thought to follow the north star and why we picked up a sharp rock with which to cut up the antelope. Play breeds action. Whether you’re building a suspension bridge or a hummingbird feeder, or planning a murder or getting over a girl, it takes a monumental output of make-believe and sharp-headed concentration. And now is the time for the entire lot of you to get off of your collective sad-sack laurels, put the needle back on the record and start using your god-given brains towards a purpose you’ll find useful and gratifying.”

And so began the storied Team Gustav tradition of the mid-race chess match. It was simple enough: One cyclist playing against another, using standard algebraic chess notation to indicate their moves. For Team Gustav, keeping the ever-changing chess board in their minds required–as Pete had promised–a tremendous level of imagination and concentration. Speeding across the European continent, lost in the aerobic rhythms of their bodies and in the wonders of the chess board, they soon found their minds happily far removed from their self-induced misery and loneliness.

In the early stages of the race, as Team Gustav tackled the vagaries of their new chess-related tasks (the visualization of the game board with all its countless potential moves and counter-moves, the intuiting of the wide range of projected outcomes for their respective games) it seemed that they were almost instantly cured of the most topical symptoms of their collective malaise. They were more cheerful, more intellectually engaged, and riding with an energy they didn’t know they possessed. But the playing of the game (and specifically the way in which they played–on bikes, in their heads) soon became more than just a remedy for depression. Team Gustav began to develop a genuine worldview–an overarching ethos that surprised even Pete with the variety of its practical applications. The thematic contents of this philosophy, as well as its somewhat prosaic name, will be revealed to the patient reader in the coming episodes.

Click here to continue…

 

One Glazed St. Jerome & The Impossible Stoplight

As recently noted, the Golden Circle has expanded its operations to include the selling of doughnut-based art objects and mini-stories, including the image and story below. You can browse the selection here.

The Impossible Stoplight is on the corner of Camden Street and 55th Avenue in Los Besos, California. In the stoplight’s 10 year existence, its machinations have never once proven satisfactory to any of the motorists, pedestrians or bicyclists who have passed through the intersection. Pedestrians find the light short and erratic, leaving them stranded mid-crossing, as impatient motorists, invariably bottlenecked by a succession of cargo trucks attempting to make illegal lefts onto Camden (and into the back parking lot of the ever-popular Tenderfoot’s Home Repair Warehouse) cut into the bike lane, thus aggravating and agitating bicyclists and vice versa. On the northeast corner, said bike lane is very often blocked anyway, as hungry drivers double-park and rush into one of the neighborhood’s most popular Chinese take-out eateries, Magical Lotus Fantasy. Couple all of the above with the havoc caused by a tenacious colony of feral parrots that roost on top of a traffic control switch station near Zenas Park. Despite pest control’s best efforts to eradicate or relocate the birds, their oversized nests of garbage and eucalyptus branches cause frequent fires and shorts in the system, thusly causing the Impossible Stoplight to malfunction and revert to flashing four-way yellows at least once a month for hours at a time.

Apartments near the Impossible Stoplight tend to go for at least one third below the market rate.

 

Doughnuts For Sale!

UPDATE: Doughnuts are currently all sold out–but more to come soon!

For the very few of you who follow the long-winded narrative contained herein, you may be hard-pressed to remember that despite the author’s preoccupation with existential quandaries and romantic despair, this remains a forum for stories about doughnuts. And since it will take some time before the current plotline winds its merry way back to the corner of 31st Street and Avenue Cardoza (the location of our titular doughnut shop), we thought it might be nice to take a breather from all the cold war intrigue and provide some sugary refreshment.

So: doughnuts are now for sale at the Golden Circle’s Etsy shop. Each reasonably-priced doughnut illustration is hand-painted on sturdy bristol board and measures around 5 by 8 inches. Your purchase will allow you to explore firsthand the Golden Circle’s famous saint-based doughnut menu, as well become the proud owner of a handwritten original mini-story that will be included with each illustration. Delight your friends, amuse children and impress difficult women with doughnuts from the Golden Circle!

A word of caution: Like most choices in one’s life, purchasing and eating a doughnut generally seems like a good idea at the time, but tends to have surprising and not always pleasant consequences. With that in mind, we will also be posting the doughnuts (pictured above) and accompanying mini-stories here for your browsing enjoyment.

