Preface - Avoiding the Inevitable

Here I am a week and a day out from June 9th, 2007--the final day of AIDS Life Cycle 6. It feel like a distant memory already, and I don't think I could be more sad about it. Not sad as one is when one regrets an experience or when one has lost a memory, but sad at the prospect of losing the vivid memory of an unmatched experience. Like drinking from cupped hands, you desperately try to quench your thirst for detail, but it slips through your slotted mind.

I am feeling variously about all that transpired between early morning June 3rd, 2007 and early evening June 9th, 2007. It is a maddeningly confusing mixture of accomplishment, loss, joy, sadness and love. This past week found me staring for long stretches out my office window, past the G5 iMac that commands my attention most hours of the day, on out to face of the UCSF Mount Zion Cancer Treatment Center and south down Divisadero to Alamo square, a green tuft of verger surrounded by city. The sky: unblemished blue. While staring, I thought in abstractions--just feelings really. A moment on the ride would flash through my mind and I would feel a sharp selection in the spectrum of human emotion. Again and again it would occur until I forced myself to concentrate on work. Everyone experiences this phenomenon, this post-life-changing-experience reminiscence.

And the task of writing about the AIDS Life Cycle 6 was nagging at me. It was not that I didn't want to write, but I did want to present the event in a pithy and original manner. It seemed inevitable that I would be unoriginal. How to do that and avoid sliding easily in the format of another writer or reporter? What unique perspective could I bring to bear? Mine, I guess would be the answer. In my efforts to chronicle every mile, every camp, every vista, every rest stop, every flat tire, every varied rider and roadie I will naturally find my own style, wit, take, and depart from all others.

All I can do is begin with Day One.