Eggy Cupcake

April 11, 2011

In this Lenten season, a small number of Christians give something up. Some of them will tell you about their sacrifice in a martyr-like manner. For those of you with the stomach for it, I will jump on both of these bandwagons….at the same time! (Yes, I can do that because I’m fairly flexible, and I occasionally wear tights, that’s right - acrobat-wear). For this Lenten season, I appear to have (completely accidentally) given up my safe bicycling ways. I have also become an object of ridicule to the masses. Yes, I am also happy to have developed a Christ complex in this Christly season of Lent and the upcoming Christian and pagan ritual of Easter (or as it was known to the ancient Romans - the ides of Eastermass).

I was feeling kind of down following my weekend activities. I think huge quantities of sugar and small amounts of exercise formed a potent blend of highly reactive chemicals that may have affected a shift in my spiritual trajectory. But I shoved aside my feelings of dejection and jumped out of bed with the alacrity of A.A. Milne’s beloved, striped kid’s idol -Tigger a full 12 minutes before my alarm went off. A scant 90 minutes later and I was on my speedy mountain steed

and swooping raptor-like towards my office eyrie. As I was impressing myself with my speedy gracefulness, I surprised a complacent wooden fence with my speedy attack.

Showing no mercy, I gouged at it with my vicious headlight and then away! I rode away as if nothing had happened, although the car at the intersection I had just swooped across seemed to hesitate just a bit, perhaps in bemused wonder or perhaps temporarily paralyzed with spasms of laughter.

The feeling of heaviness settled upon me like the effects of DDT into the fragile eggshell of my young day. I felt as if I had been chosen for a particularly Mondayish Monday. I went to work and dunked and drowned my sorrow with peanut butter cookies and coffee.

I noticed I had missed a few spots on my mug during my morning shave.  I shuffled my way through a humdrum day and then began a lazy ascent on a low-gear-powered updraft. When I had almost made my escape back to my pastoral homeplace, a girl’s laugh accompanied an airborne ovo’s flight through the spoke’s of my front wheel.

I decided not to dignify their prank with a lifted head, and just ignored them as they sped gleefully around the corner, plus I was listless.

From Tigger to an Eyore’s bland acceptance of misfortune, I had truly come full circle and back to my origins. I felt as if I was a clumsy martyr for the cause of amusing others with my bumbling antics. Oh and of course it's no surprise to me that I forgot my camera, and the lens of my camera-phone seems to have been damaged somewhat by a recent ice-skating incident, so you'll just have to take my word that there is egg-yolk hanging from my spokes in that photo.  Well, I may have busted a headlight, but my friends and family nearly busted a gut laughing as I related my free-wheeling follies for their amusement.