Visit the Golden Circle’s Etsy shop

 

Thesis Part 6

It was into this politically volatile situation that our friend Spartan Pete, through a series of events far too complex and extraordinary to explain here without further narrative digression, found himself riding as a full-fledged member of Sweden’s Team Gustav Cycling Club. This was to be Pete’s first (and only) professional bicycle race. In fact, he hadn’t ridden a bicycle in over a decade.

This is not to say Pete was by any means a poor bicyclist. Despite decades of unrepentant chain-smoking, a greasy lunch counter diet, and his somewhat advanced age*, Pete proved to be a popular addition to the team and an adept rider. And, as we shall see, despite his short tenure with them, he became integral to the success that has followed this now-storied cycling club throughout the decades.

*Spartan Pete’s age has always been somewhat of a mystery to us. When pressed, he tended to answer vaguely or jokingly, and one would find no clues in his appearance. Pete was one of those men who was outwardly robust until that day late in life when seemingly overnight, he’d been transformed into a strikingly decrepit old man, barely capable of shuffling down the street. In 1970, At the time of this particular anecdote, Pete could have passed for a haggard 25 year-old, a somewhat leathery 36 year-old, or an amazingly well-preserved 48 year-old. We tend to think the latter was closer to the truth.

In those days, Team Gustav had the distinction of being Sweden’s only all-divorced professional competitive bicycling team.

The martial status of the racers was a marketing ploy concocted by their sponsor, a Scandinavian pharmaceutical company that had just released a new brand of deodorant aimed at aging bachelors.

Before Pete joined the club, the members of Team Gustav were an exceptionally moody lot. Never were a group of men more ill-suited to the contemplative state of mind that repetitive aerobic exercise, sustained wind exposure and staring at long stretches of open roads will engender in the human psyche.

As a race would move forward from hours into days, Team Gustav’s reluctant bachelors–instead of reaching a state of endorphin-induced enlightenment–would sink deep into endlessly circular interior dialogs of regret, loss and heartbreak.

To an outsider like Spartan Pete, it was immediately evident that his team needed new energy and inspiration. Adrift in their collective miasma of despair, Team Gustav’s members had not only lost their competitive edge, but to his eye, they had become monumentally boring people, either silent mopers or self-indulgent depressives.

In a letter to his (and our) friend Franzie, Pete remarked that he “can’t tolerate stunted and starchy conversation for long stretches, and long stretches are all I have to look forward to with these cheese-eaters. What these boys need is a distraction. Normally, I’d say a good night or two with a friendly schatze might do the trick, but these fellas already have enough women trouble. What we need is a thinking-man’s solution.”

Continued here…

special thanks to my coworker Johan for the Swedish translation

 

Thesis Part 5

The race in question was a long one: 1970’s 3rd Annual Trans-German/Iberian Championship Tour (TGICT), which wound a meandering route through almost 1,500 miles of scenic European terrain from Germany to Spain.

This being the height of the Cold War, the TGICT had acquired special significance for various activist groups. Known informally as the “Tour De Gauche au Droite,” the tournament organizers had hoped to raise the awareness of modern-day tyranny by beginning the race at the Allied entrance to Checkpoint Charlie, and ending it at Madrid’s Alcalá Gate in the heart of Franco’s Spain. Thusly, along with a ripping bike race, both anti-communists and anti-fascists could use the ensuing press coverage as a makeshift forum to give voice to their political agendas. Times being what they were and people being what they are, this was bound to turn sour rather quickly.

In fact, the previous year’s tour had been marred by tragedy at its outset. East Berliner Hans Pellenbach, a star player in the inaugural run of the tournament (the GDR team came in fourth, but Pellenbach broke several personal speed records and was much admired in the cycling community), found himself denied an exit visa for the following year’s race.

The Stasi, it turned out, had objected to a drunken comment Pellenbach had made to a Der Spiegel reporter, comparing himself to comic book hero Captain America.

On the night before the race, Pellenbach was machine gunned as he attempted to surreptitiously enter West Berlin so that he might race with his team. A photograph of Pellenbach’s corpse, draped across the wall’s barbed wire, his GDR team uniform visible underneath his parka, was printed in western magazines and for some time became the rallying image for legions of anti-Soviet protesters.

Today, Pellenbach’s story is mostly remembered as being the basis for Paul Whittingham’s 1974 hit melodrama, The Cyclist.

Continued here…